The Most Interesting People You’ve Never Heard Of

This review originally appeared in Local Culture 8.1.

In September of this year SUNY Press will publish Bill Kauffman’s twelfth book, Upstaters: Poets, Pols, Prophets, and Bush-League Heroes of Upstate New York. This sprightly unponderous tome will arrive not a minute too soon for readers hungry since Kauffman’s last book, Poetry Night at the Ballpark (FPR Books, 2015), to learn obscure new words or become reacquainted with long-forgotten old ones: “longevous,” “susserated,” “detumescence,” “grimalkin,” “hoydenish”—as in the hoydenish Kathy O’Chelrie, a character in The Boyds of Black River, by a novelist born into the central New York aristocracy, one Walter D. Edmonds.

(Edmonds—that household name!—is the subject of one of the longer profiles in Upstaters. But can he be made interesting? He can. “It is a measure of Walter Edmonds’s gentlemanliness,” Kauffman writes, “that he was genuinely surprised when a politician reneged on a promise.” The politician was Thomas E. Dewey, who said “he wouldn’t betray the people of New York by running for president.”)

But I digress. Reading Kauffman will cause a man to parenthesize in the Kauffman manner.

So back to the hoydenish Kathy O’Chelrie, who, it turns out, is not quite as dashing as the real-life Louise Brooks, a “bobbed-hair beauty” and acerbic chronicler of the silent film era. We learn in a chapter about the New York novelist Henry W. Clune that Brooks was caught up in a “scandal involving the better part of a high school football team.”

Kauffman does not overstate the fallout—this “made it best for her to move on”—though I must say I was surprised to see him pass on an opportunity to call Brooks a real hoydendish.

Upstaters is not a book for upstate New Yorkers only. I cannot emphasize this enough. I am a devout Michigander. I distrust any state that is home to New York City. I foresee various northeastern states passing that city around like a hot potato or playing Musical Chairs with it. Who, I wonder, will be the unlucky loser standing chairless and holding this hot mess when the music stops?

But I cannot imagine a true localist anywhere—not even a hayseed-and-hookworm tourist walking through Times Square (albeit with his head over his shoulder, nervous as a whore in church, as out of place as bacon at a bar mitzvah)—I cannot imagine anyone not relishing this book, except maybe all those journalistic hacks and their fawning followers who believe, who actually honest-to-God-believe, that red and blue are the only two colors reality puts on offer.

What Upstaters is is a collection of pieces written over several years, for several different outlets, profiling many of upstate New York’s places and several of its remembered, forgotten, but always colorful characters. For, as Kauffman assures us, “pound for pound, Upstate can slug it out with anyone—we can even go fifteen rounds with the champ, Mississippi.”

“You doubt me?” he asks in mock incredulity. “Then I bid Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain (he wrote The Adventures of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in Elmira), and Edmund Wilson … for openers.”

You know you’re going to hear about Batavia’s other famous writer, native son John Gardner, and you are not disappointed. Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues “sets up my kind of political dichotomy,” Kauffman states: “not the exhausted and inane liberal versus conservative, but rather Progressive versus Reactionary.” In October Light a reactionary Vermont farmer, James L. Page, blasts “his sister’s television set ‘to hell, right where it came from.’”

And she deserves it, Kauffman assures us: She “believes in agribusiness, supermarkets, New York City, the Equal Rights Amendment, and nuclear power. That is to say, she believes in the destruction of rural America.”

Some readers will already know the burden poor besotted John Gardner bore his whole life, that one day, driving a tractor when he was 11 years old, he accidentally drove over and killed his 6-year-old brother. Kauffman tells the story poignantly and well. And in the typical Kauffman way he notes that Gardner’s pallbearers were not “Bill Gass, Stanley Elkins, and the rest of the legion of the walking unread.”

“Walking unread”! Why didn’t I think of that?

We learn about upstater novelist Warren Hunting Smith (the household names keep rolling in!), the “quintessential” Episcopalian Genevan, who honors “with nonchalant superciliousness … his own tribe, particularly the established families of South Main Street—‘a citadel of culture in a commercial nation, a haven of leisure in a bustling world, an oasis of Southerners in a land of Yankees’—while dismissing ‘the uglier parts of Geneva’—for instance, the Methodist church.”

Trust me: Humor is not easy. You need guts to write a sentence like that. Or at least a gut.

Then there is Tim Tielman, who has managed, at least so far, to save Buffalo, New York, from all those who by means of progress would destroy it—and notwithstanding the attempts of its underachieving pro football team to do the same. Tielman tells Kauffman, in true localist fashion, that success occurs when “someone can buy a quart of milk or get breakfast in the neighborhood. You break up a big forbidding scale and allow smaller things to happen…. You create the basic setting and then you let other people do what they can do.”

