Four decades ago Saul Bellow traveled to Galena, Nauvoo, Cairo, Shawneetown, and Springfield to gather material for “Illinois Journey,” an essay published by Holiday magazine in 1957. At the time Bellow, living in New York, had distinguished himself in his fiction as an anthropologist of the human spirit. He’d plumbed the psyche of a Chicagoan and a New Yorker respectively in Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), and he’d explored the promise Chicago held for the persistent opportunist in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), the novel that earned him his first National Book Award.
For Bellow all these towns harbored only their memories, some towns exploiting them more successfully than others. Bellow also briefly visited Springfield, detecting under the pulse of the state’s third capital “a residue of old grievances” between unionists and southern sympathizers. Like many northern city dwellers during the Jim Crow 50s, Bellow was fascinated by the vestiges of Civil War sentiment and slavery, particularly in the southernmost parts of the state.
Galena, located approximately 150 miles from Chicago on the other side of the state, would be the greatest surprise to Bellow. The “failure town” has become a destination for travelers, something one recognizes long before arriving there. Depending on the time you are coming or going, you will find yourself stalled in traffic reminiscent of the clogged arteries leading from Chicago to southern Wisconsin and southwest Michigan. Route 20, already a four-lane highway from I-90, is being widened from Freeport to the Apple River valley just west of Galena. In Galena, year-round residents await the coming of the superhighway somewhat apprehensively, wondering which Mississippi vistas the bypass will obscure.
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I came to talk to the Geiserts about the changes Galena has undergone since they arrived in 1970. In this relatively short time they have seen the main street upgraded from 26 bars and a block-wide hardware store that sold single nails from bins to a string of upscale shops and restaurants catering to summer people and tourists. The storefronts in town are too dear for groceries and hardware. Laid out in the mid-19th century to accommodate 15,000 residents, the town proper now has but 4,000. But in its peak months, Park Avenue, the main street, suffers the glut of summer spas all over the country. The wide downtown roads hemmed in by shops bend with the little river’s meanderings; they are promenades perhaps suitable for foot traffic and horses and buggies but not for an endless line of automobiles in the humid summer. The town fathers have had to make them one-way streets. For some two decades the Geiserts have met friends for breakfast once a week at a restaurant to catch up on the local news. “We sit in the same place and say the same things,” Art says. “We are polite, but we do stare.” These are the words of a local, confident in belonging to a place.
Clearly, Galena no longer has the look of economic failure that Bellow discerned. If one measures success by tourists, traffic, and visible restoration, Galena has caught up with and perhaps surpassed Dubuque. Bellow’s Galena of 1957 still exists in its historical landmarks. But no longer is Grant’s home just a “museum within a museum.”
But to the south, toward the small town of Hamilton, a stretch of low bluff contains vacation homes, some of which rival those in Galena. This development rankles 65-year-old Estell Neff, a gray-bearded farm equipment appraiser and history buff, who exhibits an astounding variety of used and new history books in his small store on the east side of Hamilton. “It’s a shame,” he says of the houses on the bluff. He thinks the owners, many of whom have cleared trees for the view, have little regard for the environment. Their houses, he predicts, will be left to rot when the next generation can no longer afford to keep them up and a view of the river loses its appeal. As in Galena, these are second homes whose owners are not uniformly welcomed by locals. Those who vote here know that this country lies in what a political wag once called the “Kingdom of Forgottonia,” the large section of the state west of the Illinois River and, according to residents, for years poorly served by the state’s economic development schemes. Its beauty is all it has going for it, and, in spite of what the song says about the best things in life being free, the beauty of the river from these sorts of homes is something you have to be able to afford. Nauvoo and Hamilton are less populated and clearly less affluent than Fort Madison and Keokuk, Iowa, just across the Mississippi. Not enough summer people have chosen the Nauvoo territory.
In 1996 Cairo exists, but the visitor does not know why. Because of its location it still figures in a small way in river commerce. But in spite of efforts to salvage it from years of prevailing poverty, racial tension, and general neglect, it is a desolate place. If the African-American prevailed in the racial rivalries of the 70s in Cairo, he finds it a cruel victory. The town is predominantly black. It is also a town that looks boarded up and dead. In his essay, Bellow gave short shrift to Cairo. Even then it showed signs of decay, and Holiday readers would not have wanted to take the trouble to venture there.
