In Art As It Is In Heaven

"They might, without sacrilege,
have changed the prayer a little and said,
'Thy will be done in art, as it is in heaven.'
How can it be done anywhere else as it is in heaven?"

~ Willa Cather ~
from her novel The Professor's House (p 57)

Two views of
Harold Gilman's House at Letchworth, Hertfordshire (1912)

The house of artist Harold John Wilde Gilman (1876 – 1919)
Painted by Spencer Frederick Gore (1878 – 1914)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Recent Reading

1. The Professor's House
by Willa Cather

So many engaging themes in this novel: a lovely old house, a grand new house, a mid-life crisis, sibling rivalry, academic cynicism, beautiful Lake Michigan, bustling Chicago, bureaucratic Washington DC, and of course the wild wild west:

"Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a sacred spot. . . . with no incentive but some natural yearning for order and security. They built themelves into this mesa and humanized it" (199).

"Lillian's prejudices, her divinations about people and art (always instinctive and unexplained, but nearly always right), were the most interesting things in St. Peter's life" (38). [See Hamnet and Mary Rose below.]

2. The Thursday Murder Club
by Richard Osman

This novel has so many fun lines and observations, but for right now, I'll start with this one: "In life you have to learn to count the good days. You have to tuck them in your pocket and carry them around with you. So I'm putting today in my pocket and I'm off to bed" (88).

"The gang has all gone now. Two cancers and a stroke. We hadn't known that Jersey Boys would be our last trip. You always know when it's your first time, don't you? But you rarely know when it's your final time" (85).
[See Mary Rose, below. See also Tears & Longly.]

As for loved ones who are fading away: "Can he feel it? Does Penny hear her? Have they both already disappeared? Or are they only real for as long as she chooses to believe they're real? Elizabeth clings on a little tighter and holds on to the day for as long as she is able. . . . Everyone has to leave the game. Once you're in, there is no other door but the exit" (148, 369).

The setting is Coopers Chase Retirement Village, where life is neither miserly nor miserable. A refreshing change from the typical cliche that assisted living is to be avoided at all costs, as in . . .

3. Remarkably Brilliant Creatures
by Shelby Van Pelt

As occurs so often in books and on TV (and in real life), Tova’s friends personify a pronounced anti-assisted living bias and glorification of adults who are willing to live with their elderly parents. Why is the popular media so keen to guilt anyone who does not jump on the sacrificial bandwagon? (For a delightful exception, see above!)

If you're a fan of SeaWorld and love a good coincidence, this is the novel for you! I kept thinking of George Saunders: "Now a coincidence is all right, life is full of them, but a reader's willingness to ingest one is inversely related to how badly the writer needs one . . . "
~from his essay "The United State of Huck" (201)

Spoiler alert: In spite of myself, I like the way it all came together at the end, except I was sad that Tova moved into a new condo instead of keeping the old homestead for her newfound grandson Cameron. And to think that they bonded over an octopus -- not to mention an octopus book bag (QK & FN)!

Teen pregnancy may be on the decline, but not in this novel, with three separate subplots revolving around teen pregnancy! Really? Reminded me of some throwbacks to the 1970’s: Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones and The Girls of Huntington House; and more recently Juno (2007) -- all overly optimistic.

4. Hamnet
by Maggie O'Farrell

Anne Hathaway's first impressions of William Shakespeare:
"That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she'd ever met. . . . She is rarely wrong. About anything. It's a gift or a curse, depending on who you ask. So if she thinks that about you, there's a possibility it's true" (137).
[See The Professor's House, above; and Mary Rose, below.]

And William loves Anne [referred to in the novel as "Agnès"] because "you see the world as no one else does" (115).

His fascination with her falcon mirrors his enchantment with Anne herself: "It seems extraordinary to him to be in such close proximity to a creature which is so emphatically from another element, from wind or sky or perhaps even myth" (35).

Thinking of deceased children: "How frail . . . is the veil between their world and hers" (108).

5. The Ten Thousand Doors of January
by Alix E. Harrow

29, 31: "It's stupid to think things like that. It just gives you this hollow, achy feeling between your ribs, like you're homesick even though you're already home, and you can't read your magazine anymore because the words are all warped and watery looking. . . . I didn't say anything because then I would cry and everything would be even worse."
[See also: in comments]

Thanks to my friend Katie who knows how to
judge a book by both its contents AND its cover!

