With 'Driftless,' Rhodes finds his way back to rural Wisconsin

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MCT) - The road to novelist David Rhodes' farmhouse in southwestern Wisconsin meanders through some of the most beautiful countryside anywhere. Spruce and aspen grow thick, and the rolling hills offer spectacular views of lush grasslands ribboned with twisting streams. This is the driftless region of Wisconsin, the place the glaciers missed, a place that Rhodes describes in his new novel as "singularly unrefined" enduring in "its hilly, primitive form, untouched by the shaping hands of those cold giants."

This is also the place that has both hurt him and redeemed him.

Thirty-one years ago, Rhodes crashed his motorcycle on one of this innocent countryside's rural roads, breaking his back and losing his literary way in a thicket of pain and emotional and physical paralysis. Now, the same countryside has helped return the one time prodigy to the literary world that he had dazzled with three novels before his accident.

After a silence of 33 years, Rhodes has published "Driftless" (Milkweed, $24), a profound and enduring paean to rural America inspired by the community in which he has lived since the mid-1970s.

And his editor at Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis, who tracked him down and persuaded him to publish, is also reissuing his third novel, "Rock Island Line."

If his first three novels were forgotten, "Driftless" resurrects them and secures Rhodes a place in American letters as a major contemporary writer of the rural Midwest.

The new novel, radiant in its prose and deep in its quiet understanding of human needs, swirls outward from the central character of July Montgomery to encompass several others who live in the fictional Wisconsin farm community of Words.

Montgomery, a character from Rhodes' "Rock Island Line," has become a respected and loved citizen in the decades since he wandered into Words as a broken young stranger. But while he's the center of "Driftless," the novel gives equal time to the lives of several other people in Words. The result is a rich fabric of community, a familiar yet completely fresh look at the psychology and intellect of the rural Midwest.

"I wanted to write a novel where the main character is less important than the others," Rhodes said on a recent afternoon at his home about 10 miles outside the Juneau County community of Wonewoc.

"This impetus underlaid the form of the book. The original inspiration for the novel came from the death of a friend 12 years ago. ... I had felt that I knew my friend very well, but at the funeral there were 250 people, and I knew only about 30 of them. It was through meeting people I didn't know that I felt I knew a piece of him. So I thought to do a novel where the central character is known through others. It was such an exciting idea to me because I think our identity is like that. We have a composite identity that's held through different relationships."

His friend, a dairy farmer, suffocated when farm machinery caught his coat and twisted the fabric around his neck. The accident, like so much else in the area where Rhodes lives, found its way into his fiction.

Rhodes, 61, spoke eloquently and engagingly about his work, his youth in his native Iowa, and his divorce and artistic state after the 1977 motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. He had positioned his wheelchair near a leather sofa in the living room, where he also writes at a corner desk. Against one wall was a bookcase crammed with novels and volumes of poetry and philosophy. In a large adjacent room lay the remnants of the lunch that his wife, Edna, had served before she rushed off to her job as a school psychologist. Outside, the aspens on their 36-acre property were changing color.

It is this rich life outside urban America that Rhodes captures in his novels. He portrays rural Americans lovingly, respectfully, as complex human beings. He is concerned more with their internal landscape than with such outward trappings as their speech.

"I tried to do what Steinbeck can do so well, which is reproduce rural dialogue, but I couldn't do it," he said when asked about the occasionally unrepresentative dialogue in his novel. "I think that makes you immediately feel a distance between you and the characters. And I did not want that. I feel that everyone, in his own thoughts, has the same richness in them, and I wanted to be in their thoughts. In that way, I can show them the same way as others without talking down to them or disparaging them."

Rhodes was raised in rural Iowa, on the northeast edge of Des Moines, where his father worked as a newspaper pressman. His mother, the daughter of a Quaker preacher from southwestern Wisconsin, taught second graders in a rural school.

Rhodes, the second of three sons, graduated from a Quaker boarding school in 1965, then briefly attended Beloit College before moving to Philadelphia, where he found work mixing chemicals in a factory. But big cities were not to his liking. He moved once more, this time to Marlboro College in Vermont, from which he graduated in 1969.

In school, when he discovered Faulkner, he said, it was like finding God. He had been writing since 16. So he enrolled at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he spurned the writerly social life to work on a novel. Even before he graduated from Iowa in 1971, Atlantic/Little Brown had taken his first novel, "The Last Fair Deal Going Down."

