So I found myself reading another book about small town life: The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth by Bill Holm

Bill Holm wrote a wonderful book about the year he spent teaching in China, Coming Home Crazy. When I saw his new book at Barnes & Noble, I turned it over and read that this was the book where he "returns to his hometown and investigates--through the lens of small town life--what community means to us and the rigid definitions we give to 'success' and 'failure.'" That sounded intriguing and I bought it.

I was not disappointed. I was disappointed. There are some wonderful and insightful things in this book. And some of it bored me.

I was excited enough by the second essay, "The Music of Failure," (subtitled "Another Idea from Walt Whitman that no one wants to hear") to go out and buy two copies of the book and send them to my adult children who are thinking about the meanings of success and failure (albeit in very different ways than I am). I also sent them permission to ignore most of the book, but to read the first 60 pages. You have the same permission if you need it.

What Holm talks about in that essay are the cultural and social impositions on our notions of success and failure. His ruminations began when he ended up living in Minneota, Minnesota. As an adolescent growing up there, he defined failure easily; it was "to die in Minneota." He ended up there jobless, broke and divorced, wondering how he had so thoroughly avoided success. Then he began to meditate on some of the failures he had known, people who died in Minneota. The essay focuses on Pauline Bardal, the woman who taught him a love of music.

Bardal, daughter of immigrants, never married, never owned anything of substance, never played the piano well, never went very far from her Minneota birthplace, and apparently never gave a thought to failure or success.

Her love of music and enthusiasm for playing piano was infectious. She helped keep her family farm going for years. She tended her parents in their last days. She was a housekeeper and "baby sitter" to many in Minneota. She was a pillar of the Icelandic Lutheran Church Ladies Aid. In her own old age she was a one-woman hospice for the town. A good, solid citizen, but not, by most popular notions a success: no wealth, no descendants, no accomplishments, no monuments.

Holm asks, in effect, am I headed for the same fate? Are you? Does that make us failures?

Here's where Holm harks back to Whitman and his insistence that success depends on remaining true to yourself.

He writes, "What, then, shall we say in praise of the Bardals, all dead in a hundred years in America, and failed miserably by almost every definition our culture offers us? In my judgment, our false language of power and success, and its consequent notion of sweeping genuine failure harmful to other humans and ourselves under the rug, has left us no true language (except perhaps poetry or song) to describe or think about their lives and thus absorb their history into our own. Without that acknowledgment of failure, memory disappears, history ceases to exist accurately and is of no use to us." (I heard Holm read this section in his wonderful baritone, and I can hear his voice in my head as I type. You might want to get this book on tape.)

(This sounds a bit like Kathleen Norris' comments about small town life and the need of many people there to "remember" things nicely rather than accurately. Well, in the small town it's harder to ignore failure than it is the city. In the city, the failures can be ignored unless they are either pushy or ugly street people, because they don't live in your neighborhood or because the failures you pass on the street are anonymous and look much like everyone else. In the small town, everyone knows the "failures" and deals with them. They are in the store, the church, the tavern, and the school. If you can't deny the failures, Norris observes, you might as well try changing the memories.)

Holm's argument continues, "The country closed its ears against the tune [of failure]; citizens denied that they had ever heard it. 'Tomorrow,' they said, but this was only another way of saying 'yesterday,' which did not exist quite as they imagined it. This continual denial gave a hollow, whining quality to conversations. Discussions of politics, work, or marriage sounded like a buzz saw speaking English." (Does this remind you of parts of the political discourse of this Presidential election campaign?)

He explicitly bridges the gap between small town revisionism and that of our society at large. "The fifties [1950s] have, thank God, died a natural death. The corpse isn't quite rotted yet, and the cynical contemporary politicians keep wanting us to revive it with adrenaline shots of mildewed nostalgia straight to the heart."

He's hollering at us not to get sucked into the social definitions of outward success anymore than into a longing for some mythical golden age fed to us by some political or media elite who want to lead us around by the nose to a voting booth or a mega-mall. Good advice for people in a mass society.

The essay is worth the modest price of the book. And the library may have it "free." You may even find some of the other essays more wonderful than I did. His essay on the meaning of food is very good (Lutefisk as the bitter herbs of the Icelandic immigrants' "seder"). The ones on the ghosts of our pasts and the value of books and reading are good. I welcome your thoughts on The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere On Earth by Bill Holm.

The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere On Earth from Minnesota Public Radio
A review of Bill Holm's essays from Hungry Mind Review.
A Coming Home Crazy page.