6. Winter Street
by Elin Hilderbrand

A fun connection: Mitzi's favorite Christmas ornaments are "a fancy fur-clad shopper and a dapper doorman by Soffieria De Carlini" (35).

Guess what -- I have a couple of them! Before going on our treetop, they were on our wedding cake!

7. In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson
by Bette Bao Lord

8. Oh William!
by Elizabeth Strout
[See also: in comments]

9. The Time of Green Magic
by Hilary McKay

Another wacky lovable family (like the Cassons & the Conroys). Abi, Max, and Louis -- living in a big magical house, working together as sibs, dealing with family tensions, and facing their fears (remember Indigo?) real and imagined: "Iffen is real!" (182). From whence came the magic? "It came out of books" (229).

10. Mary Rose
by J. M. Barrie

A text of continued surprises, a gentle ghost story, time - travel and loss: ". . . being a ghost is worse than seeing them" (75).

9, 67: "The pictures on her walls in time take on a resemblance to her or hers though they may be meant to represent a waterfall, every present given to her assumes soome characteristic of the donor, and no doubt the necktie she is at present knitting will soon be able to pass as the person for whom it is being knit. It is only delightful ladies at the most agreeale age who have this personal way with their belongings. . . . I have been so occupied all my life with little things -- very pleasant."

32: "I know I'm not clever, but I'm always right."
[See The Professor's House and Hamnet, above.]

47: "Let me tell you . . . there will be a lat time of seeing your baby . . . I mean that he can't always be infantile; but the day after you have seen him for the last time as a baby you will see him for the first time as a little gentleman. Think of that. . . . Don't you think the sad thing is that we seldom know when the last time has come? We could make so much more of it."
[See Thursday Murder Club, above.]

56, 57: "I can see the twilight running across the fields. . . . happiness keeps breaking through."

65, 70: "It is the years. . . . there are worse things than not finding what you are looking for; there is finding them so different from what you had hoped."

11. The House in the Pines
by Ana Reyes

Not to be confused with "Three Pines" or "Twin Peaks." Murder by hypnosis, mesmerism, levitation, and so forth. Somewhere in the woods.

***********************
P.S.
November 2025
More from Cather & Osman on
Autumn Personified

July 2026
More Thursday Murder on
Summer Sleuthing

Willa Cather Summer

"A pioneer should have imagination,
should be able to enjoy the idea of things
more than the things themselves."
(O Pioneers! 28)

The Song of the Lark (1884)
by Jules Breton (1827 – 1906)

Cover Design & Illustration
by Wendell Minor (b 1944)

Cover art unattributed,
likely Wendell Minor

In order of publication:
O Pioneers! (1913)
The Song of the Lark (1915)
My Ántonia (1918)

I love the way these book covers capture Willa Cather's sweeping vision of frontier life. Cather looks deep into both the interior psyche and the exterior landscape inhabited by the settlers of the North American Great Plains. The pioneers may be surrounded by stunning natural vistas, yet their hearts are often troubled by conflict and anxiety.

For further reading ~ click here ~
Most are brief, as novels go,
so you needn't be daunted by the project
of assigning them all to yourself as a
summer reading challenge.
Back in 1977, I was required to read My Antonia, which I loved and have re-read a few times over the years, especially the beautiful Christmas chapters, and the segments that remind me so much of my own great - grandmother's descriptions of homesteading in Nebraska.

I don't know why it took me so long to read more of Willa Cather's elegant, evocative historical fiction. However, I knew it was time when, within days of each other, one friend (Antoinette) recommended Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and another (Claude) recommended One of Ours (1922). In turn, I suggested these titles to my friend Megan, also an avid reader.

When I asked Megan if she had read My Antonia in high school or college American Lit, she wrote back: "Yes I literally had to choose my own book to do a book report on in high school, and I chose My Antonia. I've never re-read it. I'm usually a one and done reader, movie watcher, husbands -- haha! Good for you to go deep into an author. Then you really know their voice, right?" Megan always gets it!

