A Literary History of The American West

A
LITERARY HISTORY
OF THE
AMERICAN WEST
SPONSORED BY
The Western Literature Association
Texas Christian University Press Fort Worth
Copyright 1987 by The Western Literature Association.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Main entry under title: A Literary history of the American West. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. American literatureWest (U.S.)History and criticism. 2. West (U.S.) in literature. I. Western Literature Association (U.S.) 810'.9'978 85-50538 PS271.L58 1986 ISBN 0-87565-021-x Design by Whitehead & Whitehead
An excerpt from Estimated Prophet by John Barlow and Bob Weir is reprinted by permission of Ice-Nine Publishing Co., Inc. 1977, 1979 by Ice-Nine Publishing Co., Inc. An excerpt from The Night Chant: A Navajo Ceremonial is reprinted from Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature, edited and translated by John Bierhorst. 1974 by John Bierhorst. Reprinted by permission of John Bierhorst. AbiquiuThursday in Holy Week is reprinted from New & Selected Poems by Peggy Pond Church. 1976 by Ahsahta Press at Boise State University. Reprinted by permission of Ahsahta Press. Tin Cans at Keeler is reprinted from If There Is Time by Hildegarde Flanner (published 1942 by New Directions Publishing Corp.). 1942 by Hildegarde Flanner. Reprinted by permission of Hildegarde Flanner. The Occultation of Venus and Sheep Herding by Sharlot Hall are reprinted from Women Poets of the West: An Anthology, 18501950. 1978 by Ahsahta Press at Boise State University. Reprinted by permission of Ahsahta Press. An excerpt from Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts III & IV by Thomas McGrath is reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. 1985 by Thomas McGrath. Like Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce is reprinted from Selected Poems by Norman Macleod. 1975 by Ahsahta Press at Boise State University. Reprinted by permission of Ahsahta Press. Tired is reprinted from If I Could Sleep Deeply Enough, Poems by Vassar Miller, by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright 1968, 1972, 1973, 1974 by Vassar Miller. Black Hair is reprinted from Black Hair by Gary Soto, by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. 1985 by Gary Soto. Watching a Storm is reprinted from In the Clock of Reason by William Stafford (published 1973 by Soft Press, Victoria, British Columbia). 1973 William Stafford. Reprinted by permission of William Stafford. Hills Brothers Coffee is reprinted from Seasonal Woman by Luci Tapahonso (published 1982 by Tooth of Time Books, Santa Fe, New Mexico). 1982 Luci Tapahonso. Reprinted by permission of Luci Tapahonso.
A LITERARY HISTORY of the AMERICAN WEST
BOARD OF EDITORS
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
J. Golden Taylor (19121982)

SENIOR EDITOR
Thomas J. Lyon Utah State University George F. Day University of Northern Iowa Gerald W. Haslam Sonoma State University James H. Maguire Boise State University William T. Pilkington Tarleton State University
SECTIONAL EDITORS
CONTENTS
Preface Max Westbrook Chronology Richard W. Etulain

PART ONE :
XV xxi
Encountering the West

3 8 11 29 68 71 104 119 135 141
Introduction James H. Maguire Section I: Oral Traditions Introduction James H. Maguire Native Oral Traditions Larry Evers and Paul Pavich Folklore in the American West Barre Toelken Section II: The Written Done of Western Literature Introduction James H. Maguire Across the Wide Missouri: The Adventure Narrative from Lewis and Clark to Powell J. Golden Taylor The Military Michael Koury Lawmen and Outlaws Kent L. Steckmesser Section III: Beginnings of Genres in the West Introduction James H. Maguire Precursors of the Western Novel James K. Folsom
A Literary History of the American West
The Western Story Gerald W. Haslam World Westerns: The European Writer and the American West Richard H. Cracroft Western Poetry, 1850-1950 Tom Trusky Western American Drama to 1960 James H. Maguire The Nature Essay in the West Thomas J. Lyon The Western Movie to 1960 William T. Pilkington Section IV: Beginnings of Literary Historiography Introduction James H. Maguire Roosevelt, Wister, Turner, and Remington Ben Merchant Vorpahl Early Western Literary Scholars Fred Erisman
PART TWO :
152 159 180 204 221 266 273 276 303
Settled In: Many Wests

319 326 339 359 370 381 398 416 424 447
Introduction James H. Maguire Section I: The Far West Introduction James D. Houston Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and the San Francisco Circle Patrick D. Morrow Mary Hunter Austin Jacqueline D. Hall Frank Norris Don Graham Jack London Earle Labor Robinson Jeffers Robert Brophy H. L. Davis Paul T. Bryant John Steinbeck Richard Astro Theodore Roethke Kermit Vanderbilt viii
CONTENTS
William Stafford J. Russell Roberts, Sr. William Saroyan Gerald W. Haaslam Prophets on the Burning Shore: Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and San Francisco Dennis McNally Section II: The Southwest Introduction William T. Pilkington The Cowboy in Short Fiction W. H. Hutchinson The Novel of the Cowboy Lou Rodenberger J. Frank Dobie Henry L. Alsmeyer, Jr. Harvey Fergusson William T. Pilkington Katherine Anne Porter and the Southwest Joan Givner Oliver La Farge Everett A. Gillis Paul Horgan Robert Gish William Eastlake Delbert E. Wylder Benjamin Capps James W. Lee Edward Abbey Ann Ronald Larry McMurtry Jane Nelson The Southern Border Lou Rodenberger Section III: The Midwest Introduction George F. Day Hamlin Garland and Midwest Farm Fiction Roy W. Meyer Willa Cather John J. Murphy Rlvaag and Krause: Two Novelists of the Northwest
458 472 482 496 515 523 535 546 559 567 574 587 597 604 612 622 636 664 686
ix
Prairie Frontier Arthur R. Huseboe John G. Neihardt Lucile Aly The Western Writings of Sinclair Lewis Glen A. Love Mari Sandoz Helen W. Stauffer Wright Morris G. B. Crump Frederick Manfred Robert C. Wright Thomas McGrath Frederick C. Stern Robert Bly Douglas Smith Section IV: The Rocky Mountains Introduction Levi S. Peterson Mormon Novels Kenneth B. Hunsaker Vardis Fisher Louie W. Attebery Intellectualoids, Westering, and Thomas Hornsby Ferril Tom Trusky Bernard DeVoto Wallace Stegner A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Wayne Chatterton Frank Waters Charles L. Adams Jack Schaefer Fred Erisman Wallace Stegner Joseph M. Flora Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the American Dream Max Westbrook The Northern Boundary Morton L. Ross
716 739 754 764 777 792 806 813 822 849 862 887 899 912 935 958 971 989 1000
CONTENTS
PART THREE :
Rediscovering the West

1017 1026 1038 1058 1067 1079 1101 1119 1139 1148 1162 1167 1178 1182 1202 1232
Introduction Gerald W. Haslam Section I: Earth Tones: Ethnic Expression in American Literature Introduction Gerald W. Haslam Western American Indian Writers, 18541960 A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff American Indian Fiction, 19681983 Paula Gunn Allen Coyotes Sons, Spiders Daughters: Western American Indian Poetry, 1968-1983 Patricia Clark Smith Early Mexican-American Literature Raymund A. Paredes Contemporary Mexican-American Literature, 1960Present Raymund A. Paredes Asian-American Literary Traditions Jeffery Paul Chan and Marilyn Alquiloza Afro-American Writers in the West James W. Byrd Scandinavian Immigrant Literature Christer Lennart Mossberg Section II: Present Trends Introduction Gerald W. Haslam Unknown Diversity: Small Presses and Little Magazines in the West, 19601980 Gerald W. Haslam Trends in Western Womens Writing Lou Rodenberger Contemporary Trends in Western American Fiction Mark Siegel Present Trends in Western Poetry William Lockwood Contemporary Western Drama Mark Busby
xi
The Western Nature Essay Since 1970 Thomas J. Lyon Western Movies Since 1960 Don Graham The Modern Popular Western: Radio, Television, Film and Print Michael T. Marsden and Jack Nachbar Epilogue: The Development of Western Literary Criticism Martin Bucco Major Reference Sources on the West George F. Day Contributors Index
1246 1256 1263 1283 1317 1324 1330
xii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
HIS WORK WAS MADE POSSIBLE through the assistance of a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, served as the business office of the project. Dr. Arthur Huseboe, of Augustana, wrote the original grant proposal to NEH and administered the resulting funds most efficiently. At Utah State University, the final gathering and editing of the text was generously supported by William F. Lye, Vice-President for University Relations; by Glenn R. Wilde, Associate Dean, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; and by Kenneth B. Hunsaker and Patricia Gardner, who served as Heads of the English Department during the project. Bibliographical research and compilation were handled most competently by Charlotte Wright. A very great deal of accurate typing, copying, and proofreading was contributed unstintingly by Patricia Gordon. She was aided by Anna Marie Ivie. To all these people and institutions, we owe the existence of this volume.
xiii
PREFACE
set sail to cross the Atlantic, they were not going to a small, manageable island. Their destination was a continent, a new world. Their mission, as described with the bias of European civilization, was to establish a beachhead, a first settlement on the beginning edge of a land that was enormous, mysterious, frightening, and challenging. Clearly, the territory later called the American West was going to play a major role in the development of the nation they hoped to establish. The Puritans had little knowledge of what lay beyond their foothold on the New England coast, but early explorers had told of vast lands, strange natives, and incredible variety. The continent to the west of Plymouth and Jamestown, with its millions of undeveloped acres, added a massive physicality to the Puritan adventure in religious and political freedom. As religion receded from politics and democratic capitalism developed, the West provided opportunities for the poor and temptations to the exploiter, thus making the American experiment a realistic testing ground for democracy. A chapter in history began to unfold, a chapter characterized by such materials as inspire myth-makers. Both marvelous and terrible, the development of the West came to be symbolized in the American mind by pioneering, Indian wars and cattle drives, by the talismanic figure of the cowboya merging of Hispanic and Anglo traditionsby the heroic yet shameful railroad story, by miners, farmers, and loggers; and, at the end of the trail, in the promised land of California, there was a pot of gold. Back east, White House policies and Congressional debates often centered on the lands and riches of the West. From colonial times to the present day, recognition of the importance of the West to American history has been clear and continuous. The importance of western literature as a part of our national literature, however, has not been established. With professors and readers of history, the frontier has always been a respected topic. With professors and
HEN THE PURITANS
xv
readers of literature, to mention frontier stories is to evoke automatic thoughts of popular stereotypes. While the term western history may suggest Thomas Macaulay, Francis Parkman, Washington Irving, Frederick Jackson Turner, Henry Nash Smith, Bernard DeVoto, and Richard Hofstadter, the term western literature suggests for most such names as Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis LAmour, and various Hollywood actors from Tom Mix to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. The contributing authors of A Literary History of the American West have avoided the polemical trap of a special pleading and concentrated on presenting and analyzing their assigned topics. Yet one of the major underlying purposes of A Literary History of the American West is, by demonstration rather than defensiveness, to support the ongoing introduction of western literary riches to readers interested in American literature, culture, and history. Admittedly, as always, there are problems in the court of literary evaluation. Those who study the literature of the American West tend to believe there is an entrenched prejudice in favor of minor novels and mediocre poems written amidst the cultural prestige of England or New England and a prejudice against excellent novels and poems written about the harsh plains of Nebraska or the unprestigious deserts of Nevada. Still, the West has produced no William Faulkner, no giant with enough original power to make prejudicial rankings collapse; and, regrettably, some attempts to defend the worth of serious western literature have been strident attacks on the eastern establishment or somewhat sentimental praise of the local because it is local. Since the founding of the Western Literature Association in 1966, however, the attitude of teachers and critics of western literature has been characterized by a disinterest in proselytizing and a confidence in their chosen field of study. The belief, stated simply, is that the literature of the American West, although handicapped by association with Hollywood horse operas and stereotypical paperbacks sold in bus stations, includes a large body of first-rate literary art. Western literature of quality, much of it unknown to the reading public, honors the dramatic invitation of western history. The American West plays an important role in the history of the nation; western literature, as demonstrated by A Literary History of the American West, plays an important role in the literature of the nation. The editorial problem, in fact, has not been how to find western literature of quality but, rather, how to organize and present an enormous and remarkably varied body of such literature. The first step, obviously, was to gather the troops, a group of scholar-critics with a variety of knowledge equal to the task. The Western Literature Association and its journal Western American Literatureprovided the forum necessary for identifying xvi
PREFACE
and organizing over seventy scholars with specializations that include major writers of the American West, regional literatures and historical periods, a wide range of genres and literary methods, and literatures writtenor spokenin languages other than English. Gathering an appropriate group of scholars turned out to be less difficult than conceptual questions about the project itself. The history of the American West has been defined by groups conscious of their own history but too often unaware or unappreciative of any other history. Anglo pioneers, for example, tended to think of themselves as moving into a new world, that is, one not characterized by their notion of civilization; and yet up ahead were unknown millions of indigenous citizens, many with an oral tradition of power and sophistication. Moving into a supposedly new world, the Anglo pioneer was actually moving into a very old world. Likewise, the oversimplification of red versus American ignores long-established Hispanic civilizations in the Southwest and in California, the influence of French trappers and missionaries, Scandinavian developments in northcentral America, German communities established in Texas and throughout the West, and the stories of blacks, Asians, and literally dozens of other ethnic groups. The assumption that the American West was settled by Anglo pioneers moving out from gateways such as Independence, Missouri, in fact, needs reconsideration in the light of theories which emphasize the importance of the largely Hispanic movements from the south and the importance of largely Scandinavian movements following a northern route into the Dakotas and surrounding territories. Western literature, being concerned with what happened and with what various people thought was happening, moves around in history and the history of consciousness in ways that are difficult for the scholar to map. The editors have also had to face the fact that regionalism, from the beginnings to the present day, is intrinsic to the best of western literature as well as to the mediocre and, often, the worstthe most formulaic. Thus the editors confronted an old paradox: literary art tends to achieve universal significance by devotion to a specific locale, a region. Homer, according to Hamlin Garland, was a regionalist. If Garlands example of a universalregionalist seems extreme, then Henry David Thoreau and William Faulkner will make the case for him. The problem of a regional literature ambitious for national and international recognition is, in the present instance, acute. Among numerous other editorial problems, at least one requires mention. Just as regional, chronological, and ethnic headings do not provide a neat shape for the literary historian, so does the essential term, western, refuse to cooperate with the scholar seeking clarity. Definitions in terms of geography, themes, subject matter, or the residence of the authors have all xvii
