It’s been a while since I posted on here. The fact is, I’ve been busy.
I have recently launched a new novel, Lost and Found in Nebraska. Although the story is fresh – I started writing at the beginning of lockdown in 2020 – the background material has been on my mind for thirty years.
I first visited Nebraska in 1991 as part of a research trip – driving up the Santa Fe Trail from New Mexico and into Missouri, then back along the Oregon Trail, following the Platte river through the Cornhusker state. I was immediately enchanted by the place, the people, its history – and soon developed a keen interest in one or two of its writers.
Two years later I was invited to deliver a paper at the Willa Cather conference in Hastings, and it was there, through a casual conversation over breakfast, that I was prompted to dig deeper into the life of a lesser known Nebraska writer.
I’d been talking to Helen Stauffer, the biographer of Mari Sandoz, author of the classic Old Jules. Helen told me that the key to understanding Mari’s writing was an unpublished manuscript she’d written as a very angry young woman – an unflattering portrait of her family and in particular her father, Old Jules Sandoz.
With us at breakfast were Frank and Charlotte White, friends of Mari’s youngest sibling, Caroline. They insisted I should drive out to the Sandhills and visit her. Before I could protest about my schedule, and the inconvenience of a six-hour round trip, they had called ahead and and told Caroline to expect me. It’s the way westerners are.
I drove partway there that evening, camped on the lawn outside the American Legion Hall in Hyannis, and started again at sunrise next day after turning on the sprinklers for a makeshift shower.
I arrived with my nerves jangling, having nursed a shiny rental sedan several miles along a thin, sandy trail that bumped across featureless, dusty cattle pasture.
‘What time do you call this?’
I looked at my watch. It was eight thirty, I’d been on the road since six, and this 83-year-old gal was standing there with one hand against the door frame, slap bang next to a Winchester .410. She assured me it was only there to ‘pepper those darned deer’ that kept chewing her trees, and invited me in for coffee.
I’d barely been there half an hour when she took me down into the basement. It was packed with her late sister’s effects – clothes, hats, pictures, papers and books, plus a few small items of furniture. In 1966, after Mari’s death, Caroline had taken a four-ton truck to New York and emptied her apartment. She gave first pick to the University of Nebraska. I was looking at what they’d declined to take.
I came straight to the point and asked whether Caroline had a copy of the unpublished manuscript that would eventually feed into Old Jules. Yes, she said. And there it was, in a ring-binder, in my hands… and there we were sitting opposite each other at the dining-table, turning the pages.
Aside from breaking for lunch, we sat there for eleven hours. I read as fast as I could and passed each chapter to her as I completed it.
What I had in front of me was clearly an apprentice writer’s attempt to describe her young life, and – I can state this with conviction – to put on record her every grievance against her (fictionalised) father and mother. It was an exorcism: intemperate, angry, occasionally incoherent. And there was no mistaking the true identity of the fictional characters, nor of the home they inhabited. It was the Old Jules homestead alongside the upper Niobrara.
As we read, Caroline mentioned that it was a long time since she’d looked at the manuscript. At one point, after I’d ingested a very lurid passage about a beating dished out by the father (Jock) on the daughter (named Endor, but clearly Mari), she looked over the top of her glasses and asked me, ‘What exactly is your interest in my sister?’
I think I said something about my scholarly pursuits, and my plan to write about a number of Great Plains writers whose first reflections on frontier life were bitter and angry but who later overlaid their accounts of the past with a more forgiving, generous, even elegiac tone. Then I got back to skimming, and scrawling in my pad. I left that night with some 30 pages of notes.
For years I had to put Mari Sandoz on the back burner. In between my other work I managed to read most of her books, spent some time in her archive in Lincoln, and got to attend a handful of conferences. One day, I told myself, I would write something about her.
When I finally reached the point where I felt I had time to tackle my subject, I knew I needed to get back to that unpublished draft manuscript, variously entitled Murky River or The Ungirt Runner. This was surely, I told myself, a simple matter of asking the archivists in Lincoln, or at the Sandoz Center in Chadron, to dig it out.
Neither had any idea where the manuscript might be. I tried various individuals connected to the family, the Center, and the Sandoz Society. Nobody knew anything. One or two denied all knowledge of such a document.
Further enquiries led me to the conclusion that Caroline, who died as recently as 2011, might have destroyed the manuscript – or hidden it away. Or maybe the family decided to do so. I have seen with my own eyes the instruction Mari left, that it should never be published. And the fact is, it’s badly written, and paints an unflattering picture of a dysfunctional family. You wouldn’t necessarily want it out there in public.
So where did that leave me, with oodles of material, a passionate interest in Mari’s life and work – and a strong yen to write about a region that had cast its spell on me, just as it did on my literary heroine? All that, but lacking the source material I wanted.
And that’s what freed me up to create a fiction. It came to me when I sat down in our isolated off-grid cottage in the Scottish Highlands in February 2020, writing by candle-light as the storms raged over the mountains. I decided I would write a novel in which some imaginary person – perhaps two – would set out along a similar path to the one I had trodden. I’d set them on their way, and see what happened when they found the manuscript didn’t exist.
I think the result is entertaining and engaging. It goes far beyond mere scholarly enquiry. It looks at the disruptive effect of secrecy and misinformation within families; it celebrates the Sandhills landscape, and the life of the area’s most famous daughter; it examines the frontier myth; it brings together two adults from widely different backgrounds who become involved in the Sandoz story from very different standpoints, and teaches them the redemptive power of understanding as they tread the long road to reconciliation.
Give it a try. Lost and Found in Nebraska
