The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  And that, I suppose, is the end of my Kansas story. Everyone knows the end of the story, about the war and all of that. And most people know about the Lawrence Massacre, in August of ’63. The fellow Quantrill, who led it, was said to be about Frank’s age. No one had heard of him during my time in K.T., but he must have been as mad with rage as any of them, because he oversaw the killing of some two hundred men or so, all of them civilians, many of them in front of their wives and children. And as always, they burned what houses they could burn. I heard later from Louisa that Charles was safe—off in Leavenworth—and Governor Robinson hid in a gulch, while Jim Lane ran off across a field in his drawers. But Mr. Stearns, who had the store, was shot, and old Mr. Smithson was, too, and many, many others. Louisa wrote: "I never thought I would thank the Lord that the Bushes both passed on with that fever last winter, but I do, for no one who saw what those devils did will ever forget or forgive. The Lord Himself isn’t powerful enough to make you do it."

  One thing is left to tell. After I returned from subsequent travels, and Frank returned from fighting in the war, with General Grant at Vicksburg for a while, then in Virginia, he was twenty-three years old and looked forty. It was only then that we ever spoke of K.T, and then it was only to agree that whatever anyone else thought, after K.T., nothing, not Bull Run or Gettysburg certainly not the raid at Harpers ferry that some thought started it all, not the Emancipation or the burning of Atlanta, not the killing of the President, nothing ever surprised either of us ever again.

  The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

  JANE SMILEY

  A Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with Jane Smiley

  Q: Explain the genesis of The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.

  A: I was in Washington D.C. during a book tour when I heard that the federal building in Oklahoma had been bombed. I then called a friend of mine and told him that I wanted to write about the intersection of ideology and violence in American life. Without hesitation he said, "Kansas, 1850." So the idea came from outside of me, but the material was so interesting that it quickly drew me in.

  Q: How did you select a genre for the novel?

  A: Well, when I started writing The Greenlanders in the early eighties, I knew I wanted to write an epic, a tragedy, a comedy, and a romance. Someone I read defined all American novels of the nineteenth century as romances. So it was clear to me that if I was going to write a romance, it was going to be set in the nineteenth century.

  I was trained in medieval literature, which has a stock of romances, and the one that I really loved was the thirteenth century Middle English romance The Lay of Havelok the Dane. I would define romance simply as a story in which a character goes on a journey and sees amazing things. Nonetheless, I wanted to play with some of the genre’s conventions. Havelok’s adventure ends in triumph. At the close of her travels Lidie is not saved; she doesn’t find the holy grail. That’s the sign that it’s a modern romance.

  Q: Talk a bit about the research that preceded the writing of this novel.

  A: The primary source material for this novel was extensive and wonderful. Many women in late-nineteenth century Kansas kept journals; some were quite sad; all of them were politically conscious. One of the most famous belongs to Sarah Robinson, the wife of Governor Robinson. She was smart; she knew what was going on; and she had lyrical moments, too.

  She was not only a source of information, but a model of what was possible for a woman in those days.

  Q: What’s the story behind your decision to introduce each chapter with an excerpt from Catherine E. Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home?

  A: discovered Beecher when reading a book about the history of housework titled Never Done. As a research tool Beecher’s book offered a great deal of substance to me: it was a guide to what Lidie would know and do. Yet I also loved Beecher’s tone of voice and writing style as well as her opinions about what it meant to be a good woman and a good wife. I thought I could piggyback a bit on Catherine Beecher, that she could help me help the reader understand Lidie’s story in the context of nineteenth century domestic life.

  First, I thought it was going to take me forever to weave the Beecher text into my novel, that I was going to have to know all the chapters forwards and backwards before using them. Then I decided to use the book like a fundamentalist reads the bible: opened it up, ran my finger down the page, and if it stopped on something remotely appropriate I put it in.

  Q: Your 1996 Harper’s essay, "Say It Ain’t So, Huck," for many a dander-raising dismantling of Twain’s famous work, has led a number of critics to regard this novel as polemical corrective rather than dispassionate literature.

  A: I prefer to look at it this way: Twain is the dad, Harriet Beecher Stowe is the mom, and Catherine Beecher is the maiden aunt, and I’m not going to throw any of them out of the house. And I don’t think that I have to say that one influenced me more than the other. I love Uncle Tom’s Cabin; I think it’s a much underestimated piece of work, and I learned a lot from reading it—not only about slavery, but about writing as well as the different concerns about men and women. There are scenes of nineteenth century domestic life in Stowe’s work that are as important as any of the feuds in Twain’s novels. And to say that they are not is to denigrate women’s concern

  When I was looking back for things to know about the nineteenth century, I didn’t feel that the only thing to know was Huckleberry Finn. Also, I didn’t feel that everything I needed to know was in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I think it’s unfortunate that some reviewers act as if there is an antagonism between the two. There’s a lot about American literature that’s bifurcated: never the twain will meet, as it were, never the Twain will meet the Stowe. Yet there’s no reason in life for that to be. I came to see the book as a kind of family reconciliation.

