Enchanted Prose

Without meaning to, The Beautiful American nicely follows Madame Picasso, my last posting.  Picasso’s back, a minor role yet a profound one.  Instead of Cubism as the new art form, here it’s photography and Surrealism.  Historically, the reader is swept past the “anything goes” pre-war Paris years into occupied and post WWII France.  I thank my lucky stars for having a way to share this gem.

A Perfumer’s Story and a Photographer’s Story: The friendship of imaginary Nora Tours and the real Lee Miller (Poughkeepsie, NY, London, Paris, Grasse, Cannes, 1914 to 1977): The Beautiful American is beautifully structured, beautifully told.  You may wish the true beauty to be fictional Nora, for her quiet strength, but the singular title is meant for the wilder Lee Miller, famous war and fashion photographer, Vogue model, and muse/lover of the surrealist photographer, Man Ray.  For it is Lee Miller Jeanne Mackin “wanted to learn about … and I thought others would find her fascinating as well.” She’s certainly that!

Our lens for learning about Lee Miller is seen through the softer eyes of the imagined narrator, Nora Tours.  These very different women, unlikely friends, come together at important “thresholds” in Nora’s life.  Their seventy years are creatively divvied up using names borrowed from the world of perfumery – for Nora has inherited a “good nose” and at various times in her story she sells perfumes.  The Prologue is titled Départ; Part One is Note De Tête; Part Two is Note De Coeur; Part Three are the Base Notes; and the Epilogue is the Sillage.  Their essence:

Prologue: “Begins the journey of perfume and its wearer”

Part One: The “top note.”  The ‘once upon a time’ opening”

Part Two: The “middle notes suggest the destiny”

Part Three: The “base notes,” which have the “most lasting impression”

Epilogue: The “closest thing to a molecular memory.”  The “final lasting impressions.”

These descriptions come from perfumery notebooks composed by Nora.  The artfulness of composing runs throughout: Nora composed perfumes, Lee Miller and Man Ray composed photographs, and Jeanne Mackin has composed a wonderfully enlightening historical novel filled with a range of human emotions: love, loyalty, betrayal, melancholy, anger, jealousy, grief, regret, forgiveness.

Perfumery and Photography shape Nora’s and Lee’s stories and the wistful prose.  Just as perfumes are “memories pressed into memories” and photography captures memories, the novel looks back at Nora’s memories so she can reveal to us the circumstances that led her teenage daughter, Dahlia, to disappear.  From the opening pages, we’re told Nora is frantically searching for her.  Lest you assume Dahlia has run away from a bad mother, think again.  If Dahlia “wanted the moon,” Nora “would pull it down for her.”

The “once upon a time” part of the story is how Nora and Lee, both born in 1907, became early childhood playmates despite differences in social class.  Nora’s father was the gardener at Lee’s upstate NY family farm, where he infused Nora with the nostalgic flower and herb scents passed down from his great-great grandfather, a perfumer in France.  Lee’s father, Theodore, was wealthy and indulgent.  Something tragic happened to Lee, a “vulnerable beauty” by 7, ending their friendship.  A closely-guarded traumatic event, which enormously influenced Lee.  So private that Nora, who knew about it, pretended not to when she and Lee bump into each other years later at a bookstore and Lee doesn’t even remember the gardener’s daughter; and then later, far more significantly, when their friendship and the novel heats up, in Paris, in the late ‘20s, when they meet again.

Nora was 20 when she “danced across the Atlantic” with a boy she deeply loved, her high school sweetheart Jamie, the “Tastes-So-Good” baker’s son, an aspiring photographer hoping to be discovered.  Her devotion to him is boundless.  Their stay in London was brief; Paris, the “center of the world,” seven years.  It’s during these pre-war Paris years, when Nora runs into Lee again, now a Vogue model discovered by Conde Nast.  She’s also the muse of the avante-garde photographer, Man Ray, 20 years her elder.  Their relationship is as edgy as their art.  His is a possessive, “aching, can’t-live-without-her love;” hers “nuanced,” anything but conventional.  For Lee Miller is a restless soul, dauntless, seductive, fiery.  Things don’t seem to bother Lee the way they do Nora, like Man Ray’s cut-up images of her – a “single eye representing the entire body of the woman he adored.”  Nora sees violence in these nightmarish images, a “touch of cruelty in the worship of beauty … Wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world that armless, defenseless Venus de Milo?”  But Jamie is infatuated with Man Ray’s artistry.

