Time Reading Program: The Sea of Grass

Cover illustrated by Brigitte Hanf.

“Long after they had gone, I watched him in the bright June moonlight that was almost like day, standing motionless on the big gallery facing the big vega. And that night as I lay in my sleepless bunk staring into the white haze that entered my deep window, I fancied that in the milky mist I could see the prairie as I had seen it all my life and would never see it again, with the grass in summer sweeping my stirruped thighs and prairie chicken scuttling ahead of my pony; with the ponds in fall black and noisy with waterfowl, and my uncle’s seventy thousand head of cattle rolling in fat; with tracks of endless game in the winter snow and thousands of tons of wild hay cured and stored on the stem; and when the sloughs of the home range greened up in the spring, with the scent of warming wet earth and swag after swag catching emerald fire, with horses shedding and snorting and grunting as they rolled, and everywhere the friendly indescribable solitude of that lost sea of grass.”

The Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter, copyright 1936, The Curtis Publishing Company. Time Reading Program Special Edition reprinted with introduction, 1965.

#NovNov

Prairie Fires

Several years ago, I read a fantastic article in the LA Times Review of Books called “Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Wolves.” Around that time (2012), a number of books and articles were published  discussing LIW’s possible Libertarian politics and whether those politics were inserted into the Little House books either by LIW or her editor/daughter Rose.  Fraser’s article takes on the politicization of LIWs works, and particularly how her works were being used in contemporary politics to forward conservative policies and agendas.

Fraser lays out a compelling argument that LIW was more interested in the wild open places and the freedom and beauty of wild creatures that she has seen disappear from the West in her lifetime than politicking. She writes, “Lost in the discussion of whether she was a libertarian or a mere purveyor of liberty is the Wilder who rejoiced in wilderness.” When I’d finished I thought, who is this Caroline Fraser and where can I read more?

Turns out Caroline Fraser is the editor of the Library of America’s two volumes on Laura Ingalls Wilder and a former staff writer at the New Yorker. At the time, she must have also been reading and researching all things LIW to write the brilliant Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, released at the end of last year.

Finally, in Fraser, Laura Ingalls Wilder has a scholarly biographer who doesn’t seem to have a completely personal or overtly political agenda. In Prairie Fires, Fraser situates the events of LIW’s life (those in and out of the Little House books) in the broader historical, political, and environmental context of the times. Fraser especially emphasizes how LIW’s outlook and choices were in most ways defined by extreme poverty and hardship. She started writing because she needed money to supplement the meager income she and Almanzo eked from farming. But LIW’s poverty and hardship was not unique to her or her parents. The settlement of the American west, fueled by the much romanticized homesteading act, almost guaranteed hardship for the thousands of pioneers it enticed west. Their farming efforts destroyed the prairie grasslands, brought drought and natural disasters, and ensured that they would not and could not succeed and rise out of the poverty that had driven them westward.

LIW started writing to make money to supplement her meager farming income at Rocky Ridge farm. She wrote a column for local paper and then later, began to record her family stories. I was really struck by how Laura’s desire for financial security played such a big part in her starting to write. I started to say “in becoming a writer,” but from this book, I am not sure LIW ever considered herself a writer.  She was a farm woman whose daughter was a glamorous (if incredibly difficult) writer and editor. But it just so happened that she had witnessed firsthand the great changes in natural world brought on by people just like her and her pioneer family, so she wrote them down. Rose helped her shape them into the quasi-autobiographical gems of American writing they have become. The royalties from the books did make Laura money and bring her financial security by the end of her life. But she lived her whole life on a farm in one of the poorest cities in the U.S.

Fraser seems to have read and traveled widely to research the book. Thought she doesn’t complain, she does wonder: why isn’t there a dedicated museum or archive to one of our most celebrated and uniquely American writers? LIW’s manuscripts and artifacts are scattered from the Ozarks to Iowa to Minnesota to southern Kansas to South Dakota. Rocky Ridge Farm, where Laura and Almanzo lived most of their adult lives but now a museum, has never had a professional curator. The people who work there are volunteers. If LIW had been a male writer, I am sure we’d have had serious effort to assemble a serious, conserved, scholarly archive of her works and letters by now.

