A ‘Greenwich Village’ on the Prairie
Were I to write a Mari Sandoz biopic, I’d start with a shadow racing across her desk. I’d start at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 1935. I’d start with a 39-year-old hayseed — thin as a fence post and prickly as barbed wire — assaulting her typewriter on the ninth floor of the Nebraska State Capitol as a local bank teller plunges 135 feet to his death on the stone transept below. Perhaps I’d cut to the fingernail marks he left on the observation deck five floors above, or the note he left behind. I’d then creep slowly back up to Sandoz, red hair in a French bun, hands on her hips, standing quietly — even knowingly — at the window while her co-workers at the historical society buzz around her.
Roll credits.
Born and raised in the remote Nebraska Sandhills, roughly 400 miles west of Lincoln, the author Mari Sandoz plowed her way into the literary canon of the Great Plains — just months after the teller’s leap — when she finally published “Old Jules,” the biography of her father, a Swiss homesteader. “On putting down this book,” wrote The New York Times Book Review in 1935, “one feels that one has read the history of all pioneering.” Before her death from bone cancer in 1966, she would publish 18 more, fiction and nonfiction alike, enshrining her status — alongside Walter Prescott Webb, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner and others — as one of the most cleareyed chroniclers of the American frontier.
I’ve long felt a certain kinship with Sandoz. I, too, fled the Sandhills. I, too, graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I, too, began my writing career in the city. And I, too, sometimes chafe at my New York editors. “Damn it, you and I know the East has long bled the west white, is still doing it, and I’m to distort facts to please a book public,” she once wrote to a friend. “Why, I’d rather write my own way and dig ditches for my soup and hard tack than write lies for a yacht and sables. Row boat and rabbit’s more my style anyway.”
Sandoz would eventually leave Lincoln, first for Denver and then for New York, but she spent more years in Nebraska’s capital city than anywhere else. And though she criticized Lincoln throughout her career — calling it “the last word in decadent middle-class towns” and “particularly unkind” to writers — she would eventually soften on the city. Sort of. In a short essay for The Lincoln Star, the former morning newspaper, in 1959, she wrote, “I remember Lincoln as our Greenwich Village,” recalling long hours in cheap coffee shops and the hungry underclass of would-be artists and writers with whom she often commiserated: the poet Weldon Kees, the philosopher Loren Eiseley and the short-story writer Dorothy Thomas, among others.
So here I am, home again, half drunk and squinting beneath the Capitol, hoping to glean something more about Sandoz and the city she so loved to hate, or perhaps so hated to love. I’ve returned to see this sprawling city of roughly 300,000 people — where the skyline sprouts from the rail yard and the subdivisions spill into the cornfields; where the streets are treed, but the wetlands are paved; where the U.N.L. campus hums in the heart of the city and the Capitol beckons from miles away — through the eyes of its most vocal and most ambivalent critic.
Concealing a bottle of cheap rosé, my wife and I crane our necks. We stare. Nebraskans often call the Capitol tower the “Penis of the Plains,” and truthfully, there’s no debating its phallic structure: 15 floors of Indiana limestone standing erect above the city, capped with a dome of golden tiles and — as if to avoid any confusion — a 19-foot bronze statue called “The Sower” casting his seed to the wind.
But I’m fixated on the teller’s jump, instead. I squint, he falls. I squint, he falls. And I wonder how Sandoz might have interpreted the same. In those hollow hours before she burst onto the national stage, nary a book to her name, rejections mounting like unpaid bills, she must have borne a certain empathy for the bank teller. Her own family worried she might commit suicide, so far adrift from her literary ambitions, and she once wrote that after so many revisions of “Old Jules,” “I could have jumped off the Capitol too, but it wouldn’t have improved the book particularly.”
I squint. She falls.