Man Ray, then, is also a transformational figure for Jamie, who gradually grows consumed by ambition.  Although Lee, “like many artists, could be on the self-absorbed side,” she cannot be pigeon-holed.  She helps Jamie land a position as assistant in Man Ray’s studio.  So does Picasso, one of Lee’s many legendary friends.  But Jamie struggles.  His “lovely and natural” photographs of “real people” are not hot.  The ever-steady Nora tries to assuage Jamie by reminding him that timing is everything in the art world, things will change.  They don’t for Jamie, which has heavy consequences for Nora, forcing her to flee Paris in 1932.

Interestingly, it’s Picasso who comes to her rescue because it’s Picasso, the shrewd businessman, who stays in touch with his past patrons (a way to manage sales and his reputation), so he knows of the Grasse home of a widow, Madame Natalie Hughes, willing to take Nora in.  Her son, Nicky, also a widower, bought some of Picasso’s early works for his hotel in Lyon.  This is serendipity for Nora, Grasse being the “perfume capital of France.”  Madame and Nora find solace and contentment in each other, both outsiders and survivors.

While the author’s descriptions of Grasse sound lovely – lavender hills, jasmine farms, olive orchards, stone houses covered by moss and colored by red geraniums – Grasse is somber compared to Paris.  It is here that Nora must fashion a new life not only for herself but her baby daughter, Dahlia.  The reader can guess who the father might be.  Madame Hughes, Nora, and Dahlia become a little family. Village life is peaceful, until war rages.

Without giving away what happens next, this part of Nora’s story illuminates how divided a country France was during and after the war.  Two and half million French fought the Germans, supporters of De Gaulle’s Free French, as well as the French resistance fighters.  But the Vichy government fed right-wing sympathizers of Hitler.

Post WWII France is anything but normal too.  This is when Dahlia runs away, and Nora begins her desperate search.  Retracing her London days, she chances upon Lee again, by now a famous war photographer and married to the art collector, Roland Penrose.

It’s at this point that the novel comes full circle: final chapters re-connect with the introductory one.  Events, though, have dramatically changed these women.  Lee’s not as beautiful as she once was, having seen the horrors of war behind her camera.  And Nora is now the one with the closely-held secret.

To tell a lifetime of stories, Nora has us looking backward and forward.  “Home is always in front of us or just behind us, except for the home we carry inside that is more than mere place.”  It’s this home, Nora’s soul, which we keenly sense.  It leaves a lasting impression.

Lorraine

“Love changed people”: Imagining the influence of a great artist’s greatest love (Paris, Pyrenees and Provence villages, 1911 – 1914 ): The Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, is universally known, but how well do we know the man?  It doesn’t help that what we know most famously about him – Cubism, an abstract art form he conceived – is tough to understand without the interpretations of art historians.  Perhaps you’ve heard unflattering tales of his womanizing.  Googling these affairs, I learned of five influential women who came into Picasso’s life at important artistic junctures – in addition to the two early ones featured in Madame Picasso – and reportedly there’s dozens, maybe hundreds, more.  If you knew all this, they paint a complex picture of a “vain, egotistical, selfish, and demanding” artistic genius.  But what if there was a softer, tenderhearted side that could be glimpsed in one of these amours, a love so deep, so sacred he – and his lover/muse – sought to conceal?  That is the fascinating premise of Anne Girard’s fascinating novel.

Even if you’re skeptical of the author’s imaginings – which some reviewers seem to be despite the author’s extensive research that included studying handwritten letters and interviewing Picasso’s last remaining close friend of 30 years, the French photographer, Lucien Clerque – you ought to applaud the author for tackling this giant of an artist, wanting to “honor” Picasso in this way.

