On Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder
In my life, I've loved a countless number of authors: There were casual flings (Diane Duane, J.R.R. Tolkien), long, torrid affairs (Terry Pratchett, Elizabeth Peters), and a few, precious soul mates. Like most people, I can safely say that the first to fall into this last category for me was Laura Ingalls Wilder. She taught me how to read, Laura did, and how to love books and maybe even how to live life.
Right now I'm reading the first biography ever written about her, a book that obviously came out during the Little House TV series' height in the late 70s. Its design is half bodice ripper--with an open-shirted Laura eying a dashing Almonzo across its back flap--and half tribute to Garth Williams' work, its cover being made up Laura and Mary peering out of a wagon set in a wide, golden sea of prairie.
Usually biographies are a little cold, a little distant, but Donald Zochert's take on Laura's life walks a perfect line between scholarly treatise and gushing fanboy ravings. He makes up for a scarcity of hard facts with dreamy descriptions of scenery and weather and the character of the places where Laura lived.
I'm starting to realize that some of the text's immediacy finds its source in something other than the author's love for his subject, though. For all the unimaginable otherworldliness of her childhood life, with its uncharted wildnernesses and values and beliefs so different from our own, Laura Ingalls Wilder only died in 1957. When my dad was a little boy, he could have sat on her lap. He could have listened to her stories told in her own voice, watched TV with her in my grandmother's dark cave of a living room.
Sure, the books happened in another time and place, as exemplified by a story in the biography's first chapter: When Laura was a grownup, she tried to find the original Little House. She and her daughter drove through Oklahoma, and thought they wound up in the right place. Only years later when Zochert was researching this biography was it discovered that Laura wasn't even in the neighborhood--the real Little House was in Kansas. How can it be that just a hundred years ago, whole stretches of the country were being made void and formless, being remade so thoroughly that in the space of a lifetime one could loose a house, a town?
But "her life spanned ninety years," Zochert writes in the book's preface. "In this incredible reach of time, wonders were common--the invention of the telephone, the radio, the automobile, the motion picture, the airplane, the television, the transistor, the computer, the taming of nuclear energy--but none so wonderful as the stuff of life upon which she turned the bright lens of memory and imagination. In the year Laura Ingalls Wilder died, American military advisors were already in Vietnam; artificial satellites whirred and whispered around the earth. So close do we stand to the Little House in the Big Woods, to the vast world of pioneer America, to the sound of a fiddle drifting across the distant prairie."
Being a University of Vermont student means spending time in Montreal, the funnest place on the North America continent. And on every one of my trips home from the city, I passed a sign pointing off down a faceless highway, one that read simply "Prairie." I always wanted to turn onto that road, because the sign's matter of factness made me suspect that, if I drove far enough, I might find myself in calico and hoop skirts, safe and happy in a little sod house on the bank of a creek.
It's tempting to think that the perfect world we see in Laura's childhood was indescribably better than our own, pure and full of goodness and light. But of course it wasn't, and it's too bad that Zochert doesn't get it: Everyday we all live lives just a great as Laura Ingalls Wilder's, just as of an era and just as of all eras. The only thing that separates us from her is time, and time is no judge, no trip from better to worse or worse to better. We could write stories of our childhoods, of Sesame Street and Chef Boyardee and checking The Long Winter out of school libraries housing thousands and thousands of books, and she would be just as amazed by them as we are by the stories of her childhood.
Any one of us could be Laura Ingalls Wilder if we wanted to, which is probably one of the reasons why practically everyone I know gets misty-eyed at the thought of the first time they ever read Little House on the Prairie. We love her for what she wrote, but we also loved her for what she was--us.
Right now I'm reading the first biography ever written about her, a book that obviously came out during the Little House TV series' height in the late 70s. Its design is half bodice ripper--with an open-shirted Laura eying a dashing Almonzo across its back flap--and half tribute to Garth Williams' work, its cover being made up Laura and Mary peering out of a wagon set in a wide, golden sea of prairie.
Usually biographies are a little cold, a little distant, but Donald Zochert's take on Laura's life walks a perfect line between scholarly treatise and gushing fanboy ravings. He makes up for a scarcity of hard facts with dreamy descriptions of scenery and weather and the character of the places where Laura lived.
I'm starting to realize that some of the text's immediacy finds its source in something other than the author's love for his subject, though. For all the unimaginable otherworldliness of her childhood life, with its uncharted wildnernesses and values and beliefs so different from our own, Laura Ingalls Wilder only died in 1957. When my dad was a little boy, he could have sat on her lap. He could have listened to her stories told in her own voice, watched TV with her in my grandmother's dark cave of a living room.
Sure, the books happened in another time and place, as exemplified by a story in the biography's first chapter: When Laura was a grownup, she tried to find the original Little House. She and her daughter drove through Oklahoma, and thought they wound up in the right place. Only years later when Zochert was researching this biography was it discovered that Laura wasn't even in the neighborhood--the real Little House was in Kansas. How can it be that just a hundred years ago, whole stretches of the country were being made void and formless, being remade so thoroughly that in the space of a lifetime one could loose a house, a town?
But "her life spanned ninety years," Zochert writes in the book's preface. "In this incredible reach of time, wonders were common--the invention of the telephone, the radio, the automobile, the motion picture, the airplane, the television, the transistor, the computer, the taming of nuclear energy--but none so wonderful as the stuff of life upon which she turned the bright lens of memory and imagination. In the year Laura Ingalls Wilder died, American military advisors were already in Vietnam; artificial satellites whirred and whispered around the earth. So close do we stand to the Little House in the Big Woods, to the vast world of pioneer America, to the sound of a fiddle drifting across the distant prairie."
Being a University of Vermont student means spending time in Montreal, the funnest place on the North America continent. And on every one of my trips home from the city, I passed a sign pointing off down a faceless highway, one that read simply "Prairie." I always wanted to turn onto that road, because the sign's matter of factness made me suspect that, if I drove far enough, I might find myself in calico and hoop skirts, safe and happy in a little sod house on the bank of a creek.
It's tempting to think that the perfect world we see in Laura's childhood was indescribably better than our own, pure and full of goodness and light. But of course it wasn't, and it's too bad that Zochert doesn't get it: Everyday we all live lives just a great as Laura Ingalls Wilder's, just as of an era and just as of all eras. The only thing that separates us from her is time, and time is no judge, no trip from better to worse or worse to better. We could write stories of our childhoods, of Sesame Street and Chef Boyardee and checking The Long Winter out of school libraries housing thousands and thousands of books, and she would be just as amazed by them as we are by the stories of her childhood.
Any one of us could be Laura Ingalls Wilder if we wanted to, which is probably one of the reasons why practically everyone I know gets misty-eyed at the thought of the first time they ever read Little House on the Prairie. We love her for what she wrote, but we also loved her for what she was--us.