proved unsatisfactory; and attempts to discover a distinctively western style or vision, while rewarding, are not definitive. The best definitions, perhaps, are studies in practical criticism which invite further analysis rather than campaign for an end to analysis. As the Table of Contents makes clear, the editorial decisions are a series of compromises. The beginning, certainly, is Native Oral Traditions, even though the concerted and ongoing study of Indian literature is a fairly recent enterprise. Other beginnings are explored in essays on the development of various genresincluding poetry and dramaand in essays on types of prose sometimes associated with culture or history rather than literary art. Nature essays, for example, are a necessary topic for study because they challenge our theoretical distinctions between art and non-art and often capture that sense of place, of land, which is for many the very soul of western literature. Folklore-and this is true for other literaturesis often the raw material of formal art; and gunfights and cowboy movies, a sore point for many serious western artists, are entangled in the minds of writers and readers even if only as destructive myths in need of purgation. And popular culture, of course, regardless of artistic merit, is a revealing and important field of study. The arrangement of Part Two, although easier to outline than to defend, seemed required by the recurrent emphasis on specific locale. Just as Faulkner devoted himself to his postage stamp of the world and found it inexhaustible, so have many western writers found a complete world in the Southwest, the Midwest, the Rocky Mountains. The fourth regional division, the Far West, may be a legitimate category for its consistent defiance of all categories. Historically, the Far West was often the goal of western expansion, and yet it was also the end of expansion, the place where pioneers turned back from the ocean and faced the East. Oregon Territory loomed in the national psyche as the ultimate in newness, and yet California, the neighboring state, was an old and established civilization. A paradise of fertile land and mineral wealth, but also a land of corruption and violent injustice, the coast as paradox has inspired a number of literary explosions. Part Three, Rediscovering the West, is a shift in organizational principle required by the fact that so much of the ethnic literature of the American West has received even less recognition than novels and poems by Anglo writers. The editorial rationale here lies in the history of improving consciousness rather than the history of the literature itself. Belatedly, there is a widespread effort to recognize the art of ethnic minorities and a burst of energy both in criticism and in creativity. Present Trends, a sub-division of Part Three, returns to the principle xviii
PREFACE
of chronology; but the decision, while a compromise, is not arbitrary. There is, both in the West and in the nation generally, a small press renaissance in progress. Major publishers, in part because new owners are less willing than their predecessors to work for literature as well as profit, are widely believed to be uninterested in taking a chance on a new writer or on a veteran who has never had a best seller. A full description of the small press business has not been written; but it is well known that while some small presses do not last the season of their birth, many endure with surprising tenacity. In major cities, and often in small towns, an enormous number of active and serious publishers and writers constitute a national small press industry. Although important, the trend is not exclusive, of course. As made clear in each of several chapters, many western novelists and even a few poets do enjoy a happy relation with a major publishing firm, nature writing continues to be an important genre, and there are quality western films made in major studios. In the Epilogue, Martin Bucco describes the course of western literary criticism from its beginnings to the present. He does for western criticism, in short compass, what George Saintsbury (History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe) and Ren Wellek ( History of Modern Criticism: 17501950) have done, on a monumental scale, for comparative criticism. The need for a literary history of the American West was first expressed quite casually, over coffee, by various members of the Western Literature Association. Afterwards, during a plenary session, the idea met with immediate and total agreement. The significance of the apparently innocent inception of this literary history is that scholars and critics of western American literature had already realized the existence of a third stage in the development of a western literature. The first stage was the history itself, events culminating, at least in our consciousness, in a period of about fifty years, roughly the second half of the nineteenth century. The second stage was the emergence of a large and varied body of literature. The development of a responsible criticism, a movement of the past twenty-five years or so, is the third stage. Broad generalizations need, of course, the obvious qualifications; but a surprising amount of the best of western literature has been written in the twentieth century but set in the nineteenth. Perhaps the historical development of the West went forward at such a heady pace that we are, distanced by time, not as surrogate pioneers but for ourselves, still trying to absorb the glories, cruelties, and stubborn endurance that characterized the westering experience. Along with the continuing effort to understand what has happened, however, there is a large and increasing number of talented writers who focus their attention on life in the West as it is today. Appropriately, in xix
undertaking the writing of a literary history that must confront such longrunning and yet ever-changing concerns, the editors and authors of A Literary History of the American West believe they have contributed to the beginnings of serious study. Far from thinking of this volume as the last word, the members of the Editorial Board have expressed their hope that the present undertaking will encourage further work in the literary history of the West. Relevant to encouragement is the Boards decision not to impose a lock-step marching order on contributors in matters of critical approach. Anyone who reads in this volume will note that some of the chapters are strongly interpretive, others more general and neutral. This diversity of approach and tone represents the editors recognition of the variety in western literature, the relative freshness of the West, andthereforeits invitation to many different types of criticism. Understandably, there are problems and topics yet to be confronted. A proper thanks for work done is not possible in an undertaking of this magnitude. Too many have made important contributions. A complete list, certainly, would begin with the names in the Table of Contents, those who did the actual research and writing. The Board of Editors, which changed during the working process, would come next: the late J. Golden Taylor, first elected Editor-in-Chief; Thomas J. Lyon, who took up the unfinished task and saw it through to completion; William T. Pilkington, James Maguire, and George F. Day, who joined the Board at a time when their scholarship and industry were essential; and, the editor who served the longest and deserves a special word of thanks, Gerald Haslam. Finally, the support of the members of the Western Literature Association and a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities are gratefully acknowledged, along with thanks to Arthur Huseboe, who worked patiently and efficiently in securing financial support for the project. Literary histories, of course, do not have a reason for being unless there exists the literature itself. This volume, perhaps more than others of its kind, is an expression of appreciation for the talented and dedicated literary artists who ignored the odds, avoided temptations to write for popularity or prestige, and chose to write honestly about the American West, believing that experiences long known to be of historical importance are also experiences that need and deserve a literature of importance.
M AX W E S T B R O O K ,
University of Texas
xx
CHRONOLOGY
I. A Historical Chronology of the Frontier and the American West
Western Hemisphere first called America Vasco Nuez de Balboa crosses Panama to discover the Pacific Ocean Francisco Vsquez de Coronado explores the interior Southwest Hemando de Soto travels through Arkansas and Oklahoma Juan de Oate plants settlements in northern New Mexico Frontier settlements in Jamestown, Virginia Founding of Santa Fe, New Mexico Pilgrims organize Plymouth, Massachusetts Boston, Massachusetts, is settled by the Puritans Pre Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet explore the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley 1680: Pueblo Revolt, the Indians drive the Spaniards out of New Mexico 1692: Don Diego de Vargas begins successful reconquest of New Mexico Founding of Albuquerque, New Mexico 1706: Birth of Daniel Boone (17341820), first frontier literary hero 1734: Treaty of Paris ends French and Indian War and cedes French Canada 1763: and trans-Appalachian West to England; Louisiana given to France 176970ff: Spanish establish missions from San Diego to the Bay Area Treaty of Paris ends American Revolution and extends U.S. borders 1783: to the Mississippi River 1803: Louisiana Purchase from France doubles the size of the nation 180406: Lewis and Clark expedition, first major exploration into the recently acquired area of the Louisiana Purchase 180507: Zebulon M. Pike explores the Mississippi and Colorado and New Mexico 181215: War of 1812 pushes the British from most of the frontier 1818: Convention of 1818 fixes the U.S.-Canadian border west to the Rockies 1819, 1821: Transcontinental (Adams-Ons) Treaty provides boundary for Texas, Nevada, and California 181920: Major Stephen H. Long explores the Southwest 1820: Missouri Compromise attempts to solve the growing slavery controversy
1507: 1513: 154042: 154142: 1598: 1607: 160910: 162021: 1630: 1673:
xxi
A Literary History of the American West Mexico wins independence from Spain and assumes control of the Southwest Hudsons Bay Company absorbs its major British competitor, the North-West Company Beginning of the Santa Fe Trail Jedediah Smith ( 17991831) makes first of many western explorations 1822: 1820s30s: Halcyon years of the American fur trade and mountain man era in the Rockies and the Southwest Organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; pub1830: lication of Book of Mormon 183536: Texas Revolution and establishment of Republic of Texas (183545) John Charles Frmont makes first of several western explorations 1842: First major groups travel the Oregon Trail to the Pacific Northwest 1843: Annexation of Texas as a state 1845: Journalist John L. OSullivan writes about Manifest Destiny Oregon Country is divided at 49 between U.S. and England (Canada) 1846: 184647: Mormons leave Nauvoo, Illinois, travel along the Mormon Trail, and begin to settle in the Salt Lake valley 184648: Americans fight and win the Mexican-American War and thereby wrest control of the Southwest from Mexico Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promises to respect Mexican rights in 1848: recently captured areas but fails to do so Gold is discovered in California and thousands flood west to the 184849: mines California becomes the first far-western state 1850: Compromise of 1850 tries to solve boundary and slave controversies in the Southwest Ft. Laramie Treaty, major attempt to make peace with Plains Indians 1851: Gadsden Purchase completes present border between U.S. and 1853: Mexico Beginning of the bloody struggle over slavery in Kansas and Nebraska Kansas-Nebraska reignites national slavery controversy 1854: Bleeding Kansas results from the struggle over the extension of 1856: slavery 185758: The Utah or Mormon war Mountain Meadows Massacre 1857: Establishment of the Overland Mail Company to carry mail to the West Coast Completion of the first stagecoach and mail service from Missouri to 1858: California 185859: Gold discoveries lead to rushes to Nevada and Colorado Oregon becomes a state 1859: 185960: Mining rushes to Nevada, Colorado, and Idaho 186061: Pony Express crosses the West Completion of first telegraph connecting the East and West 1861: 1821:
xxii
CHRONOLOGY
186165: 1862:
1864: 186567: 1867: 1868: 1869: 1872: 1874: 1876: 1877: 1878: 1879: 1881: 188283: 188587: 1886: 1887: 1889: 188991: 1890: 1891: 1892: 1893:
Civil War has large impact on the West although few battles take place west of the Mississippi Homestead Act provides inexpensive land for western pioneers Morrill or Land Grant Act sets aside lands for colleges of agricultural or mechanical arts Pacific Railroad Act helps pave the way for transcontinental railway with generous land grants to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads Sand Creek Massacre in which John Chivington and the Colorado Volunteers destroy a band of Cheyennes Continued battles with the western Sioux The purchase of Alaska The Dominion of Canada is established Founding of University of California, Berkeley The Overland Monthly begins publication First transcontinental railroad joins at Promontory Point, Utah Establishment of Yellowstone National Park, worlds first national park Barbed wire fence patented Battle of the Little BighornCusters Last Stand (June 25) Retreat of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce Black Exodusters migrate to Kansas Timber and Stone Act, a land grant for western pioneers Publication of Henry Georges reformist study Progress and Poverty Helen Hunt Jacksons expose of Indian reforms and conditions, A Century of Dishonor Transcontinental railroads completed to southern California and Pacific Northwest Severe winters in Rockies and Plains destroy thousands of cattle and many ranchers Capture of Geronimo ends major wars with Indians Dawes Severalty (General Allotment) Act attempts to Americanize Indians through outright gifts of land Beginning of Oklahoma land booms Ghost Dance and Battle of Wounded Knee end armed conflicts with Indians Woodruff Manifesto proclaims end of Mormon polygamy U.S. Census Bureau announces the closing of the frontier The Populist Party is established Sierra Club founded Severe national depression sweeps through the West Completion of the Great Northern Railroad from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest Frederick Jackson Turner delivers his key essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History
xxiii
A Literary History of the American West William McKinley defeats William Jennings Bryan for the presidency and much of the Populist movement disappears 189798: Last major gold rush to the Yukon and Alaska 1898: Sunset Magazine begins as regional West Coast journal Spanish-American War includes the famous Rough Riders, who were mostly westerners 1900ff: Carmel, California, and Taos-Santa Fe, New Mexico, begin as notable artistic-literary colonies 1902: Oregon institutes initiative and referendum laws 1903: Great Train Robbery, first Western film; produced in New Jersey 1904: A. P. Giannini establishes Bank of Italy in San Francisco, which becomes the Bank of America in 1930 1905: Establishment of Industrial Workers of the World, radical labor union 1906: San Francisco earthquake and fire San Francisco segregates oriental children 1907: Publication of Spirit of American Government, J. Allen Smiths progressive treatise 190708: Gentlemens Agreement notes place restrictions on Japanese immigration 190910: Milwaukee Road and Western Pacific, last of the transcontinental railroads, completed to the Pacific 1910: Election of Hiram Johnson, Progressive governor of California The Pinchot-Ballinger controversy over conservation policy 1910ff: Hollywood becomes major location for the production of films 1912: Hiram Johnson runs unsuccessfully with Theodore Roosevelt as vicepresidential candidate of the Progressive Party 1914: William S. Hart stars in his first major Western film Completion of the Panama Canal, a new route to the West Coast 1914, 1916: U.S. invasions of Mexico 191415: Founding of the Non-Partisan League, socialistic political group in the Rockies and northern Plains 1915: Death of IWW hero, Joe Hill, by firing squad, on a murder charge 1916: Congress authorizes the establishment of a National Park Service Jeanette Rankin, Montana Congresswoman, first woman elected to Congress 191718: U.S. involvement in World War I brings great socioeconomic changes to the West 1918: Noted U.S. cultural figure, Mabel Dodge (Luhan), arrives in New Mexico 191920: Western senators Hiram Johnson and William E. Borah lead successful fight against Treaty of Paris and League of Nations 1919: Seattle General Strike (February 611) attacked by conservatives as evidence of communist infiltration in the Far West 1920: Nineteenth Amendment ratified, giving vote to women 1920s: Los Angeles becomes the automobile-driving capital of the U.S. 1896:
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CHRONOLOGY
