The Cellar Door Book Society: Oh What a Beautiful Morning: Some Music, Some Luck, Some Kind of Miracle, and Some Old-Fashioned Corn Shucking

There's a bright golden haze on the meadow;

The corn is as high as an elephant's eye,

An' it looks like its climbin' clear up to the sky….
On this oh-what-a-beautiful August morning, we are sitting on the patio, shucking sweet corn from the weekend farmer's market. It is warm and humid, and it is indeed a bit hazy. For the sake of lyrical continuity and essay development, let’s call it a bright golden haze. Brimming with unexpected optimism, we find ourselves humming the opening number from Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaborative effort, a 1943 Broadway triumph and subject of numerous revivals, tours, and successful domestic productions.

Oklahoma, OK!

We remember Oklahoma! on Mom’s old record player: a stack of 45rpms spinning on the turntable, needle wobbling across vinyl discs, sisters singing and dancing and taking the parts of cowboy Curly McClain, sweet Laurey Williams, supporting cowboy Will Parker, saucy Ado Annie, and scary Jud Fry. Even as we wax nostalgic about the Successful Domestic Central Pennsylvania Rec Room Productions of 1969, we consider a bumper crop of successful domestic fiction—full of corn but not-too-corny—hand-picked and delivered fresh-for-summer reading to our local bookshelf.

Some Luck by Jane Smiley.

Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 395 pages.

Historical Fiction

Walter Langdon, patriarch of the farm family central to this literary epic, knows a thing or two about corn: he was less and less able to imagine any other life. He was thirty now. Ten years before, he’d been working for his father—head down, it felt like, his eyes lifted only as far as the next hill of corn. On a farm near Denby, Iowa, Walter Langdon and his wife Rosanna live their lives and raise their children: first-born Frank, sensible Joe, sweet Lillian, bookish Henry, and baby Claire. The Langdons are engaged in time-honored lifeways, enveloped in traditional values, and ensconced on a densely-populated family tree—a diagram of which is provided in the front of the book for much-appreciated reading-time reference.

Iowa Corn, High As an Elephant's Eye.

In the beginning and in its heart throughout, this is a family story and a farm story; in time, however, the Langdons radiate ever-outward from the homestead, traveling the American landscape and tripping the historical timeline. Each chapter covers a year-in-the-life from 1920 to 1953, from the twilight of World War I, to the gray days of the Great Depression, through the turbulent darkness of World War II, and into the anxious first light of Cold War America.

Year by year, chapter by chapter, page by page, moment by moment, we share births and deaths, long lives and lives cut short, love and loss, passion and betrayal, celebration and despair, innovation and inertia, stories told and untold-- all set against broader social, economic, and political twists and turns in our national story.

This is what we look for in stand-alone historical fiction: engaging characters, engrossing history, expansive storytelling, laughter and tears, perception and perspective. Fortuitously, Some Luck is the first installment in a trilogy… oh-what-a-piece of summer reading luck! Or, as a Langdon Granny observes, That was a piece of luck… but what would we do without some luck after all? We read on….

Early Warning by Jane Smiley.

Alfred A Knopf, 2015. 475 pages.

Historical Fiction

The second installment in the trilogy follows the Langdons from 1953 to 1986, as they navigate an increasingly complex, nuanced American landscape, moving beyond Some Luck to good luck… no luck… out of luck… and plain old luck. The adult Langdon children and their increasingly complex, nuanced children—save steady, soil-tilling second son Joe—scatter to various pushpins across the map, but the oh-what-a-beautiful heart of the story remains rooted in family and in Iowa farmland: a local pastor sermonizes on the goodness of the toil itself, the tilling of the soil, the richness of the ears of corn, the miracle of soybeans. Okay. We see no need to ruminate upon the miracle of soybeans here, but we will call attention to the corn and comment upon the continuing goodness of Smiley’s toiling characters and the richness of her storytelling.

Golden Age by Jane Smiley.

Alfred A. Knopf (October 2015). 464 pages.

