One of the things that has been really great about this project is that I've discovered some authors that I probably wouldn't have otherwise, they are the unsung heroes, the forgotten ones. One of these is Gwethalyn Graham, the author of Earth and High Heaven which is the book that I finished this afternoon. Gwethalyn Graham is an amazing writer: one of the few women to win the Governor General, and one of the even fewer women to win it multiple times, first for the novel Swiss Sonata(GG in 1938)and then again for Earth in 1944. I read Swiss Sonata right when I started pursuing this project seriously and fell in love with her then, thankful that I had this projects to make discoveries like that one. I got Swiss Sonata through an interlibrary loan with the Seattle Public Library. The book came from Pomona, California. What a jewel of a novel. It takes place pre-WWII in a Swiss boarding school. This Swiss boarding school becomes the microcosm for what is going outside this 1930s version of Mean Girls. I wrote a review about it on Amazon.ca and here it is:

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

A rare and outstanding jewel, Mar 7 2006

By	Pastry chick (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

Graham's novel was an amazing look at the world pre-WWII, written with such insight and foreshadowing as I have only seen in novels written post-war, when one has all the time in the world to have hindsight. Written in 1938 about 3 days during 1935, it turns a Swiss "finishing school" into a microcosm of pre-war Europe and abroad. Sometimes while reading, I couldn't see how the book pertained to a kind of Canadian experience, which I thought might be fitting as it was the 1938 winner of the Governor General, but I realized that it chronicles several human experiences, loneliness and loss among them, that make it universally worthy of any award presented to it. A must read for anyone who likes to think, but also enjoys good prose.