1922: 192324: 192428: 1928: 1929: 1930s: 1931: 1933ff: 1934:
1935: 193540: 1939: 1941: 194145: 194243: 194244: 1943: 1945: 194050s: 1948: 195053: 1952: 1958: 1959: 1960:
Airplane manufacturing begins on the West Coast Rapid development of dude ranches in the West Oregon becomes major stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan Aimee Semple McPherson builds Angelus Temple in Los Angeles First one-day, coast-to-coast air flight Teapot Dome oil scandal McNary-Haugen Bill to aid farmers first defeated in Congress and then twice vetoed by President Calvin Coolidge First sound motion pictures Herbert Hoover, first western president, elected Great Depression strikes the West The West experiences the Depression, Dust Bowl, and New Deal Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, major historical reinterpretation of the West Gambling is legalized in Nevada New Deal and its policies profoundly transform the West Indian Reorganization (Wheeler-Howard) Act revises the Dawes Act of 1887 and places more emphasis on Indian self-identification Taylor Grazing Act authorizes policies for open-range grazing Upton Sinclair loses as Democratic finalist for the governorship of California (End Poverty in California campaign) Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicates Boulder (Hoover) Dam Federal arts, guides, and theatre projects under the Works Progress Administration Release of Stagecoach, the classic John FordJohn Wayne Western film Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and U.S. joins World War II Economic and social disruptions of World War II transform the West Racial conflicts in Sleepy Lagoon Case and zoot suit riots Internment of Japanese-Americans in detention camps in the interior West Henry J. Kaiser builds giant wartime plants in coastal states First Los Angeles smog First atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico United Nations charter written in San Francisco Beats and North Beach area involved in the San Francisco Renaissance Beginning of uranium rushes to the Southwest Far West becomes jumping off place for Americans involved in the Korean War General Dwight D. Eisenhower, westerner, is elected president (195361) Alaska admitted to statehood Hawaii becomes the fiftieth state Los Angeles third largest U.S. city (population 2,479,015) behind New York and Chicago
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A Literary History of the American West 1962: 1963: 1964: California surpasses New York as the most populous state Csar Chvez organizes the National Farm Workers Association President John F. Kennedy is assassinated and Texan Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president (196369) Two westerners, Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater, compete for the presidency Congress enacts the Wilderness Act, creating a National Wilderness Preservation system Watts riots in Los Angeles Californian Richard Nixon wins the presidency (196974) Indians seize and hold Alcatraz as protest against government policies Organization of the National Indian Youth Council Confrontation between Indians and government officials at Wounded Knee, South Dakota Decline and fall of Rev. James Jones and the Peoples Temple California voters uphold Proposition 13, limiting local taxation measures Boat people and other Southeast Asians move into western U.S. Los Angeles remains third largest city behind New York and Chicago Ronald Reagan, former cowboy movie star and California governor, elected to the White House
1965: 1968: 1969: 1970: 1973: 197778: 1978: 1980:
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II. A Literary Chronology of the American West

During the millennia before the arrival of the Europeans in North America, a rich oral tradition flourished on this continent. Myths, legends, and songs were passed from generation to generation.
1510: 1539: 1542: 1610: 1630: 1682: 1778: 1782: 1783: 1785: 1790: 1799: Las Sergas de Esplandin, by Garc Rodrguez Ordez de Montalvo, describes California The image of a golden West is sketched in Report of Fray Marcos de Niza lvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, La Relacion, first captivity narrative Gaspar Prez de Villagr History of New Mexico, verse narrative Fray Alonso de Benavides, Memorial Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (better known as The Narrative of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson ), first captivity narrative in English Jonathan Carver, Three Years Travels Through the Interior Parts of NorthAmerica Hector St. Jean de Crvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, first notable philosophical consideration of frontier life John Ledyard, A Journal of Captain Cooks Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean Captain James Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean John Meares, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789 Russian explorer A. A. Baranov, Song, first poem by a white composed in the West Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, early portrait of Indians in fiction George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World Franois Ren de Chateaubriand, Atala, early example of romantic primitivism Zebulon M. Pike, An Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi and Through the Western Parts Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen edit History of the [Lewis and Clark] Expedition, first publication of expedition journals Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, chronicle of the Stephen H. Long expedition James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, first of the five Leatherstocking Tales; introduced western hero to England and Europe Timothy Flint, Francis Berrian, first novel in English set in the Southwest
1801:
1810: 1814: 1822: 1823: 1826:
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A Literary History of the American West 1827: 1829: 1831: 1832: 1835: 1836: 1837: 1839: 1840: 1841: 1843: Timothy Flint begins publication of Western Monthly Review (1827 30), first magazine published west of the Allegheny Mountains Tokeah; or, The White Rose by Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl) James Ohio Pattie, The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie, early travel narrative of California and the Southwest Albert Pike, The Fall of Poland, in his Prose Sketches and Poems Written in the Western Country; first poem in English by a white and composed in the West Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies Washington Irving, Astoria Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville John K. Townsend, Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado River to the Sandwich Islands Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, travel account dealing in part with Spanish California Das Kajtenbuch (The Cabin Book ) by Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl) George Catlin, North American Indians Frederick Marryat, The Travels and Adventures of Monsieur R. Violet in California, Sonora, and Western Texas Father Pierre De Smet, Letters and Sketches Thomas J. Farnham, Travels in the Great Western Prairies George Wilkins Kendall, Narrative of the Texan-Santa F Expedition Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies John C. Frmont, Narrative of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 David H. Coyner, The Lost Trappers Die Flusspiraten des Mississippi ( River Pirates of the Mississippi) by Friedrich Gerstcker George Horatio Derby (John Phoenix), first western humorist, arrives in California Francis Parkman, The California and Oregon Trail George Frederick Ruxton, Life in the Far West, Englishmans views of mountain men, Indians, and traders Lewis H. Garrard, Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail, classic account of trapper life by American teenager Bayard Taylor, El Dorado The Scalp Hunters by Mayne Reid Alonzo Delano, Pen Knife Sketches; or, Chips of the Old Block John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, first novel by a Native American Margaret Jewett Bailey, The Grains, or Passages in the Life of Ruth Rover, first novel of the Northwest Alonzo Delano, Across the Plains and Among the Diggings Mrs. Maria Ward, Female Life Among the Mormons George Horatio Derby, Phoenixiana
1844: 1846: 1847: 1848: 1849:
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1857: 1858: 1860: 1861: 1864: 1865:
1866:
1868: 1869:
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1875: 1876: 1878: 1879: 1881:
The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, as dictated to T. D. Bonner James G. Swan, The Northwest Coast Alonzo Delano, A Live Woman in the Mines Juan Segun, Personal Memoirs Les Trppeurs de lArkansas (The Trappers of Arkansas) by Gustave Aimard Horace Greeley, Overland Journey Moncure Daniel Conway edits first midwestem little magazine, The Dial Der Halbindianer ( The Half-Breed ) by Balduin Mllhausen J. Ross Browne, Crusoes Island Theodore Winthrop, The Canoe and the Saddle Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Charles Farrar Browne, Artemus Ward, His Travels Outcroppings: Being Selections of California Verse, edited by Bret Harte, first Far West poetry anthology Bret Harte and Mark Twain establish themselves in San Francisco Thomas J. Dimsdale, The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Justice in the Rocky Mountains, early apology for extralegal justice in the West Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog, and Other Sketches The Overland Monthly is founded in San Francisco and publishes Bret Hartes The Luck of Roaring Camp Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad John Muirs first summer in the Sierra The Luck of Routing Camp and Other Sketches, Bret Hartes first collection Bret Harte, Plain Language from Truthful James Cincinnatus Hiner [Joaquin] Miller, Songs of the Sierras, published in England Mark Twain, Roughing It Clarence King, Mountaneering in the Sierra Nevada George A. Custer, My Life on the Plains Nicolai Severin Hassel, Alf Brage eller skolelaereren i Minnesota En original norsk-amerkansk fortelling ( Alf Brage, or the Schoolteacher in Minnesota: An original Norwegian-American Story), first NorwegianAmerican novel John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Tributaries Dan de Quille (William Wright), The Big Bonanza Joaquin Miller, The Danites (First Families in the Sierras, 1875) Arthur Morecamp (Thomas Pilgrim), Live Boys; or Charley and Nasho in Texas Bill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye) founds Laramie Boomerang, a newspaper outlet for Nyes comic sketches
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A Literary History of the American West Isabella L. Bird, A Ladys Life in the Rocky Mountains Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, first autobiography and tribal history by an Indian woman Mary Hallock Foote, The Led-Horse Claim E. W. Howe, The Story of a Country Town Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona Charles A. Siringo, A Texas Cow Boy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony Elizabeth B. Custer, Boots and Saddles, or Life in Dakota with General Custer Kristofer Janson, Praeriens saga ( Saga of the Prairies) Josiah Royce, The Feud of Oakfield Creek Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet Frances Courtenay Baylor, Juan and Juanita James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Englishmans view of America Adolph Bandelier, The Delight Makers Hamlin Garland, Main-Travelled Roads John Gregory Bourke, On the Border with Crook Eusabio Chacon, El hijo de la tempestad ( Son of the Tempest) and Tras la tormenta la calma (Calm After the Storm) Charles F. Lummis, The Land of Poco Tiempo Karl May, Winnetou John Muir, The Mountains of California A. S. Mercer, The Banditti of the Plains Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols Founding of The Lark, little magazine in San Francisco The Land of Sunshine, edited by Charles F. Lummis (18951909) The Wave, literary magazine edited by James OHara Cosgrave Carl Hansen, Praeriens brn (Children of the Prairie) Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals I Have Known Frank Norris, Moran of the Lady Letty, his first novel Nephi Anderson, Added Upon Gertrude Atherton, The Californians Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe Jack London, The Son of the Wolf, his first book Francis LaFlesche, The Middle Five, book-length autobiography by Indian Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California John G. Neihardt, The Divine Enchantment, his first major poem Owen Wister, The Virginian Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa; Sioux), Indian Boyhood
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1887: 1888: 1890: 1891: 1892: 1893: 1894: 1895:
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1904: 1905: 1906:
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1916: 1917: 1918:
Gertrude Atherton, The Splendid Idle Forties Frederic Remington, John Ermine of the Yellowstone Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain Jack London, Call of the Wild and The People of the Abyss Andy Adams, The Log of a Cowboy Billy the Kid, play by Walter Woods John C. Van Dyke, The Desert Mary Austin, The Basket Woman Emerson Hough, Hearts Desire William Vaughn Moody, The Great Divide George Wharton James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert B. M. Bower (Bertha Sinclair Muzzy), Chip of the Flying U Thomas Hornsby Ferril, A Mountain Thought, first published poem Early Western Travels, edited by Reuben Thwaites, multivolume collection of major western travel and exploration narratives O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), Heart of the West Oliver O. Howard, My Life and Experiences Among Our Hostile Indians Martha Summerhayes, Vanished Arizona: Recollections of the Army Life of a New England Woman Founding of Texas Folklore Society Jack London, Martin Eden Frances M. A. Roe, Army Letters from an Officers Wife Enos Mills, Wild Life on the Rockies Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Good Men and True Sharlot Hall, Cactus and Pine, collection of western poems Robinson Jeffers, Flagons and Apples, first volume of poems Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage John Muir, The Yosemite Ole Rlvaag, Amerika-Breve ( Letters from America), first novel Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, her first farm novel Oscar Micheaux, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer, first novel by a black in the West Robinson Jeffers moves to Carmel, California, with his new wife Una Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, notable mountain man document Founding of Midland, regional literary magazine, by John T. Frederick Harry Leon Wilson, Rugggles of Red Gap Southwest Review begins publication (Texas Review, 191524) John G. Neihardt publishes first Song of Epic Cycle of the West (other four Songs in 1919, 1925, 1935, 1941) Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark Charles A. Eastman (Sioux), From the Deep Woods to Civilization Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border Mary Hallock Foote, Edith Bonham Willa Cather, My ntonia
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A Literary History of the American West 1919: Will Rogers (Cherokee), Rogers-isms: The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference and Rogers-isms: The Cowboy Philosopher on Prohibition H. L. Davis wins Levinson Prize for poems in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Alice Corbin (Henderson), Red Earth, an early volume drawing on Indian and Hispanic traditions of the Southwest Sinclair Lewis, Main Street Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Stepsons of Light Hamlin Garland, A Daughter of the Middle Border, wins Pulitzer Prize Harvey Fergusson, Blood of the Conquerors Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt Dame Shirley (Louise A. K. S. Clappe), The Shirley Letters, edited by Thomas Russell; important source on Gold Rush camps Harry Leon Wilson, Merton of the Movies Emerson Hough, North of 36 Willa Cather wins Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922) Mary Austin, The American Rhythm Land of Sunshine merges with Overland Monthly Willa Cather, A Lost Lady Sidney Howard, They Knew What They Wanted Mary Austin, The Land of Journeys Ending Robinson Jeffers, Tamar and Other Poems; reprinted as Roan Stallion and Other Poems (1925) Willa Cather, The Professors House Frederic Logan Paxson, History of the American Frontier, wins Pulitzer Prize for history Dorothy Scarborough, The Wind Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese, her first novel of prairie farm life Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, wins Pulitzer Prize for fiction Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Pas por Aqu Thomas Hornsby Ferril, High Passage, wins Yale Younger Poets Award Susan Shelby Magoffin, Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico Will James, Smoky, the Cow Horse Walter Noble Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid Ole Rlvaag, Giants in the Earth, first published in English Mourning Dove, Co-ge-we-a, first novel by an Indian woman Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, classic interpretation from western populistic perspective Upton Sinclair, Oil, first major novel on oil industry Frontier begins as regional magazine, H. G. Merriam as editor Prairie Schooner begins publication at the University of Nebraska Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Heavenly Discourses Harvey Fergusson, Wolf Song