In the same way that My Antonia coincides with the experience of my ancestors in Nebraska, numerous details in One of Ours echo the letters that my grandfather and his brother sent home from France during World War I. A month before he died, my Great Uncle Sam wrote to his mother:

"I surely hope you are not worrying about me and trust you are not because I am faring fine so be easy as possible. I figure this is a cause worthy of an easy mind, although the outcome might be unfortunate for a boy, it is well worth whatever loss he meets, is simply why I can set steady in the boat. I want you to see it is so, not for the good old US alone but for humanity's sake in general, and I know you do of course and . . . see where we are fighting for Right and it's not near as much trouble for you. For me, I am not bothered a bit -- can't be bothered haha!"

Informative background sources reveal timely connections between the current war in Ukraine and Cather's portrayal of World War I. This particular analysis is uncannily consistent with Sam's letter home and with recent testimonials I have read from determined young Ukrainian soldiers:

"Whether or not one agrees with those who create wars — the politicians — men and women do go to war, fight, and die out of a sense of patriotism, honor, and duty, because of some sense of a higher truth or greater cause. Because war is horrible, some do become disillusioned with the experience; some are traumatized forever. Some, like G. P. Cather [Willa Cather's cousin] and Claude Wheeler [Cather's main character in One of Ours], die before their illusions or ideals are destroyed.

" . . . a statement made by one of Cather’s most critical contemporaries in the same year she began work on “Claude” [to be retitled "One of Ours"]: 'how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered' (Baker 52). That was young Ernest Hemingway."

from " 'Pershing's Crusaders':
G.P. Cather, Claude Wheeler, and the AEF Soldier in France"
by Richard C. Harris

An unexpected connection:

"In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A funeral, the sight of a neighbour lying rigid in his black coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of lonely creatures rotting away under ground. life seemed nothing but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape; that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay . . . . He could not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness!" (p 27)

from One of Ours
Chapter 1: "On Lovely Creek," Part VII

and from an unrelated work,
which I happened to be reading
coincidentally the same week
that I pulled out all the Cather novels:
"Men especially dislike the thought that after each one ceases to exist, others will continue in the usual way, soon filling the empty space. Along this line of thought a man is pushed toward the conclusion that no matter how precious his life is to him, no matter how he strives, accomplishes, and hoards to validate that life and protect it against every assault, still in the cosmic scale it weighs no heavier than the life of a hyena or a scorpion." (p 28)

from The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power
by Barbara G. Walker

In conclusion,
a few favorite highlights from

Death Comes for the Archbishop:
1. The Long Nights of Lent
2. Hue, Value, Intensity
3. Like a Coloured Map
4. Missing Ancestors
5. Softly, softly

The Professor's House:
1. Going to the Lake
2. Taking Death Seriously
3. In Art As It Is In Heaven

My Antonia:
Thus Far Our Experience

And numerous other references on
The Quotidian Kit

Sawdust or Stardust?

Poems by Jim Barnes
my undergrad poetry professor and friend

The Sawdust War

On the early summer days I lay with back
against the sawdust pile and felt the heat
of a thousand pines, oaks, elms, sycamores
flowing into my flesh, my nose alive
with that peculiar smell of death the trees
became. Odd to me then how the summer rain
made the heat even more intense. Digging
down the dust, I began to reshape a world
I hardly knew: the crumbly terrain became
theaters of the war. I was barely ten.

What I knew of the wide world and real war
came down the valley's road or flew over
the mountains I was caught between. Remote
I was nightly glued to the radio,
wondering at reports of a North African
campaign and Europe falling into chaos.
All daylight long I imitated what I
thought I heard, molding sawdust into hills,
roads, rivers, displacing troops of toys,
claiming ground by avalanche and mortar

fire, advancing bravely into black cities,
shrouding the fallen heroes with white bark.
I gained good ground against the Axis through
long summer days. Then one morning, dressed in
drab for hard work of war, I saw real smoke
rising from my battlefield. Crawling from
beneath the sawdust like vague spider webs,
claiming first the underground, then foxholes,
it spread like a wave of poison gas across
the woody hills I shaped with a mason's trowel.

I could not see the fire: it climbed from deep
within. No matter how I dug or shifted dust,
I could not find the source. My captured ground
nightly sank into itself. The gray smoke
hovered like owls under the slow stillness
of stars, until one night I woke to see,
at the center, a circle of smoldering sparks
turning to flame, ash spreading outward and down.
All night the pile glowed red, and I grew ashamed
for some fierce reason I could not then name.

