I'm not sure exactly when my mother decided I was old enough to check out adult books from the library, but when she did Edna Ferber topped her list of recommended novelists. Although I can't recall it specifically nearly six decades later, So Big must have been among the ones I read because I tore through her canon quickly, riveted by her superb narrative skill and indelibly drawn characters, including strong, capable women who practiced lower-case feminism.
Does anyone read Ferber today? I chose it as my first audio book mostly for sentimental reasons, and was quickly engrossed by the family saga of plucky Selina Peake, orphaned by her gambling father in late 19th-century Chicago, and her son Dirk, whose ascent to the heights of 20th century capitalism plays as a cautionary tale, particularly for today's young readers. Ferber flavors her tale of this self-made, idiosyncratic woman, who pronounces cabbages "beautiful" long before she ever grows them, with a modest but potent form of eroticism and refreshingly omits any spirituality.
This is So Big's centenary year; it won the Pulitzer Prize, no doubt for its vivid and engrossing depiction of America's transition from an agrarian to an industrial nation. It reminds me a bit of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, if either of those Christian white men wrote with the Jewish Ferber's verve and perception. Hollywood director George Stevens turned Giant, another of her best sellers into an Academy Award-nominated vehicle, for Elizabeth Taylor--as he did, coincidentally, with A Place in the Sun, based on An American Tragedy, Dreiser's masterpiece, published in 1925, the year So Big won the Pulitzer--but Ferber herself has faded with time while her male contemporaries continue to be taught at the university level.
I suppose I'm keen on a revival that gives Ferber her 21st-century due because I share Selina Peake's values to a tee. My eyes teared as I listened to this speech, in response to a question about what she wants out of life.
It’s beauty!” Selina said then, almost passionately. Aug Hempel and Julie plainly could make nothing of this remark so she went on, eager, explanatory. “I used to think that if you wanted beauty—if you wanted it hard enough and hopefully enough—it came to you. You just waited, and lived your life as best you could, knowing that beauty might be just around the corner. You just waited, and then it came.”
“Beauty!” exclaimed Julie, weakly. She stared at Selina in the evident belief that this work-worn haggard woman was bemoaning her lack of personal pulchritude.
“Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to—to make something fine come of it.” The word self-expression was not in cant use then, and Selina hadn’t it to offer them. They would not have known what she meant if she had. She threw out her hands now in a futile gesture. “That’s what I mean by beauty. I want Dirk to have it.”
Selina waxes just as eloquent on the subject of why college students should pursue the humanities as a course of study. Alas, like most well-educated straight men, Dirk equates happiness with earning money although he lives to regret it when he eventually falls hard for a woman much like his mother. But the book ends on a happy note, when Roelf, a farm boy Selina once schooled, returns to Chicago after working decades in Paris as an artist.
Selina's father once told her that people fall into either of two categories: wheat or emeralds. While Selina is proud to be "wheat,"--with the hands to prove it--Ferber glows green, if forgotten a century after she wrote this very fine book.
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