Willa, Wallace, and William

Willa, Wallace, and William:  three of my absolutely favorite authors: Cather, Stegner, and Maxwell.  Cather I knew early on, in college. Then I learned about Stegner when it turned out he was a close friend of one of my professors.  Maxwell came a bit later ... when I was working in book publishing and colleagues spoke of his excellence.

Willa was a good generation older than the other two, 1873-1947.  Wallace and William were only a year apart.  Wallace was born in 1909 and died as a result of an automobile accident in Santa Fe in 1993 at the time I was living there.  William was born in '08 and died in 2000.  But they all dealt with western or mid-western themes.

Rather than repeat much of what you can find on-line, I prefer to simply recommend though, yes, I will add a few comments about each.

Wallace Stegner's childhood was spent in Montana, Utah, and Sasketchewan--written up in his autobiography, Wolf Willow (1962) (subtitled A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier).  He eventually settled in Los Altos Hills when he began Stanford's creative writing program which included such luminaries as Wendell Barry, Ken Kesey, and Larry McMurtry.  He won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Angle of Repose (1971), and a National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976).

Among my favorites is his semi-autobiographical novel, Crossing to Safety (1987), which describes the friendship he and his wife had with another couple.  Though the names and places are changed, the other couple lived in Claremont, California.  I know that because Stegner's friend in the book--the husband--was one of my Humanities professors there.  I well remember when a classmate and I ran into him on campus one day in the late '50s and he began telling us about this extraordinary friend named Wallace Stegner who was turning out some superb writing.  He seemed quite in awe of Stegner's abilities plus the great honesty of the man.  Novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, historian, teacher.

Somewhere I read that in writing Crossing to Safety, Stegner wanted (and I may be quoting myself here in some notes I took) "to write something about a decent human being living an ordinary life, not having to resort to a writer's attention-getters of violence, death, greed."  As a long-time reader, "Bravo" is all I can say.

Then, too, Stegner is said to have made the comment:  "The lessons of life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus."  Life was not always easy for him.  But, as with writing, he once said that the harder something was to write, the easier it was to read.

As for Willa Cather, she and I share a love of the Southwest, the colors, the wide distance, the blue skies and clean air.  One of her better known titles is Death Comes for the Archbishop about Father Latour who was, in real life, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, a French Roman Catholic prelate who served as the first archbishop of Santa Fe.  He built the cathedral in the center of town ... as well as a small chapel out in the Tesuque hills where he would go on retreats.  The chapel still stands on property now owned by The Bishop's Lodge--a resort hotel where I worked briefly during college summers. Among her other great works are My Antonia, The Professor's House (with beautiful descriptions of the Southwest's mesa country), The Song of the Lark, and O Pioneers!.

Archbishop Lamy's small chapel in the hills outside Santa Fe

The chapel's interior

Archbishop Lamy.  Willa Cather gives him the name of Archbishop Latour.

Then, there is William Maxwell, a consummate writer.  No unnecessary words, nothing contrived.  I believe more than one of his works centers around the sudden death of his mother from the 1918 Spanish flu when he was a lad ... and the impact that event had on him and his father.  As in his work, The Chateau, about a young American couple in France, he likes to take experiences from his life and turn them into fiction.  And speaking of fiction, he is said to have worked with some of "the literary lions" since he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. Among his works are They Came Like Swallows and Time Will Darken It.

P R I M A V E R A !!! (Whew)

Such was the message I wrote a family member on March 20th, The First Day of Spring. "Whew" was right.  Winter seemed endless.  I, literally, no sooner got back from my month in Santa Fe than we were all met with those three Nor'easter snow storms, Quincy, Riptide, and Stargaze.  Those weren't the names, of course, but you know the ones I mean.  Beastly storms!

Front lawn on the first day of spring

But my forced house-bound status put me onto a project I've been meaning to do.  One of those things on my long-term list that you can't just spend an hour or two and then tick off.  No, this project can take days, weeks.  The Big Spring Clean.  Going through everything in the house--and I do mean everything.  Holding it up to look at.  Deciding if it stays or goes.

Coincidentally, I found a just-published book that spoke of cleaning out when one gets to be, as the Swedish author described herself, "between the ages of 80 and 100."  The gist?  To get rid of things yourself so that your loved ones have less to do when the time comes. I'm not, in fact, dealing with major stuff but rather clothes that no longer fill the bill, old 33 RPM records from Vivaldi to the Kingston Trio, books/books/books, outdated files.

It's all very satisfying.

But along with those re-evaluations is the one that asks me about this blog. As of today, April 5th, I have now been at this exactly seven years--with 302 postings in all. Not bad.

So, my question:  do I continue this blog?  Answer:  yes, for now.  As long as I enjoy it and feel that I have something to say that might elicit some interest.  But ... I can't promise how long I'll continue it. Its demise might just fit into a new attitude one day.  Which reminds me of something else I was going to mention with respect to this cleaning-out thing. It also lets me make room for New Things, New Activities, Opportunities.  (I capitalize them because they're more fun that way.)  I find, for instance, that I spend nearly all my evenings reading.  So that means I read a LOT of books.  But I also get to the point where the part of my brain that I might call "Books Read" seems to get filled up.  Even filled to over-flowing.  I sometimes think of myself as a Book Junkie.  Too many.  I need to leave a little more space.

So, it can be the same with Things.  Too many.  No room for something new. So I toss out those things ready to go ... but often thank them first simply because I have fond memories of many.  So whereas it may seem that you're making room for more things, in fact you might be making room for new approaches, new attitudes, as I mentioned.

Enough said.  Happy Spring, everyone!!  Just think:  with the snow melted (which it isn't yet as I write this), we will have room for the daffodils to bloom ... then the lilacs, the iris, and on and on.

Under this sketch of this humble little flower, the snowdrop--a faithful harbinger of the season--I wrote, "Even bigger than life size, but a portal to spring ... and the sense of possibility."