And so we eagerly anticipate autumn release of the trilogy's conclusion. Arcing through the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Golden Age will bring the Langdon family to the present generation and drop them on the doorstep of our not-so-distant future. Indeed, provocative previews suggest that the culmination of One Hundred Years of Storytelling delivers more domestic drama, more historical sweep, and-- given that the book opens in 1987 and concludes in 2019-- a bit of authorial prognostication.

Oh what a beautiful morning,

Oh what a beautiful day,

I’ve got a wonderful feeling,

Everything’s going my way…

Old-Fashioned Corn Shuckers, 1943.

As we shuck away, reveling in wonderful feeling and still brimming with unexpected optimism, we recall that Oklahoma! won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1944, and Jane Smiley won hers in 1992. Or, as they say in King Lear: A proclaimed prize! Oh, most happily met!

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.

Anchor Books, 2003 (1991). 384 pages.

The Pulitzer Project

Some have called it King Lear in a Cornfield: in truth, forsooth, this artful, agricultural re-imagining of King Lear—Shakespearean tragedy projected upon a late-twentieth-century Iowa farm family—makes us squirm. Proud, uncompromising, tyrannical patriarch Larry Cook—shades of proud, uncompromising tyrannical King Lear!—decides to divide his successful Middle American farm—shades of a mythical Middle-of-England kingdom!—between three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline—shades of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia! When Caroline-who-is-shades-of-Cordelia refuses to play along, Larry-who-is-shades-of-Lear disowns her, cuts her out of his will, and descends into madness, carrying us across an oh-what-a-dark domestic landscape of treacherous truth, tortured love, and twisted humanity.

Cordelia's Portion, Ford Madox Brown, 1872.

Still shucking. And still thinking, now of Cordelia lamenting her father in Act IV, Scene IV… as mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud… Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds… With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers… Darnel and all the idle weeds that grow… in our sustaining corn. Speaking of Pulitzer Prize winners and sustaining corn:

One of Ours by Willa Cather.

Vintage Books, 1991 (1922). 371 pages.

The Pulitzer Project

To the north and south, Claude could see the corn-planters, moving in straight lines over the brown acres where the earth had been harrowed so fine that it blew off in clouds of dust to the roadside. Young Nebraskan Claude Wheeler is heir apparent to a comfortable, corn-filled livelihood on his family’s prospering farm. Emotionally estranged from an insensitive father and pious mother, sadly spurned by charmingly-monikered wife Enid Royce, our restless protagonist yearns for something beyond a ready-made fortune and the perceived drudgery of farming and marriage. When America enters the Great War, Claude enlists and soldiers across a bloody French frontier as vague notions of purpose and direction coalesce into something meaningful and heroic. Here's another coming-of-age story. More Cather, if you'd rather:

My Antonia by Willa Cather.

Mariner Books, 1995 (1918). 272 pages.

Oldies But Goodies

We hold this richly-composed classic close to our reading hearts: narrator Jim Burden’s reminiscence of his orphaned boyhood in late-nineteenth century Nebraska and his relationship with Bohemian immigrant Antonia Shimerda. The story is a romantic rumination on life with-and-without the vital and titular Antonia. But then-- like all the successful domestic fiction we’re considering-- it meditates on something more: our nation’s immigrant experience, the strength and forbearance of women, the desire for for community and connection.

Willa Cather, circa 1912.

And perhaps most movingly, it offers an elegy to the once-upon-a-time frontier… the wild, windy plains, the wide open sky. And the heat, oh, the heat. Jim recalls that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the plains of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the stars one caught a faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odoured cornfields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green. The heat, oh, the heat! We’re feeling a bit breathless, if not brilliant, on the New Jersey patio this oh-what-a-beautiful morning. And still shucking.

All the cattle are standing like statues,
All the cattle are standing like statues,
They don't turn their heads as they see me ride by.
But a little brown mav'rick is winking her eye....

Jim the Boy: A Novel by Tony Earley.

Little, Brown and Co., 2000. 227 pages.

