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.
A ‘modern tall tale’
When I first arrived in Lincoln, I rendezvoused with Ron Hull, then 92 and a pioneer of public television, beneath the stone columns of the Temple Building, one of the oldest structures on the U.N.L. campus. It was in the studio below, he told me, in the spring of 1959, that he produced a seven-part series called “Creative Writing With Mari Sandoz” for the university’s educational television station. “I would rather face a rattlesnake than that camera,” he remembered her saying, but as their work together progressed, she slowly began to relax.
“Quite frankly, if there’s one photograph of Mari Sandoz and me that I wish I had,” Mr. Hull said, “it’s of the two of us dangling our legs off the loading dock, both smoking my Pall Malls.”
With an elfish charm and bushy white eyebrows, Mr. Hull neatly unpacked his memories of the author: her generosity with students, her underdog complex, her staunch liberalism, her retreat to New York and, finally, Nebraskans’ general contempt for her second novel, “Capital City,” a thinly veiled allegory published in 1939 about the rise of fascism in the Midwest. Little did I know, of course, that just eight months later, Mr. Hull would, like Sandoz before him, be gone.
“I personally think ‘Capital City’ was a hate letter to Lincoln,” Mr. Hull said. “But it was here that she found herself. These people gave her the tools, and I think she felt she owed Lincoln a lot.”
But it’s here on the Capitol grounds, where she often spent her summer nights, escaping the heat of her nearby apartment, that I feel most connected to Sandoz. She once wrote that it rose from the corn lands like a “sort of modern tall tale,” and for years I understood this as a compliment, as if she could hardly believe its grandeur. There’s no doubt she adored the building. But I wonder now, as the streetlamps blink on and the bats flutter overhead, if I haven’t mistaken her intent. Perhaps by “tall tale,” she meant that the Capitol represented ideals — equality, justice, democracy — that the state had not yet realized, or maybe never would. Perhaps the double entendre was intentional. To be progressive in such a conservative state was then — and is now — to be perpetually caught between hope and despair.
But while Nebraska is redder now that it’s ever been, Lincoln itself leans relatively liberal and has evolved in some ways that Sandoz probably would have cherished. Forever a champion of the underdog, and the daughter of immigrants herself, Sandoz would very likely praise the city for its long history of refugee resettlement, for example. As a fan of contemporary art, she would no doubt frequent both the Sheldon Museum of Art and the nearby Great Plains Art Museum, too.
Old haunts and an obsession with hats
For a more intimate look at the author’s life, I meet up the next afternoon with Jamison Wyatt, a Sandoz aficionado whom I first encountered in college nearly 15 years ago. He now works for the State Legislature and served, until recently, on the executive board of the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society. And since 2014 — by request only — he has ushered Sandoz fans like me on a roughly mile-long walking tour of her life in the city. He calls it “Stalking the Ghost of Mari Sandoz,” a play on one of her pitched-but-never-published essays about Crazy Horse, and issues a 24-page hand-bound booklet to everyone who attends. Today, that’s just me and my parents, now tourists in their own city. It’s a blistering 99 degrees. Not a cloud in sight.
We start at the corner of 14th and P Streets, in the heart of downtown Lincoln, where Sandoz, then 23, attended Lincoln Business College just months after divorcing her first (and only) husband and fleeing her life as a rural schoolteacher in the Sandhills. We then move north to the welcome shade of campus, with stops at the former Teachers College — where Sandoz first enrolled — and the Social Sciences building, where she learned the fundamentals of her craft as a writer.
From there, we head to the former department stores looming above O Street, the city’s main drag, where Sandoz indulged her obsession with hats. Then to the old Lincoln Star building, where she took a part-time job as a copywriter, and past the Cornhusker Hotel, where — in its previous iteration — she savored the coffee shop’s free air-conditioning and wrote multiple drafts of “Old Jules.”
I’ve visited Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Ga.; H.L. Mencken’s Italianate rowhouse in Baltimore; William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak in Oxford, Miss.; the Hemingway Home in Key West, Fla.; and more. None of those tours were half as compelling as “Stalking the Ghost of Mari Sandoz.” Not because her personal landmarks have been especially well preserved — in fact, most have been razed or renovated beyond recognition, including two of her former apartments — but because Mr. Wyatt’s fascination with Sandoz is intoxicating.
By the end of our nearly three-hour tour, I feel voyeuristic, as though I’ve witnessed too much, and indeed, Mr. Wyatt’s scholarship bleeds well beyond the pages of Sandoz’s official biography. We know that her husband chased her from the Sandhills all the way to Lincoln, for example, where archival materials suggest he later cried on her doorstep. And we know, unlike most of her peers at U.N.L., that her greatest mentor, Prof. Melvin Van den Bark, wasn’t courting his favorite student, as the campus rag once suggested.
“He was gay,” says Mr. Wyatt, who explored the professor’s queerness for his undergraduate thesis at U.N.L. In May 1941, Van den Bark was arrested with a younger man from Kansas and charged on scant evidence with “immorality,” after which the chancellor demanded he resign. Sandoz, forever his friend and confidante, Mr. Wyatt explains, “pretended like she didn’t know where he went. But she knew.”
Mr. Wyatt later guides us through the Capitol’s interior, from the yawning foyer bedecked with glittering murals to the parapet on the 14th floor. “A fine place for thought,” Sandoz once called it, with a sweeping view of the city.
But down here on J Street, just steps from her old apartment, where Sandoz watched the monument rise, year after year, and the moon behind it, night after night, I’m thinking again of her biopic. I’m thinking of “Mist and the Tall White Tower,” the short story she wrote not long after the teller’s leap, about a young Sandhiller who flees his abusive caretaker — not Old Jules but Old Jillery — only to find himself on the Capitol parapet, one foot dangling over the ledge, struggling to reconcile life’s disappointments, before finally pulling back from the brink. I’d cut to her cluttered desk back home, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, and a letter addressed to The Atlantic Monthly sitting beside it.
“I don’t suppose anyone will want to print this story,” it reads. “But you understand that it had to be written.”
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023.
Be the first to comment