Will the real Duluth please stand up?

Jun 30, 2023

DULUTH — When a character on the Hulu series "Only Murders in the Building" said he wanted a new Broadway musical to reach "Debbie from Duluth," some locals were a little confused. Duluth? As in, our Duluth? Could the character mean the other Duluth, in Georgia?

In the 21st century, Duluthians are unaccustomed to hearing our city cited in a context like this — emblematic of the ordinary Midwest, far from the coastal culture hubs, a place where the biggest excitement is "girls' night out at the Calorie Pit." The "Only Murders" reference recalled the "little old lady from Dubuque" infamously cited by The New Yorker Editor Harold Ross as someone his publication didn't care to court.

Dubuque, OK. But ... Duluth? There's nothing ordinary about Duluth! It's not where you'd park the culturally clueless or terminally mundane. Is it?

As it happens, 2023 marks 40 years since the publication of a novel that made Duluth the poster child for American vapidity. Gore Vidal's "Duluth" isn't actually about the city itself. It's a metafictional satire about a city of the imagination that somehow encompasses both the southwest desert and the northern forests, located in Minnesota and yet also on the Mexican border.

I initially planned to write this entire column about "Duluth," but then I actually read the book. The novel traffics in racial and gender stereotypes that, while presented in a satirical context, are so wildly offensive that I didn't want to elevate the book by making it the subject of an entire column. Today, the novel "Duluth" is largely forgotten, and I think that's for the best.

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It did seem striking, though, that Vidal chose Duluth as the name to give his dyspeptic dismissal of the cynical hypocrisy that he seemed to believe characterized our country. Unlike in "Only Murders," Vidal left no question as to which Duluth he was referencing. The dust jacket of the novel's first edition quoted an excerpt of a 1951 Encyclopedia Britannica entry about the "city of Minnesota, U.S.A., on the western tip of Lake Superior."

"Gore Vidal has put Duluth off the map," reads the jacket, which also claims that "'Duluth' tears the lid off 'Dallas,'" making clear that the book is about American immorality writ large. "Every society gets the Duluth it deserves," writes Vidal in the novel itself.

It's hard not to take that personally. Maybe Vidal took offense at the encyclopedia's glib description of our "popular vacation playground," or maybe he just liked the sound of the city's name, but his book made Duluth into the ever-mutable, all-encompassing nexus of America's failings.

(I realize I may be making this book sound intriguing, but again let me emphasize that it is not actually about Duluth and is wildly problematic. Even reviewers at the time didn't like it. For a postmodern satire with a local angle you'd be better off pasting a Canal Park postcard to the cover of any given Don DeLillo novel.)

Forty years on, I can't help but wonder if Vidal intuited something real about the mutability of "Duluth" as a concept, even for those of us living and working in this real, physical city with a population of something less than the 2 million Vidal assigned it.

The focus on recreation in the Britannica excerpt reflects a longstanding campaign to highlight Duluth as a locus of outdoor enjoyment — the kind you can't have without snow, hills and a giant lake. Duluth has done well cultivating a reputation as a place people go to be active outdoors, and when the word "fun" is uttered, the average Minnesotan probably thinks of Duluth before, say, Rochester or St. Cloud.

Hold the Nordic skis, though. Industrial might is also inextricable from Duluth's image. Driving into town on Interstate 35, you might miss Spirit Mountain but you're certainly not going to miss the rail cars carrying ore to the docks, or the giant toilet paper plant. Even in the heart of Canal Park, with its popcorn wagon and ice cream counters, bulk freighters are the marquee attractions.

The profits produced by that industry once fueled, and to some extent still maintain, Duluth as a bastion of the elite. Glensheen and the Kitchi Gammi Club weren't built for square dancing, and the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center's recent Symphony Hall mezzanine revamp is a reminder that even as recently at the 1960s, Duluth aspired to be a place where you could have a seriously swanky time.

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In part to preserve and celebrate that bygone luxury, Duluth is a city of history. We'll keep a grand old high school building around while its replacement opens, then closes, hoping that someday we can put apartments in there. Our armory will sit empty (except for snowplows) for decades lest we lose the spot where Bob Dylan once saw a show. When the interstate came through, we kept the trains.

Duluth's latest buzzword is "craft." We make the best beer from the best water; we build airplanes that come with their own parachutes; and our bags are so sturdy, Indiana Jones sneaks them onscreen even when his company cuts a deal with some other company out west.

That kind of craft takes a deep sincerity of purpose, and yet Duluth is also defiantly, almost obdurately weird. The News Tribune's entire " Northlandia" series is a portfolio of people who decide to do things that are objectively odd, but that they approach with utter dedication.

You need a bridge covered with stuffed animals? A tiny store full of tiny houses? A park that celebrates pavement? Duluth sees no contradictions, only opportunity.

So our city may have a rolling identity crisis, but we're unaccustomed to being regarded as basic. The occasional Minneapolis sophisticate may have a take or two about the Northland's surfeit of cover bands and shackets, but hey! We live a little closer to the land. There are practicalities to consider.

Competing visions of Duluth will come to the fore in this fall's mayoral election. Without any hot-button policy disagreements, the two leading candidates will be judged in large part on the competing stories they tell about Duluth. What's most important to this community? What does our future look like? Who is this city for?

Whoever "Debbie from Duluth" votes for, she'll be hoping Gore Vidal was right about one thing: that our society will get the Duluth it deserves.

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