海角大神

Well. Surprise, surprise. I thought she was talking to me 鈥撎�me.听

Not so. I wasn鈥檛 the only one duped. I, and I bet many of you, and Virginia Kirkus, too, who was working as an editor at Harper & Brothers at the time when across her desk slid the manuscript of "Little House in the Big Woods":听鈥淭he real magic was in the telling. One felt that one was listening, not reading. And picture after picture ... flashed before my inward eye. I knew Laura 鈥� and the older Laura who was telling her story. Here was a book no depression could stop.鈥� If only Laura Ingalls Wilder鈥檚 "Little House"听books, instead of a world war, could have stopped the Great Depression. But that鈥檚 as much an idyll as the series.

In her new book Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser doesn鈥檛 mush the idyll of Wilder鈥檚 books so much as set the stories in their true surrounding circumstances and thereby let reality do the mushing. Fraser brings a learned hand to this substantial biography of Wilder, learned and substantial though also light on its feet, washed with color, and opinionated.

We meet here a Wilder who embodied 鈥渁 great American drama in three acts鈥�: poverty, struggle, and reinvention, the latter while engaged in the profound autobiographical novelization of American mythmaking and self-transformation. Here we meet the human: parsimonious and humble and with a touch of vanity; not an intellectual, but an intellect; blessed with the dry humor of endurance, all things considered; as proud of her hen-raising skills as she was gimlet-eyed about the iron drudgery of rural, domestic expectations; and the curse of money and never having enough, or any at all.

The epic, uplifting, triumph-of-the-American-farm series Wilder wrote 鈥� or co-wrote, as will be seen 鈥� as had limelight enough, the eight books in the series having sold 60 million copies in 45 languages that created the cozy security of nights by the frontier fire, with daytime drama that was thrilling, not demoralizing or terrifying. Okay, enough about the subject matter of the books and on to the demoralizing and, at many a time, terrifying life of Wilder.

The first two acts of Wilder鈥檚 life were marked by promise, then having the rug yanked out from under her a seemingly unfair number of times, then the having the stoic grit to rebuild or move on. When Laura was a girl, the Ingalls family upped from a prospering Wisconsin farm for parts unknown for reasons unknown. Evidently the tall grass, big bluestem prairie beckoned. They didn鈥檛 reckon on the locust, over 3 million strong, proving to be the market for their wheat crop. Fraser draws a wicked picture: 鈥淟ike a demonic visitation, it was flickering red, with silver edges,鈥� a ground cloud 鈥渢hat appeared to be alive, arriving 鈥榓t racehorse speed.'鈥�

Fraser鈥檚 color commentary freshens the story time and again, because Laura鈥檚 life was one of wildfire, dust storms, house fires, illnesses like diphtheria, tornadoes, crazy 鈥渟inister鈥� weather (as is said, if you don鈥檛 like prairie weather, wait a minute), warfare in the Black Hills and warfare with the Osage. 鈥淎n 1807 watercolor portrait of an Osage warrior shows his bald head sprouting a brilliant orange crest, like a mohawk, at the crown of his skull. His eyelids, cheeks, and torso are likewise colored a fierce orange, contrasting with the blue-green headdress bristling with the head of a small raptor, the beaks of waterfowl, and the skins of hummingbirds. The Osage were not shy about defending their land and their interests.鈥� Or when 鈥渁n ominous funnel began forming out of the black clouds to the north. The air turned green.鈥� Then there are times that her writing overreaches and jangles: 鈥渢he whole remains elusive, obscured under the soot of time,鈥� followed shortly thereafter by 鈥淟ooking for their ancestry is like looking through a glass darkly.鈥� Soot?

Giving a panoptical look at Wilder鈥檚 time is Fraser鈥檚 intelligent grasp of the bankers鈥� role in the Great Depression, the environmental role in the Dust Bowl, the hucksterism of the Homestead Act: 鈥渇armers were increasingly aware that the system was rigged to favor the railroads, middlemen, and large operations such as the bonanza farms of the Red River Valley, which could afford to stockpile grain and wait for the market to turn.鈥� There is also some unfortunate infatuation on both Lane and Wilder鈥檚 part with fascism, which lingers a mite too long. And Wilder displays a level of racism that even 鈥渢he times鈥� can鈥檛 excuse for its insensitivity. 鈥淲ilder鈥檚 treatment of Indians, for all of her admiration of them, had undeniably reductive and racist elements.鈥� We do not read of Osage desperation, but three times we do come across the slur 鈥淭he only good Indian is a dead Indian.鈥�

Much of the book, as needs be, circles around the writing relationship between Laura and her daughter, the journalist Rose Wilder Lane. Fraser comes down hard on the collaborationist side 鈥� and Fraser鈥檚 extensive footnotes appear to bare this out: that Wilder would complete a rough draft, Lane would add polish, and then Wilder would roughen the too-polished and rein in the melodramatic. Lane did not ghostwrite the books, nor was she merely a cheerleader for Mom. Theirs was a freighted relationship 鈥� Lane was a wild one, and a bit unstable to boot. Wilder couldn鈥檛 have been different 鈥� but they understood each other鈥檚 strengths and played to them ... to, what was that? Sixty million copies.

Fraser鈥檚 volume feels as secure in its verisimilitude and necessary guesswork as those cozy fireside-reading sessions out there on the glorious prairie, that burning, pestilential, heartbreaking, health-sapping, dust-broiling, dark, and wintry prairie. The book will stand true 鈥� a testament to bootstrapping work by both Fraser and Wilder 鈥� a lot longer than those sod huts.听 听听