A Willa Cather scholar of some renown told me recently, "Yours is a book I wish I'd had the courage to write. But only you could have written it."
This is true of any book we pour ourselves into. Authenticity depends upon years of research and analysis, still more research, and live interviews when we can get them. I am lucky to have started my Cather research in the late 1970s, when some of her relatives and close friends were still alive and somewhat willing to talk.
My own category of "Books I Wish I'd Written" has always been eclectic. I have former President Barack Obama to thank for the most recent addition: Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. Although Obama didn't say he ranked them in any order, it turned up third on his Favorite Books of 2019.
Watching the video of Casey Cep's reading at Politics and Prose soon after her first book started to hit the bestseller lists, I was first struck by how young she is, to have done four years of research on a book only tangentially about Harper Lee, but absolutely about Alabama, and to have grasped, from the get-go, that it was all about Alabama, just as my big book (which I hope to finish in 2020) must be all about Florida.
Selection of material is crucial when you've got a story to tell. It's the historic details Casey Cep chose that make her book shine. For example, she tells us that Harper Lee inscribed a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird for First Lady Roslyn Carter in 1978 by quoting a verse from one of the Hymns to Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs: "Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace."
I was destined to fall in love with Furious Hours, not only because Obama loved it, but because it mentions three of my favorite southern women: Harper Lee, Roslyn Carter, and Zora Neale Hurston. Finally back at work on my 20-year project, examining the Florida Journeys of twelve women authors, I am soaking up every new detail published about Hurston, and there have been a lot, in recent years.
Despite her claims about being born in the all-black town of Eatonville, most Zora Neale Hurston fans know by now that she was born in Alabama, not Florida. That's why I can include her in a book about women transported to the Sunshine State, most in adulthood, but three as children. Hurston fits that category, along with Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Rose Wilder Lane.
As Casey Cep shows, Zora Neale Hurston had Alabama in her bones, although her family moved to Eatonville when Zora was too young to remember much about her actual birthplace of Notasulga. But she knew instinctively, if she wanted to learn anything about voodoo without going all the way to Haiti, she had to go back to Alabama.
Cep's book is ostensibly about a voodoo preacher named Willie Maxwell, who created mayhem for many, and the brave man who shot him. It was the murder trial that brought Harper Lee to Alexander City, Alabama, researching what she thought would be her next book, perhaps her last book.
Casey Cep tells the story as well as any good novelist would do, except it's not fiction. Thus the reason for my admiration, bordering on envy, for the way she brings it all to life.
Not all of my "Books I Wish I'd Written" fall into this category. One of the very first to inhabit the list, more than forty years ago, was a little red book called When Found, Make A Verse Of by Helen Bevington.
I had no idea back in pre-internet days who Helen Bevington was, and I sill don't. It has never occurred to me to Google her until now. Her little red book has stayed on my list, regardless, but it turns out she wrote other books considered more important than my favorite. One of her novels was even short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. That same book, Charley Smith's Girl, was banned by the library in Bevington's hometown of Worcester, New York, because it told the story of a Methodist minister's wife divorcing him for adultery, and Bevington happened to be that very minister's daughter.
I don't know if I'll get to read this marvelous writer's novel, or any of her other books. My time here grows short. But I do like knowing that she taught one of my other favorite writers, Reynolds Price, who credited her poetry class at Duke with teaching him "that poetry was the prime means by which the English language took to purify and communicate itself most eloquently." I'd say her little red book did the same thing.
Perhaps every writer, when we're lucky, gets to write the one book they were meant to write in their lifetime. Willa Cather considered that book, out of her twelve novels, to be My Antonia.
I have some more books in me, but I may not get them finished. If I do or I don't, I think I shall always feel that the one book I was meant to write is the one my kind colleague said only I could have written: Long Road from Red Cloud. Its Life Lessons from Willa Cather makes the closest to poetry of her situation that I could come. There's an audio I recorded myself (with a how-to on audio books soon to come), an e-book, a paperback, and next a hardcover edition for libraries and collectors. We are compiling a list of independent bookstores throughout the U.S. which will be serving as brick-and-mortor distributors for this book and those to come. If my strength returns and I am able eventually to do a bit of a reading tour, they will be my first stops, along with a few of the hundreds of libraries and museums where I've done Chautauqua-style portrayals of wonderful women authors over the years. If you're a bookseller or a librarian who would like to get in on that, let us know.
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