1920: 1921: 1922:
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1935:
Vardis Fisher, Toilers of the Hills, first novel and first in Antelope Hills series Lynn Riggs, A Lantern to See By J. Frank Dobie, A Vaquero of the Brush Country Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy, wins Pulitzer Prize Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany, notable regional collection, B. A. Botkin, editor Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry Frances Gillmor, Windsinger Edna Ferber, Cimarron Sinclair Lewis becomes first American writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize Max Brand (Frederick Faust), Destry Rides Again J. Frank Dobie, Coronados Children, folk tales of the Southwest Writers Editions cooperative of Santa Fe begins publishing southwestern works Katherine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas, first collection of short stories Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, first Sam Spade novel New Mexico Review begins, T. M. Pearce and Dudley Winn, editors Ole Rlvaag, Their Fathers God, his final prairie novel Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), Green Grow the Lilacs, play from which the musical Oklahoma was made Robert Cantwell, Laugh and Lie Down Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twains America, sets off argument with Van Wyck Brooks on Mark Twain, the West, and American culture John Joseph Mathews (Osage), Wah Kon-Tah Mary Austin, Earth Horizon Maxwell Anderson, Night over Taos John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of Sections in American History, wins Pulitzer Prize for history Robinson Jeffers, Give Your Heart to the Hawks T. M. Pearce and Telfair Hendon, eds., America in the Southwest: A Regional Anthology The Lone Ranger, WXYZ Radio, Detroit Robert Cantwell, The Land of Plenty Ruth Suckow, The Folks William Saroyan, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, his first collection Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Westering Paul Horgan, No Quarter Given, his first novel about the Southwest Bernard DeVoto begins his twenty-one-year stint as writer of the Easy Chair column in Harpers Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie
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A Literary History of the American West Robert E. Sherwood, The Petrified Forest Mari Sandoz, Old Jules, wins Atlantic Non-Fiction Prize H. L. Davis, Honey in the Horn, wins Harper Prize 1935; Pulitzer Prize 1936 John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat Overland Monthly ceases publication George Stewart, Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle Sophus Winther, Take All to Nebraska, first of three novels about Americans on the frontier Bernard DeVoto begins brief stint as editor of Saturday Review of Literature (1936-38) Lynn Riggs, Cherokee Night, first play by Indian writer on an Indian subject DArcy McNickle, The Surrounded George Milburn, Catalogue: A Novel Conrad Richter, The Sea of Grass E. P. Conkle, Two Hundred Were Chosen John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men Wallace Stegner, Remembering Laughter, his first novel wins the Little, Brown novelette prize Oliver La Farge, The Enemy Gods Intermountain Review (later Rocky Mountain Review and Western Rev i e w) begins publication, edited by Ray B. West Mabel Major, Rebecca Smith, and T. M. Pearce, eds., Southwest Heritage Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poetry John Steinbeck, The Long Valley William Attaway, Let Me Breathe Thunder William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life, wins Pulitzer Prize (1940) but he declines the award Paul Corey, Three Miles Square, first of Mantz trilogy Vardis Fisher, Children of God, wins Harper Prize Franklin Walker, San Franciscos Literary Frontier John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, wins Pulitzer Prize Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider J. Frank Dobies Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver wins first Texas Institute of Letters award for best book by a Texan Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Fields, revisionist study of farm workers William Everson, San Joaquin Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
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Joseph Henry Jackson, Bad Company Yvor Winters, Poems Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident William Saroyan, My Name is Aram Judy Van Der Veer, November Grass Alan Swallow publishes first book: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, eds., Signets: An Anthology of Beginnings Edward and Charles Weston, California and the West Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely Paul Bailey, For This My Glory John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts, Sea of Cortez J. Frank Dobie, The Longhorns Kenneth Rexroth, In What Hour, first poetic collection Frank Waters, People of the Valley George R. Stewart, Storm Maurine Whipple, The Giant Joshua Frank Waters, The Man Who Killed the Deer Wright Morris, My Uncle Dudley, his first novel J. Frank Dobie, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Idwal Jones, The Vineyard William Saroyan, The Human Comedy Robert Easton, The Happy Man Virginia Sorensen, A Little Lower Than the Angels Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake Bernard DeVoto, The Literary Fallacy, precipitates controversy with Sinclair Lewis J. Frank Dobie, A Texan in England Feike Feikema (Frederick Manfred), The Golden Bowl Ernest Haycox, Bugles in the Afternoon John Joseph Mathews (Osage), Talking to the Moon George R. Stewart, Names on the Land Josephina Niggli, Mexican Village Oliver La Farge, Raw Material, an autobiographical account Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves Khatchik Minasian wins Edwin Markham Gold Medal for Poetry Arizona Quarterly begins, Albert R. Gregenheimer founding editor Promised Land, edited by Stewart Holbrook, Northwest regional anthology James Stevens, Big Jim Turner Great Tales of the American West, edited by Harry E. Maule John Steinbeck, Cannery Row Luke Short (Frederick Glidden), And the Wind Blows Free Frank Waters, The Colorado
xxxv
A Literary History of the American West Southwesterners Write, eds. T. M. Pearce and A. P. Thomason Mine Okubo, Citizen 13660, first major work on Japanese-American relocation camp experiences. Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart, first major book by a FilipinoAmerican Herbert Krause, The Thresher Feike Feikema (Frederick Manfred), This Is the Year Frank Waters, The Yogi of Cockroach Court Mario Surezs first story appears in Arizona Quarterly Western Humanities Review, Jack Garlington founding editor A. B. Guthrie, The Big Sky Bernard DeVoto, Across the Wide Missouri, wins Pulitzer Prize for history Wright Morris, The Home Place Forrester Blake, Johnny Christmas Theodore Roethke, The Lost Son and Other Poems Robinson Jeffers, The Double Ax Samuel W. Taylor, Heaven Knows Why George R. Stewart, Fire Tom Lea, The Brave Bulls Jack Schaefer, Shane Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Track of the Cat A. B. Guthrie, The Way West, wins Pulitzer Prize Frank Waters, Masked Gods Franklin Walker, A Literary History of Southern California Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Watchful Gods and Other Stories Khatchik Minasian, The Simple Songs of Khatchik Minasian, first poetry collection Harvey Fergusson, Grant of Kingdom Wallace Stegner, Women on the Wall, first short story collection A. Grove Day, The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American lndian Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire Tom Lea, The Wonderful Country John Houghton Allen, Southwest Thomas Hornsby Ferril, New and Selected Poems Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year John Steinbeck, East of Eden Edna Ferber, Giant Ernest Haycox, The Earthbreakers, the last written of his many novels J. Frank Dobie, The Mustangs Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier William Inge, Picnic, wins Pulitzer Prize for drama Jack Schaefer, The Canyon
1947:
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J. Mason Brewer, The Word on the Brazos Louis LAmour, Hondo, his first well-known Western H. L. Davis, Team Bells Woke Me and Other Stories Dorothy M. Johnson, Indian Country, a collection of stories Thomas McGrath, Figures from a Double World, wins Alan Swallow Award Paul Horgan, Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, wins Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes for history Frederick Manfred, Lord Grizzly Theodore Roethke, The Waking, wins Pulitzer Prize for poetry Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian Alan Le May, The Searchers Harvey Fergusson, The Conquest of Don Pedro William Inge, Bus Stop Six Poets at the Six Gallery: Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg Wright Morris, The Field of Vision, wins National Book Award (1957) W. H. Hutchinson, A Bar Cross Man William Eastlake, Go in Beauty Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems A. B. Guthrie, These Thousand Hills Fred Gipson, Old Yeller Edward Abbey, The Brave Cowboy William Inge, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs Jack Kerouac, On the Road Jack Schaefer, Company of Cowards Northwest Review begins publication John Okada, No-No Boy, major work on Japanese-American relocation camp Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land, first major work on American Basques Blue Cloud Quarterly, literary magazine, begins publication, Brother Benet Tuedten editor Frederick Manfred, Riders of Judgment Dorothy M. Johnson, The Hanging Tree, a collection of stories Shig Murao and Lawrence Ferlinghetti arrested for selling obscene Howl San Francisco columnist Herb Caen coins term Beatnik Theodore Roethke, Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke, wins Bollingen Prize Jos Antonio Villarreal, Pocho, first important Chicano novel The Book of Negro Folklore, edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps William Eastlake, The Bronc People
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A Literary History of the American West Wright Morris, The Territory Ahead The Wormwood Review, Marvin Malone, publisher Frederick Manfred, Conquering Horse Gary Snyder, Riprap, first collection of poems Jack Schaefer, Old Ramon Don Berry, Trask Wright Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree Poetry Northwest begins publication Paul Horgan, A Distant Trumpet E. L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times Will Henry (Henry Wilson Allen), From Where the Sun Now Stands John Graves, Goodbye to a River Larry McMurtry, Horseman Pass By, his first novel The Outsider magazine founded by Jon and Louise Webb John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me William Brammer, The Gay Place, first novel John Steinbeck is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature Don Berry, Moontrap William Stafford, Traveling Through the Dark, wins the National Book Award for Poetry (1963) Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools A Country in the Mind, edited by Ray B. West Upton Sinclair, Autobiography Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest Edward Abbey, Fire on the Mountain Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi Jack Schaefer, Monte Walsh William Eastlake, Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses South Dakota Review begins publication, John R. Milton, editor Virginia Lee, The House That Tai Ming Built Benjamin Capps, The Trail to Ogallala J. Frank Dobie, Cow People Theodore Roethke, The Far Field, posthumous The Western Review begins publication Thomas Berger, Little Big Man Thomas McGrath, New and Selected Poems Frederick Manfred, Scarlet Plume Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion Sam Shepard, Cowboys, first play begins off Broadway Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, wins Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award ( 1966) Luis Valdez founds El Teatro Campesino Joan Didion, Run River, her first novel Oliver La Farge, The Door in the Wall, a collection of short stories
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1970:
lnternational Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, published by Len Fulton and Ellen Ferber Organization of the Western Literature Association Vardis Fisher, Mountain Men Frank Waters, The Woman at Otowi Crossing Western American Literature begins publication, J. Golden Taylor and Delbert E. Wylder, founding editors James K. Folsom, The American Western Novel Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Words for Denver Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show Publication of Southwest Writers Series, edited by James W. Lee (196774) William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, wins Pulitzer Prize for history Jack Schaefer, Mavericks COSMEP (Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers) founded in Berkeley by Len Fulton and Jerry Bums Ishmael Reed, The Free-lance Pallbearers, first novel Small Press Review begins publication, edited by Len Fulton Southwest Writers Anthology, edited by Martin Shockley Gerald Locklin, Sunset Beach, first poetry collection Gary Snyder, The Back Country Robert Bly, The Light Around the Body, wins National Book Award for poetry ( 1969) Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America Wright Morris, In Orbit Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American American Negro Folklore, edited by J. Mason Brewer Richard Bradford, Red Sky at Morning N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, first novel, wins Pulitzer Prize (1969) Frank Waters, Pumpkin Seed Point Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins Leonard Gardner, Fat City, first novel James D. Houston, Gig, first novel The American Indian Speaks in Poetry, Fiction, Art, Music, Commentary, landmark anthology edited by John R. Milton Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Part I and II Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays A. B. Guthrie, Arfive Paul Horgan, Whitewater
xxxix
A Literary History of the American West 1971: Founding of Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, David D. Anderson and others Frank Waters, Pikes Peak Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose, wins Pulitzer Prize (1972) John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique Wright Morris, Fire Sermon First issue of Southwestern American Literature published The Literature of the American West, edited by J. Golden Taylor Lawrence Clark Powell, California Classics Lawson Inada, Before the War, first collection of poems Down at the Santa Fe Depot, edited by David Kherdian and James Baloian Toms Rivera, . . . y no se lo trag la tierra, first novel Paul Foreman founds Thorp Springs Press Elmer Kelton, The Day the Cowboys Quit Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima Hanay Geiogamah, Body Indian, opens John Seelye, The Kid Frank Chin, The Chickencoop Chinaman, is staged Thomas McGrath, The Movie at the End of the World: Collected Poems Boise State College Western Writers Series begins, edited by Wayne Chatterton and James H. Maguire Ann H. Zwinger (with Beatrice Willard), Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra George Keithly, The Donner Party, first poetry book Larry Levis, The Wrecking Crew, first collection of poems, wins U.S. Award from International Poetry Forum Elmer Kelton, The Time It Never Rained Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan Wright Morris, A Life Gerald Haslam, Okies, first collection of stories Frank Bidart, Golden State, first poetry collection Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream 18501915 Arna Bontemps, The Old South Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, The Carousel Would Haunt Me, first poetry collection Rolando Hinojosa-S[mith], Estampas del valle y otras obras, first collection of stories William T. Pilkington, My Bloods Country Paul Foreman, Redwing Blackbird, first poetry collection Richard Hugo, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir Copper Canyon Press founded by Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson Art Cuelho, The Last Inch of Shade, first poetry collection Miguel Mndez, Peregrinas de Aztln Western Writing, edited by Gerald Haslam
1972:
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1978:
