Edward S. Curtis as The Shadow Catcher

[Betty]

The Shadow Catcher/ Marianne Wiggins. This is an imaginative work based upon the real-life photographer Edward S. Curtis and in which a main character has the same name as the author. There's a third character, John Wiggins, apparently Wiggins' father. It might not be generally known that the author Marianne Wiggins was Salman Rushdie's second wife.

There are apparently two threads through this Hollywood story: one about the never-at-home Curtis (1868-1952) and another about the never-at-home John Wiggins (1920-1970). The narrator Marianne Wiggins begins with an ever-present, memorable Da Vinci drawing she had seen in The Queen's Gallery, London. I found her description rewarding. My response to her writing so far is that it's very flowing and very nice to read as well as with a hint of good humor. Someone mentioned her style is lyrical; and I would agree:

The Queen's Gallery is small, neither well maintained nor adequately lit, and when I went there to see the Royal Collection of Da Vinci drawings, the day was pissing rain and cold and damp, and the room smelled of wet wool seasoned in the the lingering aroma of fry-up and vinegar, an atmosphere far removed from the immediacy, muscularity, and sunny beauty of Da Vinci's subjects.

Da Vinci painted Mona Lisa. I'll have to find some of his drawings to recognize those traits. Even if not, I'd be interested in reading someone's different perception.

[Betty]

Definitely, Judy. And your comment, "...there were so many mountains and valleys, my head is still spinning!" makes me picture Lewis and Clark on their dangerous overland journey a century earlier.

[Betty]

Judy wrote: "...One thing The Shadow Catcher did well was accentuate the contrast between the old country and the new. The people were the same, yet they were different. Those types of contrasts always get my attention. ..."

I also notice the contrasting elements, the oppositions, in a story and I will look for them in The Shadow Catcher. The two threads, Curtis and Wiggins, are a kind of opposition, taking the reader in different directions. As you say, Judy, there is a sense of their eventually being connected.

Re: interest in Lewis and Clark and bibliography for it, I pulled out my reference book Updating the Literary West (1997) to find out what it says about Lewis and Clark.

* Alexander Mackenzie , 1764?-1829, a precursor of L&C, made

"in 1793...the first transcontinental trek to the Pacific, and his resulting book spurred President Jefferson to organize the expedition of Lewis and Clark."

A recent edition is The Journals of Alexander MacKenzie: Exploring Across Canada in 1789 & 1793.

*Journals of Lewis and Clark
Meriwether Lewis

Your topic is very exciting, Judy. There's so much about the literary western US. My resource has many topics and bibliographies of books published 1980-1996 about literature and themes historically set in the western US.

[Betty]

"Updating the Literary West", I just remember, mentions this essay 'Beyond the Shining Mountains...' by John Seelye. , Virginia Quarterly Review, 63, Winter 1987, pp 36-53.

And I find this, set later than Lewis and Clark's journals, but interesting to me: Stories of the Old West: Tales of the Mining Camp, Cavalry Troop, and Cattle Ranch.

[Betty]

Reading the biography by National Geographic Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light alongside The Shadow Catcher is rewarding. The illustrated biography is a joy to read; so far the fictional biography by Marianne Wiggins captures my imagination and mentions incidences from the biography while getting the eponymous screenwriter character Marianne Wiggins to an interview.

The poetic opening of Leonardo DaVinci with a divine perspective over earth leads into "Take Fountain", a chapter about shifting plates, predicting LA traffic, and selling a screenplay.

[Betty]

In "Reds", Wiggins develops a meaning of redness from hair color, sunsets, and alerts to the hospital admitting rep Mrs Rosen, who phones her that John F Wiggins her father is in ICU, surprising since he died decades ago.

[Betty]

In "Edward and Clara", Clara Phillips and her brother Hercules of Minnesota lose their mother and father in a freak avalanche when snow slides off a roof, thus the children being sent to live with friends, the Curtis' in Seattle. Clara brings with her an understanding of nursing and of painting, skills useful in the plot, as well as a self-reliance and work ethic (talent, hard work, luck, risk-taking) that scorns charity. Clara picked up from her father his knowledge of painting technique (perspective, portraits, and medieval and renaissance art), topics about which Clara speaks. She received a primary education from her parents; so, she can read aloud Gulliver's Travels. However, her painter father viewed photography as simply mechanical by contrast with the art of painting. Ironically, Edward Curtis, a son of the Curtis' with whom Clara is staying and with whom she will marry, is devoted to photography, persuasively explaining its scientific principles after she looks at his photographs whose scenes Clara describes as fragile and beautiful.

[Betty]

In "Lights out for the Territory", it's evident that this biography about Curtis is also a memoir about Marianne Wiggins and her forebears, linked by

*the Civil War experiences and ministries of Curtis' father and Wiggins' great-grandfather

*Curtis lighting out to the field and Wiggins' Greek ancestors lighting out to the far-away country of America, and

*the necessity of identifying a dying indigenous culture and a dying man said to be her father.

If you're going to light out, there has to be a something you are lighting from. From's a given; from's a certain. To is out there, in our minds, uncertain. No one can promise us a to. No one ever gives a certain future to us in our hands, that we can hold...That the journey that you make through time--where you light out to--is the only meaning you can claim. Our lives are our individual claims on the combined experience--our lives are not our names or our professions...

[Betty]

In "The Mad Greek", the author Wiggins, diverging from the Curtis biography, presents an autobiographical memoir, still immensely interesting about her travels in the western US and about her first-generation Greek mother and her disappearing father. The latter not unlike Edward S Curtis. What's interesting is not just the facts but Wiggins' point of view and examples that talk about myth-making and about commemorative portraits.

[Betty]

In "Vegas, Baby", describing her impressions of Las Vegas, Marianne heads into the crowded city to Sunrise Hospital to identify a man purporting to be John Wiggins, her dead father. The man bringing the cardiac patient to the hospital, Lester Shadow, a native American, meets her, divulging information about his own father, Owns His Shadow, a chief who made two silver bracelets. Up to now, the story has been commentary on the facts but is Mr Shadow's revelation fact or fantasy?

[Betty]

In "Clara and Edward", the story goes back in time to the great Seattle fire of 1889 after which Edward S Curtis buys a half-share in a photographic studio and marries Clara. While mountaineering, Edward rescues lost mountaineers, who turn out to be the conservationists Merriam, Grinnell, and Pinchot, whose mission is to preserve national resources and and to observe/record native American culture.

The chapter jumps quickly ahead to Clara and Edward's four children, Edward's long absences, their divorce, and Clara's death.

[Betty]

In the chapter "An American Place", the most suspenseful so far, the theme of disappearing fathers replays, this time with the hospitalized father purporting to be Marianne Wiggins' but actually Colonel Curtis Edwards', who in turn informs Wiggins about the death of her father in 1970.

The chapter answers a historical question about the whereabouts of the photographer Edward S Curtis between his leaving Clara and his reuniting decades later with his four adult children. The reader finds out where some of the photographer's hand-tinted photographs and Indian artifacts end up. Wiggins gives us an answer that freely mixes fact and fiction; sometimes it's hard to know the difference.