The power of mothers and old books

Willa Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska. (Photo by Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal.)

Yesterday (Monday) would have been my mom’s birthday. I wrote this in recognition that I’m just beginning to appreciate all that she gave me. Because of her, old books and great writing, turbulent times seem a lot more manageable.  

It’s not the loftiest aspiration, but I’m trying to become marginally less foolish as I age. As anyone who’s been around me in the past decade can tell you, my progress toward that goal has at best been uneven.

But at least I’ve been trying to open up to things that in younger days I quickly and thoughtlessly rejected. Those include genres of music I was too cool to consider, sports I thought weren’t athletic enough and above all, fields of literature and history I thought not worth the time. Over and over, I’ve been both humiliated and pleased to learn that my idiotic arrogance had shut me off from something that was now open and exciting and new. 

As I’ve said before (a few too many times for some of my friends, probably), one of the biggest of these was the literary genius of Willa Cather. My mom, who knew what she was talking about, for years tried to get me to read her. But I wouldn’t out of some juvenile, misogynistic closed-mindedness. I thought it was girl’s stuff; a more literary “Little House on the Prairie,” which I hadn’t read, either.

But after that villain Alzheimer’s began to take my mother and I could no longer talk to her about much, I picked up “My Antonia” — probably out of a forlorn desire to find another way of talking with her. I quickly learned why Willa is considered a giant of American letters. Her stories are modest yet profound, her characters complex and human, her writing musical yet straightforward, and the images she paints with her words are as vivid as any photograph. She captured places in their time and in their cultures in a way that the best-writing historians simply can’t because they don’t have the same creative tools at their disposal. Willa shunned politics and strove for pure art. She succeeded.

Especially after mom died a few days before Christmas in 2021, I’ve been reading and rereading Cather with increasing intensity. I guess that with everything we’ve been through so far this decade, I needed a way to keep from being overwhelmed. This spring, I read two biographies about her, and in July, I drove to Red Cloud, Nebraska. That’s the town where she grew up and that she described so vitally in the three prairie novels she set there (although by different names). I listened to audiobooks of all three on the way, and I was transported as they echoed in my head while I wandered the little town and strode the lonely Pavelka Farmstead, the setting of 1918’s “My Antonia.” I took a leap outside of myself as I saw with my eyes images that had already been so familiar in my mind. The real Bohemian family on which Antonia Shimerda is based lived there. I was literally walking in their footsteps. Sure it’s nerdy. But it’s also a lot more.

For me, the visit to Red Cloud was another, brilliant illustration of the value of art if we’re able to appreciate it. It was a gift my mother tried to give me that I was foolishly slow to accept. Going to Willa’s hometown meant an 800-mile detour on a trip I was already taking to my beloved El Paso. I made the pilgrimage in an attempt to keep from drowning in a dread that was again welling in the nation. Happily, Cather’s art lifted me onto dry land. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done, and if you have vague ideas about chasing similar rainbows, get off your butt and go do it. You’ll be happy you did. Happier than you can anticipate.

After that trip, also thanks to my mom, another scale of youthful foolishness fell away.

Late in her career, Cather turned to historical fiction. In her mind, the world before 1922 was worth looking upon, but after… not so much. She increasingly withdrew from the social sphere, associated with a small group of intimates and dwelt increasingly upon the past. Some of that sentiment might be attributable to a broken heart, but Willa was hardly a modernist, so the turn to history seems natural. In 1927, Cather published “Death Comes to the Archbishop,” a story of French Jesuit missionaries in the American Southwest of the 1800s, to lasting critical acclaim. 

I love that book, but the following one has a stronger hold at least partly for parochial reasons. “Shadows on the Rock,” 1931, is an account of French colonists trying to make a go of it on the rock of Quebec at the end of the 1600s. Part of the reason the story is so powerful for me is that it’s about early French Canada, the place all my mother’s ancestors are from, many going back even farther than Cather’s story. It’s a bitter irony, but I’m not even sure mom read it because I shut down the conversation she wanted to have about Cather until she was no longer capable of participating.

But beyond the personal connection I feel with “Shadows on the Rock,” I think it’s a wonderful story, beautifully told. I’ve read it repeatedly and each time it evokes the warm reality of a small, tightly knit community that struggles to survive another year in an unforgiving place. I’m no literary critic (thank God), but some have taken inane cracks at the book. Most of them are variations of the claim that “Shadows on the Rock” has no plot. That’s true in the sense that the book doesn’t revolve around some lurid stabbing that takes place amid a sordid tryst. It’s a living mural, and inherent in every life portrayed is a story. The best kind of story. One that feels real.

