'Easy Since He Had Lived By His Wits'

“In his last year, he reread the works of one of his favorite Americans, Willa Cather.” 

That sentence is from Josiah Lee Auspitz’s “Michael Oakeshott: 1901-1990,” published in the Summer 1991 issue of The American Scholar. The English philosopher had died six days before Christmas 1990. I admire Oakeshott enormously, though I have little interest in political thought. He impresses me as a serious man with a good, limber prose style. Already at age twenty-seven, Oakeshott, like any serious person, is contemplating death. This is from September 1928 in his Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint-Academic, 2014):

 

“Show how the whole of our life & activity & achievement is just an attempt to master death. All religion, all philosophy, learning, science, business, poetry, literature, art,--everything we do or think or make. Love, the family, communities, the state.”

 

Oakeshott’s love of Willa Cather took me by surprise and moved me to see what she had written, if anything, about Christmas. What I found was “The Burglar's Christmas,” an early story published in 1896 under the pseudonym Elizabeth L. Seymour. I hadn’t read it before. The story is formulaic, hinging on an unlikely coincidence. It recalls O. Henry, though the big plot revelation comes midway through the story, not in the final paragraph. The twenty-four-year-old hero, a lost soul who has deserted his family, is forgiven. Yes, it’s melodrama, but already Cather demonstrates narrative momentum and clear, vivid prose. Here’s a passage I enjoyed:

 

“He had not found life easy since he had lived by his wits. He had come to know poverty at close quarters. He had known what it was to be gay with an empty pocket, to wear violets in his button hole when he had not breakfasted, and all the hateful shams of the poverty of idleness. He had been a reporter on a big metropolitan daily, where men grind out their brains on paper until they have not one idea left—and still grind on. He had worked in a real estate office, where ignorant men were swindled. He had sung in a comic opera chorus and played Harris in an Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company, and edited a Socialist weekly.”

 

A wayward life distilled into six sentences. Think of “The Burglar’s Christmas” as a Yuletide respite from cynicism.