This is Fraser’s last paragraph in the book, but I don’t think my quoting it here will spoil anything:

Critical or adoring scholars and readers might agree about one thing: the Little House books are not history. They are not, as Wilder and her daughter had claimed, true in every particular. Yet the truth about our history is in them. The truth about settlement, about homesteading, about farming is there, if we look for it — embedded in the novels’ conflicted, nostalgic portrayal of transient joys and satisfaction, their astonishing feats of survival and jarring acts of dispossession, their deep yearning for security. Anyone who would ask where we came from, and why, must reckon with them.

5/5
library copy

The Sport of Kings

The Sport of Kings does not have a lick of wimpy writing in it. Instead, it’s the kind of prose that hooks two fingers in your nostrils and drags you through it:

In the fifth month Henry’s terror grows steadily in the womb of his mind. What if the Blood Horse is born of Soured Milk? What if there exists no vestige of divinity at all but only a satyr, that beast of horsetail, cloven hoof, and black pugnacious eye? It’s all her fault — seductress! She was too voluptuous, too hot-blooded and luxuriant. She lay in the undulatory grasses under green, fireworking trees, drunk on the liquor of Nature when the other pricked her lip and butterflied her and split the red carbuncle. See how the ordered marvels have been made vulgar! Now the invasive little goat floats in the tendrils of his sodden horse’s tail; he is swilling her dark wine, strangely robust and grinning, that swarthy little fiend already stroking himself erect, good for nothing and unfit for work, a mother’s trouble and Nature’s excess, the child of the a warmongering Orangutan and a woman, Simia satyrus. The bestiaries will designate him an indolent cline.

That’s just Henry Forge, a horse breeder and scion of an old, wealthy Kentucky family,  thinking about his daughter’s pregnancy. This is an extreme paragraph — all the writing is not quite so florid — but it does give a good sense of the intensity of C. E. Morgan’s prose and the way she  lashes together rich vocabulary and syntax to tell the story and layer and sculpt her themes.

I romped through this novel, initially caught up in the language. It’s about a topic and place — horse breeding/racing in Kentucky — that I know very little about. The book starts with the establishment of the Forge family in Kentucky and the many generations of Forges that gets us to Henry and his only child, Henrietta. Henry defies his ancestors by turning their noble plantation into a world-class horse breeding facility.  His daughter turns his family’s long line of privilege on its white, racist head by hiring a formerly incarcerated black groom (with his own long back story) that she gets up to all kinds of business with in the horse barn.

Splitting each chapter of storytelling are “Interlude” chapters where the writer waxes wild about her themes: race, breeding, genetics, blood lines, primogeniture, in horseflesh and human flesh. It was altogether clear that Morgan was playing with the ideas of breeding horses and breeding humans and how miscegenation and racism factored into both the business and the personal.

Looking at them all raising glasses to her munificent grandfather, her ambitious father — panegyrics for the living and the dead. The bourbon Henrietta was drinking was florid and complex, but she tasted only confusion. She had lain under Allmon just this afternoon, curing with want and wanting his need. She was in love, but maybe she was also hopelessly naive. She blinked. Did she actually think that love offered some kind of escape? There is kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species. You could step out of your heels, walk backward down the hall, recede from their collective gaze, but you could never escape the category of your birth and all the morphological categories which preceded it.

Where Morgan grabbed me with her writing style, she lost me with her storytelling. I don’t want to give too much away, but I found Henrietta’s declared love for her groom utterly ridiculous–lust, yes, love, no. Everything about her character was set up to make such a declaration highly improbable (though maybe the preceding quote suggests such awareness). Also, Allmon, the black groom and her lover, was a complex character that I didn’t think Morgan had a good hold of on many levels — his emotions, ambitions, and motivations. I almost stopped reading at the point where Allmon has an emotional breakdown in the horse barn — it really seemed cheesy to me. I wish her storytelling were on par with her wordsmithing, then this book would have been the humdinger it promised.