They are waiting for you. Will you answer?

In 1972, Rhodes moved to a 100 -year-old farmhouse outside Wonewoc, not far from the small town where his grandfather had once preached. Two years later he published "The Easter House" to critical acclaim. A New York Times reviewer compared the novel to Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." The following year came the acclaimed "Rock Island Line," which would lure college student Phil Christman and Milkweed editor Ben Barnhart to Wonewoc 35 years later.

Rhodes had everything going for him _ a wife and an infant daughter, three novels published while he was still in his 20s, a home in the countryside he loved. But in 1977, his luck ran out. A neighbor to whom he had given his motorcycle came by to show him how he'd spruced up the bike. Rhodes decided to take his old bike out for a spin. He crashed. The hard landing broke his back. He found he could not move his legs.

"I fell apart after that and continued to fall apart," Rhodes remembered. In pain, he spent two years in the hospital. When he returned home, he struggled with morphine addiction. His marriage faltered. His wife eventually moved to Madison with their daughter.

"I have no hard feelings," he said of their breakup. "She married me as a whole person. But after the accident I was literally a shell of myself, and she made the right decision, did the right thing in getting away from me.

(EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

"I pretty much cut myself off from everyone except for a couple of friends. I felt at the time that I was in danger of living my life in reverse. I was in danger of glorifying my past and re-living it. So I cut myself off. I just did not want to live the rest of my life mourning. ... Though I continued to write, I no longer thought of my public persona as a writer."

He withdrew. If anybody criticized his work, he gave up, pursuing it no further.

"I basically lost voice," he said, adding that his writing had become too dark. "I never stopped writing, but I think the writing became too personal. In my writings I was dealing with problems I wasn't able to psychologically universalize. I couldn't make my story one story. I was too consumed myself."

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Five years after the accident, mutual friends introduced him to Edna. It changed his life.

"I owe everything to Edna," Rhodes said. "You have no idea. I don't even know how I can even talk about it. She's so huge. ... She made the money. She did the work. She took care of me. She's like a titan. Look at those black-eyed Susans, the echinacea. She planted it all. She's absolutely everything."

Supporting FREE Catholic Education with Grass-fed Beef

Edna, who grew up in Milwaukee, found him full of fun and "marvelously articulate." They have been married 26 years and have one daughter.

Though Rhodes withdrew from the publishing world, he reached out to his community. He volunteered at a hospital and nursing home, wrote profiles in a community newsletter, formed a his-and-hers book club with his wife.

(EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

"He reads a lot; he reads as much as he writes, if not more," Edna says. "David has had a lot of interests over the years There was a period when he really was into fast cars; he had a Dodge Challenger. . . . He's actually quite an adventurous guy. He played jazz guitar until just recently. He also played in a band. He's always been very artistic. If you watch him doodle, you know he's a good artist. And he's always into philosophy.

"And I was always confident that his work was wonderful and he would find it getting published. I was always certain that readers would find him eventually."

As Phil Christman did when he was a college student.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Phil Christman first learned of Rhodes in John Gardner's landmark book, "On Becoming a Novelist." Gardner praised Rhodes' eye, saying "nothing in Rhodes' vision is secondhand." But it was only years later, when Christman was working for AmeriCorps in the Twin Cities, that he finally came across Rhodes' novels in a library.

"I went from being mildly curious about him to being totally in awe about him after I read him," remembers Christman, who now is working on a master's of fine arts in South Carolina.

He urged his friend Barnhart to read "Rock Island Line." Barnhart, too, was bowled over. The pair began searching for Rhodes' earlier novels, which had fallen out of print. Barnhart wondered what had happened to this incredible talent. Why had he not published anything after 1975? Was he even alive?

Curious and eager to reissue "Rock Island Line," Barnhart searched the Internet and found a David Rhodes in Wonewoc. Another search turned up his New York agent, Lois Wallace. Barnhart wrote her, asking for information. She said she didn't even know if Rhodes was still publishing, but she contacted the author.

Within a few months, Barnhart and Christman were at Rhodes' dining table, eating Edna's lamb dish and discussing literature and film _ and the manuscript that Milkweed would publish as Rhodes' fourth novel, "Driftless."

Free Catholic PDF's - Home / Parish / School / Bulletin Inserts

___

© 2008, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.