Earth and High Heaven is also a gem. Graham tackles a social unmentionable: the possible mixed marriage of a Jew and a Gentile. Interestingly, this book takes place DURING WWII, while Canadians and the rest of Europe were fighting against Hitler and Nazi Germany. At the heart of the novel are two people, Erica Drake and Marc Reiser. Erica is from a wealthy family who has seen their wealth slip a bit during the Depression, but they still cling to their WASPy status wholeheartedly(at least her parents do). Marc Reiser is a Canadian Jew, born to Austrian immigrant parents, who practices law in Montreal. Erica and Marc meet at a party at her parents' posh Westmount home, and you could pretty much say it was love at first sight. But, what ensues is a battle for that love as Erica's parents fight wholeheartedly against the relationship, because to them marrying a Jew is pretty much the worst thing in the world, at least they claim it will be for her, since her social status will diminish and after all, this man is only "using" her to get ahead. The love that Marc and Erica share grows despite all of this though, and even despite Marc misgivings that HE will ruin Erica's life with the prejudice she will face with a mixed marriage. Questions arise like "How would they raise their kids?" and the fact that Erica's father wouldn't be able to have his son-in-law come to his club(something that matters to him a great deal, to Erica not so much). What lies at the heart of this novel is prejudice and how blinding that prejudice in the face of stubbornness it can become. Erica's father is already not too pleased by his son's marriage to a Catholic French Canadian, this, especially given the fact that Erica is his favorite child is too much. It takes the second generation, both Marc's brother and Erica's sister to show parents some sense(though Marc's parents seem more amenable to the idea; Marc's mother's only worry is that when people are married for a long time they can fight and say things they wouldn't say to anyone else. She's afraid that Erica would throw Marc's being a Jew back at him). This, to an extent can be applied to any situation involving prejudices towards something someone doesn't or can't(because of lack of desire)understand. I know that when I began dating Keren, my mother got extremely worried. This is a woman for whom Christmas is a literal explosion all over her property every single year. The fact that I would possibly never celebrate Christmas again bothered her terribly. I still don't think she's completely over it, but at least she's willing to work with it and is not trying to prevent the relationship from continuing like Erica's father, especially, tries to do. Erica's father feels he knows what's best for her, but of course the only one that knows what's best for her is her, and he doesn't get it at all...Some phenomenal quotes come out of this book: "That human beings, regardless of their own merit, should take upon themselves the right to judge a whole group of men, women and children, arbitrarily assembled according to a largely meaningless set of definitions, was evil enough; that there should not even be a judgement, was intolerable" (Graham 32).
And in reference to Erica's father: "What he was saying was of no importance in itself, it had all been said before so many times, repeated parrot-like but with an air of acute perception and originality by one person after another, in one country after another, all the way down through history. After all, even Hitler was unable to think up anything really new on the subject of the Jews; he merely said what everybody else had been saying, only of course he said it louder and oftener, and put it a bit more strongly.[paragraph break] The importance lay, first, in the fact that it was Charles who was saying it, and second, in the fact that if he believed what he said, if he believed that even half of what he was saying applied to Marc, then, whether or not her father ultimately came round, it would make no real difference. He might put up with Marc, he might even endure him for her sake, but he would never like him. He would never even get near enough to Marc to find out whether he was likable or not. [paragraph break] (and MY FAVORITE PART RIGHT HERE) You might just as well try to see a man through a brick wall as try to see him through a mass of preconceived ideas" (149).
What I particularly loved was the foresight that Graham's characters had towards AMERICAN government. something that seems particularly fitting seeing as we are in an Election year moving towards FINALLY electing a new President. "'Do you think the people who are in a position to do all the talking really know?' asked Erica. [paragraph break] 'Maybe a few of them do, but all we seem to have got so far is a kind of mass consciousness of the way things are changing or ought to change, if we're really going to get anywhere after the war. At least the English masses seem to be getting the hang of things, and I guess we are too, though naturally not to the same extent yet, because we haven't taken anything like the beating they have. I don't know about the Americans, though I'd be willing to bet that when capitalism is a dead duck in the rest of the world, the Americans will be the last nation to admit it.' 'Why?' asked Erica. 'Because their attitude toward Government seems to be fundamentally different than ours. The further you get from unrestricted capitalism the more Government you have to have. So far as the war is concerned, for example, the Americans apparently get production in spite of their Government, half the time, and not because of it. It's their individual industrial geniuses who work the miracles, not Washington. They still believe in rugged individualism and don't believe in 'government interference,' so rugged individualism works and Government doesn't. Most of the Americans I know talk about their Government as though it was on one side of the fence and they were on the other. Good old-fashioned capitalism is the only economic system that suits that point of view'" (157-8). Hmmmm....
The novel gets its title, one discovers, from The Shropshire Lad by A.E. Houseman, which contains the lines 'Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle.../Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.' That makes me think of today even, that in some regards things haven't changed, or at least not as much as we would like. My mother worried about me dating a Jew, but not as much as she worries about what our lives are like as being a lesbian couple. There is an entire part of the country(ultra-conservatives)that are afraid, much like Erica's parents in the novel are, of people who are different, and there are also a lot of people who claim to be enlightened, but when push comes to shove...
"When I was just a little girl" I wanted to be Jewish so bad. I thought it was cool, that it would make me different. This book made me think about how hard it must have been, to preserve one's faith and culture in the face of sooooo much adversity. One night while I was reading the book I asked Keren about whether sometimes it had been hard for her to be Jewish in this country. Her answer made me think. Have we really come that far as a nation, as a world? This impending election has raised a lot of those questions, since the democrats have either a white woman or a black man as possible nominees. How ready are we really, and are our preconceived notions like the wall that stretches across China, or like the one in the former East Berlin? GGs-35. PPs-36.

