Old jules, p.1
Old Jules, page 1
© 1935, 1963 by Mari Sandoz
Introduction © 2005 by Linda M. Hasselstrom
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Bison Books printing: 1962
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sandoz, Mari, 1896–1966.
Old Jules / Mari Sandoz; introduction to the Bison Books edition by Linda
M. Hasselstrom.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Hastings House, 1935.
ISBN 978-0-8032-9359-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Sandoz, Jules Ami, 1857?–1928. 2. Sandoz, Mari, 1896–1966—Family. 3. Pioneers—Nebraska—Biography. 4. Frontier and pioneer life—Nebraska.5. Fathers—Nebraska—Biography. 6. Frontier and pioneer life—Nebraska—Sandhills. 7. Nebraska—Biography. 8. Sandhills (Neb.)—Social life andcustoms. 9. Sandhills (Neb.)—Biography. I. Title.
F666.S34 2005
978.2'031 '0922—dc22 2004023021
Bison Books Edition reprinted by arrangement with the estate of Mari Sandoz
E-book ISBN: 978-0-8032-9364-9
Linda M. Hasselstrom
OLD JULES AND THE MAGGOTS OF SOCIETY
You know I consider writers and artists the maggots of society.
Jules Sandoz to Mari Sandoz, 1926
Once when a poet friend visited me on the ranch, we naturally talked about our writing. Visiting with my parents, we chatted at length about the importance of writers in society. Finally, my friend said, "It's hard work sitting under a tree writing a poem."
I remember bracing myself for a viciously sarcastic remark from my father, but I can no longer remember what he said. For years afterward, however, he sneered as he quoted my friend's remark to laughing neighbors. Many of those hard-working ranchers believed attending college, reading books, or creating art was a luxury no working family could afford. They proudly said they hadn't read a book since grade school.
My father always remembered my friend's name, and every year or so asked about her. I'd answer honestly: She'd won a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She'd published a book.
He'd grimace and say, "So she's living off the government. Has she got a job? Is she married, or is she still looking for a man?"
No matter what I said, he'd add, "Maybe she ought to spend less time sitting under trees writing poetry."
When I announced she'd gotten married and started having children, he smirked. "Once she starts having babies, she'll be too busy changing diapers to sit under a tree and write poetry. She's going to find out what real work is."
And every time we spoke about her, he'd conclude, "You know, Old Jules had it right when he said writers and artists are the maggots of society."
People who are disturbed by Old Jules forget that only the strong and the ruthless stayed—that the squeamish may be nicer to live with, but they conquer no wilderness. If you look into history you will find that vision is always accompanied by a degree of thoughtlessness, impatience, and even intolerance for others.1
Maggots—legless soft-bodied, wormlike fly larvae—develop quickly in dead flesh and become annoying houseflies and bluebottles. Most rural children could tell firsthand maggot stories, so Jules used familiar facts for his insulting metaphor.
Yet both Jules and my father, John, taught their daughters how to make wise decisions about the land and animals that were our responsibility. The way our fathers treated us contradicted that degrading judgment. Jules's daughter worked hard to become a respected writer and historian. She never willingly compromised her own high standards, never backed down from a battle with anyone who disagreed with her. She survived blizzards, prairie fires, an apartment-house fire, rattlesnakes, argumentative editors, critics, bad reviews, death threats, and every crisis in her life but the last. Nearing the end of her fight to snatch more writing time from the cancer that was killing her, she wrote briskly and without pretense, "After two malignancies one learns to be prepared for anything, and promises very little for the future. If I'm alive I'll be happy to write the introduction for the book."2 She finished the introduction, though it was published posthumously. Anything but soft-bodied, that Mari.
As Mari contemplated, and quoted, her father's remark about the maggots in later years, I wonder if she thought of that epic story of the trapper Hugh Glass, left to die on the Dakota prairie by his so-called friends after being clawed by a grizzly. She knew Frederick Manfred, apparently admired his writing, and doubtless read Lord Grizzly, his fictionalized account of the ordeal.3 As Manfred tells it. Glass crawled toward civilization in the stench of his own decaying flesh as the wounds on his back began to rot. Maggots ate the putrid meat, so by the time Glass could stand upright and think of revenge, his back had healed. The maggots clearly did him more good than harm.
Moreover, maggots transform themselves; they change from wiggling grubs to creatures able to see in all directions and travel freely. Jules meant his comment as criticism, but a careful look at the metaphor suggests his daughter might have been justified in taking it as a compliment.