Arnold R. Rojas, These Were the Vaqueros Len Fulton, The Grassman, first novel Lawrence Clark Powell, Southwest Classics The Man to Send Rain Clouds, edited by Kenneth Rosen; short story collection of contemporary American Indian writers Hector Lee, Tales of California Gary Snyder, Turtle Island, wins Pulitzer Prize (1975) John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War James Welch, Winter in the Blood Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties Laurence Yep, Dragonwings Jack Schaefer, An American Bestiary Ron Arias, The Road to Tamazunchale Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang Paul Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fe, wins Pulitzer Prize (1976) for history Literature of the American Indian: Views and Interpretations, first anthology of critical essays dealing with American Indian literature Aiiieeeee !: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, edited by Frank Chin, et al. The Western Story: Fact, Fiction and Myth, edited by Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones Larry McMurtry, Terms of Endearment Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird, wins National Book Award David Wagoner, Collected Poems Preston Jones, A Texas Trilogy, opens on Broadway William Everson, Archetype West Luis Valdez, La Carpa de los Rasquachis El Teatro Campesino performs in Europe Gerald Locklin, The Chase, first novel Phantasm founded by Larry Jackson Southwest: A Contemporary Anthology, edited by Karl and Jane Kopp William Stafford, Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems Paul Horgan, The Thin Mountain Air Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquin, first collection of poetry Leslie Silko, Ceremony Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe Richard Hugo, 31 Letters and 13 Dreams Dick Harrison, Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction Robert Day, The Last Cattle Drive William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl Sam Shepard, Buried Child, wins the Pulitzer Prize for drama Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit California Heartland, regional anthology edited by Gerald Haslam and James D. Houston
xli
A Literary History of the American West Women Poets of the West: An Anthology 18501950, edited by A. Thomas Trusky Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men Elmer Kelton, The Good Old Boys C. L. Sonnichsen, From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind Chester Seltzer, The Stories of Amado Muro Lanford Wilson, Tulleys Folly, wins Pulitzer Prize for drama Jessamyn West, The Life I Really Lived Marilyn Brown, The Earthkeepers Wallace Stegner, Recapitulation Dick Harrison, Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature Wright Morris, Plains Song, wins American Book Award Sam Shepard, True West, opens off Broadway Southwestern American Literature: A Bibliography, edited by John Q. Anderson, et al. Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men John R. Milton, The Novel of the American West Don D. Walker, Clios Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade Frank Waters, Mountain Dialogues Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping Southwest: Toward the Twenty-First Century, edited by Karl and Jane Kopp A Bibliographical Guide to Midwestern Literature, edited by Gerald C. Nemanic Wayne Ude, Becoming Coyote, first novel Wright Morris wins Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature William Stafford, A Glass House in the Rain Thomas McGrath, Passages Toward the Dark Richard Dokey, August Light Ivan Doig, The Sea Runners Texas Books in Review, edited by William T. Pilkington, begins Levi S. Peterson, The Canyons of Grace, first short story collection Fifty Western Writers, edited by Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain A. B. Guthrie, Fair Land, Fair Land A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature, compiled by Richard W. Etulain Larry McMurtry, Cadillac Jack Thomas McGuane, Nobodys Angel Lanford Wilson, Angels Fall Wallace Stegner, One Way to Spell Man Lou Halsell Rodenberger, ed., Her Work: Stories by Texas Women
1979:
1980:
1981:
1982:
xlii
CHRONOLOGY
1983:
1984:
David James Duncan, The River Why Louis LAmour first novelist to be given a special National Gold Medal by Congress Historians and the American West, edited by Michael P. Malone The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, first feminist American Indian novel published by feminist press, Spinsters Ink Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski, Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction Joan Didion, Democracy Douglas Unger, Leaving the Land Westward the Women: An Anthology of Western Stories by Women, edited by Vicki Piekarski R ICHARD W. ETULAIN , University
of New Mexico
xliii
Part One
ENCOUNTERING THE WEST
INTRODUCTION
N THE LAST LINES
writes:
of Axe Handles, the western poet Gary Snyder And I see: Pound was an axe, Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on.
The craft of culture in the American West, as in any land, is not limited by provincial examples, for as Snyders poem demonstrates, those who practice a craft can look to any culture for their models. Yet because most artists encounter their first models close to home, the first part of A Literary History of the American West begins with the stories told in and the reports about the Old West. There are also chapters surveying the history of those genres brought to the West before 1890 but not well rooted here until after the Second World War. In short, the first stage in the literary history of the West is the literature of the frontier. The history of every literature, of course, begins with such a stage. That is how we go on. In 1890, when the U.S. Census Bureau announced the closing of the frontier, the belles-lettres of the American West were still in a nascent state. Nevertheless, the roots of western literature are centuries old. Although many computer-age westerners may be unaware of the Wests rich pretwentieth-century heritage, most contemporary western writers draw upon it for subjects, themes, and characters. Western literature written before 1890 is to the West what pre-1800 literature is to America. Every literature begins with such a seedtime, which can be profitably studied both for its own sake and for what it reveals about the work that grows from it. The seedtime of western American literature began with the oral tradition of people who had arrived in North America thousands of years ago. Europeans, after encountering the West and its inhabitants,
added letters, reports, diaries, and journals to the Wests literary heritage. That literature of early encounters proceeded in stages: Spanish and French before 1800; then, starting with Lewis and Clark, American exploration up to the Civil War; and scientific cataloguing of the land and the natives from the end of the Civil War into the new century. From the time of first settlement, Europeans and, later, Americans began to write about the West in the various genres of European literature. And even before American settlement in the West, a western literary criticism had started to grow. The first of those disparate sources of western American literature is the oral tradition of the Native Americans. It probably began with the arrival of people on this continent some 30,000 years ago. When people began to paint pictures of bison upon the cave walls at Lascaux in Europe, other humans were telling stories about giant bison in what is now the West. American Indians had sung the glories of the land centuries before Columbus sailed; some of their songs and stories survived and now inspire many contemporary western writers. With that oral tradition this literary history begins. A tradition so apparently far removed from our usual notions of belles-lettres may seem an odd beginning, but the reader should recall that European literature began with the oral tradition which culminated in Homers Iliad and Odyssey. Into that European literature came reports of the lands that Columbus and his sailors had reached. Long before the Lewis and Clark expedition, western wilderness acted as a lodestone for explorers and philosophers. As Howard Mumford Jones explains in O Strange New World (1964), the earliest European immigrants arrived in America with preconceived, conflicting notions about the wild new lands: they had heard ( I) that the wilderness was a new Garden of Eden and (2) that it was an earthly hell. Perhaps the noble natives would freely give you mountains of gold; but if you stayed in the New Worlds strange wild vastness for too long, you might degenerate, losing all your civilized traits and sinking to the level of the cannibalistic savage. (Europeans often forgot that their own civilization offered examples of behavior that made a cannibal look kind.) , One of the first Europeans to encounter the West, lvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca traveled with three companions through parts of the Southwest in the 1530s, and his narrative of their adventures appeared in print in 1542. After Cabeza de Vaca came other Spanish explorers: Marcos de Niza ( 1539), Coronado (1540), Rodriguez-Chamuscado (1581), Espejo (1582), Castao de Sosa (1590), and Humaa-Bonilla (1594). To the reports of their expeditions were added accounts of early Spanish settlement, beginning with Juan de Oates expedition in 1598. The year when Santa Fe was founded, 1610, also saw the publication of the poetic chronicle History of New Mex-
INTRODUCTION: ENCOUNTERING THE WEST
ice by Gaspar Prez de Villagr, followed in twenty years by The Memorial of Friar Alonso de Benavides. Only Sir Francis Drakes brief voyage along the California coast in 1579 antedates the Spanish presence there; and before the end of the American Revolution, a string of Spanish missions extended as far north as San Francisco. Spanish descriptions of California and French accounts of the upper Midwest had been written decades before President Jefferson sought to purchase the Louisiana Territory. However prosaic and derivative one considers the early Spanish and French reports and chronicles of their western experiences, they nevertheless have what Randolph G. Adams calls the charm of the primitive, not only in expression but in the format of these old books. In his chapter, Reports and Chronicles, in the Literary History of the United States (third ed., rev., 1963), Adams adds that the principal appeal of such early accounts lies in the fact that they present the feelings of the man who was there at the time the event took place and not what some later interpreter, however learned, may have felt (pp. 3839). What Adams says of the early European reports and chronicles is also true of early American accounts of encounters with the West. The first official American inland exploration was the Lewis and Clark expedition (18041806), and the journals of that expedition have not only the charm and appeal of the earlier European reports but also the interest of early attempts at scientific measurement and classification. Moreover, The Jourrnals of Lewis and Clark are to western American literature what William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation is to early American literature: one of the major sources of a tradition. Adding volumes of reports to the growing American knowledge of the West, other major government explorers included: Zebulon Pike (1805; 1806; 180607); Stephen H. Long (181920); Charles Wilkes (1838-42); Joseph N. Nicollet (183940); and John C. Fremont (1842-43; 1846-47; 1848-49). The government also published reports of the transcontinental railroad surveys of 1853-54. All the early western explorers faced the same challenge: writing about the vastness and strangeness of the West in a language they had learned back home, a language suited mainly to the cultivated and more familiar lands of Europe and the East. The efforts of the early explorers made easier the task of post-Civil War scientists such as Ferdinand V. Hayden, Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, George M. Wheeler, and Walter P. Jenney, who were all engaged in the work of scientific investigation and mapping. Even the incredible wonders of the Grand Canyon came to be more accurately described in the works of Major Powell and Clarence Dutton, as Wallace Stegner explains in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. Besides that language of scientific accuracy, writing about the West
also included a new boisterous lingo of hyperbole added by the mountain men of the fur trade. Fur companies entered the West soon after the Lewis and Clark expedition, and from then until 1840 (the year of the last mountain man rendezvous), fur trappers and traders traversed the West, creating a new culture that was a mixture of and allied to American, Indian, Canadian-French, and southwestern Hispanic cultures. Long after the last rendezvous, the mountain men influenced the West; and the list of twentieth-century novels about the early fur trade is a long one. Only a few decades after the beginning of the western fur trade, other businessmen entered the West. In 1821, William Becknell pioneered the first venture along the Santa Fe Trail. Mexicos achievement of its independence had made possible the opening of the Santa Fe Trail; and Mexican independence and American settlement in Texas led to Texan independence in 1836. The Year of Decision, as Bernard DeVoto called 1846, and the next few years after it mark another great divide in western American history. The Mexican-American War, the Mormon migration, and the Gold Rush, followed by statehood for Texas, California, and Oregon, provided enough history, enough colorful new jargon, enough fantastic characters to keep any countrys authors busy for generations. Much of that history repeated itself in the mining booms and the waves of immigration of the next four decades, not to mention the Indian Wars, the building of the railroads, and the era of the great cattle barons and cattle drives. So rich, in fact, is the history of the Old West that a great part of westem literature continues to focus on that epic time. Aware of the danger of such an exclusive focus, Wallace Stegner has called upon critics and readers to avoid defining as western only that literature which depicts Old West history of the white male. In History, Myth, and the Western Writer (The Sound of Mountain Water, 1969), the best essay yet written on the development of western fiction, Stegner says that it is difficult to identify many characteristics that are true of all, or even most, of western fiction, because a number of things happened to block the organic cultural growth the West had a right, from the experience of the rest of America, to expect. Those inhibiting forces included the Wests great environmental and ethnic diversity; the flood of pulp fiction whose formulas froze the most colorful western themes and characters into simplistic petrified myths; constant immigration; late and irregular development; and a citizenry that have always been notably migrant. Fearing the loss of what tradition we have, says Stegner, we cling to it hard, we are hooked on history. As a result: The typical western writer loves the past of his native region, but despises the present. In a way the dichotomy between past and 6
present is a product of two forces, generally embodied in characters frequently encountered in both western fiction and the Western: the freedom-loving, roving man and the civilizing woman. As some of Stegners own histories explain, however, the western frontier was not entirely barbarous. The old axiom that literature does not flourish on a frontier did not hold true for all of the West. As Franklin Walkers literary history of early San Francisco shows, the Forty-Niners had scarcely left their sluice boxes before the likes of Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, and Mark Twain had made the Bay Area a literary center that could for a time rival all but a few of the centuries-older cities on the eastern seaboard. Universities had been founded and periodicals such as The Overland Monthly established almost before the western frontier had emerged from its adolescence. By 1890 when the massacre at Wounded Knee ended the Indian Wars, universities in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington-in fact, in almost all the western stateswere already fixtures of western life, many of them having passed their twenty-fifth anniversaries. Although the frontier had ceased to exist in many areas beyond the hundredth meridian long before 1890, that year is the divide between the Old West and the New. The region had emerged from its territorial days, and it faced the approaching twentieth century with a rich and colorful past. The West now had a considerable body of frontier literature, pioneering efforts that constitute the first stage of its literary history. When we compare that first stage with what came later, the following lines by Walt Whitman apply: These are of us, they are with us, All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind, We to-days procession heading, we the route for travel clearing, Pioneers! O pioneers!