Since my last blog, I've read two more winners...Home Truths by Mavis Gallant and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I feel slightly bad, because I didn't do any writing about Home Truths. I thought it was easily one of, if not the the best, short story collections I have EVER read. But, even though each story was very well crafted and highly enjoyable, I didn't find any of the stories to be particularly memorable. This is not to detract at all from Gallant's writing ability at all, though. Her collection of short stories, though shorter than Katherine Anne Porter's, was so much better.:) Gallant explores what it means to be "Canadian"...Her depiction of Canadians is not always good, she sometimes demonstrates them as close-minded, but others as explorers of their world. Perhaps this is to show that just like in the US, despite sometimes international thought depicting us differently, it takes all kinds of Canadians to make, well, Canada.
The book I finished early this morning is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. It was 945 pages long, and at first, I was like "this book is FUCKING long." But, especially in the last 300 pages, it became quite amazing. Larry McMurtry is one of the most successful American writers, not only because he has published a crazy amount of books, but also because he has had those books turned into screenplays(Terms of Endearment, etc.)and also written several screenplays of his own, including the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain(adapted from E. Annie Proulx, short story). Lonesome Dove is also about cowboys, lots and lots of them, though absolutely NONE of them are gay, unfortunately. 945 pages and NO ONE IS GAY? Come on! Women too are scarce in the novel, only a handful show up of any real note and less than 5 women would be considered main characters(probably really only 2, Clara and Lorena). That was also disappointing, but then I had to really think about what the West was like...
I will completely, and totally, readily admit that the West has been a fascination of mine since I was probably about 7 years old, when I first read Little House in the Big Woods and all the books that followed. I have, for at least the past twenty years, scoured libraries and bookstores for anything about the West and pioneers, mostly women and pioneering, which is pretty rare. Willa Cather whom I adore(especially since she was a lesbian) talked about establishing the Midwest and living and working the land, but she always used male protagonists(arguably because then she could write more freely about the love for a woman). Cather's only Pulitzer prize winner also has a male protagonist. But, anyway, I've always thought the West and travelling the West was pretty interesting, though I always focused much more on the pioneer aspect and less on the cowboy aspect. There are quite a few books, interestingly enough, in the Pulitzer list, that are about establishing the West, which makes sense because the Pulitzer is supposed to be about the American Experience, a huge part of which of course is the never-again paralleled Westward Expansion. I will have many more books to read about the West and hard farming lives in the Midwest, which is great! Why didn't I have to read this stuff in school? Why are all the early books pushed aside and put away? I can't wait to read almost all of them, especially women writers writing about prairie experiences.
Back to Lonesome Dove. When the book opens, we are thrust into the small town of Lonesome Dove, Texas, with Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call and all the other characters who will forever stay in my memory. The novel follows these two mean as they lead thousands of cattle north to Montana, loves lost and gained and also all the peripheral stories of other people and how the world is such a truly small place. My favorite character, besides Augustus(Gus) McCrae, is Clara Allen, who is Gus's long lost love, from twenty years prior. She only figures in the book in memory, until around the last few hundred pages, when the cattle trip stops by her house in Ogallala, Nebraska. Then, her life without Gus is revealed and when he comes to visit, he brings Lorena, the whore that he rescued from Indians(up until that point the only real female character in the novel). She winds up living with Clara through the duration of the novel, helping to raise Clara's two children as well as the baby son of a young sheriff who is half-heartedly searching for Jake Spoon, a cowboy that Gus has known for years, who is on the run from the law and spent quite a long time with Lorena, who is on the trail to Montana because of him. See what I mean? In the novel of Lonesome Dove, it's truly a small small world.
It is fortunate that for the most part all of McMurtry's female characters(what few there are)are quite strong-minded survivors. That makes me appreciate them so much, despite the presence of them. However, I have to remind myself that the West certainly had a limited female population anyway and what women survived HAD to be strong in body AND spirit. Even Louisa, a woman farmer that Roscoe(July Johnson the sheriff tracking Jake Spoon's deputy sheriff)encounters on his way west is a hard-working, takes no prisoners, kind of woman, a fact that surprises Roscoe greatly. I wonder what I would have done if that opportunity had been available to me back then. Would I have gone and taken my chances with the men? It was appalling to see how limiting the career options for women were. You were either a schoolteacher, married or a whore. How would I, if I was as I am now, a lesbian, have handled myself and would I have taken advantage of my desire to see the West and explore, or would I have stayed East and NOT risked my life. It was crazy enough to move out here on my own now, over one hundred years later with the amenities such as car and cell phones. I'm not sure what I would have done back then. My dream would have been(especially when I was single)to open a restaurant in a town and cook for the men who would have loved homecooked meals, but I'm not sure whether there was a real possibility of me then being raped or forced to marry. I'm sure I wouldn't have been allowed to be single for too long. And then, where would I meet other women and/or have had exposure to books and education? As one found out while reading Lonesome Dove, when Clara talks about how long it takes for her to get her magazines that she sends away for, and one discovers how illiterate the men were, it would have been hard for a big reader like me. However, the description of the landscape on the way north from Texas to Montana made me want to get in the car and do a long-distance drive right away and see Wyoming again, not to mention the land I haven't seen, Montana, which to all accounts is supposed to be absolutely stunning. There is so much to write about with a 900+ page novel, but this has already been super long. I can say, it is like the Gone With the Wind of the West. Perhaps that will give you a better idea...:) Pulitzer prize-35, GGs-34.