This is not the first time I’ve been drawn to novels about artists during the atmospheric La Belle Epoque, bringing forth evocative prose.  Girard’s is tender and sensual, well-matched to her supposition that so was Picasso, if you closely examine the least known of his loves, a “petite country girl with massive blue eyes,” Eva Celeste Gouel.

Eva assumes the name and confidence of Marcelle Humbert when she comes to Paris at 24 to be swept up into this “vibrant new age.” She came to “drink the magic of the city,” peopled with a collection of historical figures who created their own magic – artists, writers, poets, dancers, actresses, and singers like Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Colette, poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein (Picasso’s wonderful early champion) and her kindly companion Alice B. Toklas, Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, Toulese-Lautrec, Cezanne, Matisse, Maurice Utrillo, and Georges Braque (“the  only other artist who truly spoke his [Picasso’s] creative language”).

Besides the pleasure/educational value, you’re likely to come away with another perspective of Picasso, and insight into his vulnerabilities, having lost two people early on that he cared deeply about: his sister, Conchita (illness), and his friend, Casagemas (suicide).  Picasso irrationally blamed himself for his sister’s death, which had a lasting impact on his religious beliefs, superstitions, and fears.  His friend’s death thought to be the catalyst for his Blue Period, painting in muted colors.  We see a man with a passion for art, women, and friendships, a man for whom events are life-changing.  If we believe Gerard’s estimations, in Eva he found his soul mate, a profound love that enormously influenced this prolific artist, who influenced so many other artists and art movements.

Eva has a quiet, elegant beauty and strength.  She realizes her “fantasies, like dreams, are very fragile things.” Still, she’s determined to get more out of life than what her parents want for her, despite grieving leaving them. We meet her running late to an interview for a seamstress at the Moulin Rouge that her chorus girl roommate, Sylvette, told her about it – the dancers always tearing their costumes with all that kicking.  It’s a skill her Polish mother taught her, and while not her dream, it’s an exciting start.

Eva lands the job, although winning over the stern wardrobe head, Madame Léautaud, takes reticence, proven talent, and quick wittedness.  When Eva peers out from the cabaret stage into the front audience, she spots an arresting man with “long, messy crow-black hair” and piercing eyes.  It’s Picasso at 29, but she knows nothing about art so she doesn’t recognize him.  Picasso locks eyes with Eva too (hers are so blue he “could swim” in them.)  They meet again at the famed Salon des Indépendants art exhibition, which Eva attends with her only other Parisian friend, Louis, a cartoonist and painter with ambitions; also Polish, their tie.  While she doesn’t understand Picasso’s overpowering paintings – “dangerous in his sexuality” – she’s stirred by the “Chaos.  Daring.  Certainly a wild heart.” Seems innocent Eva has a “heady spark of fire” too.

Flirtatious encounters with a famous artist may be amazing to Eva, but for Picasso they are far more pivotal.  He’s at a crucial stage in his life, frustrated by a tumultuous, ten-year relationship with his model and mistress, Fernande Olivier, an emotional beauty whose hold on him is frustrating his art.  Picasso’s confused feelings for Fernande are mixed up with gratitude and obligation since they were together during his Rose Period, paintings in oranges and pinks, many those recognizable harlequins and acrobatic performers.  His passion, though, is Cubism – “the cubes and lines speaking to him like poetry.”  Yet he’s only exhibiting a sampling of his cubist creations.  The rest, the wilder, more grotesque works the French public may not be ready for, so they are hidden, exploding riotously in his Montmartre studio, “the place where his soul resides.”

This private place is where Picasso invites/whisks Eva away for he must paint her now; she accepts his hand and off they run.  All she knows about him is that he has “set the French capital on its ear.”  Eva is emotionally moved by his paintings – “the color, the light, and the clutter, all of it together” – and by the man – the “sensuality that seemed to pulse through him.”  The point is that Picasso perceives Eva is not afraid of what she sees, or of him, even if she doesn’t comprehend what these powerful abstract images mean.