Oh, by the way, you would hardly expect anyone of my temperament to "emphasize the hopelessness of the struggle in the sandhills." I don't recognize any hopelessness in any struggle with nature. Defeated we are, of course, for death is inevitable, but to the people that seem interesting to me the struggle is a magnificent one in any event. 4
My father may have introduced me to Old Jules; he admired the book as an accurate portrayal of the homesteading era. Yet he became so angry when I wrote about him that he stopped reading my books. (Having learned from him to be stubborn. I buried the books with him.) His Swedish father came to the plains of South Dakota in 1899, homesteading in western South Dakota only a couple decades after Jules Sandoz settled in western Nebraska. When we were trying to solve a problem, my father sometimes wondered aloud what Old Jules would do. He declared that Old Jules knew how to raise children tough enough for real life. Though he never struck me, I was terrified of his cold disapproval. Like Mari, I was "too frightened of him to voice either approval or surprise" at his actions.5
My life in Dakota in the 1950s and 1960s was easier than Mari's in Nebraska fifty years earlier. Still our experiences were similar in many ways. We both rode through blizzards, handled and were hurt by horses and cattle, harvested hay and crops. Like Mari I learned how to work hard while discovering the limits of my strength and intelligence. We grew up physically strong, becoming self-reliant women who trusted our own judgment. My father always told me I could do anything I set my mind to do. While he may have taken this philosophical position by default—he had no sons—the effect was liberating. Jules and John treated their daughters like equals: like men.
You know my notions about us human beings. I figger that this world runs on a pretty even keel and those of us who are cursed with fine virtues, like courage and sincerity, have faults as strong. Frontiersmen had to have courage, tenacity, resourcefulness, and determination and the sap of life in superlative degree or they'd high-tailed it back east long before they got to be frontiersmen. To balance these virtues you and your kind are permitted any faults you may care to entertain and it's all right with me.6
I can't be sure when I first began to read Mari's work with more than casual interest, but I remember the famous blizzard of '49: how the snow began to fall softly from a gray sky, the bolts of lightning, the growl of thunder. Eventually, I read Mari's Winter Thunder and felt that shiver of recognition, of kinship with someone who knew in her bones, as I do, what a blizzard means on the plains.
By that time I had also begun to understand the difference between people who visit the plains or fantasize about it and people who really live here. I had absorbed the prairie into my bones and flesh so completely that I will never willingly, or truly, leave it. Perhaps Mari felt the same; she wrote about her "outpost in New York."7
During my ranch childhood I thought of Mari as a neighbor who lived a little too far away to fight our prairie fires. The rural community where her family still lived was less than a hundred miles from my own, a negligible distance for folks who regularly drove to regional markets to sell livestock or to buy groceries and goods we couldn't get in our own little towns. Some of our acquaintances knew her neighbors and gossiped about the family.
Every time an Oh-you-poor-dear-how-you-must-have-suffered letter about Old Jules comes in I am tempted to write you a note of thanks for seeing that the Running Water of my childhood was a paradise, a paradise beyond anything the horrified can conceive, let alone attain, in even the best of their conventionalized, dehumanized, civilized society.8
Mari suggested that Old Jules was written for a limited audience, people who would understand how truly it portrayed the physical and cultural heritages of the plains homesteading era. She was at first pessimistic about the book's future precisely because she thought that the majority of Americans were becoming detached from the reality of hard work required on the prairie. In 1935 she predicted that the country would soon be populated by people who have "been spared the necessity of facing actual reality at all. . . . I happen to disapprove of the whole process of infantilizing our citizenry. I like the strong things of life. . . . I like bone and muscle in my literature and what passes for literature."9
Seventy years later, Mari's foreboding sounds downright prophetic. Many modern urbanites have only a dim idea of what the plains environment is like and think our western culture is a myth they can imitate by buying a ranchette or a big hat. Meanwhile, folks who make their liv ing from agriculture still face the traditional hardships as well as fresh survival tests: a tangled international economy, newfangled diseases, and muddled lawmaking by uninformed folks in distant urban centers. Mari's biography of Old Jules and his battles with authority offer hope, encouragement, confirmation to working people.
Almost every community has or had some person . . . who saved or helped save the early settlement. . . . Often, too, it wasn't the community's finest citizen but that only improves the story. I should like to stress the idea that if you know and understand the story of your community you will know and understand a great deal of the story of man, anywhere.10
In 1992 Letters of Mari Sandoz appeared, and my father died. Mari's letters about her struggles to write and publish seemed especially poignant as I worked with my notes, journals, and letters about my father to write the essays that became my book Feels Like Far. Meanwhile I was earning a living by speaking about writing, ranching, and the environment. As I talked with rural and urban readers, I encountered stories of fathers like Old Jules and realized that, though I had never met the man, I knew him well.
Part of my knowledge came, of course, from Old Jules and my father's appreciation of it. I'd lived with him long enough to understand that he admired Old Jules because they were a lot alike.
More important, however, Old Jules still lives, and not only on the plains. A man who closely resembles him lives somewhere near you, raising children and crops, building cars or highways, hunting elk or bowling. He occasionally writes a letter to the editor of his local newspaper. He takes his cattle to the sale ring or cashes his weekly paycheck and shops at Wal-Mart. He visits with his neighbors in church after a funeral or in the bar after work. He pays his taxes but is always looking for a loophole. His brother belongs to a group of anti-government veterans who have weapons cached in Utah, or is it Idaho? He can salute the flag while cussing the government. His daughters and sons go to college or work in the local fast-food joint or get pregnant or join the Army. He always votes unless he can't get to town, but woe shall befall any political pundit who tries to predict how he will vote.
