According to a recent biography, Mildred Walker hated being called a “regional novelist.” It’s easy to see why. For any American writer, “regional” is a kiss of death. You’d have an easier time earning the respect of the literary establishment writing Star Trek novels. But there’s really no other word that will do. Walker published 13 novels between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, and though her locales changed, they’re all in the America that’s off the mainstream map. She wrote novels about a Vermont soapstone quarry, a lumber town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a Nebraska farm, a Detroit brewery, a Montana dude ranch. She was the laureate of flyover country.
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Her 1949 novel Medical Meeting is typical. It’s about an upstate New York researcher who’s spent ten years in lonely isolation working on a cure for tuberculosis. His quest has cost him his academic career, possibly his marriage, and certainly his daughter’s hearing (when he used his new antibiotic to treat her brucellosis), but he believes he’s made a breakthrough, and he goes to a medical convention in Chicago to present his results. Is there a high-noon showdown between the renegade individualist and the hidebound medical establishment? No–just a slow fade to gray. The hero’s results aren’t rejected, but they turn out to be of only moderate interest. Other researchers, better connected and better funded, have made more progress.
If that austere isolation was all there was to Walker’s books, she’d be a pretty dreary read. The power of her work is deeper, a sense that there’s something fundamentally spooky about the heartland. (This is something it shares with many of the hidden classics of midwestern literature–books that, as it happens, have also disappeared down the trapdoor into oblivion, like Gene Wolfe’s Peace and Hannah Green’s The Dead of the House.) She doesn’t write ghost stories; there’s nothing supernatural or visionary about her work. Her worldview is wholly secular and materialist. But she excels at suggesting that her characters’ private worlds hide all kinds of dark impulses.
Walker offers these deeper possibilities so obliquely that when I first started reading her novels I was half convinced I was making them up. In fact I wasn’t sure until I read this new biography, Writing for Her Life: The Novelist Mildred Walker, by her daughter, Ripley Hugo. For one thing, it makes clear that she was an obsessive artist who did nothing inadvertently; for another, it demonstrates that authors quite often get swallowed up by their own material. The biography itself turns out to be a kind of Mildred Walker drama.
