City Limits
Teachout, Terry
Terry Teachout grew up in a small town in Missouri and, after brief improvisations here and there, made his way to the big lights of New York City. Now in his thirties—not exactly his dotage—he's...
...As a psychotherapy student in Illinois, Teachout found himself manning a Crisis Line for deranged people in the middle of the night...
...A chain of coincidences leads him to an enviable editorial job, but there had been, he writes, "a single bright thread of fascination" pulling him there all the time...
...And there is an account of a bank robbery with bullets flying and blood on the floor that is a perfect set piece...
...Like Evelyn Waugh, if Teachout ever got hold of a time machine, he would set the engine Slow Astern...
...and in order to get down on paper indelible impressions of prelapsarian small-town America, it was probably necessary for Teachout to be sitting in an apartment in Bronxville in the middle of the night, listening to car burglar alarms wailing over the hum of his word processor...
...I understood at last why my love affair with psychotherapy, the great secular religion of our time, had gone sour...
...It's what happens automatically to a body between the ages of 20 and 30 if no other instructions are given to it: it ends up back in school...
...Without such places—so it seems anyway to an exasperated New Yorker—the republic could not possibly keep muddling on...
...Such are the paradoxes of literary life: In order to really see New York and Boston, Henry James had to move to moldering old Europe...
...Teachout was born and raised in a place called Sikeston, which, so far as I can tell, has not had its 1965 yet...
...Now in his thirties—not exactly his dotage—he's written a memoir of this pilgrimage, City Limits...
...These cobwebs make up much of this fine book, which can readily be put beside such quiet contemporary classics as Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory...
...New York, it has been observed, was once all superego, and now it's all id...
...His father's leanly edited home movies, he writes, "cannot satisfy my longing for a movie made up of nothing but wasted film, a prosy, commonGeorge Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...
...The descriptions of his childhood family life resonate with that elusive thing called happiness, which, if we but knew it, often resides in a "normality" that requires a fair amount of effort...
...But the trajectory was slow and uncertain...
...For Teachout, this meant a "prig's progress" into the library stacks or behind a closed door at home, where he would spend hours listening to jazz records...
...Among the delights of City Limits is an elegant prose style that never calls attention to itself...
...book makes the last stop in the book Grand Central Station...
...Freudian terminology aside, Sikeston, Mo...
...There are whole chapters that give the pleasurable ache of one's earliest memories...
...It's an account of what William James called the twice-born soul, of a person who somewhere between adolescence and maturity grows a second soul in order to keep moving forward...
...What do I mean by this...
...Spray-paint vandals who signed themselves COOLJET200 began to redecorate the subways, people stopped using garbage receptacles on the sidewalk, newsstands sprouted pornography, and every neighborhood became a theater of operations for psychopaths...
...There is, for example, an elegiac chapter about the final days of jazzman Woody Herman—Teachout spent a few deliriousweeks on his tour bus—that ought to be in the next good anthology of modern jazz writing...
...The main problem with childhood, of course, is that it eventually turns into adolescence...
...Sitting in a kitchen (surprisingly, calls were taken at home) after midnight, beneath "the tight cone of light of a pull-down ceiling fixture," talking to anonymous strangers about their "bad night between doses of Thorazine and Valium" would seem as close to the contemporary heart of darkness as you can get...
...A mentor with a sardonic knowledge of the whole range of gestalts and therapies persuaded him that psychoanalysts with medical degrees were no better at curing their patients than laymen who had been given month-long crash courses in nondirective therapy...
...Adolescent shyness often pays its dividends decades later...
...But like any first-rate memoir, there CITY LIMITS: MEMORIES OF A SMALL-TOWN BOY Terry Teachout Poseidon Press/204 pages/$19 reviewed by GEORGE SIM jOHNSTON 70 The American Spectator January 1992 is not a hint of solipsism and along the way we pick up a great deal of interesting information about contemporary America...
...After two catatonic semesters in one college and a successful stint in another, Teachout spent more than half a decade burning holes in his résum...
...Shucking off the bank work, Teachout fell into what computer people call a default mode...
...Evocative without being cloying, these shots of an enclave of bustling self-sufficiency, complete with A & W Root Beer stand and local Elks Club, make the reader wonder why the author did not follow the path of least resistance and set up shop as a small-town lawyer...
...Not the stuff of great narrative, you might think, but he paints a portrait of post-adolescent disaffection that will strike deep chords in many readers...
...I grew up in New York City, and in 1965 everything began to get weird...
...Teachout soon came to the conclusion that must eventually catch up with most dispensers of Freudian analysis: while it's not totally useless, it's not very effective either...
...Nobody comes to New York by accident, least of all the stray children of the small towns in America who flock here like stubborn pigeons...
...One way for a painfully shy teenager to loosen up a bit was to get involved in theater ("Give a man a mask and he'll tell you everything," as Wilde put it), and there's a wonderful account of a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof in which Teachout, having misplaced his glasses, comes crashing down from the upper reaches of the stage set, desperately holding up a violin to keep it from breaking...
...place, uneventful movie whose only purpose is to show how Sikeston looked on an average day in 1950 or 1960 or 1990 . . " So Teachout uses the opening chapters to produce a kind of prose home movie, in which the camera lingers on childhood landmarks "lightly touched with mystery...
...Even so, he cannot help but trail what Teachout calls the broken cobwebs of the past...
...appears to be one of those unvisited pockets of decency out there in the heartland, a place where you can still leave the backdoor unlocked at night...
...One hopes that Poseidon Press is already nagging Teachout for a sequel, which will no doubt be called Escape from New York...
...In Teachout's case, it seems to have provided a protective membrane which allowed his intellect and character to travel well beyond the city limits of Sikeston...
...First, there were four years as a bank teller in Kansas City...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
