Guest Column: A Son’s Father (Book Review) by Thomas E. Simmons

Guest Column: A Son’s Father (Book Review)
by Thomas E. Simmons

Novelist Frederick Manfred was born in Doon, Iowa, kicked around in Dinkytown and Bloomindale, Minnesota, built a house amongst the blue mounds north of Luverne, Minnesota, and worked for a time at the University of South Dakota as a writer-in-residence. He died in 1994 of brain cancer.

He and I may have passed each other on a sidewalk of the USD campus when I was an undergraduate, though I think I would remember the event (and I don’t) given that Manfred’s stature – 6 foot 9 – would have made quite an impression on the young man I was then. I did meet his personal physician once, immediately after I had finished delivering a talk on Manfred’s portrayal of landscape at Augustana University’s Center for Western Studies, but that is the closest I’ve ever come to meeting Manfred himself.

As I visited with Manfred’s doctor, he recalled delivering the news to Manfred that the writer had cancer. It was terminal. He cared for Manfred at the end. To shake this doctor’s hand is the closest I’ll come to shaking Manfred’s hand.

Manfred’s most popular novel is one of my all-time favorites: Lord Grizzly (1954). It recounts the true story of Hugh Glass and his solitary 1823 crawl across South Dakota after being mauled by a momma bear near the banks of the Grand River close to where Shadehill Reservoir is today, south of Lemmon. The story has been retold in film, most recently with Leonardo DiCaprio as Glass in The Revenant (2015).

That film’s substitution of the views of northwestern South Dakota with Rocky Mountain crags betrayed the truth of the epic crawl that Hugh Glass completed. The stunning landscape of buttes and vistas stretched across Perkins, Corson, and Dewey Counties outranks the Rockies any day.

Recently, I read a much more obscure book of nonfiction essays by Manfred titled Prime Fathers (1988). Very unlike Lord Grizzly, it’s a spare, simple book of four essays focusing on fatherhood. To round out the page count, there are also three shorter essays and selections from an interview with Manfred.

Politial junkies might enjoy the lengthy essay on Manfred’s work as a young man on Hubert Humphrey’s unsuccessful first campaign for mayor of Minneapolis. Word-nerds will like the pair of essays on Sinclair ‘Red’ Lewis. But I treasure the essay about Manfred’s own father; a condensed biography.

Here is a snippet of a close call from his father’s boyhood:

[W]hile shingling the cupola on the locally famous Reynolds round barn, the cleat on which is foot rested gave way, and he began sliding. He fell off the cupola and hit the main roof. Despite desperate clawing and scratching, he kept on sliding. When he knew there was no way of stopping the slide, he figured out where the fresh cow manure pile lay below and, deliberately rolling himself over and over as he slid, managed to aim himself for it. He shot out over the edge of the roof, and miracle of miracles, landed in six feet of loose green slush.

Miraculously, he was unhurt. But Manfred starts his father’s biography earlier, with the genealogy of the man’s parents who left Tzum (in the Netherlands) when his father was a baby. At Ellis Island, Manfred’s father’s (and father’s father’s) first names were changed from Frjentsjer to Frank.

Manfred’s paternal grandmother and grandfather initially settled in Orange City, Iowa (a Dutch town if ever there was) and then moved around a lot, even residing briefly in South Dakota’s Badlands, before settling permanently in Doon.

Frank Jr. grew up there at a time (the 1890s) when the primary mode of transportation was either horse or horse and buggy. One could still find wild, untilled prairies, especially in the rougher terrain and along the rivers. Some houses were still built of sod. Manfred’s father once rode a horse for ten miles without encountering a fence.

The numerous stories of Frank Jr. are told with his son’s accessible yet polished prose. They tell of a father’s boyhood and adulthood, ending with his death. (The title of the essay is a quote from Frank Jr. near the end: “Ninety is Enough”). It’s funny, sad, and moving. If you happen across a copy, I’d give it a read.

Thomas E. Simmons
University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law
Vermillion, SD