Understanding Picasso’s art comes later.  Eva is different than any other women Picasso has ever known.  He realizes her beauty, charm, and devotion will be a calming influence and thus the inspiration he craves.  With Eva, he marvels at “what innovative things might he dare to do in life.”

Peaceful togetherness does not come easily for the couple at first.  Eva must separate herself from Louis’ stranglehold, a “man who played at his art” whereas “Picasso was a man who lived it.”  For Picasso, it means painfully cutting ties with intimate friends loyal to one of their own, Fernande.  In spite of them all, Picasso escapes with Eva to idyllic French villages, freeing his creativity, so now his:

“palette of colors reflected his heart.  Where Paris had called to him the grays and muted shades of brown, beige and blue of the city, here he chose vibrant colors full of light.  Picasso has begun to play with shapes, as well, and after listening to a quartet … began experimenting further with musical instruments.”

Picasso and Eva’s love has grown so strong there’s “nothing in the world he would not have done to bring her into his life.”  For her part, Eva carries a secret burden that shows how staunchly dedicated she was to the man and to his art.

The trusting scene of Picasso pronouncing to Eva that “the most significant event of my life had nothing to do with my art.  It was falling in love with you” – imagine more important than “cubism [which] made him the master” – was so tender and convincing of Anne Girard’s premise that love changes people.

Lorraine

Magnificence and Malfeasance: A magnificent place where “evil exists” (Montana, present-day): When was the last time a novel brought you to tears?  So much emotion in Carrie La Seur’s prose – enchanted, poignant, angry.  The soul of northern plains Montana looms large, as important as the emotionally-felt characters.  Understandable, for this over 10 years in the making debut is deeply rooted to the author’s Montana stretching seven generations to the 1860s.  The “home place” preserves a “common heritage.”

Drawn to novels with a powerful sense of place, I’d no idea this one would also be a page-turning mystery.  It’s also a heart-tugging romantic story of first-loves.  Under its big skies, there’s ample room to tackle big issues: duty, ethics, racial and sexual prejudices, environmental protection (mineral rights).  There’s also a rancher/cowboy life “where you work your tail off for twelve months a year and live or die by three hours at the livestock auction in February.”  Here “the men have always been strong but the women are made of steel.”  In short, this novel ought to have wide appeal, to both men and women.

The opening line – “the cold on a January night in Billings, Montana, is personal and spiritual” – grabs you as I’d hoped prose crafted by an environmental lawyer/author’s might.  The unforgiving winter weather, its own character, plays a prominent role.  The  central character, Alma, 30, named after the author’s great-grandmother, lost her parents at 17 on icy roads, probably on a “high country dark” night when the brutal winds whipped over the:

“Beartooth range to the west  … shivering down the Yellowstone, the mighty Elk River – howling hurting … The leafless trees bow over it, but the pines, the native ladies, merely part their heavy skirts and let the wind come through, lifting the featherweight of snow from their boughs, dispersing it in breathtaking little blizzards that sweep down the street, one after another, like guerillas advancing, attacking, and taking cover.”

Despite Alma Terrebone’s Montana ancestry going back generations like the author’s, her “deep-frontier instinct” and “infallible country girl sense of direction,” she ran away from this land of “inexpressible sweetness,” a place she feels like “texture.”  Gone 15 years, she still “sees her soul as a snow globe balanced on a windowsill: something beautiful within, but sizzling with potential energy, so close to falling, shattering.”  During those years, Alma channeled that energy compulsively and productively at Bryn Mawr and Yale, where she learned “how to be intimidating when something is important.”  Nearing partner at a corporate law firm in Seattle, she’s done well for herself, a pro at repressing her feelings.

The problem with that escape is she left behind her younger, vulnerable, troubled, sister, Vicky, and brother, Pete.  Now those ferocious winds have found Alma, instantly changing her controlled life, upon receiving a nightmare phone call from a soft-spoken detective, Ray Curtis, of the Billings police department.  He’s Crow – yielding a racial theme since his is a language “barely acknowledged” – so he respectfully informs her that Vicky has been found dead on those icy streets.  Vicky, 25 year old mother of 11 year old Brittany, whose father, Dennis, is one of a number of low-life men she got mixed up with.  This family tragedy Alma must run to, her niece needs her.  All that she has accomplished to survive and fix her destiny is at risk of unraveling, threaded with tremendous guilt as Alma journeys to piece together her sister’s life.