Fiction Favorites

Late in the morning on Jim’s eleventh birthday, something like a miracle happened: Mama gave him permission to go up the mountain with the uncles. Jim glass lives with his widowed mother and three excellent-yet-unmarried uncles in the small town of Aliceville, North Carolina. He is growing up during the Great Depression, and he’s beginning to explore the world beyond his loving, sheltered home. It is an ordinary life, extraordinarily rendered. And there is corn! As Jim travels up the mountain on his birthday, The power lines along the state highway rose and dipped in rhythmic, swooping loops. Young corn waved from the bottoms along the river. Milk cows grazed in the rich June pastures while new calves butted and tugged at their teats....

The Blue Star: A Novel by Tony Earley.

Little, Brown and Co., 2008. 286 pages.

Fiction Favorites

Something like a miracle…. The Blue Star flashes forward to the eve of the United States' entry into World War II. Now a high school senior, Jim has fallen in love with classmate Chrissy Steppe. Their relationship is made difficult by Chrissy's mysterious commitment to boorish, Pearl Harbor-bound Bucky Bucklaw-- and her Cherokee family's complicated interaction with their landlords, not coincidentally the Bucklaw family. The Blue Star is poignant exploration of Jim the Boy's journey toward maturity, and by deft extension, commentary on the wider world's struggle with complex, nuanced issues: confronting prejudice, going to war, gathering wisdom and experience. Gracefully crafted and deceptively simple, Jim the Boy and its sequel are often classified as YA (Young Adult) Fiction by people who do that sort of thing. It's safe to say, though, that EMA (Ever-Maturing Adults) at the Cellar Door Book Society enjoy the tandem bildungsromans and take something enduring and positive from the exercise of reading them. Still brimming with unexpected optimism. And still shucking.

All the sounds of the earth are like music,
All the sounds of the earth are like music,
The breeze is so busy it don't miss a tree,
And an ol' Weepin' Willer is laughin' at me….

The Moonflower Vine: A Novel by Jetta Carleton.

Harper Perennial, 2009 (1962). 318 pages.

Fiction Favorites

Callie Soames, matriarch of the farm family in this unassuming classic, appreciates ol’ weepin’ willers dotting an oh-what-a-beautiful rural landscape: She did not turn back at once, but wandered further down the slope, considering the fine green morning. The broad leaves of the oak trees glistened; the willows made a soft haze down by the slew. Beyond them the cornfield rippled as she imagined an ocean might.... In the first half of the twentieth century, on a farm in western Missouri, Matthew and Callie Soames build a life for themselves and a home for a quartet of complex, nuanced daughters: Jessica, Leonie, Mary Jo, and Mathy. As the family narrative slowly uncoils and reveals itself—not unlike an evanescent moonflower from the title—we witness moments of betrayal, deceit, heartbreak, and escape. But there are also ample expressions of loyalty, honesty, healing, and homecoming: timeless testimonies to the inscrutability of the human heart and to the inevitability of family.

Oh-What-a-Beautiful Moonflower.

Jetta Carleton’s only published-during-her-lifetime novel, written with intimacy and simplicity and infused with autobiographical texture, invites us to contemplate that everyone has at least one story in them, maybe just maybe... Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the green bud unfurled, the thin white edges of the bloom appearing and the spiral ascending, round and round and widening till at last the white horn of the moonflower, visible for the first time in the world, twisted open, pristine and perfect, holding deep in its throat a tiny jewel of sweat. We like the way the moonflower vine climbs across the Soames’ front porch and the way The Moonflower Vine twines into our reading lives. The blooming of the moonflowers... a kind of miracle.

Corn on the Microwave Turntable.

We finish shucking the sweet corn: some kind of miracle, and a fine green morning indeed. Oh shucks! We remember too late the video, shared on social media, promising shuck-less, silk-free corn-on-the-cob, prepared in the microwave, spinning round and round like 45rpms on Mom's old turntable. Some luck! And some shuck: we'll stick with the old-fashioned way, the nostalgic way. Sing it with unexpected optimism, 1955 film adaptation Gordon McCrae: