Further Backdrop to What's Made Us into Us

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Tuesday
April 24, 2007
FURTHER BACKDROP TO WHAT'S MADE US INTO US; for Jay

Dear Jay,

Hello again. I trust all's well with you and yours. I neglected to mention in any of my recent open letters that April 20th marked the 25th anniversary of Harry's death and that he was buried in the Richmond Cemetery on Shakespeare's (probable) birthday a quarter of a century ago -- which, poetically, was his best friend, Cecil McCall's, birthday. Also, I was born a week after Shakespeare (and a week before Freud) on April 30th, so we'll be eating out with Jaromir & Magda this coming Saturday evening to celebrate both her and my birthday. I'll be turning 58 -- which means that you must have turned 50 this year; but I've forgotten the date. Sorry. Please remind me. Thanks.

I believe strongly that one of the most important functions of a memoir or autobiography is to let other people -- particularly the next generation that's coming along -- gain some measure of insight into their own lives by gaining some measure of understanding of who we believed ourselves to be, what we were like, and how we came to be the way we were during our short dance here beneath the sun. In keeping with this concept, you'll recall that I recommended David McCullough's enormous biography of Harry Truman to my other favorite cousin Jane Stone in a recent open letter.

This evening, in keeping with this same concept, I'm recommending to you (and Jane and Kevin and anyone else who's interested) a 1998 novel by the magnificent Jane Smiley entitled THE ALL-TRUE TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON. It's set mostly in the landscape which would one day become "the greater Kansas City area" (or what the broadcast media term "the metro"), during that momentous era (1854-1865) we now refer to as "Bloody Kansas."

In a nutshell: Lidie is an unusually moxy young woman from Illinois who physically resembles the novelist herself and who comes out here with your new husband to homestead (as did W.K.'s & Phoebe's parents) in the 1850's, in part to assure that Kansas will enter the Union (as it did in 1861, the year Harry's mother was born) as a Free State. In other words she and her groom are abolitionists, a sort of mid-19th century version of ourselves. After her husband is murdered by pro-slavery bushwacker types, Lidie bobs her hair, disguises herself as a young man, and sets out to walk (And this is much of what fascinates me about the story.) . . . to WALK from Douglas County, Kansas, all the way across Jackson County, Missouri, through the farm country which became the city where you grew up, over into what is now Independence, to exact revenge by executing the men who've murdered her husband.

This novel, like much of Smiley's writing, is positively Shakespearean. But more to my immediate point: Smiley's description of the LANDSCAPE of this rural "Ur-" or Proto-KCMO is utterly enchanting. The hills and dales especially. And the dense woods. (A foreign visitor once remarked to Walt Bodine: "How wonderful, to build a city in a forest.") Even though I read Smiley's book quite a few years ago, I didn't grasp the significance of the landscape through which Lidie travels toward her revenge until I took this job with the school district and began patroling every inch of the landscape where this story is set. It's made us us.

Yours in History Therapy,

Uncle Bunky

(Galen)


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