Not a pretty picture.  Raised by an aunt and uncle, Walt and Helen, Walt a brute who “took everything to heart” since returning from Vietnam with a Silver Star and Purple Heart; Helen a passive person, weakened by multiple sclerosis, preventing her from bearing children.  You might think Vicky was welcomed into their home, but she spelled trouble.  A life on the edge – drugs, borrowing money from everyone, dangerous relationships.  The autopsy revealed tattoos of angels flying, sending Alma’s mind back to little Vicky wanting to be an angel.  The imagery of wings evokes the freedom the landscape inspires, but not for Vicki.  She may have “lived under a big sky full of a million stars, none of them lucky for her.”

Did Vicki fall victim to her own circumstances, die from accidental causes on those treacherous streets?  Or, was something more sinister lurking under those magnificent skies?  These questions Alma doggedly pursues, while grieving and tending to her bereft niece and dealing with a make-or-break investment deal she left behind at the office, along with her boyfriend of two years, Jean-Marc Lacasse.  As if not enough to balance, she runs into Chance, former rodeo cowboy turned electrical engineer whose come home to the family ranch, her first love.  You may be anonymous in Seattle, but not in Billings.

Chance, what a great name – are their second chances? – will charm you.  He “has a gift for falling for women who can’t accept what I have to offer.”  Jayne, his dear mother who loves Alma like her own despite knowing she “broke her son’s heart,” still finds a well of human kindness to welcome her and Brittany back to their ranch.   Jayne symbolizes the “quiet strength” of mothers, like the Cheyenne women, Alma muses.

Alma’s mind races back and forth in time as she races around trying to figure out what happened to Vicky.  Two people she turns to are Pete, also ex-military, who owns a coffee shop, The Itching Post.  Her brother has been Vicky’s rescuer, honorable, protective.  The other is grandma Maddie, whose “voice speaks of place as much as the place itself, not the word but the land made flesh.”  For 50 years, Maddie lived at the “home place,’’ but now she lives alone in an Airstream, frailer but still another woman of inner strength.  Grandpa, Al, has passed on.  Raised on a Crow reservation, he with an “exceptional sense of sacred,” is missed.

These comforting characters strike a contrast to a host of unseemly ones who become suspects in a possible homicide.  They include: a crew of undesirable men Vicky was involved with; and Rick Burlington of Harmony Coal, who has been threatening landowners, tribespeople, and the “home place” to get access to mineral rights.

Alma’s in-the-moment-searching prose is filled with anger and sadness, but her musings are uplifting prose, reminiscences of an idyllic, Western childhood: riding horses (“across the vast grazing lands, along cool creek bottoms, and onto buttes that lifted them like demigods above the magnificence of a high plains universe”); fly fishing (“casting into dark, glowing pools”); “swimming the deep holes, jumping off bridges and high rocks, floating the river on inner tubes.”  The nostalgic prose sparkles like her memories of “playing with sparklers on summer nights.”

Nothing, though, comes close to Alma’s remembrances of Chance, who still makes her feel “legless.”  When Chances divides Montanans into “the ones who never leave, and the ones who leave for good, and the ones who choose to come back,” what he – and Alma – and we want to know is where does Alma fit in?

As there’s “no room for falseness in the moonlight” – a beautiful sentiment that matches the illumination of the truth of Vicki’s death – the reader hopes Alma cannot “unlearn” her true feelings for Chance, which she longs to do.  How strong is a first-love?  Can it endure like “the home place”?

