“Are you a lesbian?” a man asks the narrator of Shirley Schoonover’s novel Sam’s Song.
“No,” she replies. “But I’ve been called a unicorn. A zebra. I have a cousin who is an onion.”
Whatever Sam is, the only thing that’s certain is that’s she’s not happy with it. “I don’t quite know who I am,” she thinks. “Even after thirty years of living with me, I don’t feel familiar with myself.”
Everything about Sam’s Song is wildly out of place. Sam, the thirty-something mother of three who’s separated and in the final stage of divorcing her husband, in her own skin. “I find myself to be a bitch. But in a world of bitches, I don’t want to hand on to my children the ugliness that is in me.” She’s out of place in her community. Having chosen — unfathomably in the eyes of most of the people she knows — to leave her children in her husband’s custody, she’s the woman that other women talk about at cocktail parties.
Yet she’s unwilling to let her soon-to-be ex’s new girlfriend get ideas: “I’ll kill you, you bitch, before you’ll mother my children.” Restless and horny, she picks up men in bars knowing they have no interest in staying with her: “I can make love. Fuck, if you will. But, my God, I have the secret knowledge that I have been fucked with shit.” When they ask her name, she answers, “I am no-name.” She even dresses up as a man and goes to bars where gay men hang out. “I smell cocks and peacocks, cut booze, and brothers lusting for their brother’s cocks.” She drinks — hard. “You use up Scotch like other people use water,” observes Martha, Sam’s last remaining friend.
They fucked her up, her mum and dad. She’s Sam, not Samantha, because they wanted a boy, not a girl. “Girls are no good on a farm,” her father said. She admires men for their ability to take what they want, material or sexual. That same selfishness is one of the few things she’s sure of about herself. “Yes, I am selfish,” she admits to her son one afternoon as they swim together. “Fuck you,” he replies.
That stops me. I tread water again, looking at him. He stays out of my reach; I read his eyes. He knows I can feel his anger. At this moment he feels hate. He hates me because I left them with their father. No, just because I left them.
Which reminded me of something Nora Ephron once wrote: “You give kids a choice — your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they’d choose suicide in the next room.” Yet as confused and unhappy as Sam may be, she’s clear-sighted when it comes to the potentially toxic effect she could have on her kids if left responsible for their day-to-day care.
Not that Sam is in ecstasy, let alone in Hawaii. Nor does she expect her life to be turned around by the freedom of the single life. “Living alone, unloving, I will shrivel and dry into an ancient sterile turd,” she thinks.
As these quotes suggest, Sam’s Song is a long way from the safe, nice housewives of 1960s sitcoms. When she wrote the book, Shirley Schoonover was herself the mother of three, living in Lincoln, Nebraska and in the process of divorcing her husband. That didn’t mean that the book was autobiographical, though. “I didn’t go to bed with any sailors, I didn’t pick men up off the street, I didn’t have a homosexual lover,” she later said. “But the anger was real,” she warned. And so was her frankness. “We Finns are very blunt,” she told an interviewer. “We come out and say, no tact whatsoever, what we have to say. I guess a lot of people don’t understand that.”
Schoonover and her husband met in Iowa, where she had studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel Mountain of Winter (1965), about a young Finnish-American girl growing up rural Minnesota, was closer to autobiography. Born Iliana Waisanen, she was given the name Shirley by her mother, who loved Shirley Temple and who wanted her daughter to seem “more American.” Schoonover hated the name.
Mountain of Winter was generally well-received. Bernard Bergonzi wrote that “its humanity, its breadth of feeling, and range and exactness of observation of men and nature, place it well above the ordinary run of first novels (or second or third novels, come to that).” The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and folks in Lincoln were so proud of her accomplishment that the manager of her local IGA grocery store even cleared space on an endcap for a display and hosted an autograph party.
She joked that a few of the customers, as they picked up a copy along with five or six cans of Campbell’s soup, that the book might be “dirty.” “Well, it was very frank,” she later said, “but not nearly as potent as Sam’s Song .”
When Sam’s Song came out, however, it was another story. “Sam’s Four-Letter-Word Symphony” proclaimed the headline of the Lincoln Journal Star review. “If it had not been assigned to me for review, I would not have read past the first 15 pages.” The reviewer — a man — judged that Sam “is as abnormal as any woman could be” and that her language “is worse than any attributed to the wharves of Liverpool.” He did, however, admit that the book might be useful for students of vocabulary: “If there is a four-letter word used to describe sex in its most perverted form, it can be found in this book.”
Coward-McCann’s dust jacket blurb didn’t help. It promised that the book featured “sexy sex, sick sex, homosexual sex, racial sex, even religious sex.” The Journal Star’s reviewer wrote that Sam’s Song “ranks with the stuff that is sold under the counter in shops which deal with pornographic works.” Most Lincoln bookshops preferred not to stock the book at all, on or under the counter.
Martin Levin, then one of the New York Times’ lead reviewers, argued that those who wrote off Sam’s Song as pornography were missing the point: “When is a dirty book not a dirty book? When it is a cri de coeur, in which whatever detritus there is exists as part of the structure of personality.” Contrary to the Lincoln Journal Star’s reviewer, he considered Sam “a thoroughly homogenized mixture of ambiguous urges, detoured maternal feelings, sharply bitter humor, and ethnic (Finnish) traces.” It seems that the bigger the city, the better the chances of Sam’s Song getting a favorable review. When the novel came out in paperback in early 1970s, the Chicago Tribune’s book editor observed cynically, “It is one of the most revealing books ever written about a woman. Which is probably why the hardcover edition vanished without a trace.”
If anyone picked up Sam’s Song in search of a thrill, they were bound to be disappointed. Sam is certainly profane, but it’s not pornographic. Sam does not “discover” herself through her sexual liberation. Sex is more like booze, a source of temporary relief from pain. Sam’s Song is more a four-letter-word rap than symphony: Sam’s profanity is visceral, a sign of the pain, anger, and unrest always simmering, always on the brink of boiling over. It may be the rawest book written by a woman in the 1960s.
By the time the book was published, Schoonover was ready to leave Lincoln. “I literally felt like a zebra in a herd of horses,” she later said. When her divorce from her first husband, Leroi Schoonover, was finalized, she headed to New York, where she joined the faculty at the University of Rochester. She took revenge on Lincoln with a “Letter from Nebraska” that was published in the New York Times after she’d moved to Rochester. “If you don’t love Willa Cather’s work you are not included in the literary life of the university.” Sam’s Song is nothing like My Antonia: it’s closer to Last Exit to Brooklyn.
When it came to Nebraska as a whole, Schoonover concluded that, “As far as I can tell, there is no literary life in Nebraska.” “You ask if writers talk to each other,” she wrote her imaginary correspondent. Since Karl Shapiro, who’d been the editor of the university’s long-running literary quarterly Prairie Schooner had left Lincoln in the mid-1960s, she replied, “I’ve been talking to myself; and you know that can become agonizingly lonely. That’s Nebraska. Beautiful but killingly lonely for the writer.”
After a few years at Rochester, Schoonover moved to Missouri, where she taught at Webster University in St. Louis. While there, she published her last novel, Winter Dream (1979) a folk tale set in Finland in the 15th century. “I wrote it for the child in me,” she told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. “I wanted to write something people could enjoy and whose characters they could love.” Schoonover moved to Teaneck, New Jersey in her later years to live near her son Noel. She died in 2004.