J AMES H. MAGUIRE ,
Boise State University
Part One
ENCOUNTERING THE WEST
INTRODUCTION
N THE LAST LINES
writes:
of Axe Handles, the western poet Gary Snyder And I see: Pound was an axe, Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on.
The craft of culture in the American West, as in any land, is not limited by provincial examples, for as Snyders poem demonstrates, those who practice a craft can look to any culture for their models. Yet because most artists encounter their first models close to home, the first part of A Literary History of the American West begins with the stories told in and the reports about the Old West. There are also chapters surveying the history of those genres brought to the West before 1890 but not well rooted here until after the Second World War. In short, the first stage in the literary history of the West is the literature of the frontier. The history of every literature, of course, begins with such a stage. That is how we go on. In 1890, when the U.S. Census Bureau announced the closing of the frontier, the belles-lettres of the American West were still in a nascent state. Nevertheless, the roots of western literature are centuries old. Although many computer-age westerners may be unaware of the Wests rich pretwentieth-century heritage, most contemporary western writers draw upon it for subjects, themes, and characters. Western literature written before 1890 is to the West what pre-1800 literature is to America. Every literature begins with such a seedtime, which can be profitably studied both for its own sake and for what it reveals about the work that grows from it. The seedtime of western American literature began with the oral tradition of people who had arrived in North America thousands of years ago. Europeans, after encountering the West and its inhabitants,
added letters, reports, diaries, and journals to the Wests literary heritage. That literature of early encounters proceeded in stages: Spanish and French before 1800; then, starting with Lewis and Clark, American exploration up to the Civil War; and scientific cataloguing of the land and the natives from the end of the Civil War into the new century. From the time of first settlement, Europeans and, later, Americans began to write about the West in the various genres of European literature. And even before American settlement in the West, a western literary criticism had started to grow. The first of those disparate sources of western American literature is the oral tradition of the Native Americans. It probably began with the arrival of people on this continent some 30,000 years ago. When people began to paint pictures of bison upon the cave walls at Lascaux in Europe, other humans were telling stories about giant bison in what is now the West. American Indians had sung the glories of the land centuries before Columbus sailed; some of their songs and stories survived and now inspire many contemporary western writers. With that oral tradition this literary history begins. A tradition so apparently far removed from our usual notions of belles-lettres may seem an odd beginning, but the reader should recall that European literature began with the oral tradition which culminated in Homers Iliad and Odyssey. Into that European literature came reports of the lands that Columbus and his sailors had reached. Long before the Lewis and Clark expedition, western wilderness acted as a lodestone for explorers and philosophers. As Howard Mumford Jones explains in O Strange New World (1964), the earliest European immigrants arrived in America with preconceived, conflicting notions about the wild new lands: they had heard ( I) that the wilderness was a new Garden of Eden and (2) that it was an earthly hell. Perhaps the noble natives would freely give you mountains of gold; but if you stayed in the New Worlds strange wild vastness for too long, you might degenerate, losing all your civilized traits and sinking to the level of the cannibalistic savage. (Europeans often forgot that their own civilization offered examples of behavior that made a cannibal look kind.) , One of the first Europeans to encounter the West, lvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca traveled with three companions through parts of the Southwest in the 1530s, and his narrative of their adventures appeared in print in 1542. After Cabeza de Vaca came other Spanish explorers: Marcos de Niza ( 1539), Coronado (1540), Rodriguez-Chamuscado (1581), Espejo (1582), Castao de Sosa (1590), and Humaa-Bonilla (1594). To the reports of their expeditions were added accounts of early Spanish settlement, beginning with Juan de Oates expedition in 1598. The year when Santa Fe was founded, 1610, also saw the publication of the poetic chronicle History of New Mex-
ice by Gaspar Prez de Villagr, followed in twenty years by The Memorial of Friar Alonso de Benavides. Only Sir Francis Drakes brief voyage along the California coast in 1579 antedates the Spanish presence there; and before the end of the American Revolution, a string of Spanish missions extended as far north as San Francisco. Spanish descriptions of California and French accounts of the upper Midwest had been written decades before President Jefferson sought to purchase the Louisiana Territory. However prosaic and derivative one considers the early Spanish and French reports and chronicles of their western experiences, they nevertheless have what Randolph G. Adams calls the charm of the primitive, not only in expression but in the format of these old books. In his chapter, Reports and Chronicles, in the Literary History of the United States (third ed., rev., 1963), Adams adds that the principal appeal of such early accounts lies in the fact that they present the feelings of the man who was there at the time the event took place and not what some later interpreter, however learned, may have felt (pp. 3839). What Adams says of the early European reports and chronicles is also true of early American accounts of encounters with the West. The first official American inland exploration was the Lewis and Clark expedition (18041806), and the journals of that expedition have not only the charm and appeal of the earlier European reports but also the interest of early attempts at scientific measurement and classification. Moreover, The Jourrnals of Lewis and Clark are to western American literature what William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation is to early American literature: one of the major sources of a tradition. Adding volumes of reports to the growing American knowledge of the West, other major government explorers included: Zebulon Pike (1805; 1806; 180607); Stephen H. Long (181920); Charles Wilkes (1838-42); Joseph N. Nicollet (183940); and John C. Fremont (1842-43; 1846-47; 1848-49). The government also published reports of the transcontinental railroad surveys of 1853-54. All the early western explorers faced the same challenge: writing about the vastness and strangeness of the West in a language they had learned back home, a language suited mainly to the cultivated and more familiar lands of Europe and the East. The efforts of the early explorers made easier the task of post-Civil War scientists such as Ferdinand V. Hayden, Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, George M. Wheeler, and Walter P. Jenney, who were all engaged in the work of scientific investigation and mapping. Even the incredible wonders of the Grand Canyon came to be more accurately described in the works of Major Powell and Clarence Dutton, as Wallace Stegner explains in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. Besides that language of scientific accuracy, writing about the West
also included a new boisterous lingo of hyperbole added by the mountain men of the fur trade. Fur companies entered the West soon after the Lewis and Clark expedition, and from then until 1840 (the year of the last mountain man rendezvous), fur trappers and traders traversed the West, creating a new culture that was a mixture of and allied to American, Indian, Canadian-French, and southwestern Hispanic cultures. Long after the last rendezvous, the mountain men influenced the West; and the list of twentieth-century novels about the early fur trade is a long one. Only a few decades after the beginning of the western fur trade, other businessmen entered the West. In 1821, William Becknell pioneered the first venture along the Santa Fe Trail. Mexicos achievement of its independence had made possible the opening of the Santa Fe Trail; and Mexican independence and American settlement in Texas led to Texan independence in 1836. The Year of Decision, as Bernard DeVoto called 1846, and the next few years after it mark another great divide in western American history. The Mexican-American War, the Mormon migration, and the Gold Rush, followed by statehood for Texas, California, and Oregon, provided enough history, enough colorful new jargon, enough fantastic characters to keep any countrys authors busy for generations. Much of that history repeated itself in the mining booms and the waves of immigration of the next four decades, not to mention the Indian Wars, the building of the railroads, and the era of the great cattle barons and cattle drives. So rich, in fact, is the history of the Old West that a great part of westem literature continues to focus on that epic time. Aware of the danger of such an exclusive focus, Wallace Stegner has called upon critics and readers to avoid defining as western only that literature which depicts Old West history of the white male. In History, Myth, and the Western Writer (The Sound of Mountain Water, 1969), the best essay yet written on the development of western fiction, Stegner says that it is difficult to identify many characteristics that are true of all, or even most, of western fiction, because a number of things happened to block the organic cultural growth the West had a right, from the experience of the rest of America, to expect. Those inhibiting forces included the Wests great environmental and ethnic diversity; the flood of pulp fiction whose formulas froze the most colorful western themes and characters into simplistic petrified myths; constant immigration; late and irregular development; and a citizenry that have always been notably migrant. Fearing the loss of what tradition we have, says Stegner, we cling to it hard, we are hooked on history. As a result: The typical western writer loves the past of his native region, but despises the present. In a way the dichotomy between past and 6
present is a product of two forces, generally embodied in characters frequently encountered in both western fiction and the Western: the freedom-loving, roving man and the civilizing woman. As some of Stegners own histories explain, however, the western frontier was not entirely barbarous. The old axiom that literature does not flourish on a frontier did not hold true for all of the West. As Franklin Walkers literary history of early San Francisco shows, the Forty-Niners had scarcely left their sluice boxes before the likes of Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, and Mark Twain had made the Bay Area a literary center that could for a time rival all but a few of the centuries-older cities on the eastern seaboard. Universities had been founded and periodicals such as The Overland Monthly established almost before the western frontier had emerged from its adolescence. By 1890 when the massacre at Wounded Knee ended the Indian Wars, universities in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington-in fact, in almost all the western stateswere already fixtures of western life, many of them having passed their twenty-fifth anniversaries. Although the frontier had ceased to exist in many areas beyond the hundredth meridian long before 1890, that year is the divide between the Old West and the New. The region had emerged from its territorial days, and it faced the approaching twentieth century with a rich and colorful past. The West now had a considerable body of frontier literature, pioneering efforts that constitute the first stage of its literary history. When we compare that first stage with what came later, the following lines by Walt Whitman apply: These are of us, they are with us, All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind, We to-days procession heading, we the route for travel clearing, Pioneers! O pioneers!
J AMES H. MAGUIRE ,
SECTION I
Oral Traditions
Introduction
O MANY WRITERS have been inspired by the oral traditions of the American West that very few western novels, poems, and plays are without allusions to Native American myths, tales, and songs or to western folklore. Thanks to the pioneers of ethnology and folklore studies, the Wests oral traditions have been recorded in print, preserved in thousands of volumes. Many readers are aware of the existence of such volumes of recorded oral literature, but few realize how rich that heritage is. Even after reading books of Indian literature, many non-Indians remain ignorant of the value of the Native American oral narratives, because, as Kenneth M. Roemer explains, they tend to associate them with quaint or primitive fairy tales, folklore or superstitions. Part of the explanation for these misconceptions is that the popular written and mass media forms of transmitting information about Native American oral narratives often strip away the cultural and literary contexts of the stories. Furthermore, the narratives are usually associated with the dead past of the Vanished American (Native American Oral Narratives: Context and Continuity, in Smoothing the Ground [University of California Press, 1983], ed. Brian Swann, p. 39). In their chapter in this section of A Literary History of the American West, Larry Evers and Paul Pavich explain the history of the Native American oral tradition in general terms, giving the cultural and literary contexts of that tradition. Evers and Pavich, pointing out that their subject is too vast and complex to be exhaustively treated in a single essay, ask us at least to recognize that our media-instilled views of Native American literature are misconceptions. The mass media may find it increasingly difficult to continue purveying such misconceptions, since the study of Native American culture has become an established part of the curriculum at many major universities, leading to the publication of journals such as American Indian Quarterly, Studies in American Indian Literature, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Magazine. Such journals exist because, as Karl Kroeber writes,Indian narratives need sophisticated critical attention. In Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and In-
ORAL TRADITIONS
terpretations (University of Nebraska Press, 1981), Kroeber also says that as a teacher he has found that many Americans who know only Western literature are baffled by Indian oral narratives (p. 1). He advises an inexperienced reader . . . to assume that such tales can be comprehended, that they are neither below nor beyond our customary procedures of analyzing and evaluating literature, and, therefore, that one should attack head-on any overt critical problems posed by a particular tale. One should begin by assuming that an Indian oral narrative may be a first-rate work of art. One must abandon the misconception that this literature is primitive. It is not. It is worth remembering that all good literature raises troubling problems and is structured by intricacies which both attract and defeat the most intense analysis. (pp. 23) Western folklore has also invited analysis, perhaps because it has occupied such a large territory in the American mind for more than a century. As Malcolm Cowley explains: What we might call the first American mythology had taken final shape by 1890. In retrospect it seems amazingly complete, including as it does a score of familiar backgrounds, each with its registered trademark. And many of the trademarks Cowley mentions are western: . . . the sod house on the prairie, the chuck wagon surrounded by cowboys squatting on their heels, the Indian village with dancing braves, and the gambling saloon near the California diggings (Three Cycles of Myth in American Writing, in A Many-Windowed House [Southern Illinois University Press, 1970], p. 235). Against those familiar backgrounds, Cowley continues, moved a whole pantheon of mythological figures, at least twelve of which might be listed as major gods of our first native Olympus. Of the twelve American gods Cowley identifies, five are largely or entirely western: the woods ranger; the backwoods boaster; the slit-eyed, lean-jawed, soft spoken gambler with two six-guns hidden beneath the frock coat made by the best Omaha tailor; the outlaw; and the Indian chief. And of the demigodlike figures not far behind those major deities, many are western. The Old West gave us those folklore figures, and the New West and the contemporary West have added to American folklore, too. Western folklore, like all folk literature, differs from the rest of literature, as B. A. Botkin has pointed out, only in its history: its author is the original forgotten man (A Treasury of American Folklore [New York: Crown, 1944], p. xxii). Barre Toelken, author of the folklore chapter in A Literary History of the American West, does not, however, focus on the literature. Instead, he explains folk groups and customs and tells about the shifts and changes in 9
the oral tradition from one layer of culture to another, from East to West or West to East, and from past to present. The traditions of the folk are one of the richest of sources for western writers. In revering the oral traditions of any culture, there is the danger, as Botkin warns, of a clannishness that can fuel chauvinism. But there is an equal danger in ignoring oral traditions: the danger of forgetting that the source of all literature is ultimately the people. Literature is, after all, a process, not a product. And as Robert Weimann has argued in Structure and Society in Literary History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), the process of literature, when seen in terms of both its creation and reception, is functionally, significantly, and historically part of the social activity of its creators and recipients (p. 178). Since a literature begins with what its people say, this literary history starts with an account of what was said by the first peoples who encountered the American West.
