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February 02, 2011
Author Timothy Schaffert is Guest Curator on Writer’s Houses website
Timothy Schaffert, noted author of The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God, Devil’s in the Sugar Shop, and The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters serves as “Guest Curator” for Writer’s Houses, a website dedicated to author’s homes and the influence those homes have had on their writing. In his entry, Schaffert discusses the motivation for his latest book, The Coffins of Little Hope and shares some of the profound stories behind them.
Below are his contributions in their entirety…
I’m a cold skeptic and don’t believe in ghosts, except when I’m in Red Cloud, Nebraska where I fell madly in love with Willa Cather and writers’ houses.
For a sub-plot of my novel The Coffins of Little Hope, I invented a writer named Myrtle Kingsley Fitch, an author of hardscrabble, hard-biscuit prose of the Plains, a lesbian before lesbians were lesbians, à la Willa Cather (and my apologies to the apologists who would prefer we think Cather a wholesomely straight-and-narrow prairie gal, her celebration in small-town Nebraska not-at-all anomalous). In my novel, Fitch is long dead, but a dying Nebraska town has revived itself by paying tribute to the places and landscapes of her fiction. Red Cloud, the childhood home of Cather, was obviously my inspiration.
It would break my heart if anyone thought Myrtle Kingsley Fitch (author of such dreary novels as A Prairie Wedding Among the Radishes and The Plumes and the Feathers), and the historic town of Lemontree (pronounced, not “lemon tree,” but “la-mawn-tree), was a lampoon of Cather and Red Cloud. It’s all meant, rather, as homage to all those who’ve built one of my favorite Nebraska towns into something unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
A few summers ago, I spent a week in Red Cloud teaching a course in fiction at the restored Opera House, the home of the cherished Willa Cather Foundation, and where once-upon-a-time Cather herself had pasted on a moustache and taken to the stage to play the gent in melodrammers. (Cather famously assumed the character of “William” Cather in her daily life too, being a young girl with a fascination for the advantages afforded men.) I was kept in a duplex owned by the local mortuary, the town’s hearse housed in the duplex’s garage. Originally, I’d been intended for the home of the real-life inspiration of My Antonia, but the rooms were still under renovation upon my arrival. During my week in Red Cloud, the Paper Plane Theatre Company of New York City had also invaded the Opera House, for a summer residency; while my workshop discussed fiction on the street level of the Opera House, we enjoyed the pleasant thump and distant music of the actors rehearsing on the stage on the second floor.
One of the things you’re quite likely to gather from your guided tour of Red Cloud, Nebraska (which includes a number of restored buildings either described in her fiction or key to her own life history, as well as the cemetery where the inspiration for some of her characters rest-in-peace) is that Cather would’ve been just as happy to douse the town in gasoline and set it afire as to leave it standing. I learned from the tour that she vowed never to be buried there, and when her brother’s corpse was on its way to Red Cloud in a box, she swiftly intervened, preventing its purchase into Nebraska dirt. She never returned to Red Cloud after her parents died, and while they were still alive, she’d sit on the verandah to write, sneering at the passersby who rubbernecked at her eccentricity, until she flung up a sheet to hide herself.
Depending on your guide, you’ll be told, should you ask, that Cather wasn’t a lesbian, but rather was in a “Boston marriage” with editor Edith Lewis, the woman she lived with for over thirty years. As a gay man originally of small-town Nebraska (I grew up on a farm about an hour’s drive from Red Cloud), I could be aggravated by this, but nonetheless I enjoy it—it feels like a refusal that embraces, in a creaky Midwest tradition of silent anxiety. Calling the Cather-Lewis partnership a Boston marriage is a creative way of both denying (for the squeamish) and affirming (for the liberated). A marriage between two women, Boston or otherwise, is typically an indication of bald-faced lesbianism; the “Boston” part even adds a nod of civility and approval. (Following the tour, I bought from the gift shop a tea towel embroidered with the name Lucy Gayheart, the title of one of Cather’s novels.)
Eventually I grew quite cranky with Willa’s Boston wife in the basement of the town’s old bank—in a display case is a prop book open to blank pages, perhaps too playfully representing the novel Cather was writing at the time of her death. Edith Lewis had destroyed the book, Willa having requested that her unfinished pieces go up in smoke. Those blank pages are what I remember most about Cather-town—it’s a lovely bit of overkill on the part of whoever curated the display, a startlingly tactile, taunting symbol of what Cather’s readers have been denied forever by Cather’s maybe-wife.
