Lawler Literature: Family Matters and Territoriality

There’s not a whole lot of crossover between historical accounts and personal narratives. In fact, I often loathe memoirs precisely because they are, by definition, narrow and solipsistic, while history books tend to have the opposite problem; they’re too broad, too impersonal, to latch on to any specific details.

Maybe that’s why I so genuinely enjoyed reading Jeannette Walls duo of novelistic memoirs (or perhaps memoiristic novels?): The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses.

Taken together, the two books become a multi-generational epic, featuring, first, early 20^th century American ranchers, and then a nuclear family of 1960s Western drifters. Of course, the ranchers and the drifters represent different generations in the same family. Jeannette Walls and her siblings spent their childhoods vagabonding across the United States in a stationwagon navigated by their half-mad parents. Walls details their heartbreaking escapades in her first book, The Glass Castle. For her second book, Half Broke Horses she adopts the perspective of her tough-as-scorched-earth maternal grandmother, bringing the tale back to its true origins.

In a uniquely American twist, land seems to be the historical hitch, particularly in the West. How do we value land now as opposed to then? Is it a gift, or a burden, or a birthright? Walls, who, remember, spent her youth in a rather landless, anchorless state, seems to contend that it is the land that defines you. Land gives you history.

Here’s Walls writing with the voice of her grandmother, Lily the rancher, in Half Broke Horses:

Maybe it was the Irish in me, but everyone in my family, going back to my grandfather…had always been obsessed with land. Now, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to own some outright. There was nothing to compare with standing on a piece of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it. The soil belonged to you, and so did every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, and all the water and minerals under the land all the way to the center of the earth. And if the world went to hell in a handbasket—as it seemed to be doing—you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it. Land belonged to you and yours forever. P. 200

Before Walls wrote the above passage, she wrote the following one in The Glass Castle. It is from her personal perspective this time, right after she has discovered that her own mother, the drifter, has knowingly owned one million dollars worth of property inherited from Lily. She surmises that such funds could have staved off many of the hardships her and her siblings had endured:

‘You mean you own land worth a million dollars?’ I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars? Had all those years, as well as Mom and Dad’s time on the street—been a caprice inflicted on us by Mom? Could she have solved our financial problems by selling this land she never even saw? But she avoided my question, and it became clear that to Mom, holding on to land was not so much an investment strategy as it was an article of faith, a revealed truth as deeply felt and incontestable to her as Catholicism. P. 273

I admire how the two passages dovetail to reveal an evolution in American values. Once upon a time, land was inarguably more valuable than money. As Lily points out, no one could take it away from you, and if you were savvy enough, you could survive off of it. Now, that fundamental narrative has changed. Dollars and cents are valuable. Independent farmers and ranchers are a dying breed.

Still, I Jeannette Walls, in her contemporariness, has survival instincts very much in common with her grandmother. It is Rosemary, Jeannette’s mother and Lily’s daughter, who holds on to property for sentimental reasons. Lily and Jeannette are more practical. Perhaps this pattern indicates a swing of the proverbial pendulum: the mother chooses to ‘hunker down’, the daughter chooses to cut loose; then, vise versa, and so on and so forth. Either way, each successive generation is defined by their relationship to property, or lack thereof.