J AMES H. MAGUIRE ,
10
Native Oral Traditions

Long ago, they say, when the earth was not yet finished, darkness lay upon the water and they rubbed each other. The sound they made was like the sound at the edge of a pond. There, on the water, in the darkness, in the noise, and in a very strong wind, a child was born. from a Papago narrative First Born made the earth. First Born made the earth. Go along, go along, go along. Its going along. Now all will remain as it is. 1 a Papago song
F WE ARE to speak of the literature of the American West, we must speak first of the native American literatures, for each of the two or three hundred tribal communities living in the West has invested this land with traditions of story and song. The reciprocal relationship between man and the land is a common denominator for all native literature. The land is our 2 source, and here, in Mary Austins phrase, the land sets the limit. Within the limits the land sets, it remains for man to imagine ways of seeing and talking about it, ways of knowing it. First Born emerges from the land only to turn back and create it with story and song. The Papago communities who join together to tell of First Born invest the land with meaning. They make the land into a cultural landscape. Cultural landscapes are social and cumulative. They are the natural result of a process which has been carried on for centuries in native communities on this continent. Cultural landscapes are made whenever communities of people join words to place. They enable man to feel a sense of place, to hear the darkness rub the water. The remarkable thing about the cultural landscape that whites call the American West is that it was created in absolute ignorance of the cultural landscapes of the native communities it displaced. The explorers, missionaries, trappers, ranchers, and settlers who flooded the West saw it as had Lewis and Clark, a void to be imagined. It was only in the late nineteenth century, when most native American peoples were safely confined on reser-
11
vations, that we began to recognize the achievement of native verbal artists and to realize the intimate imaginative relations their stories and songs shared with the earth. To speak of these native verbal arts as literature has certain dangers. In a few significant cases, they were literally so: the Toltec and Mayan glyphic systems of Mesoamerica and the pictographic systems of the north Pacific coast, Plains and Southwest. More commonly, they were preserved wholly in the memory of those who performed them, each performance being at once a kind of publication and reading. Traditional native American literatures are thus predominantly oral and aural, not literal. So to speak of a native American literature might have two meanings. First and most significantly, native American literature consists of stories and songs as they are performed in natural contexts in the communities which support them. Secondly, native American literature might be said to refer to those transcriptions of story and song from native American communities which record in print the oral performances of native people. It is the latter, of course, that academics usually think of when they speak of native American literature. There is a connotative problem as well. In the Euro-American tradition, we tend to think of literature, indeed all the arts, as something associ3 ated with marginal misfits and the discontented. These are associations to leave aside in approaching native literatures. In native communities stories and songs count, they make a difference, and those who make and perform them are among the most valued members of the community. They remind the people of who and what they are, why they are in this particular place, and how they should continue to live here. A Navajo singer recently told us: When one has even one song, he will live for a long time. He will live 4 by it. He will guide his children by it. He will guide his people by it. Literature in native American communities has always been central to mans existence. It is not possible here to discuss all the native literatures of the American West. Both space and experience limit this discussion to some thematic and generic similarities among them. To an explication of these is added a brief review of the history of collecting, translating, and studying native oral literatures, as well as a final comment on the continuing presence of native literatures in the West.
FORMS
Despite their diversity, there are striking generic similarities among the native American literatures. Most native traditions distinguish between narrative and song, and many consider prayer as a separate category of ver-
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NATIVE ORAL TRADITIONS
bal expression as well. Contemporary Navajo singer Andrew Natonabah, for example, speaks of how the stories, the songs, and the prayers come together to form a literature.
NARRATIVES
Anyone who glances at native American narratives must be struck by their high level of organization. And one who troubles to inquire into native thought on the subject will discover important insights regarding form and genre in native American tradition. Narratives tend to be divided into those thought to be literally true and those thought to be fictional. While these distinctions resemble the European distinction between myth and folktale, it is very important to recognize that native American people have long had their own ways of talking about the distinctions. Winnebago, for example, distinguishes between waikan, what-is-sacred, and worak, what-is-recounted; Zuni between stories of the chimikyanakowa, the Beginning, which are regarded as true historically, and telapnaawe, tales, which are considered fictional. In Hopi society, tuuwutsi, stories about make-believe things, are distinguished from stories which are kaatsa, not false, 5 that is to say the events of Hopi history. Taken together, true narratives often form a kind of Bible for native peoples, a collection of central religious texts which furnishes an allusive background for other native literary forms. The core story is of the origin or emergence of life, and a wide range of other narratives generally branches off from the origin narrative like so many limbs from the trunk of a tree. These may tell of the migration of ancestors, detail the adventures of culture heroes and account for the origin of specific ceremonies, customs, and rituals. True stories of this sort are set in real time and real space but before the world is as it is now. It is common for them to be filled with place names, to be lengthy, to be told to initiates in ritual settings, to contain esoteric language, and to be the subject of endless allusion, discussion, and interpretation. Hopi Albert Yava tells of discussing and debating the Hopi tradition that Hopi people climbed into this world from a lower world through a bamboo reed: One night we were talking about it (in the kiva) and someone said: Now how in the world could all those people come through a bamboo? How could they get in? How could it hold their weight? 6 How could they get through the joints? Such questions indicate that there exists a tradition of native critical inquiry based on oral literary texts which has largely gone unremarked by scholars.
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Stylistically, true narratives show enormous variation throughout the West. Consider, for example, the expansive accumulative quality of this portion of a Papago narrative told over four consecutive nights by medicine man Frank Lopez. e: marks the narrative into stanzas and has no direct translation in English. e: his heart felt very bad, from thinking of it, after he heard how his father was killed; e: that is what happened; when it was morning they tried to feed him, but he would not eat, and then he went outside and just sort of walked around, the way one does when one does not feel right, perhaps when one hears of a relative dying and one feels like walking somewhere and lying down; that is what happened to the boy, and that is why he did not think of eating anything, of drinking any water; in the morning he went out and walked toward the north where the cactus was standing; then when the sun was a bit this way and made a shade, he walked over and laid in the shade; he laid down; he laid face down; and it happened that his mother was missing him, so she followed him; she found him and saw the way he was and was also that way; she understood what he was seeing and why he was that way. e: after she saw him, she went back. e: after he was like that for a while, it became noon and the 7 shade moved the way it does in the afternoon. . . . In this way, the narrative continues to describe how a young man is able to make a personal connection with the supernatural through the slow ritualized process of grieving. By contrast, the following portion of a Western Apache narrative details how an Apache community was able to contact the supernatural while grieving for one who was lost. The spare, compact, repetitive quality of this passage is typical of the whole narrative which was told in less than an hour by Rudolph Kane of Cedar Creek: Lone time ago, at nighttime, They all started dancing. They were all singing. They said the gaans were coming to them, and they came to them, at etso goheyo [yellow place called]. There were four of them: black, blue/green, 14
yellow, white. They all, 8 all the gaans came down. A second kind of narrative is generally regarded as fictional in native American communities. Fictional narratives are usually told during the winter at night by grandparents to delight and instruct their grandchildren, but they may be told at other times and in other circumstances as well. These narratives are often set off from normal discourse by special phrases which serve as formulaic openings and closings for the story. Somewhat in the manner of the European once upon a time . . . they signal listeners that the tale teller is moving from the world of literal truth into the fictional world of the tale. In Hopi communities, for example, where these stories are called tuuwutsi, a storyteller will begin with Aliksaii . . ., and close with Pai yuk polo (Now to here it ends). In between, the audience must also respond with the formulaic expression oo after each sentence, for, as one teller puts it, the storyteller is touchy, if you do not respond she may 9 pout and not tell a story. Formulaic endings among the Lakota demonstrate the type of story being told. He ha yela owihake (that is all; that is the end) is used at the end of those stories whose main purpose is to entertain rather than skee (it is said) and keya pie (they say) which signify that the story is true. Among the Western Apache, the closing formula is vivid: shi goshk dash jaa (Thats the 10 way my yucca fruit hangs). The yucca fruit resembles a cluster of bananas and is a particularly apt image for the kinds of stories which the teller encloses between the opening and closing formulae. Fictional narratives of this sort are often episodic or cyclical, and cluster around the adventures of a conventional character. The cante fable is common, and narrators of fictional tales often embellish and embroider their narrations with vocal tone change and gesture. Probably the most popular character type for these stories is the trickster figure, so labeled because he deceives and is deceived himself again and again in stories. He appears in a wide variety of guises throughout the native West: Raven, Rabbit, Fox, and most commonly Coyote. The trickster is pictured as a humorous character who never learns from his mistakes but continually entertains through his absurd antics. At the same time, the trickster tales often teach the listeners the outcome of inappropriate actions. The trickster often embodies qualities such as lust, greed, envy, and avarice. The adventures attributed to him in a single telling might range from an historical narrative about how he stole fire with his tail for the People, to a satirical one in which he tricks an Anglo farmer.
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Like his real life counterpart, the coyote, the trickster has proved to be remarkably adaptable and well-suited to the twentieth century. In fictional stories about him, we see the beginnings of social protest as a theme in a native literature of the West. Consider the following episode from a cycle of trickster tales collected among the Minnesota Ojibway by Coleman. The Trickster/Hero Nanabozho is addressing a council meeting: Youre not the only one whos puzzled. Long ago there was plenty of deer. There was enough meat for food, hides for clothing, sinew for thread, hoofs for little baskets. I used to soak the brains and rub them on the deer hide to soften it. I hung up the deer hide on racks before a slow fire to dry it. I cut up the deer meat and put it into a clean cloth sack and then later I used it for making soup. I sliced it and chopped it fine for soup and other dishes. Now I cant do this. There are game wardens. The new laws affect me too. I go fishing and turn around, the game warden tells me Im over my limit. I want rabbit and I set my snares, and the game warden tells me I cant do that either. My brother I am troubled. But I feel sorry for you. I have two dollars in the bank. You can have it. (Imagine Nanabozho having money in the bank.) Not long ago, Nanabozho said, I controlled everything. 11 Now there are big officials. Tell me how to get on WPA.
SONGS
Songs pervade every part of life in native American communities from such ordinary daily activities as corn grinding, working in the fields, traveling, and child care to more extraordinary ritualistic occasions. Songs are both ceremonial and non-ceremonial. Ceremonial songs are often regarded as a kind of special speech in native communities, a speech which distorts the regular cadences and sounds of everyday conversation at the same time as it stretches language semantically to accommodate poetic, religious realities. Such special speech may be regarded as an esoteric language in some communities. In others, it may give voice to the supernatural. The Yaqui deer singer, for example, considers his songs to be the voice of the deer who does not speak, but speaks in l2 an enchanted way. Ceremonial songs show considerable range in length and complexity throughout the American West. The Navajo Nightway Ceremony, for example, fills nine days and eight nights with some four hundred songs such as the following:
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Tseghi! House made of dawn. House made of evening light. House made of the dark cloud. House made of male rain. House made of dark mist. House made of female mist. House made of female rain. House made of pollen. House made of grasshoppers. Dark cloud is at the door. The trail out of it is dark cloud. The zigzag lightning stands high up on it. Male deity! Your offering I make. I have prepared a smoke for you. Restore my feet for me. Restore my legs for me. Restore my body for me. Restore my mind for me. Restore my voice for me. This very day take out your spell for me. Your spell remove for me. You have taken it away for me. Far off it has gone. Happily I recover. Happily my interior becomes cool. Happily I go forth. My interior feeling cool, may I walk. No longer sore, may I walk. Impervious to pain, may I walk. With lively feelings, may I walk. As it used to be long ago, may I walk. Happily may I walk. Happily with abundant dark clouds may I walk. Happily with abundant showers may I walk. Happily with abundant plants may I walk. Happily on a trail of pollen may I walk. Happily may I walk. Being as it used to be long ago, may I walk. May it be beautiful before me.