I’ll bet you didn’t know that Albert Brisbane (I’ll be you’ve never heard of Albert Brisbane), “America’s best-known antebellum proselytizer for a bizarre variant of socialism,” suffered chronic indigestion, which “was no turn-on for his young newlywed bride, though Redelia”—that’s the bride’s unfortunate name—“offered the tantalizing hint that despite Albert’s ‘vital infirmities, his capacity for endurance seemed immeasurable.’”

Kauffman imagines that “a sigh accompanied that observation, but when you marry a Batavia man”—says a Batavia man—“that’s what you sign up for.”

I am setting up a joke about Kauffman’s one and only novel, so stay tuned.

The chapter on Edward “Joe” Crone, the “gawky Dumbo-eared boy” from Brighton, New York, on whom Kurt Vonnegut based Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five fame, will change forever the way you read that “antiwar and pro-time travel” novel. The cover of Upstaters features the lovely Kauffman fille, Gretel Kauffman-Dee. She is pictured next to Crone’s grave and holding a copy of Slaughterhouse Five. (Apparently she has inherited her parents’ habit of graveyard perambulations.) In this chapter we also learn of a website for the literary dead of upstate New York titled In Our Home Ground. It’s a great name and, as Kauffman puts it, a “necropolitan delight.”

Thinking about that great decade, the 1970s, Kauffman says, “one cannot overstate just how different the parties were in those days before antisocial media and vapid thirty-somethings disgorging dreary orthodoxy with comely outrage over the idiot box combined to nationalize political discourse and chase the soak-the-rich, family-first, blue-collar workers out of the Democratic Party and the well-read, liberal-minded middle class out of the Republican Party.”

Preach!

The year of our Lord 2026 is “a long way from 1974,” our author allows. “I no longer have a Minnesota Vikings poster on my bedroom wall, and peppery … liberal micks who accept Church teachings like Hugh Carey are as absent from the New York Democratic Party as rectitudinous rural intellectuals like Barber Conable are from the Republican Party.” (Conable also gets his own chapter and turns out, miraculously, to be interesting.)

There is little to quarrel with here, but as someone who did in fact have a Chuck Foreman poster in his room, I can’t help but wonder if “Minnesota Vikings” isn’t code for “Linda Ronstadt.”

There’s a great chapter on the author’s childhood pal Danny, a man who “fell harder, faster, and farther than any man I have ever known…. Reversing the Hemingwayesque ‘first gradually, and then suddenly’ pattern, Danny died suddenly, and then gradually.” The two childhood friends would bite into a piece of candy seconds before the clock struck midnight on New Year’s eve and then finish it after the stroke of twelve so that, as Kauffman reports, “we could say it had taken us two years to eat the thing.”

But a burglar broke into Danny’s house, demon drink his name, and Danny, a lawyer, became as dissolute as the Prodigal and Wordsworth’s Luke. He was disbarred. He lost his home. Living in a halfway house “he was beaten senseless and robbed by two thugs…. And then things got really bad.”

But God and Danny found each other, the latter ultimately editing his church newsletter and “giving legal advice to those in trouble.” Danny “listened to and loved the addicted. Hitting bottom, he ascended.” Kauffman tells Danny’s sad tale lovingly. “Drink up, Danny,” he says in affectionate apostrophe. “We’ll meet again.”

On a somewhat lighter note we learn that “Senator William Fulbright [is] the only good politician named Bill ever to come from Arkansas.” Why? One reason is that he said that “the price of empire is America’s soul and that price is too high.”

By God, Senator Fulbright, you were everything your patronym suggests: full, bright, and right.

When Kauffman puts pen to paper you can count on splenetic opinions touching many things, chief among them school consolidation. He recounts the story of sitting in Rochester’s War Memorial Auditorium and “watching the Wyoming Indians, the smallest basketball-playing school in Section V, contend for the Class D championship.” There was a banner, hand-scrawled, declaring that “Wyoming High will never die.”

But of course it would. The team won a thrilling game; the players and the townspeople embraced on the playing floor, sobbing without shame. And then it was over. The following fall, Wyoming High School’s fifty-six students would be tuitioned out to neighboring schools. They got those school vouchers that make the dull hearts of Beltway conservatives flutter. So instead of walking to their fine old brick building, which admittedly lacked the state-required complement of computers, they could ride buses for an hour each way.