Illustration by Gérard DuBois
for "The Cost of Sentimentalizing War"

Perhaps not quite the same imagery as
that of rural Northeast Oklahoma, but still
a childhood infused with the details of war

When I came across this picture in The New Yorker (November 29, 2021), I was reminded of the above poem, "The Sawdust War," with its 10-year-old narrator, "nightly glued to the radio" and the next day, in his innocence, imitating "what I thought I heard." The poet himself was just a kid at the time, which is how these poems -- written in the 1980s, about the 1940s -- convey the experience of WWII: through the eyes of a carefree yet apprehensive youngster, growing up in rural Southeast Oklahoma.

I wrote to tell Jim that I had been re-reading The Sawdust War and finding every poem so incredibly appropriate to the current atmosphere of confusion and wastefulness and disbelief, that it seemed his book could have been written this very week, rather than 1992. A straightforward enough message, right? But facebook had a different idea, morphing "sawdust" into "stardust." Or had I mis-typed that? But no, it kept happening. Every time I tried to type "Sawdust," facebook changed it to "Stardust." I swear it was not me -- it was spellcheck!

The spelling corrector had obviously not read the poem and knew nothing about a curious child's ability to construct an entire world from sawdust and then to witness its self - combustion! Yes, that can really happen. See, it's a metaphor! Jim caught the error right away: "Thanks, Kitti. But The Sawdust War, right? The gaze is earthward still. . . . Thank the stars that I got beyond the Sunday papers in far away 1944. The Stardust War maybe it should have been, but I made it The Sawdust War."

[Speaking of stardust, this passage from Paul Zindel's play is one of my all time favorites: "For one thing, the effect of gamma rays on man in the moon marigolds has made me curious about the sun and the stars, for the universe itself must be like a world of great atoms . . . but most important, I suppose my experiment has made me feel important--every atom in me, in everybody, has come from the sun--from places beyond our dreams. The atoms of our hands, the atoms of our hearts" (101-02).]

********************
My readerly Nebraska friends were recently discussing the authors of their state: Willa Cather for fiction, Ted Kooser for poetry, Mari Sandoz for "grit and tough truths" (thanks Laura!). If Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig seem lacking in authenticity, what other writers can provide "a rubric of art and fiction that can frame, intellectually and artistically, the experience of living farther West than Willa Cather was writing about"?

The question of "a literary path through the Western States" (thanks Jim!) came at the perfect time for me because, coincidentally, I have just finished reading three very different books about life in the wild wild west -- not my usual genre, but a timely coincidence! These all take place further south, from whence I hail, but are still of interest to the train of thought:

1. Killers of the Flower Moon:
The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
by David Grann

From the introduction: “In April, millions of flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the " gods had left confetti". In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts, and black eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.”

From the conclusion: “Stores gone, post office gone, train gone, school gone, oil gone, boys and girls gone—only thing not gone is graveyard and it git bigger.”

An utterly sad and astonishing expose of evil in Northeastern Oklahoma, just a few miles south of where my parents (and all of their parents) grew up in Southeast Kansas. I wish my grandfather (1895 - 1983) were still alive so that I could ask him what he remembers about this terrible aspect of American history.

Thanks to my cousin Sally for recommending. Everyone should read this informative, important book. It is being made into a movie, scheduled for release later in 2022. Hoping they do a good job!


2. The Horse and Buggy Doctor: A Memoir
by Arthur E. Hertzler, M.D. (1870 - 1946)

Again, like The Sawdust War (RE: Ukraine), could have been written today (RE: COVID):

"It is all right to do fool things if someone is standing by able to protect us from the fruits of our folly. But, let it be emphasized, if the cultists [anti-vaxxers] inherited the earth the epidemic diseases wold be upon us with their original pristine terribleness. After more than sixty years [written in 1938, thinking back to 1878] I can still hear the eloquent prayers that filled the countryside when epidemics of diphtheria appeared. One tube of antitoxin will do more good than all of these. I have seen all of these things. A doctor, an M.D., must think the truth. Perhaps it would be better if he sometimes proclaimed it."

3. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story
of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
by Timothy Egan

and

The Last Days of the Rainbelt
by David J. Wishart

These two are especially pertinent to the story of my grandfather's parents who came from Ohio to settle a homestead in Madrid, Nebraska. They were there from 1887 - 1895, before moving to Southeast Kansas where the drought was less severe.

********************

So there you have enough material,
for a seminar on memoirs of the West,
maybe even a two - semester course!
Well, at least a blogpost!

