Summer reading

Commonweal, June 20, 1997

To appreciate Cather's achievement, must the reader know the landscape in which she set Archbishop Latour and his soulmate, Father Valliant? Or has this reader, anyway, finally learned to read without the reward of something clearly and definitively happening?

Over the last year, I have gone on to one of Cather's novellas, The Professor's House, set on an unspecified Great Lake, woodsy, leafy green in the summer, white and cold in the winter, in a university town where little seems to happen except that the life of a middle-aged man is subtly but utterly transformed by his--well, doing nothing. This summer I will take up what I set aside last winter, Shadows on the Rock. All three are collected in the Library of America edition, Willa Cather, Later Novels, ($35,991 pp.). (In a letter to the editor of Commonweal, November 23, 1927, Cather gives a brief account of how she came to write the story. Guess I wasn't reading yet!)

"Catching up" by overcoming the partialities of youth is one criterion for summer reading. Simply catching up is another. I began early this spring the autobiography of Katherine Graham, Personal History (Knopf, $29.95,625 pp.). Too big to carry along on planes, trains, or subways, the book settled to the bottom of a pile by the bed as my attention strayed. In July, I intend to pick it up again and read right through. It seems to fall into the category: Rich people have problems too. Though I am temporarily stopped in the second chapter, it is clear that Katherine Meyer Graham is destined to overcome the constraining life of the little rich girl and do remarkable things. I want to know more.

Despite lagging behind on Graham's very long volume, I own up to carting around and reading from cover to cover a volume almost as large. I could not leave Rising Tides at home. John M. Barry's engrossing history, subtitled, The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Simon and Schuster, $27.50,524 pp.), recounts the effort from the 1850s through the great flood of 1927 to tame the Mississippi of its regular and rampant overflow; an appendix, "The River Today," brings the story up to date.

The Mississippi River Valley along with its tributaries drains 41 percent of the United States, encompassing thirty-one states as far apart as New York, North Carolina, Idaho, and New Mexico. Only the Amazon basin is significantly larger. With that geography lesson, Barry begins a history, which encompasses the moral, social, intellectual, economic, and technological struggles that the United States faced from before the Civil War until after World War I. He does this by focusing on the effort to preserve the richest farm land in the world from the rampaging waters of the river that had created that very farm land.

The book opens with biographical sketches of James Buchanan Eads and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys who contested the very definition of control; Eads, a self-taught civil engineer, and Humphreys, head of the Army Corps of Engineers, had sharply contrasting ideas about controlling the river. Eads was more fight than wrong, and Humphreys more wrong than right, but the Corps' institutional longevity and political weight came to dictate a levees-only policy that magnified the damage of each succeeding flood, as Eads had predicted.