Lorraine

Sisterhood and Individualism:  Love and other Ambitions (Australia, 1925 – 1933):  Bittersweet is a perfect title for the romantic entanglements of four sisters – two sets of beautiful, devoted, non-identical twins – at the heart of this sweeping historical novel set when a young Commonwealth of Australia gained its independence from Great Britain, in the years leading up to and during the Great Depression.  It takes place in a “kinder and richer rural area than most of Australia,” an imaginary town of 50,000 in the state of New South Wales: Corunda.  The gem-like name also perfect.  Derived from the mineral that turns out rubies unearthed here, the novel itself a gem.

With at least one man entangled with each sister, how they handle these relationships speaks to their traits, needs for purposefulness, and medical ambitions.  For as much as this is Colleen McCullough’s “first romantic saga since The Thorn Birds” (published in 1977 to a tune of 30 million copies sold), it’s also a saga about a higher calling – a “new style” of nursing – a three-year, registered nursing program all four sisters enter in 1926, when the story takes off.  New governments “as green as grass” matter greatly too.  Everyone seems caught off guard by the approaching financial calamities except for a politically ambitious male character entangled in one of these relationships.  Hence, this is an ambitious novel about ambitions.

Another author might not have pulled all this off quite so pleasurably, so seamlessly, even blending points-of-view within chapters, letting you get closer inside a character’s head.  For this is Australia, McCullough’s native homeland, and she’s authored some 20 other novels.  She’s also a neuroscientist who established a new department in a Sydney hospital, not unlike the experience that plays out at Corunda Base Hospital, where the sisters are circulating among the wards, renewed by that same clever fellow with grandiose political aspirations.

First, let’s meet these beguiling sisters, whose development is as strong and distinctive as their personalities: EDDA and GRACE, twenty months older than TUFTS and KITTY, roughly 20 and 19 when they head off to become “new style nurses.”  Their father is the Reverend Thomas Latimer, “the sweetest and kindest man in the world.”  Edda and Grace’s mother has passed away.  Enter the “pushy, shallow, and social climbing” stepmother Maude Treadby Scobie, once the church’s housekeeper.  Her only motherly cares are for Kitty, the most arresting, which has lasting repercussions.  The sisters are united in their protection of Kitty and dread of Maude, “a sickly sweet apology for a mother.”

More about the twins, whom a cold-hearted matron as “starchy” as her nursing uniform, Gertrude Newdigate, insists they be called differently to hide they’re related from the “West Ender” trainees, lest they assume the sisters have been granted special privileges, commensurate with their more privileged backgrounds, which is definitely not the case:

EDDA (Nurse Latimer):  The “ringleader,” fearless and the most gifted.  Her highest ambition is to become a doctor (a “scientist not a romantic”).  Too expensive, she pursues nursing, as “nurses had a certain power; anyone thrust into the live-or-die maw of a hospital came out with a profound respect for them.”  It fits that Edda gravitates to the Operating Theatre and Casualty ward.  Corunda can’t be enough for her, and it’s not.

GRACE (Nurse Faulding, mother’s maiden name): the complainer and most conventional about marriage, but she has an unusual passion for steam locomotives.  It’s almost expected that Grace will be the sister who drops out of nursing school for a man.  Her strength will impress you as life deals its blows.

TUFTS (Nurse Scobie, Maude’s first married name): Calmest, most logical.  With “amber-gold eyes,” she resembles the actress Myrna Loy.  At the hospital, she works alongside Dr. Liam Finucan, a decent 43 year old, Irishman plagued by a problem wife.  A “plodding” pathologist and coroner who tutors all the sisters, liked by all.  Tufts befriends him, but she’s tough!  She prizes individualism over “the subordinate role in life that marriage demanded of a woman.”  She has no desire to leave Corunda, finds plenty of misery here.

KITTY (Nurse Tready, Maude’s maiden name): Ravishing, likened to the actress Marion Davies.  Standing out with her tantalizing “lavender-blue eyes” and frank, caustic dialogue – cutting remarks that are not enchanted prose!  She finds a peaceful place in the Children’s ward, where she can be anonymous, where her beauty unimportant.  Kitty loves Corunda.  That striving fellow didn’t know Kitty detests being valued for her appearance; makes the egregious mistake of announcing his love for her upon first meeting and relentlessly pursues her.  Charles Henry Burdham, bachelor, 32, is a wealthy Englishman, a “Pommie,” who quests to become the next Prime Minister of Australia.  Since Kitty is the sister the least sure of herself, his pursuit creates one of the romantic plot tensions.