I’ll wager that this hits close to home for more people than just your humble reviewer. One of my sons played basketball against a very small school that always fielded a mediocre, if not poor, but exceedingly well-coached and therefore competitive team. The band playing at these games was always terrific, not because but although it included ad hoc members, which is to say teachers and parents and alums and whoever else could produce an embouchure.

Which is to say it was a real school and a real community band. This was a band, a basketball team, and a school in the heart of maple syrup country, Michigan, and I sometimes caught myself cheering for them, mainly because their heads seemed always to be on the chopping block and because I and (I hope) everyone else could see what a blow, what a sucking of the wind out of a sail, would be the closing of this beautiful and quintessentially American Community on a Hill.

To summarize: one reason to read Kauffman is that he rightly opposes school consolidation and every other sinister government-sponsored effort to bite the hands that feed us.

Another enemy: Daylight Saving Time. It “used to be called ‘war time,’ [because] it was a World War One innovation that eventually became permanent; henceforth, the time of day was whatever we said it was—sun be damned.”

Don’t get me (don’t get Kauffman) started on the metric system. The Greatest Generation that Tom Brokaw’s ghost writer spoke of (that joke, I admit, is Kauffman’s) had nothing on Bill and me and the rest of us born in the late ’50s and early ’60s. They defeated the Axis powers; we defeated the metric system. In elementary school we dutifully drank our half-pints of milk every day, and today, to celebrate our victory, we drink our full pints of beer.

Kauffman’s address to the Fox Hill Bruderhof Community of Walden, New York, May 4, 2018 (you will never see him use the hateful formula 4 May 2018), “The Empire Versus Our Town,” is worth whatever price you pay at any bookstore not named Amazon. (Never, as I have said elsewhere, shop at Amazon dot hell.)

The creation of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways was never discussed in the pages of National Review, flagship publication of the Cold War Right. Because the Right had lost sight of America. It became obsessed with communism, and so this very un-American ideology of anticommunism came to dominate the Right. The Warsaw Pact mattered—Warsaw, New York, and Warsaw, Illinois, did not.

What is worse than the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways? The assault on local baseball—that’s what. It is a grim irony of Upstaters that an upstater, Rob Manfred, commissioner of Major League Baseball, turns out to be the “executioner” of minor league baseball in Kauffman’s hometown of Batavia.

A circuit that was born in Batavia in 1939 (as the PONY—Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York—League) died in Manhattan’s oppressive Time-Life Building, apt headquarters of Major League Baseball, during the winter of COVID-19. [Manfred] announced the slaughter using words like “modernizing,” “prioritized,” and “unrivaled technology”—the argot of an android destroying what it does not understand.

But although our author is enraged by “Manfred’s massacre of the minors,” he thinks it may turn out to be “promotion by demotion”:

For what is true of life is true in baseball is true in politics. Localize. Decentralize. Break down the overly large into a smaller and more human scale. I mourn the death of the minors but perhaps it presages the death of the majors, or at least the rebirth of baseball in organized forms that respect the local, the idiosyncratic, the unregimented.

I’m here to tell you that there is life after major league-affiliated baseball, just as there will be life after the welcome and deserved collapse of the American Empire.

Maybe hoping that by page 164 we’ve forgotten something he wrote early on in the book—Bernard DeVoto’s telling Walter Edmonds that “early success is the worst thing that can happen to a writer”—Kauffman takes us back to the glory days of his only novel, Every Man a King (1989). (Are you still starved for words you’ve never seen before? “I guess the trigentennial festschrift must have fallen through,” Kauffman laments. “These decennial let-downs are enough to make a man doubt the existence of Google.”)

If you haven’t read Every Man a King, you should. And then you should mulishly harbor the groundless opinion that it is clearly an autobiographical novel. (It isn’t, but I and others who know that it isn’t do not relent, for in it there’s a character who for at least one unshining moment lacks the aforementioned Batavian “endurance.”) The New York Sun once declared this novel the best political satire of the twentieth century, and yet its author admits that it has disappeared “into Remainder Valley.”

Kauffman’s indulgent aunt, who went not by “Aunt Jane” but by “Jane” and who is lovingly fêted here, suggested that the Kauffman family “take ‘coping lessons’” for such a time, surely imminent, when fame would descend upon the author of Every Man a King, who at the time of publication was not yet 30. “These proved quite unnecessary, and in the three decades since, my master plan to avoid fame and fortune has worked to perfection.”

“I am no longer young,” Kauffman says, “but I am no less in love with my homeplace.”

Yes he is. And he answers to the first and greatest commandment: Thou shalt not be dull. Buy, read, dog-ear, and reread this book. And, come Christmas, give a copy of it to everyone you know.