I wanta tell you a story. Happened a long time ago.
There was a Depression, and then another World War, and the latter sort of helped the survivors of both, so that this here country was the envy of the known world. We were prosperous while all else was fire and ash.
However, we were not satisfied. For all this ecomonic growth made us sad. We were meant to be artists and writers and play the guitar and clap along and here we were working at the plant or the company store or running the vacuum under the new chaise longue. What's the meaning of that? We wanted freedom and the lambent lyricism of childhood.
Meanwhile, everyone else in the world only wanted something to eat and dress with.
I read a novel back then, and it was one of many describing the sore lorn ordeal of rats struggling in the maze, desirous to breathe free in the homogenous penguin march of Eisenhower's fifties, amen. This suburban couple, I remember, were in that fix, and the husband could maybe be a writer but there was this drudgery at the plant and all. So his wife set about freeing him of his bonds so that this little canary might fly flee of his cage like the eagle, and carry his beaming brood with him. Hooray for the Struggle for Self!
Only ... every fine spider web she removed, he wove such another. For her energy and vitality, he braced whining and alibis. We can do this, she said. Oh, yes, but how can I when I have this?
She realized after a time it was all a sham, that he belonged where he was and would never rise above his comfortable nest. She gave up on his charade then, and grew depressed, and was lost in the land before Roe with a bad curettage self-inflicted to stop the failed dreams from growing.
Her name was Arpil Wheeler. I put the book down, and only thought of it in years after when corrobartion came knocking. Everyone, I came to see, was living beneath their station, and would avoid any test of that theory like the plague.
Here I am in line at a neighborhood market, the clerk is an elder guy and jolly and knows everyone. To one customer ahead of me, he asks, "How's the motorhome running, Luke?" and laughed. To me in turn he said, "Bought him a big travel wagon the size of the Queen Mary when he retired and it's never left his driveway."
And there was the article by the boatman who sailed the seven seas alone, and he wrote, I know these people, these some plenty people, and their true nature is footloose and afloat wherever the current runs, and not a one of them has lasted beyond six months. They all sell their boats and go back to suburbia.
It is humankind's every yearning need to seek a newer world, that's what it is, or else it's just an infinite capacity for whining.
Anyway, I've been looking casually for April Wheeler for years now. I was just out of high school when I first read the book, and all I remember is her name. I would sometimes drop into forums like rec.arts.books and LITERARY-L the mailing list and ask, hey, anybody here know April Wheeler? None ever did. And then Google came along, and I googled her, but I had an infinite number of April Wheelers in return. It was looking for a needle in a mountain of needles.
Now, I see a movie reviewed. It's a big splash number, the rekindling of the romance between the main principals of Titanic. It's called Revolutionary Road, and in it Kate Winslow plays - and I nearly fell off my stool when I read this - April Wheeler!
So I found her again. I doubt if I will ever see the movie. I've seen too many of them, or read about them, from The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit onward. Also, the Beat Generation, which I followed along behind, was built on just those premises.
...
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
...
Howl; Ginsberg
I found April Wheeler today. She doesn't look any the worse for wear.
(Originally published in the wounded wilderness of Yucca Flats)