Charles – who must go by the name Charlie to mix with this unpretentious crowd – is a complex character who offers insight into the cultural and political climate of Australia after WWI.  He’s clueless why being a “Pommie” is such a liability.  Also going against him is his small size, “height no man can bear to be without.”  On the positive side, he’s a compassionate doctor who cares about the common man, his politics often siding with the Labor Party but McCullough wisely casts him as an Independent, apt for his ambivalences.  A modern man who gauges the parties are too entrenched in Old World thinking, he understands interest rates from his London time, predicting the onslaught of the financial crisis since he’s aware of Corunda’s heavy borrowing history.  He prepares, he safeguards, so he’s more than ready to assume the position of next Superintendent at the sisters’ hospital.  There, he ingratiates himself by much do-gooding, remaking this “army barracks” of a facility miserly run by the former head, Frank Campbell, under whom the sisters endured unnecessary hardships in their training, like housing and food.  Their determination to rise above these challenges offers an encouraging message.

There’s one other male character to bring into this discussion – others and all the emotional involvements must be left for the reader to freshly come upon – charming Jack Thurlow, 30, another bachelor.  A “true landsman” and horseman, he’s the one we envision riding gallantly atop one of the Arabian horses he raises on his “5,000 acres of magnificent land,” Corundoobar.  As an heir to Old Tom Burdum (96), he refuses his extreme wealth, which the already rich Charlie gladly welcomes.  Jack’s a man supremely content with what he has, values duty over money, and knows “money is no teacher of what makes humans tick.”  What’s not to like?

You cannot write a novel steeped in Australia without a slew of quirky, unfamiliar expressions.  Prose that delights such as: bikkies, flivvers, swagman, chooks, tuppeny, stickybeaks, bang on, codswallop, earwigs, karri, and my favorites, stiffen the snakes and starve the lizards!

Yes, the vocabulary is memorable.  So are the characters, especially the nursing sisters, delightful reminders that “nurses were remembered.”

Lorraine

Enchanted Prose is a blog about beautiful fiction – mostly.  From time to time, a memoir grabs me.  The two previously reviewed here (Under Magnolia and Act One) felt like fiction.  The Ogallala Road does not.  But the author’s sense-of-place is palpable, and the environmental message too real to ignore.

High Plains “Zealot” and Water Conservationist (Western Kansas, present-day):  Statistics don’t feel personal. So if you read in a newspaper a Kansas study concluded that a vast underground reservoir of water spanning eight states – The High Plains Ogallala Aquifer – will run dry in 50 years would it register?  Maybe, in passing.  When Julene Bair tells a similar story, it not only registers, it sinks in.  For her memoir is a wake-up call about the “largest, single water-management issue concern in the U.S.”

The Ogallala Aquifer is among the largest in the world.  It flows under sections of Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where Julene Bair grew up on a farm in the far western part of the state.  Her town, Goodland, the biggest east of Denver, is “dying despite irrigation, and, to some extent, because of it.” Seems the only thing “farming hadn’t messed up” might be the sky.

This forewarning is even more convincing when you realize Bair does not see the glass as half empty.  She’s the “family idealist,” who believes in the goodness of people to “do right even if it meant going against their own self-interest.”  She’s also someone who has not taken the easy road.

For a transformative period in her life, after her divorce, she lived with her young son, Jake, in a “rock house” in the Mojave Desert, on what was then Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands.  Single parenting, remotely, in a desert, is an impressive undertaking, even for someone “yearning for wild land.”  There, she “discovered the West of my imagination” and a sacred respect for the life-force of water, the “world’s purest element in its purest form.” So, when Bair says the average American uses “80 to 100 gallons of water a day” but she made do with only 500 gallons a month, she earns our respect.  Bair, unlike many of us, does not take water for granted.  When she describes modern agricultural practices advanced by government farm subsidies as “cowboying weeds into submission and magnificently boosting our yields, [but] they were also leaching into our groundwater and into our bloodstreams,” her call to arms about chemicals sounds like Rachel Carson’s alarms in Silent Spring.