  Q: Yet you have problems with Huck Finn, no?

  A: My beef against Huckleberry Finn is a purely readerly beef: I think it’s boring. It’s hilarious to me that I’ve been so attacked for thinking it’s boring. I’ve always thought that taste is not a moral issue. From the beginning I’ve told my kids, de gustibus non est disputandem, about taste there’s no disputing. So I thought it was very interesting and funny when my taste was attacked or seen as a sign of stupidity or intransigent female-ness.

  Q: What challenges arose in attempting a textured treatment of slavery?

  A: I began with the assumption that slavery was an abomination, yet realized there was a need for some sort of evenhandedness. I did not attempt to draw the slave-holders as villains. When Lidie goes among them, she realizes that the issue is more complicated than she thought. When she comes away from the whole experience, and has to give that speech in Massachusetts, she doesn’t know what to say; it’s all a tangle. She doesn’t know how to be ideological anymore, because experience—the complexity of experience—has destroyed the simplicity of ideology.

  Also, though I adore Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was important to me to have Lorna escape from a plantation that differed from the one depicted by Stowe. I wanted Lorna to escape from a place where she was treated reasonably well in order to separate issues of survival from issues of freedom.

  Q: To what extent did content determine form?

  A: Loma had to have the last word. She is the owned person, and the last word is I don’t want to be that person. So that’s kind of why I structured the novel the way I did, to have Lorna trump characters such as Helen and Papa. I also wanted to bring Lidie to a point where she knows what the cost of acting will be. At the end of the novel, she says we were never surprised again; she has paid the psychological cost of seeing incredible conflict right in front of her eyes, of believing the unbelievable.

  Q: Loss—whether of an illusion, a loved one, or a way of life— appears as a motif throughout your novels.

  A: I’m the girl who wrote about a whole loss civilization [The Greenlanders], so clearly that’s so
mething that’s on my mind. Somebody always dies in one of my novels; sometimes everybody does. The idea of coming back from loss fascinates me. How do you go on from a serious loss? I think about that all the time. I don’t have anything theoretical to say about it, however, except what I’ve said with my work.

  Q: More often than not your characters endure loss and are enlarged by their trials.

  A: The writer John Hersey [A Bell for Adano; Hiroshima] once said to me after reading Ordinary Love & Good Will that he thought my characters felt a degree of joy that at this point in the twentieth century was unusual. So I think that my characters get by because they don’t come. to what happens to them with the expectation of despair or even stoicism; they come with the expectation of pleasure and happiness. When things go wrong, they take it seriously, and suffer, but they’re suffering both from their expectations as well as the actual wound. Often my characters are so excitable that the pain of their situation presents itself as enormous. These characters eventually persevere, but it’s hard for them, because of their expectation of something good.

  This raises the issue of the true truth: is it a tragic truth or a comic truth? And in every person’s life the answer to that question is different. For a lot of my characters, not Lidie, but, say, the Moo characters, the true truth is a comic truth: a thing that was taken away from you is returned to you a hundredfold and better.

  Take a central story in our society—the life and death of Jesus. You can focus on the crucifixion or the resurrection; both stories are there, and who you are somewhat dictates what you see. There are those comic sensibilities that see the resurrection, and the tragic ones that see only the crucifixion. Those that see the crucifixion are focusing on the body, while those that see the resurrection are focusing on the spirit. And I guess throughout my works I’ve always focused on the resurrection.

  Q: The composer Giuseppe Verdi noted that "looking back is a real sign of progress," an observation that seems to characterize your oeuvre.

  A: Well, often I’m looking back in an effort to find the meaning of the moment. It could be that I’m looking back in order to stop looking back; there’s a paradox there. I’ve not been able to consistently write in the present tense and say this is happening and that is happening without trying to find meaning in what is happening. In The Greenlanders, I tried to have a narrative that was pure action, and it succeeded pretty well, but the characters still had to ponder the meaning of their experiences in some way. And though Lidie Newton is filled with incident, there’s plenty of reflection.

  It takes a great deal of wisdom to give up the past and to live consistently in the present. It takes more wisdom than most people have, and it takes the kind of wisdom that most people have to discipline themselves in some kind of systematic way to achieve. I certainly have done neither, though I’m trying. The things in my world become more and more immediate. I don’t really lead a literary life. I live a life very focused on my animals and my kids and the actual act of writing. Horses make you live in the moment, because if you don’t, you get hurt. Distraction can be deadly. I didn’t know how much I didn’t live in the moment until I started trying to get through the day with my horse.

