[Chat] Laura Lippman in Salon on books about Baltimore
WeinsteinM at aol.com
WeinsteinM at aol.com
Mon Nov 20 01:48:31 EST 2006
http://www.salon.com/books/literary_guide/2006/10/23/baltimore/index.html?source=newsletter
Destination: Baltimore
If you like "The Wire," delve into books by Robert Ward, John Waters and
William Manchester to experience more avenues of Charm City.
By Laura Lippman
To understand Baltimore, it's helpful to get a grip on its geography.
Baltimore is one of those odd American cities that lies in no county; instead, it
dangles in the water, surrounded by a ragged blob of land. It has been said that
Baltimore County looks like a monkey wrench hanging from the Mason-Dixon Line,
which makes Baltimore City the bolt -- one that has been tightened a hair too
much. Incapable of expanding, the city has been losing population and
political clout since the 1960s, when white residents began to flee for the suburbs.
Fittingly, all quintessentially Baltimore stories have a "Wizard of Oz"
quality: Characters dream of escaping to someplace new, only to yearn for home. Or,
as we say in Bawlmer: Hooooooohme.
In Robert Ward's "Red Baker" (1985), for example, the novel's recently
laid-off, eponymous steelworker tells us: "There never was a story with a happy
ending in Baltimore," yet opines later: "Even the worst of times aren't all that
bad." But Red was conceived by Ward in the early 1980s. He probably couldn't
envision a day when his company's real-life counterpart, Bethlehem Steel, would
be bought by other companies, which would then cut off retirees' health
benefits. Baltimore reveres its working-class past, but it doesn't have as much
affection for the actual workers still among us. Thankfully, Red ultimately finds
contentment -- not in Baltimore, but in a desert, the perfect diametric for a
polluted mid-Atlantic city where the snow is so lumpy that Red compares it to
grits. (Ward, who was nominated for the National Book Award for "Red Baker,"
made a similar journey, heading west to write for television -- "Hill Street
Blues," "Miami Vice" -- while keeping his hand in as a novelist.)
John Waters isn't a character like Red -- well, let me rephrase that. Waters,
the well-known film director, isn't the figment of someone else's
imagination, but he's quite the character and a terrific writer to boot. His memoir,
"Shock Value" (1981), is a wonderful story about a self-confessed odd duck growing
up in the suburbs, obsessed with the city's seamier side. (Yes, Russell
Baker's "Growing Up" (1982) is a terrific memoir, too, but its Depression-era
setting is almost too universal to count as a Baltimore tale.) At one point, Waters
counsels the powers-that-be to change the city's slogan to "Come to Baltimore
and Be Shocked" -- and the Chamber of Commerce actually complied in 2000,
printing up thousands of yellow-and pink bumper stickers as a tribute to Waters.
His essays, collected in "Crackpot" (1986), also have their share of Baltimore
moments, most notably "Ladies and Gentlemen ... the Nicest Kids in Town," a
completely sincere paean to a local dance show. That piece evolved into
"Hairspray," the low-budget film, which became "Hairspray," the Broadway phenomenon,
which is now "Hairspray," a motion picture so major that it can't even be
filmed in Baltimore.
I know that Anne Tyler is, for most of America, the first name in Baltimore
fiction, but I'm almost reluctant to include her here. Tyler, like Baker,
transcends Baltimore, although she does the gentle lunacy of the WASPy North Side
precincts very well, particularly in "The Accidental Tourist" (1985). Still,
I've always maintained that Tyler isn't a Baltimore writer, but a great writer
who happens to live in Baltimore. Charm City is not her primary subject, but
her default setting. Tyler would be an astute and perceptive writer in
Minnesota, where she was born, or North Carolina, where she graduated from college.