I’ve given paperback copies of “Shadows on the Rock” to my sisters, a beloved cousin and a few dear friends, which has meant that I’ve needed to replace them each time. As I was doing so earlier this year, I saw that I could buy a first edition for less than $30. I’ve never been a collector — or even an adult in any organized sense of the word — but I thought what the hell and I bought it.

The younger, even stupider me would have had nothing but contempt for the purchase. The artifact itself is merely a vehicle for the words, which are all that matters, I would have said, and spending beyond that is empty pretense. And, as with so many of my other fierce opinions, in this I was full of crap. The binding, the browning, thick pages, the heavy type all bespeak an era in which buying a book was no casual thing. According to Smithsonian Magazine, a hardcover book cost in the 1930s what would be $40 today. It was the Depression, so anyone buying Willa’s newest book in 1931 was making a real commitment to it and her. When I hold that first edition in my lap, I feel the weight of that history.

Since then, I’ve bought an early edition of Cather’s last novel, “Sapphira and the Slave Girl,” 1940, and what was falsely billed as a first edition of “My Antonia.” Turns out that as one of her two most major works, I can’t afford a first edition of the latter on a reporter’s salary. But the $30 volume I got is cool anyway because its first owner was Reseda High School, and pasted inside the front cover is a form that students had to fill out when they took it from the library. Rita Reyes was the first to check it out on Nov. 8, 1963. It was for Mr. Boyce’s class in room A11. Of course, those little scraps beg more questions than they answer. Did Mr. Boyce assign the book? What did Rita make of it? The answers would say more about them than the book.

My feeble dabble in antiquarianism (I think I just made that word up) led me to further geekery that maybe only my mother would appreciate. 

If one thinks first editions are cool, the point shouldn’t be to buy the ones that start at $4,000, I thought. It would be cool, though, to get a first edition of a writer’s earliest work. “O Pioneers!,” 1913, isn’t Cather’s first book, but it’s the first one she didn’t hate and it marked the start of her career as a major writer. The first of her three prairie novels, I’ve loved it for the reflection of her own past that is so genuinely there. Reading it is to live in the farm country of southern Nebraska from the 1880s through the turn of the century and sympathize deeply with the culture — especially the women and immigrants — as Willa so profoundly and beautifully did.

To buy a first edition of this one, I had to shell out $90 and thus make a clean break with my earlier scorn for such foppishness. I haven’t regretted it for a second. I’ve had the book for months, but until last week I hadn’t read it. I’d been saving it. I knew that as Election Day approached, my anxiety would swell at a time when I needed balance, and this would be my counterweight. Starting Thursday morning, I sat in mom’s rocking chair and began my day with coffee and those musty pages. The calm connection I immediately felt repaid the price many times over. 

Reading it in mom’s chair or out back amid falling autumn leaves is to be part of time and out of time. To be half out of our current uncertainties, and half in those from 111 years ago. It helps me to feel close to her and my ancestors. And as I read it, I think of the actual eyes that have gazed upon those pages — and how Willa’s words struck the minds behind them.

Whoever the first reader was, he or she most likely read by gaslight or an oil lamp. She or he didn’t know what a TV or even a radio was. And only if that person lived in town did she have access to short, silent films at nickelodeons. Only if he had a decent amount of money could he afford a phonograph and poppy, scratchy records to play on it. 

My point is that it’s easy to forget that people didn’t always carry a universe of mass media in their pockets or spend months of their lives in front of high-def, big-screen TVs. That means that the mind of a person living in 1913 had to function in some ways that are profoundly different than ours do. Life was slower and quieter. People went to church and hours-long political speeches for the entertainment alone. And the literate probably read long things a lot more than most people do now.

Also for the 1913 reader, the story wasn’t set in some quaint period before memory. It’s a narrative that started just a few decades earlier and ended a few years before publication. It surely evoked living memories of happiness and hardship that are hard for us to comprehend today.

That knowledge washes over me as I read my first edition of “O Pioneers!” for which I paid about as much as I spend on a Saturday night. It gobsmacks me — again — with the knowledge of what makes great art: You might feel you have a personal relationship with a book or a painting or a song that you dearly love — and you do. But so do many, many others, and those relationships are all different. Even the artist who creates it can’t anticipate what each of those relationships will be; what her work will look like to somebody else. The art itself stands alone and can be a great refuge in troubled times. As much as anybody, Willa Cather understood this and lived for it. My mom obviously understood it and tried to share that knowledge with me. Far apart as we are, I feel close to them as I read the foxing pages of this old book.