Wilder and a Darker Mirror

The other day I wrote that I’d been reading Little House on the Prairie. I might have added that after hours, I’ve been refracting it through a darker mirror. The darker mirror would be Dzhan—Soul, the dystopian novella by Andrei Platonov who just might be the greatest Russian writer of the communist era.

In Little House, Laura and her family venture forth onto the American frontier. In Soul, Nazar Chagataev ventures back to Central Asia, where he was born. Laura’s frontier is full of hazards and challenges, but a sense of civility and good order prevails. Chagataev’s is not so reassuring. He finds himself on the edge the Aral Sea—an area we know today as the center of one of the worst environmental calamities in human history. Apparently trouble is nothing new:

Looking out of the hut’s entrance, they could see the shadow of evening running towards the pit of Sary-Kamysh, the location in ancient times of the hell of the whole world. Chagataev had heard this tale in his childhood but only now did he understand is full meaning. In far-off Khorosan beyond the Koper-Dag mountains, among gardens and ploughed fields, lived the pure god of happiness, fruit and women—Ormuzd, protector agriculture and of human reproduction, love of peace in Iran. But to the north of Iran, beyond the mountains, lay empty sand: they stretched out in the direction of the middle of the night, where there was nothing but sparse, feeble grass—and even this grass was torn up by the wind and driven to the black places of Turan where the soul of man aches without respite. From there, unwilling to submit to despair and a hungry death, benighted people would flee to Iran. They broke into the hearts of the gardens, into the women’s quarters, into the ancient cities, and hurried to eat, to feast their eyes and forget themselves before they were cut down and any survivors were chased back into the depth of the sands. Then they would hide away where the desert comes to an end, in the empty hollow of Sary-Kamysh, languishing there until need and the memory of the translucent gardens of Iran made them rise up again.

—Andrey Platonov, Soul 32-3 (NYRB Paper back 2008)

I was going to say “you don’t get any darker than that,” but in fact you do: Chagataev travels with the people in this land where he was born and comes to understand them as people who have lost their identity and cohesion and their will to live.

Of course the true comparison to Prairie is not in the pioneers; it is in the Indians who are being driven out and broken by the pioneers’ advance. In fact, Wilder treats the Indians with respect and some understanding. But it isn’t their story she is telling. Platonov, by contrast, is telling the story of the vanquished, and it has rarely been so well told.

Appreciation: Little House on the Prairie

You’d never guess it to talk to her, but Mrs.B grew up in a household without children’s books. Because there are few things I like to do better than to read books to children, we have undertaken to remedy this sad deficiency: right now, we are doing a readaloud of Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I read it first I suppose 40 years ago when my own kids were coming on to the right age (come to think of it, Prairie wasn’t part of my own childhood, either). I liked it then, and I must say it holds up remarkably well today. You probably know the general outline: it is Laura’s account of her own childhood in “pioneer days” in the late 19^th Century. Apparently there has long been an issue over authorship: Laura’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, lived by her pen (and emerged, in time, as a high-visibility libertarian ideologue). Evidently there is controversy over how much of the book is Laura’s and how much belongs to Rose.

I can’t comment intelligently on the particulars, but I have to say this much: in detail, this cannot be the work of a first-time author. Writing novels is a craft, just like building rocking chairs is a craft, and you wouldn’t expect to get either one right without practice. So somebody polished and sanded and morticed the joints.

But no matter: both in objective detail and in emotional nuance, the book bespeaks first-hand experience. Nobody could have packaged it so well without a core of authenticity.

The framework is that of a classic children’s story: Laura has adventures, but she knows she is well loved and that things will work out well in the end. The perspective is that of an adult, remembering his childhood self. Marcel Pagnol, introducing My Father’s Glory, explains the style:

In these Recollections, it is not myself of whom I speak, but of the child that I am no longer. It is a small person whom I knew, and who is rooted in the air of the times …

So, secure and reassuring: but on closer scrutiny, it is a pretty hair-raising tale. We have wolves, malaria, prairie fire and the real threat of Indian massacre. And the adult reader has to wonder at the wisdom of cheerful, ingenious Pa, who hauls these four females out into the middle of nowhere, and dismisses near-calamity by observing that “all’s well that ends well!” All’s well indeed, and Pa and Ma show formidable resourcefulness in meeting their challenges, but you’d Pa might have been better advised to leave this kind of challenge to bachelors like his neighbor, Mr. Edwards (indeed, I recall that in later books of the series, Laura comes to see her father with a maturing vision, and comes to understand that there is something problematic about living as near to the edge as they do).

They say that the cowboy story is the American epic. Maybe, but you could make a case for the pioneer tale. Adults have Willa Cather, and My Ántonia; for the rest of us, there is Laura Ingalls Wilder.