  Q: Do novels provide an entrance to or an exit from the present?

  A: An entrance, definitely. I think we’re moving into a world that we’ll be able to live in but that we cannot currently imagine. And maybe learning to live in the present moment is our only refuge; so that’s what I’m working on. Writing or reading a novel allows you to get into that zone—the zone of the present, where the thing that you are doing is fully engaging. And riding or cleaning stalls are present moment activities as well; I’d like to live my whole life that way.

  Q: I hear a faint echo of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated and sustaining "moments of being."

  A: Yes, once some publication asked me what books made me cry. I named To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Woolf’s writing forces you to say, with her, that nothing exists except the present moment. She thought about things in a literary sense in a totally original way. She was in tune with something in a way that very few people are. The older you get, the more she knows; that’s why people keep going back to her work. The thing that she knows is a thing of the spirit rather than a thing of the world. That’s also true of Shakespeare and Dickens and George Eliot.

  Q: How would you explain the enduring relevance of those writers’ works?

  A: There wasn’t a single one of them who didn’t engage the social, cultural, economic, and political reality of his or her time. Not one. If you are a novelist and citizen of a certain time, your only option for engaging is with the social, cultural, political, and reality of your own time. If you have a view that those things aren’t timeless enough for you, then I don’t see what you’re engaging with, frankly. I don’t see how you’re engaging with others. I don’t see where your humanity is. So, why bother?

  Q: How do you deal with the shadow of past writers and the expectations of today’s readers?

  A: I always like to tell a good story, and there are pure story values of narrative, pacing, plot, and climax that I always try to do well. But for almost every serious author, there’s this other level of playing the game that has to do with orienting yourself in the world of literature: saying this is who I am, this is who I love, this is who I refer to, this is how my thoughts are related in a literary way to other people’s thoughts.

  You have a number of audiences, and they overlap. If you’re lucky, there are some people for whom everything that you write has three or four modes of meaning. That’s a pretty select group, though, and they have to be trained by you. You may never know them, but it’s through reading your work that they become attuned to who you are and what you have to offer. So, when you come along and offer something new, something you haven’t offered in the past, that trained audience says, oh, this fits in this way, and everyone’s pleasure is enhanced.

  Q: What about the Smiley neophyte?

  A: When I was a student of writing, my goal was to have whatever I wrote go down easily. It’s like Mary Poppins and the medicine she concocts for each of the children; they find it delicious. I’ve always wanted whatever I concocted to go down easily, and whatever was in it that was informational or thematic or enlightening to slide down practically unnoticed by the reader. That has been one of my lifelong goals. That’s what I was sort of sorry about in terms of Lidie’s lack of commercial success. I thought a lot of stuff about that period of American history would go down easily. People who’ve read it have enjoyed it a great deal, but there’s something about the subject or the book cover or the reviews or the karma of the time that made people resist even taking a taste. That interests me—that this one didn’t go down very easily the first time around. My goal in writing is always for my reader to have a wonderful, satisfying time.

  The novel that I’m writing now, which is about horse racing, is one I read aloud chapter by chapter to a friend of mine who knows something about horses but is not that interested. He also is not the literary type. I’m always thrilled when he enjoys it. There’s so much stuff, and if it goes down easy for him, it will go down easy for everybody.

  Q: Have you a title for the novel?

  A: Horse Heaven

  Q: A date?

  A: Derby Day, 2000.

  Q: I trust you won’t be winding down with a memoir any time soon.

  A: No way. If you look at yourself, your material comes to an end. If you look out in the world, however, your material is endless. So for a person like me, for whom just the act of writing is a pleasure, to look outward is simply a necessity. The world continues to offer more and more material. I don’t ever want to stop writing about it.

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1. Jane Smiley’s has lauded Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’ Cabin for the artistry with which "the power of brilliant analy sis" is "married to great wisdom of feeling." How does The All True Travels of Lidie
Newton measure up to this standard?

  2. Why does Ms. Smiley choose to describe Lidie’s adventures as "all-true" in the title of her novel? How would this work dif fer had the author chosen to turn her research into a narrative of nonfiction?

  3. How does the novel authenticate as well as undermine myths about the North and the South in antebellum America? What traditional notions about frontier life, Westward expansion and gender roles are confirmed or challenged?

  4. After her husband’s death, Lidie describes herself as a "new person," one she "never desired or expected to be." What is the relationship of her former self to her present self? What are the roles of chance, will, and ambition in the shaping o Lidie’s life and character?

  5. How does landscape function as a major character in the novel?