While in Red Cloud, I gathered several notes for my novel and my own perversion of Red Cloud arose from the ashes to surround my fictional Myrtle Kingsley Fitch. I actually wrote much more about Fitch than would make it into the final draft of The Coffins of Little Hope—though Myrtle ultimately died mid-writer’s block, I couldn’t stop telling her story, even writing bits of the novel that Myrtle was trying to write just before her fatal and mysterious collapse in her yard.
One of the bits that I deleted attempted to capture the experience of visiting the attic rooms of Cather’s childhood house. Cather’s parents had given her a room of her own, and it has endured miraculously for over one hundred years—the wallpaper samples she collected from the drugstore still decorate her walls, though they appear they’d turn to dust at the touch of a fingertip. In the summertime, the attic is suffocating; as you step up the stairs, you feel your breath stolen from your lungs. No, that’s not right—you just feel your breathing stop, feel it gone in a blink, the absence of air sudden and absolute. I think that’s when Cather possessed me—her imagination, her longing, her desire to escape mixed with her incapacitating nostalgia for this place of her youth—it all found in me a willing vessel.
A few weeks later, my boyfriend and I, along with our friends Janet and Kirk, drove from Omaha to Red Cloud to see the theater troupe’s performance of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. At this mention of Eurydice—a play haunted by death—I’d like to produce the aforementioned ghost (or two), via shots snapped with a digital camera in a church to which Cather had donated stained-glass windows that burst with color and light despite the overcast day:
Before the events of the first picture all other pictures taken in the church hadn’t a smudge of blurriness. We allowed ourselves onto the altar (past the velvet rope) and opened a door. Nothing odd occurred. Well, nothing odd, except for the release of specters and a rushing of souls that could only be captured on film (or, in this case, the digital approximation of film). My friends and I quite enjoyed the mystical happenstance suggested by the photo, so much so that we never paid that much attention to the second picture—only when I asked my friends last week to send me picture #1 did we notice that picture #2 seemed to have the effect of double exposure—you can see a person’s face, someone posing for a close-up, like for a high-school portrait. (The faint line of her cheek is in the middle of the photo. A few of us think she’s smiling, while a few of us see her mouth open in a scream.) We also noticed another visitor in picture #1—there appears to be someone sitting, legs crossed, on the pew at the head of the altar.
Perhaps Cather’s ghost is trapped in Red Cloud, hoping to finish her unfinished novel. I like to think so, anyway.
I conclude with another ghostly scene, one I ended up cutting from The Coffins of Little Hope. The 83-year-old narrator—an obit writer named Esther Myles—visits the childhood home of Myrtle Kingsley Fitch. In the excised paragraph, she too longs for possession.
In the attic room of Myrtle Kingsley Fitch, black nails long and short protruded from the cedar slats of the ceiling, and I longed to touch the tip of my finger to their points, to feel their rust and threat of tetanus infect me, the house diseasing me, Myrtle’s slow blood flowing into the racing of my too-rapid bloodstream. The stairs were narrow and steep enough to trip me, the humid air enough to suffocate, but I longed for far more disruption, to collapse on the hand-stitched quilt, to wreck the rickety bed into a pile of sticks, like a deliberate Goldilocks, huffing and puffing. I would dig my boot heel into the brittle hide of the buffalo-skin rug, to crack it and tear it. I wanted to lick the paint off the walls, let it twist my tongue, all the toxicity of the old house, its leads and gasses, mixing with my biology, feeding my decline. Then I would drop a match in my path as I prat-falled down the stairs like a comedy act, ass over elbows, breaking each step with my back.
Timothy Schaffert is the author of four novels: The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters; The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection); Devils in the Sugar Shop (a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and a Book Sense pick); and The Coffins of Little Hope (forthcoming May 2011), all from Unbridled Books. His short fiction was short-listed for the O. Henry Prize, and won the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. His fiction and essays have been anthologized in: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales; Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales; and When I Was A Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School. He is the director of two literary nonprofits: the (downtown) omaha lit fest and the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, and is the web editor for Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the English Department of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln
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