Eclectic Course of Must Reads

The Little Prince, Most Dashing in his Traveling Scarf!
A few years back, several people all at once, each unbeknownst to the other, asked me what titles I would recommend to a reader who was starting at "Go." I mulled it over some, thinking about syllabi and reading lists. More importantly, however, I went with my heart and in an hour or so of brainstorming came up with the following list of "Must Reads."

Undoubtedly, you have only to glance down the page before a thousand omissions become apparent. No Shakespeare, for example...but maybe I wouldn't recommend Shakespeare at the starting line; better to run a couple of laps first. Not necessarily thematic or consistent or even rational, this list represents the titles that came to mind that day when I asked myself "What books are you really glad that you have read?"

I hope you will enjoy at least some of these suggestions:

VERY OLD FAVORITES FROM WAY BACK
These were the soul - searchers:

The Fantasticks
by Tom Jones & Harvey Schmidt

Our Town
by Thornton Wilder

The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint Exupery

I Heard the Owl Call My Name
by Margaret Craven

Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak

The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee

Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein

The Water is Wide
by Pat Conroy


MYSTERIES
If you’re in the mood for a thriller,
I think these are all above average:

The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey

Summer’s Lease
by John Mortimer

The 7th of July
by Jill McCorkle

Fatal Inversion
by Ruth Rendell

The Secret History
by Donna Tartt

Turtle Moon
and
Second Nature
both by Alice Hoffman

The Erasers
by Alain Robbe-Grillet


TRAVEL
As mentioned awhile back,
you should read everything by Bill Bryson;
also these American travelogues:

Blue Highways
and PrairyErth
both by William Least Heat Moon

Mama Makes Up Her Mind
and Sleeping At the Starlite Motel
both by Bailey White


WORLD WAR II
Loss, sadness, and European history:

Badenheim 1939
by Aron Appelfeld

The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass

War Time Memories
by Louis Begley

The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro

How German Is It
by Walter Abish

Hiroshima
by John Hersey

Slaughterhouse Five
by Kurt Vonnegut

The White Hotel
by D. M. Thomas


MISC. WORLD LIT
Nearly all from my classes with
Professor Leonard Orr:

The Metamorphosis
and The Trial
by Franz Kafka

The Wanderer
by Henri Alain-Fournier

Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann

The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov

Out of Africa
and "Babette's Feast"
both by Isak Dinesen

Kitchen
by Banana Yoshimoto

If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino


AMERICAN STANDARDS
Don't worry, I'm leaving out Moby Dick:

Bartleby, the Scrivener
by Herman Melville

My Antonia
by Willa Cather

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson

The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner

In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway

"Appointment in Samara"
by John O’Hara

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams

Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger


MORE RECENT AMERICAN NOVELS
Modern and post-modern despair:

Dangling Man
by Saul Bellow

Miss Lonelyhearts
by Nathanael West

The Universal Baseball Association
by Robert Coover

Edwin Mullhouse
by Steven Millhauser

84 Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff

Still Life With Woodpecker
and Another Roadside Attraction
both by Tom Robbins

Breakfast of Champions
Cat's Cradle
Slapstick
and Jailbird
all by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Ragtime
by E. L. Doctorow

Bright Lights, Big City
and Brightness Falls
both by Jay McInerney

Moo
by Jane Smiley


A FEW PICKS FROM MY GRAD SCHOOL READING LIST
Modern British and Irish fiction:

Far From the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy

Sons and Lovers
The Man Who Died
The Captain’s Doll
all by D. H. Lawrence

Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
by Angus Wilson

Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis

Hurry On Down
by James Wain

My Strange Quest for Mensonge
by Malcolm Bradbury

Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

Keep the Aspidistra Flying
by George Orwell

The Ice Age
by Margaret Drabble

Dubliners
and Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
by James Joyce

The Third Policeman
by Flann O’Brien

My Left Foot
by Christy Brown

Murder in the Cathedral
by T. S. Eliot

A Man for All Seasons
by Robert Bolt

The Importance of Being Ernest
by Oscar Wilde


SOME SLIGHTLY EARLIER BRITISH LIT
You can substitute other Dickens' titles if you want,
but I preferred these to David Copperfield or Oliver Twist:

A Tale of Two Cities
and Great Expectations
both by Charles Dickens

Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley