Essay by Roald Tweet, Professor Emeritus of English and Conrad Bergendof Professor Emeritus of Humanities

What we experience when we view a painting or read a novel or poem is the result of a negotiation between the work itself and our own interests and history we bring to that work. My first look at Seining Minnows sent me back to Mark Twain, one of the Midwest writers I spent much of my career teaching. They seemed similar in both choice of subject and technique.

Take Tom Sawyer, for instance. When that novel was first published in 1876, readers must have been shocked. They were used to novels with high literary style. Boy heroes like Little Lord Fauntleroy talked like miniature adults, dressed in black velvet and lace, and embarked on fantastic adventures. Now here, in Tom Sawyer was a boy who spoke and acted like a real boy, catching bugs, curing warts with dead cats, and running small con games. The language in which Twain told his story was equally plain.

The Midwest writers who followed Twain used similarly common subjects and plain language, from Carl Sandburg's poems about women breaking eggs to bake a cake as the sun rises on the Illinois prairie to Edgar Lee Masters' townsfolk who maintained their petty quarrels from the grave. There are very few searched for Holy Grails or Annunciations in Midwest literature. The same thing is true of Bloom's painting. Seining minnows would have been a familiar subject for anyone living along a river in the 1930s. It was especially familiar to Bloom himself. He and his father often fished for bass in the Wapsipinicon River or on Crystal Lake near DeWitt, Iowa. Getting minnows for bait was the first step.

At first glance, such familiar subjects and simplicity of technique may seem artless, as they did to Twain's early literary critics who refused to admit him to literary circles. But of course they were wrong. Ernest Hemingway was later to claim that "all American literature begins with Mark Twain." Twain's language may be plain and simple, but he chose each word carefully and accurately. He knew what he was doing, and as a result, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn have become universal folk heroes around the world. As one of the Massachussetts Bay Puritans said in defending their plain style of writing, "It is also an art to conceal art." Imagine how far Carl Sandburg would have gotten if he had tried to be "literary" and had written "the vapors arrive shoreward on miniature feline digits" instead of "the fog comes in on little cat feet." Twain rightly believed that much of what passes for high literature was, in fact, pretense.

John Bloom was just as careful an artist as Twain. Among Augustana's art collection are several preliminary sketches for Seining Minnows. They show Bloom moving his characters slightly to get just the right perspective, and moving from detailed drawings of creases in the pants and rolled-up sleeves to a version so simplified that the men might as well be from Ireland, Greece, or Spain as the Wapsipinicon. As for the poses, drawing our attention to the hands in the net, that pose, too, seems universal. It could be Huck and Tom catching a frog, or it could be the Holy Family.

I have found that some works that dazzle me when I first approach them soon lose their luster. Some that appear to be simple grow on me. John Bloom's Seining Minnows grows on me.