It’s one thing to write about wilderness eloquently, fictionally, but when you’ve lived it and sacrificed for it, well, it takes on a whole other authentic meaning.  And Bair’s lyricism is for uncommon elements, like buffalo grass, blue gamma grass – “low growing grass stitched itself over the ground like a wooly tapestry.”  It’s marvelous that she finds the smell of grasses “intoxicating, restorative,” for it helps to balance her woeful tales of farmland and water exhaustion.

While we might not fully grasp the science of water tables, irrigation and agricultural systems, especially in a remote region of the country we may not know, we certainly can understand that more water is being used up than sustained.  If depleted it would take 5,000 years to replenish!  The Ogallala Aquifer is supposed to be “the hope and promise at the center of the nation,” Bair laments.  And yet, from this source a single farm – Bair’s – pumped 200 million gallons of water in a farming season.  Sounds like a lot, but Bair says not so.  All this irrigation has depleted the water table.  The water may run underground, invisible, but Bair can see the “land was flatter now, and the grass had vanished.  The earth had been human stitched into a patchwork of monotones – squares and circles of bare dirt, corn stubble, and winter wheat.”

Another area of western Kansas beautifully described – it brings a “tenderness in me because it was in danger” – is the Smoky Valley, a “paradise of unfarmed hills sloping down into cottonwood groves along the river.”  Bair got close to it as the home of a rancher named Ward, a serious boyfriend for much of the memoir.  Their relationship didn’t endure because he’s a “settler” and she’s a “seeker.”  They met when Bair had returned to her Kansas farm from Laramie, Wyoming, where she’d been living for eight years with her son, Jake.  An “exploring spirit,” on this day she was inspecting the “sandy beds of dry creeks.”  Water issues have troubled her for quite some time.

While Bair writes candidly about the “deliciousness of desire” in mid-life after so many years of single motherhood, it’s her romance with the “kind of low-key vista that could thrill only a native Kansan whose eye had not been jaded by mountains or the sensational” that’s most delicious.

Of course, this is a memoir, so it’s peopled with Bair’s “atypical family” (older members are liberals; younger ones tattooed).  Looming largest is her father, who farmed her grandparents’ land.  Bair watched the progression from “intense labor that broke men’s and women’s backs to intense pillage and poison that broke the earth’s.”  But her father, a rock as hard as her rock house, her “underlayment,” never gave the land up.  That’s his rallying cry: “Hang on to your land!”  The motto hangs over the author’s head and her brother, Bruce’s, who takes over the farm after their indomitable father dies.  While the heart-wrenching decision of “what to do with the farm” causes much angst, interestingly, the author’s mother concedes whatever decision her son makes, giving us insight into the “stoicism” of Kansans.

For Bair, it’s important to distinguish what losing the land means.  Her father cherished it for the real estate value; Bair’s is an emotional connection.  She’s convinced, and convincing, that “our sense of beauty is a survival instinct.”

During Julene Bair’s early desert years, she coped with great loneliness by writing in “countless spiral notebooks that she filled by kerosene lantern light.” Presumably she kept this pattern up, which enabled her to reflect vividly on those and later years, reliving her passions, hopes, regrets, and concerns.

Together, The Ogallala Road is a blend of heavyheartedness and optimism.  Bair is buoyed by “wilderness on my skin” – a “plains palette” that makes her feel “on top of the world.”  On the other hand, the once 30 million farms in the country have dwindled to less than 2 million.  Since most are now large-scale (farmers had to “get big or get out”), they’re still causing plenty of damage to our water: “farming accounts for 70% of contamination of rivers and streams.”  All this data sobering when put forth personally.

The author seeks to contribute to a cause she cares passionately about.  Her evocative prose – if widely read – is a step in that direction.

Lorraine