Despite my uneasiness with the storytelling, I did read all the way to the end. I loved her language and even enjoyed the themes, heavy-handed as they were at times. Anybody else read this? What did you think of the probability of Henrietta and Allmon’s relationship being true love? Did you think that a certain aspect (ahem…) of Henrietta and Henry’s relationship seemed to be added in as an afterthought?

A short update to say that I was just notified that this is my 100th post. Huzzah!

3/5
personal copy

In the middle of Middlemarch

I’m keeping up with one of my 2017 reading resolutions — that is, to read one book of  Middlemarch a month. Today I finished Book IV: Three Love Problems, which puts my bookmark right in the middle.

As I’ve been reading, I’ve thought about how I might or might not want to comment here in my blog. I think with Middlemarch, as with many famous and classic novels, the world doesn’t really need any more reviews, so this is more a scattershot of some thoughts and impressions. And they might only make sense if you’ve read Middlemarch — or even a part of it.

I find reading Middlemarch that I have to give my utmost concentration to the writing. There are sections of dialogue and storytelling when I can read along with ease, but when the narrator steps in, as she so often does, I have to really slow down and parse the train of thought. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about. It tempts me to describe the narrator’s style as turgid, but I think it’s really the opposite. Eliot’s use of language is so precise and dense with meaning that it often demands my full engagement to reckon the complexity of the idea she’s putting across — and/or it exceeds my ability. But when I do get it, most of the time, the narrator’s ideas seem to express human truth in a fresh way:

A good Western gone south: News of the World

It’s been a great revelation to me that I love a good Western novel: The Big Sky, Lonesome Dove, The Son, Ride the Wind, Angle of Repose — dang howdy! And Paulette Jiles’s News of the World has a terrific premise for a Western.

Set in the 1870s, an elderly man agrees, for fifty dollars in gold, to escort an eleven-year-old former Kiowa captive girl back to her relatives in Texas, a long and dangerous journey of about 400 miles by horse and wagon. The man, Captain Kidd, is in his early 70s and makes his living by driving from town-to-town and reading the news, in town hall-like settings, to the locals who pay a dime each for the privilege. He’s a widow, father of two grown daughters, and a Civil War veteran, so he’s got both the parenting skills and mettle for the task. The girl, Johannah (her forgotten German name) or Cicada (her Kiowa name), has spent four years with the tribe after being captured in a raid where her parents were killed. She has lost the language and customs of her birth parents and has become Kiowa in every way. Understandably, she is frightened and defiant, but Captain Kidd is a patient and kind man who not only understands and tolerates her non-European ways, but also empathizes with her situation. As the journey progresses, they develop a bond.

Where I’ve been and what I’ve read

No excuses for not posting except — and it’s a big except — I was gutted by the US election result and continue to writhe like an eel on a spike with every tweet, headline, and cabinet pick. When I can’t deal with reality, I escape to other worlds in books. So the good news is that I’ve been reading a lot in November and December. The bad news is that I’ve not been commenting much about those reads.  This doesn’t bode well for my blogging life in 2017 either. People say they are glad to leave 2016 behind, but I’m afraid 2016 was only the beginning of scarier and sadder times ahead. I suppose I’ll get used to it, but I’ll confidently increase my reading goal next year nevertheless.

Still, I started this blog with the intent of keeping track of my reading and impressions. So here is a short list with “lite” (or simply shallow) commentary on what’s been keeping me away from the headlines and semi-sane for the past few weeks.

But…Angle of Repose

I’m not sure why Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose was never on my radar, particularly considering my interest in recent years with novels of the West. But I had never heard of it until recently, when I read mention on some blog or other (that is the problem with reading so many bookish sites–I lose track of where I hear about things). It was called a classic of Western literature, Stegner’s masterpiece, and so forth. A few days later I happened to spy a copy at the local library book sale, so it seemed fate was telling me to read it.