Besides, I've always been a little uncomfortable with locals' panting
eagerness to claim Tyler, whose fictional world flatters us so. Baltimore tends to
romanticize its past (white, working-class) while ignoring its present, where
Johns Hopkins is the city's largest private employer and the population is
two-thirds African-American. Where is the great novel about Baltimore's black
middle class? To my knowledge, it hasn't been written yet. But as far as nonfiction
goes, "The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood" (1997),
by David Simon and Edward Burns, nails the city's underclass, pretty much to
everyone's discomfiture. Looking for the working class? Turns out that dope
fiends are the hardest-working people in Baltimore, while the city's drug dealers
run far more ruthless meritocracies than any legitimate businessman. Simon
and Burns have carried these themes into "The Wire," the critically acclaimed
HBO show that the city establishment would love to disavow. Madison Smartt Bell
tilled the same territory for a novel, the nicely understated "Ten Indians"
(1996), which examines the tyranny of good intentions. A white psychologist
opens a martial arts studio in a poor black neighborhood, and it ain't "The Karate
Kid." Bell has the courage to remind his readers that it's pretty damn hard
to save anyone, yourself included.
(In the interest of full disclosure, Simon is my longtime significant other,
and Bell hired me to teach in Goucher College's creative writing program. But
that's the thing about Baltimore: It's small, the smallest city of 630,000
that anyone could imagine. With one exception -- Tyler -- I've met every writer
mentioned in this piece. And I could have made Tyler's acquaintance just a few
weeks ago, if I had been willing to interrupt her meal at a local tapas place
.)
William Manchester's "City of Anger" has the inevitable anachronisms of any
1953 novel that takes on race relations, but the title remains depressingly
apt. Manchester, who worked for the Evening Sun (my former employer as well),
begins with one of the best descriptions I've ever read of my hometown: "The city
faced the bay. In the days of sailing vessels all the people had lived in a
horseshoe of homes circling the downtown basin, and everyone could see the
water, and the land behind was wild. Now the skyline blocked out the bay, and
those who could had moved inland and built in the green corridor of the Valley.
But the horseshoe remained, a vast arc of decaying houses running from sea to
sea, walling the skyline in and the suburbs out."
The area around the harbor is the opposite of decaying these days, but it is
more walled in than ever, ringed by expensive condos and glitzy hotels.
Baltimore has fallen hard for the siren song of Richard Florida, the city planning
theorist who encourages the development of bike paths and wine bars and jazz
clubs -- in part because they attract childless homesteaders who are willing to
overlook a rotten school system, a much harder fix. I know it's good for the
city's tax base, but there are some awfully long shadows in once residential
neighborhoods, creating urban canyons that look more like suburban office parks
than the Baltimore of my youth. Like Red Baker, I realize that even the worst
of times aren't all bad, but I only recently began to understand that the good
times wouldn't be all good. Ah, but there I go again, being a Baltimorean,
succumbing to the disease of nostalgia. Johnny U and the Colts! Them marble
steps! That Natty Boh! Fact is, the Colts are in Indianapolis, those marble steps
are a bitch to keep clean, and they haven't made National Bohemian beer here
for years, although its neon mascot still winks at us from the skyline. I hate
him.
About the writer
Laura Lippman grew up in Baltimore and returned to the city to work for the
Evening Sun and, upon that newspaper's folding, the Sun, where she worked until
2001. She edited and contributed to Baltimore Noir, an anthology of stories
about the city; her 12th Baltimore-based crime novel, "What the Dead Know,"
will be published in March. She lives in South Baltimore.
Current articles in the Literary Guide to the World
• Destination: Alaska
By Seth Kantner
Put aside stories of a freezing, exotic locale full of igloos and kooks in
favor of these portraits of the hardscrabble -- and magical -- Northern state.
• Destination: Russia
By Ken Kalfus
Alienation, the struggle for a decent life, really bad weather -- the
universal themes of this vast nation's literature make us all feel Russian at one
point or another.
• Destination: Vancouver
By Jeff MacIntyre
This livable, futuristic, far West outpost of our continent has been a home
for writers from Alice Munro to Douglas Coupland.
• Destination: Baltimore
By Laura Lippman
If you like "The Wire," delve into books by Robert Ward, John Waters and
William Manchester to experience more avenues of Charm City.
• Destination: Argentina
By Benjamin Kunkel
>From Borges to Bruce Chatwin, the rich and moody literature of South
America's most European nation reflects its homeland's squandered potential.
• All Literary Guide Stories
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