I'm extra hungry this week. That's because the sweet girl and I are reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy aloud.
Farmer Boy is the third book in the original Little House series. It tells about a year in the life of young Almanzo Wilder (who would grow up to marry Laura). How much fun she must have had talking to Almanzo and his family as she prepared to write this book! Like all of Laura's books, it's filled with vivid descriptions of daily life and activities, in this case the daily activities of a busy farming family in northern New York in the 1860s.
The family works very hard, including the children, so it's small wonder they eat a lot of food. And boy, could Almanzo's mother cook! I had almost forgotten how hungry I get when I read the descriptions of the table laden down with all the good things she made for them to eat:
"Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his red waist. And he ate plum preserves, and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie."
There's a solid, workmanlike quality to Wilder's prose. I keep getting a picture in my head of someone carefully building a brick wall, layering each brick with care, spreading the mortar in between with a trowel, scraping off any excess that slops over the cracks. She uses simple subject/verb sentences, and isn't adverse to repetition and listing things. It's a noun-heavy kind of prose, with crisp verbs and an occasional strong adjective (and not always the one you're expecting either -- I love "sleek butter"). This is true whether or not she's describing good food, harsh weather, or how to make or clean something.
Her descriptions of food always feel vivid, but I think it's Farmer Boy where they really stand out because there's just so much food. There's no getting around it: Laura's family was poor, especially in comparison to the wealthy land-owning Wilders. The food descriptions in the two books particularly highlight that difference. I can still recall, years ago, drinking water and eating dry bread (well, as dry as I could find it) while imaginatively entering The Long Winter, the story of the harsh winter during Laura's teenage years when her family almost perished from cold and hunger. Who can forget the howling of yet another prairie blizzard, the painful grinding of seed wheat to make bread, the twisting of hay for fuel? Wilder is as good at describing scarcity as she is plenty.
If the brick wall image doesn't work for you, try bread. I used to love watching my mother bake bread: the careful lining up of ingredients, the mixing together, the punching down of the dough, the rising of the dough beneath a cloth. All the careful steps to make something substantial and nourishing. Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing feels like that to me: thick, crusty, substantial and nourishing, carefully put together from time-tested recipes. Nothing fancy, and yet somehow it feels and tastes like a work of art.
If I'm thinking a lot about prose style this week, perhaps it's because I'm turning to a very different writer late in the evening. While the sweet girl and I are munching on Wilder in the afternoons, I'm sipping a delicious frothy beverage in the evening as I read George MacDonald's The Lost Princess.
I've read some MacDonald before, but can't recall if I ever read my way through this particular story. It's a fairy-tale, a parable, and the way MacDonald uses language couldn't be farther from Wilder's use of language, though they are both wonderful at evoking a sense of place and painting vivid pictures in your mind. But while Wilder describes things with her eyes wide open, noticing and recording exacting detail, MacDonald seems to describe what things are underneath, as though writing with his eyes closed. You can almost hear him murmur under his breath as though the words follow a tune he's making up as he goes along. He suggests and compares as often as he tells.
"In a little while she unfolded her cloak and let the princess look out. The firs had ceased, and they were on a lofty height of moorland, stony and bare and dry, with tufts of heather and a few small plants here and there. About the heath on every side lay the forest, looking in the moonlight like a cloud; and above the forest, like the shaven crown of a monk, rose the bare moor over which they were walking."
Walking through a MacDonald story I am struck that the landscape feels less solid. It's almost always bathed in some sort of light, moonlight or sunlight, affecting how we see (like an impressionist painter who goes back to the canvas to paint the same object or scene again and again, in different seasons and lights). The words meander. MacDonald doesn't mind advancing ahead a few feet and then stopping and swooping back a few feet more. Like someone sewing a back-stitch, he'll stop a sentence somewhere, go back and pick it up in the middle, then pop the needle back through right where he stopped. If he's a forest guide, he doesn't stick to a straight path, but runs off into detours, some of them inexplicable or even a bit wearying until you realize he's led you right to a bright wildflower several feet away (you just hadn't noticed it) or pointed out a animal hidden in the shade.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the second paragraph of the very first chapter of The Lost Princess where he separates the words "it came to pass one day that, in the midst of a shower of rain that might well be called golden....something happened" by over fifty phrases/clauses separated by commas, dashes and various other forms of punctuation, and once even a complete jump from prose to poetry as he stops to admit he's "stealing" some lines from Coleridge. All of this to describe what the golden rain looked, sounded and smelled like, as though he couldn't possibly imagine anything more important at that point in his story than to just stand there and linger, along with you, in this golden rain. It's like working your way through a sentence in a Pauline epistle (which I hear is even more fun in Greek) realizing that the flow of thought just goes on and on, like a babbling brook, one that you eagerly follow even if you sometimes lose your memory of where you started and have to go back to the source and start again.
Comparing Wilder and MacDonald is an odd exercise, I guess, because they're going about their art in such different ways and writing such different kinds of stories. But it's enjoyable for the mere sake of comparing, and for the beauty of realizing how much one can love both kinds of writing for what they are.
I love the breathless, meandering feel of MacDonald -- even just imagining reading that opening sequence makes me laugh, knowing how anyone listening will be almost quivering in anticipation (as I was the first time I read it) by the time we got to those two little words "something happened." He makes me want to follow him on that winding path deep into the magical forest drenched in moonlight, where I know owls will hoot and small creatures will scurry across our path and we'll stop to listen and to watch.
But I also love the substantial, solid feel of Wilder, where each sentence builds on the next as bricks in a wall, raindrops in a barrel, ingredients in a recipe, accumulating in ways that make sense, where the end of a chapter leaves me as satisfied as someone who has just eaten a piece of crusty homemade bread warm from the oven. And dripping with "sleek butter." Of course.
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