Mari Sandoz, "Old Jules" | Helen Stauffer, "Mari Sandoz"

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Mari Sandoz "Old Jules" (1935)

 

About the book -- University of Nebraska Press

 

스무 살이던 1779년에 Zurich의 부모와 동생들을 떠나 홀로 미국으로 와 네브래스카 주 동북부 Sandhill 지역에서 개척자의 삶을 산 Jules Sandoz의 전기. 그의 맏딸 Marie Sandoz가 썼다. 본문 424 페이지를 지루한 줄 모르고 읽게 만든 건, 내용보다도 저자의 서술 능력인 것 같다.

 

본문에서

 

    “Your papa is a thief --- he stole land from our papa,” one of the Peters girls said to Marie on the bridge one day. But Jules' children were accustomed to such things. She giggled, turned, and ran up the road homeward, kicking sand back with her bare feet as she went, the nearest thing to nose-thumbing her mother permitted. (p. 274)

 

    "I ran away. Had a racket with the Old Man --- walked the twenty-five miles today....."

    ... The boy went back, but it was the first break, and it helped the more completely disciplined Marie. She had passed the county examination from the eighth grade in good standings, despite the little schooling. Now she sneaked to Rushville the first week in August, and in a pink cross-barred gingham dress she took the teacher's examination in such subjects as arithmetic and civil government, and the theory of teaching. It seemed impossible that she could pass. All the other candidates were well-dressed young ladies and she was a child, but she must get away --- peacefully if she could, because of her mother, but get away.

    When Jules heard what she had done he was violent. "I want no goddamn lazy schoolma'ams in my family. Balky, no good for nothing!"

    But after Marie got her certificate he bragged about it when she wasn't around.    "That's what comes of living with an educated man!"

    And none denied it. (p. 366)

 

    Then one evening Jules called quietly. Mary ran to him, lifted the water-puffed body of her, tugged and pulled at it until she got him to the edge of the bed....

 

    "Mary ---" he gasped weakly through the thin beard, "Mary, we went a long ways together. But now --- I guess it is good-bye."

    “No, no, Jules, talk not so,” she cried to him in German. But his face his grayed, his beard lengthened as his jaw relaxed. She laid him back....

 

    The next day he looked through the papers and found a small item announcing a prize for a short story awarded to Marie. He tore the paper across her, ordered pencil and paper brought, wrote her one line in the old, firm, up-and-down strokes: "You know I consider artists and writers the maggots of society." (p. 419)

 

The sons of Freese, fine middle-aged men who never went to law and never talked of God, stood silently beside Jules' bed and thoughts, perhaps of the day a wagon left the Running Water, a circle of men with Wnchester watching in the rain. (p. 420) 

 

    Early in November, 1928, Jules, seventy-one now, was rushed to the hospital at Aalliance, and Mary sent a wire to Lincoln and then huddled beside the bed to wait. At daylight Marie looked out upon the first low sandhill, huge sprawled bodies under dun-colored blankets. So they must have looked from the east in 1884, a little grayer from the winter wash of snow, when Jules drove up to the Niobrara. But then there were still deer, antelope, elk, wolves, Indians,.... Now ducks swam in melancholy file on the summer-shrunken ponds. Geese circled high to catch the swifter blasts of the north wind that moaned a little over the frost-reddened bunchgrass. The sunflowers, Jules' index to good soil, bowed their frost-blackened faces and rattled their fear of winter winds. And sometimes for ten, twenty miles through the chippy country along the south road there was no house, not even a horsebacker -- only the endless monotony of a stormy sea, caught and held forever in sand. (p. 421)

 

 

 

Sandhills Region, Nebraska

 

 

 

전에 어느 책에선가 Mari Sandoz가, 가장 그럴 자격을 갖춘 작가로서, Sioux 인디언 추장의 전기 "Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Ogalas" (1942)를 썼다는 걸 읽었다. 그러고 나서 Book Stack에서 Helen Stauffer의 "Mari Sandoz"를 발견한 건 2014년쯤인 것 같다. 지지난 달 Koelbel 도서관 라운지에서 산 Sandoz의 "Old Jules"를 이번에 읽고 나서야 "Mari Sandoz"의 두 chapter 'Old Jules'와 'Denver'룰 읽었다. Sandoz는 "Crazy Horse"를 덴버에서 썼다. 정작 "Crazy Horse"는 언제 만나게 될지 모르겠다. Book Stack에 또 들러봐야겠다.

 

 

 

Helen Winter Stauffer, "Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains" (1982)

 

 

'Five: Old Jules' 에서 

 

The Boston Transcript spoke of her as slender and vivacious, having the sort of poise that easterners never acquire, vibrating with nervous energy and vitality, thin, wiry, restless, sharp-faced, with shrewd lines about her mouth and eyes. "Mari Sandoz is ruthless, intolerant, sharp in her judgment, suffering fools, or those she considers fools, not at all gladly. She is honest, real, warm-hearted, much loved by her friends, to whom she is generous with possessions, time and energy."

    No matter what she wore, her hands gave evidence of the hard work of her youth. As one observer noted, "They were the hands of a farmer." (p. 98)

 

[T]he most common complaint concerned her brutal frankness in revealing her father's character. On the orther hand, some readers sympathized with mari for having to live under such difficult conditions. She did not want pity, for she felt that few men were given either such courage or such self-love as Old Jules. (p. 106)

 

'Seven: Denver'에서

 

Crazy Horse was unusual, both in point of view and in style of language. The language is consistent with Indian points of reference. The author associates her word-picture with the time and region: the prairie and its grasses, the rivers, the sandhills, and the rhythm of the seasons are depicted as the Indian experienced them, rather than from the standpoint of their white adversaries. (p. 148)

 

She heard, too, from her friend Wallace Stegner, himself a western writer of note, who found Crazy Horse "a marvelous fusion of fact and the method of fiction, and the whole book has a grand epic sweep. I found myself comparing Crazy Horse with Hector, which makes you automatically Homer. (p. 161)