A Boring New Year, Please

I never wanted to be dull. Not that writing for a living ever promised big thrills, not like testing military jets or fighting fires on oil rigs or anything, but it did seem like a route to a challenging life full of unexpected turns; if nothing else, it would make me look more interesting than most of the other people who made their livings sitting at desks. That's why I dropped out of college: too predictable. I wanted a career of gambles and improvisations and surprises, both good and bad. 
       In my private life I was much less daring, at least for the first few decades. But in my thirties that changed too, as I discovered a predilection for flinging myself into emotional tornadoes. Even in my quest for stability I was unstable, as my wife and I broke up, came back together, broke up again, came together again, and...you get the picture.
       In my early fifties, by which time most people have burned out and settled down, I was just reaching my peak: 2010 and 2011 were the most dramatically bizarre, wonderful, terrible years of my life (personally, especially, but in some ways professionally too). This year that just ended was a lot calmer, but still...I had a lot going on, and where I was at the end I couldn't have predicted at the start.
       Yet now I find myself wanting nothing more than a predictable year for 2013. I want to work calmly on the edits for this book until it's done and then move smoothly to writing the next one. No agonies of avoidance, please, and no drastic rethinkings of my entire purpose as a writer. I want to develop my story classes and the book I plan to base on those classes at a steady pace. From my personal life I ask only one thing: no drama. (Although I suppose no one's life is entirely free of drama, so let's make that: no life-changing turmoil and roof-blowing emotionality. Not if I can possibly head them off.) I want to show up consistently for my family and close friends. I want to know for sure where I'm going to be living, and I'll be more than happy to spend the whole year on one continent.     

      I'm thinking about all this in the context of the book I just read, Willa Cather's The Professor's House. This was the first book Cather wrote in her fifties, and it was unmistakably transitional for her. She'd made her reputation with a series of novels about struggle and hardship—although that's probably too simplistic. Let's say they were novels of depth and subtlety about pioneers and hard-scrabble farmers and soldiers whose lives were shaped by struggle and hardship. She didn't tend toward fireworks and cataclysm, but she didn't shy away from hard choices and brutal conflicts, either.  
       Then, in 1925, she wrote this slow, gentle, beautiful story about a middle-aged professor in a quiet Midwestern town, writing his history of the Spanish exploration of the Southwest, dealing with the small vanities of his family and neighbors, trying to put off moving from his comfortable old house into the fancy new one that his wife and daughters are convinced he deserves.  
       There's drama in the background of this quietude: it all revolves around the legacy of a mysterious young man who shook things up and died in the war, and the small events hint at the outlines of the great economic and cultural shifts of the century. But it's a deep background. Tom Outland lives on mainly through bittersweet memories and petty jealousies, barely enough to disrupt a family dinner, while Professor St. Peter confronts the future with exasperated sighs, poignant recollections, middle-aged whimsy, and the occasional pedantic crack. The ending's a bit rougher. But it's quiet, too.
      I don't know how to begin describing the understated glory of Cather's art. I'll just say that I didn't want to leave the book any more than I wanted the professor to leave his old house. I stretched my reading out over weeks and reread chapters along the way so I could stay there.
       It was with The Professor's House, though, that Cather's reputation with the critics began to change. Her previous novel was pretty widely taken as a major work, and the one before that had won the Pulitzer Prize. This one drew far less notice, and over the next few years she found herself ever more frequently the target of critical dismissals.
       It was the new critics of the 1930s who went after her most fiercely, the politically heated young studs like Granville Hicks and Lionel Trilling, who demanded that every writer tackle the class conflicts and institutional upheavals that preoccupied their generation. Hicks especially went after Cather for her "refusal to examine life as it is," meaning her refusal to see life as he and his Ivy League Stalinist friends defined it.
       Well, fooey. That's what I say.
       At least, that's what I say now. But there was a time, I have to admit, when I might have sympathized with Hicks and his friends. I would never have agreed, entirely—I was never politically doctrinaire—but in my twenties I may well have compared Cather unfavorably with the two-fisted class warriors, Dos Passos and Steinbeck, who stirred my blood, and the probers of the grotesque, Faulkner and Anderson, who flattered my belief in the clarity of my own unblinking gaze. 
       Ah, youth.
       Well, not now I won't. Not this particular year, at least, and maybe never again. This year I want the quiet depth of the fifty-something Willa Cather. Not only in what I read but in how I live. I want solid and steady. Amusing and fulfilling and slightly melancholy. But no big drama, thanks very much. I had all that. It was exciting, and I'm glad it's in my backstory. But it's time for a more grown-up story.