This is a very, very good book, and perhaps it is Stegner’s masterpiece (it’s another winner of the Pulitzer, 1972), but for various reasons, I am not sure it lives up its laurels. It starts out rather slowly, narrated by Lyman Ward, a retired historian who suffers from an unknown debilitating illness which has left him with an amputated leg and skeletal stiffness. He is confined to a wheelchair and needs help with daily tasks, yet he has retired alone, to his son’s displeasure, in his grandparent’s house in rural Grass Valley, CA. There he has set a task for himself to sort through his grandmother’s letters and to reconstruct the remarkable and historic path his grandparents cut through the mid-1800’s West in the early years of their marriage. His grandparents’ marriage suffered a series of disappointments and great tragedies (no spoilers) that led them to live out their remaining years at an “angle of repose” rather than in a fully engaged and loving relationship. Lyman’s grandfather, whom he adored, was an engineer. The titular phrase refers to the engineering concept of the steepest angle at which loose matter can be piled before it slips down the slope. Lyman’s own marriage has suffered its own disappointments (he is estranged from his wife), and it becomes clear as the novel progresses that he is searching not only to understand how his grandparents arrived at this angle themselves, but also how he might resolve his own emotional conflict about his ex-wife.

Quick Reviews of Recent Reads

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert

I have such a love-hate for Elizabeth Gilbert. On one hand, she’s so sunny, lucid, and wise. On the other, she’s blithe and oblivious. Big Magic, her treatise on creativity and living the creative life, is all those things. I find some of her ideas incredibly inspiring, such as not making your creativity pay for itself–it’s okay to work a “real” job so you don’t put that kind of pressure on being creative. Or, inspiration will find another person to make it manifest if you don’t grab it when it arises (kooky, but I like it).

The Snow Leopard eats, prays, loves

It’s only after a few days finishing The Snow Leopard that I have started to think of its similarities to Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. But whereas I found Eat, Pray Love largely insufferable, I enjoyed The Snow Leopard, even if Matthiessen’s journey is, in many ways, just as an earlier and more rugged version of Gilbert’s.

In the early 1970s, Peter Matthiessen lost his wife to cancer. About six months later, he joined his friend, the celebrated wildlife biologist and conservationist George Schaller (referred to in the book as simply GS), on a trek through the Nepali Himalaya to the border of Tibet. Schaller, a fit, driven, and taciturn man, was off to study the Himalayan bharal, a goatish mountain sheep or sheepish mountain goat. That was the point — the animals had not been studied enough to understand where they fit in the evolutionary tree. GS wanted to watch the rut, which takes place late in the fall or very early Himalayan winter, to help understand if the animals rutted more like goats or sheep. Matthiessen, a long-time student of Zen Buddhism, joined GS for the chance to visit a place of significance to Buddhists: the Crystal Mountain and its monastery, Shey Gompa. If GS and Matthiessen were lucky, they might also catch a glimpse of the elusive and rare snow leopard.

The Hungry Tide

I was on a roll early this year reading strictly from my TBR piles. And even when I broke it, reading the first two books of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series from the library, I was still, in my mind, reading books I planned on reading for some time.

But I really broke the streak when I picked up The Hungry Tide (Amitav Ghosh, 2005), a book I’d gotten only recently in the library book sale. Perhaps it is the change of seasons, but I was really ready for a book to take me on a journey somewhere else. This book delivered.

The Hungry Tide is set in the Indian Sundarbans. I  think I’d seen part of a TV special on this fascinating region. The Sundarbans are the earth’s largest mangrove forests that make up the delta of four major rivers dumping into the Bay of Bengal. The border of India and Bangladesh runs through the center. The muddy, swampy islands and labyrinthine waterways of the Sundarbans are home to a variety of creatures, many dangerous and or endangered, including saltwater crocodiles, tigers, snakes, birds, and rare river dolphins. The tigers in this region, in particular, are known to be man eaters, and hundreds of people are killed every year by them. The area is poor, and people risk their lives to venture into tiger territory to find honey or collect firewood. The locals lives are also made precarious by the daily tides that engulf entire islands and eat away at the boundaries of others, not to mention the effects of the periodic ravages of storms. But the tides are also what give the area life and bounty. In short, this was — to me — a really fascinating setting for a novel.