Sometimes it seems that a quirk of fate has tied me to this father I feared so much even into my maturity."11
Mari lamented that her editors wanted to "easternize" her writing vocabulary and suggested that she make Old Jules a kinder, gentler person. She referred to their suggestions as the "rotariani-zation of Old Jules," and added, "the suggested prettification of Old Jules was an insult to the memory of the fine old Tartar that I couldn't stomach."12 Similarly, an editor of Feels Like Far encouraged me to erase examples of my father's kindness and intelligence from the book to make his character more wholly evil, saying that would emphasize the conflict between us as the book's theme. I resisted the suggestion, just as Mari did, because the resulting caricatures would not be the truth.
I am surprised that anyone would imagine I hated my father. Does one spend five years of his life in an effort, no matter how puny the effort, to immortalize a man one hates?13
We can infer the lessons Mari learned from Old Jules from the way she conducted her life. Determined to portray the West as she knew it through her own experiences, she overcame tremendous obstacles in publishing twenty-one books. She never stopped battling misconceptions and stereotypes that still plague the West. Deeply concerned about the future of the prairies, she wrote intelligently about many of the ethical, ecological, social, and economic problems that residents—farmers, ranchers, environmentalists, Indians—still face today.
But what of the people for whom the western plains are only a mirage or a summer playground or a retirement home? If the reader simply concludes that Old Jules was an isolated character, purely evil, his lessons will be lost. Can we afford to lose the precepts such men provide? If future generations are not taught by an Old Jules, will they be less responsible, weaker, unfit to survive a serious challenge?
The judgment belongs to the reader, not to Mari Sandoz or to me. Consider the balance: what did the descendants of Old Jules gain in relation to what they lost by his behavior?
Nor have I any desire to defend Old Jules. He needs no defence [sic]."14
Even when Old Jules is safely confined between book covers, he horrifies some readers, and some doubt that Mari portrayed him accurately. Modern readers, who have watched a repellant parade of writers with no respect for truth, have good reason for cynicism. Mari was a stickler for the facts and documentation; she spent—or wasted—valuable writing time defending her facts and conclusions. She expected editors and readers to know her reputation and to trust her word. Perhaps it's time to demand from writers we propose to honor a similar integrity.
Further, my nonfiction is really nonfiction. This side of the Hudson there is a difference.15
Reading Mari's letters, I realized I had unknowingly emulated her by trying to respond to each letter from my own readers. Mari complained about this self-imposed duty, but she kept doing it throughout her life: "I either answer letters or I write books—never both."16 I shudder to think what she'd say about e-mail. She may also have learned, as I have, that some readers ask questions with disturbing implications. Studying such a letter and composing an intelligent reply requires me to rethink a conviction or a belief—and may thus inspire me to further writing.
Sometimes I answer a letter to correct false impressions, to set the record straight. The same misunderstandings about daily life on the western plains that plagued Mari—questions about weather, landscape, politics—still bother modern readers of her work. Writers with similar interests are often isolated, so I have a sneaking suspicion that Mari, too, answered some letters for the enjoyment of sharing intelligent conversation with other writers. I am a teacher; many of my responses, like the nearly thirty thousand letters she wrote, are to fledgling writers.17 Mari wasn't always gentle, but her remarks were always honest.
I'm amused at your comments on my writing. Has it ever occurred to you that you would not venture to suggest to even a failing bootblack how to run his business and yet you, every one of you. never hesitate to tell a writer, who may have spent his life studying his craft, developing and maturing his art,—may even have considerable natural talent for his work, what to do?18
Some of Mari's readers suggested she wrote about her father to "get even" for his treatment of her. These days we use terms like "dysfunctional family" and "emotional abuse." But many of us who grew up under these conditions are likely to agree that we are grateful to our fathers, and consider the fact that they fed, clothed, and educated us more important than their emotional blackmail. Dozens of readers who were treated much worse have written to me, not to complain, but to thank me for confirming that we all survived and that we appreciate knowing others did too. Perhaps Mari and I, along with all the other folks who have weathered the Old Jules instruction, need therapy, but I must echo her response, which follows, to a reader's similar comments.
The charge made by one of your acquaintances that I wrote Old Jules to vent my bitterness amuses me. First, because there is no reason for bitterness at all. No family of my acquaintance has been better equipped against the vicissitudes of life as it must be lived than his six children. Don't forget that we got our ability to dream dreams far above our surroundings from him.19
Both Mari and I lived in a male-dominated society, with good reasons to hesitate to write about our fathers. Professionals who study these things have established beyond a reasonable doubt that daughters always seek approval from fathers.
Further, many plains folk learned to be reticent about trouble inside the home and out. Our families expected us to solve problems, not merely endure them. When I told my father that I was depressed, for example, he snapped, "Hard work will cure that." I may not have been happier after I shoveled out the barn, but I was tired enough to sleep well. By the next day, my trouble seemed more manageable. I concluded that hard work requires concentration and creates exhaustion. Sleep may encourage my brain to figure out why I'm depressed and how to cheer up. Professional therapists might deplore this method, but I continue to find it effective and consider it a way to take responsibility for my own mental state.