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May it be beautiful behind me. May it be beautiful below me. May it be beautiful above me. May it be beautiful all around me. In beauty it is finished. 13 In beauty it is finished. By contrast, a Yaqui fiesta might consist of singing a dozen short compressed and highly imagistic songs such as the following: These three like enchanted night buzzards hover above me. These three like enchanted night buzzards hover above me. As they are coming with the light before dawn, here from the enchanted light before dawn, on top, on the highest point where the mountain sits, they are swinging. These three like enchanted night buzzards 14 hover above me. Understanding and appreciation of native American song depends upon a knowledge of the religion and way of life it springs from. Papago singer Maria Chonas famous comment our song is short because we know so much suggests a depth of allusion which is present in virtually all native American song regardless of length or use. Non-ceremonial songs accompany nearly all the ordinary motions of native American life. It is not uncommon for songs used in a ceremonial context to be sung outside the ceremony for other purposes. Thus songs from the Navajo Nightway Chant might be used as traveling songs, or a Yaqui deer song might be sung to accompany house work, or a Blackfoot ceremonial song might find its way into the repertory of social dance singers. There are many songs which are created for non-ceremonial purposes as well: lullabies, grinding songs, and the like. This is a Hopi lullaby for example: Owl, owl, burrowing owl with their eyes each other relishing. Owl, owl, burrowing owl with their eyes each other relishing. Whomevers child is a crybaby, we will eat. Not you while crying, then go to sleep, not you will I eat. Then you while crying go to sleep, you will I eat.
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a-a-a-ya-a-ay, huhuhuhu aaha iihiihi 15 aahaaha iihiihi Another type of non-ceremonial song which has become popular with many contemporary native Americans is the 49. These 49s are often sung at the end of a powwow or more formal dance occasion or after the party is over. They combine English lyrics and native vocables into some strikingly ironic love songs: o-oo-o-o-oo oh yes, I love you honey iya hana yo I dont care if you married sixteen times Ill get you yet l6 hay-ha-a-a
PERSONAL NARRATIVES
During the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, there arose a new type of literature based on the oral tradition. This was a form of autobiography in which an intermediary wrote down the life story of an elderly Indian. In many cases, the autobiography becomes a vehicle for telling the history of the tribe during the persons life and for explaining native American philosophy. Perhaps the most popular example of the as-told-to narrative is Black Elk Speaks. In this work, the poet John G. Neihardt recorded the experiences of the Sioux holy man, Black Elk. The work traces Black Elks spiritual quest and that of his people from the time of Custer and the exploitation of the Black Hills. Black Elk offers a unique native American view of the events as a counter to accepted American history. He also offers to all his listeners a picture of the power and the beauty of his native tradition. A number of other works also relate the perceptions of native Americans in a rapidly changing milieu. Among the more important ones are Maria Chonas Autobiography of a Papago Woman; Crushing Thunder: The Autobiography of a Winnebago; Guests Never Leave Hungry: The Autobiography of James Sewid, a Kwakiutl Indian; and Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions. Common to most of these works is a description of the traditional world view of the tribal peoples before European contact. Some, such as Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, also offer acute criticism of the materialism and lack of spirituality in American culture.
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THEMES
Despite their diversity of language and literary form, there are striking thematic similarities among the native literatures of the West. Four major themes are the sense of the sacred, the sense of the beautiful, the sense of l7 place and the sense of community. Each of these elements is closely interwoven with the others since the native philosophies from which the literature proceeds are unitive and holistic. The Sacred. Religion permeates all of native American life. There is probably no aspect of it that could be called non-religious. Religion more often than not centers on the concept of a power or a set of powers which inform all things and which need to be contacted through words and acts if the world is to continue. So it is that words in native American communities make a difference. They matter, for they are used to contact the sacred. The sacred in turn gives language meaning; it gives words power. The sacred has the quality of balance and harmony when all is well. It celebrates a relationship among all things, a relationship in which harmony and balance are key notions. The Beautiful. Man expresses this balance and harmony of life in the patterned beauty of story and song. The form and style of story and song suggest the shape of the sacred. Thus we find symmetry, repetition, and balance (antithesis) present and valued aesthetically in traditional native American literature. When the sacred is expressed in story and song, it links the individual to his community and religion through aesthetic perceptions. Thus when a member of a Yaqui audience hears a deer song, he might say, When I hear the songs, it takes my mind to the East, to the seyewailo. The beautiful is thus experienced as something very personal throughout native American communities. Acoma writer Simon Ortiz speaks of the importance of situation in feeling the beauty of the song: My father tells me, This song is a hunting song, listen. He sings and I listen. He may sing it again, and I hear it again. The feeling that I perceive is not only contained in the words but there is something surrounding those words, surrounding the song, and it includes us. It is the relationship that we share with each other and with everything else. And thats the feeling that makes the song real and meaningful and which makes his singing and my l8 listening more than just a teaching and learning situation. Place. The beautiful and the sacred are always linked to particular places. Mountains, lakes, rivers, and other natural phenomena define the relationship of the individual to his environment. This connection with the land is essential to native American thought. Many stories recount the 20
birth or migration of tribes, which feel a sense of well-being, of harmony when they are within sight of a sacred spot. The land offers both power and security to the People. For example, the Lakota revere the Black Hills, and the Navajo and Hopi view many southwestern mountains as the dwelling place of the gods. In some cases, an area is connected with the mythic beginnings of a tribe in the place, as with the lake of emergence for the Taos people. In other cases, the land is a representation of an event which ties the very blood of the people to their environment, as with the tribes of the Upper Midwest and the pipestone area in Minnesota. A sense of place gives meaning and continuity to the People. Community. Yet another central theme is the idea of community. Among such diverse groups as the Haida of the Pacific Northwest, the Pawnee of the Plains and the Zuni of the Southwest, there resides an abiding and pervasive sense of community. This community often extends beyond the human to encompass everything in the animate and inanimate realms. The individual is constantly reminded that he is part of the whole, not any more important than any creature around him. This radical sense of community requires respect and concern for all of creation. Thus, many of the mythic tales are concerned with the time when every being was an integral part of the tribe. Even though there may be a difference in the physical appearance of things, the spirit which informs all life is the same.
COLLECTION, TRANSLATION, INTERPRETATION
Patterns of interest in American Indian story and song as literature have been cyclic. Just as American interest in anything about the American Indian ebbs and crests about once a generation so, too, does interest in American Indian literature. These generational cycles are reflected in the publications of anthologies of American Indian oral literature. Natalie Curtiss The Indians Book (1907) marks the crest of a first cycle of interest; the publication of George Cronyns The Path on the Rainbow (1918), a second; the appearance of two anthologies around mid-centuryMargot Astrovs The Winged Serpent (1946) and A. Grove Days The Sky Clears (1951), a third; and the flood of anthologies which arrived in bookstores in the late sixties and early seventies, epitomized by Jerome Rothenbergs Shaking the Pumpkin (1972) and William Brandons The Magic World (1971), l9 suggest a fourth. That the most recent cycle has only begun to ebb, and that during its course some fifteen new anthologies of American Indian literature appeared, suggests that the total force of these cycles of interest is cumulative and has shown quantitative growth. Beginning in earnest in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the present, collection, translation, and interpretation of native American literature has had a similar cyclical character. Throughout these cycles, 21
the issues and arguments among scholars as to how native American literature should be translated and interpreted have remained surprisingly the same. In one sense then, the cycles early in this century set the tone for almost everything which has followed. It was during the last years of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth that Washington Matthews, Alice Fletcher, Jeremiah Curtin, Frank Cushing, Franz Boas, and many other ethnologists and folklorists gathered enormous numbers of narratives and songs from tribal peoples throughout the American West. Printed in limited scholarly editions, these translations quickly attracted the attentions of many non-Indian poets and writers. Almost immediately an adversary relation was established between the anthropologists who strove to represent the stories and songs of Indian people in interlinear word-for-word translations of purported scientific accuracy and the poets who reached for the emotional core of the stories and songs they read. Comments such as the following one from Washington Matthewss Navaho Legends are indicative. Stephen Powers, in his Tribes of California, gives in simple and direct language, the story of how fire came to the Karok nation. A few years after he wrote, someone worked his story into a Poem, which appeared most artistically illustrated, in one of our leading magazines. In this poem, the Coyote, in a quandary, is represented as stroking his goatee. Coyotes have no goatees; Indians have no goatees. The act of stroking the goatee, in thought or perplexity, is the special mannerism of a nervous American. No allusion could be more out of place in an Indian legend. Should the poet referred to ever select any of the tales in this book to be tortured into a poem, I beg that he will not, even for the sake of making a faulty rhyme, put a beard on the chin of the 20 Navaho Coyote God. Matthews and Boas and the other ethnologists and folklorists in their tradition have tried to represent the words of American Indian story and song as accurately and scientifically as they could in their translations. An early spokeswoman for the poetic interpretation of texts was Mary Hunter Austin. She argued that the letter was less important than the spirit. Working just after Matthews, early in the present century, she remarked that she was so interested in primitive concept that she did not bother to record the original form of the songs she encountered among native people. Rather she [stripped] them off as so much husk to get at the 21 kernel of the experience. Indeed Austin preferred not to regard her work as translation at all. In The American Rhythm she writes, If forced to affix a 22 title to my work I would prefer to call it not translation, but re-expression. 22
Mary Austin and those poets who have attempted to translate, retranslate or re-express native American story and song have all been far more concerned with communicating the emotional core, the spirit, of the text than with rendering an accurate transliteration of it. The tension between these two views of translating American Indian oral literature continues throughout all the cycles and is with us in the present. Each view is associated with interpretive styles as well. The ethnologists have through the years tended to stress the necessity for viewing native American story and song against the backdrop of native American culture. They argue that it is virtually impossible to reach an understanding of native American literature without a knowledge of native American culture. Moreover, they have often placed considerable stress on native American interpretations of native American literature, internal rather than external interpretationswhat has lately been called metafolklore. At the same time, the thrust of their efforts has been in the main preservationist, many times resembling the verbal equivalent of salvage archaeology. By contrast, the poets have placed a far greater emphasis on incorporating the content and style of native American story and song into their own creative work. They argue that this is the only way one may really understand American Indian verbal expression, by making it ones own. In this way, they hope to introduce the native American tradition into American literature generally, and, in Austins phrase, redirect the ultimate literary destiny of America.
CONTINUITY
One of the constant features of writing about native American story and song is the statement or implication that it is dead or dying. Commonly an editor or collector reports that but for his efforts these dying whispers would be lost. If the American West is any indication, nothing could be further from the truth. In many communities, traditions of story and song continue and flourish. Revivalist movements are well under way as well. Spurred on by the move to teach and/or recognize native cultures in the public school system and by a growing network of community controlled and operated schools on the reservations, Indian people are bringing back, maintaining, and preserving large parts of their heritage that seemed to be slipping away from them in the years after the Second World War. Then, too, there are the efforts of such linguists as Dell Hymes, who is attempting to restore native American story and songs to communities along the north Pacific coast through his linguistic work with texts collected earlier in 23 this century. Finally, there has appeared in the decade or so since N. Scott Momadays House Made of Dawn (1968) a generation of Indian writers who seek in their own work to represent the content and style of the oral tradi23
tions out of which they come. Momadays The Way to Rainy Mountain, Ortizs A Good Journey and Silkos Storyteller are each in a significant way collections of materials from oral tradition with informed inside commen24 tary. They provide us with the most accurate, authentic and accessible approaches to native American oral traditions presently available.
L ARRY E VEN , University
of Arizona
P AUL P A V I C H ,
Fort Lewis College
and
Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. Dean and Lucille Saxton, O o thham Hoho ok A agitha: Legends and Lore of the Papago and Pima Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1973), pp. 12, 8. Mary Austin, The Land of Litttle Rain (1903; rpt. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), p. 3. See Gary Witherspoons discussion of this idea in Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977). Andrew Natonabah, recorded on the videotape By This Song I Walk, produced by Larry Evers (Tucson: University of Arizona Division of Media and Institutional Services, 1979). Distributor: Clearwater Publishing Company, 1995 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10023. Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1972), p. 118; Dennis Tedlock, Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians (1972; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. xvi; Ekkehart Malotki, Hopitutuwutsi: Hopi Tales (Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1978), p. xiii. Albert Yava, Big Falling Snow: A Tewa-Hopi Indians Life and Times and the History of Traditions of His People, ed. Harold Courlander (New York: Crown Publishers, 1978), p. 41. Al Wiapoi, trans. Ofelia Zepeda, in The South Corner of Time: Hopi, Navajo,
5.
6. 7.
24
Papago, and Yaqui Tribal Literature, ed. Larry Evers (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980), pp. 13233. 8. Rudolph Kane recorded on the videotape The Origin of the Crown Dance: An Apache Narrative, produced by Larry Evers (University of Arizona Division of Media and Institutional Services, 1979). Distributor: Clearwater Publishing Company. 9. Helen Sekaquaptewa, recorded on the videotape Iisaw: Hopi Coyote Stories, produced by Larry Evers (University of Arizona Division of Media and Institutional Services, 1979). Distributor: Clearwater Publishing Company. 10. Ella Deloria, Dakota Texts (1932; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1974), pp. ix-x; Grenville Goodwin, Myths and Tales of the white Mountain Apache (1939; rpt. New York: Kraus, 1969), p. ix. 11. Sr. Bernard Coleman, Ellen Frogner and Estelle Eich, Ojibway Myths and Legends (Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, 1961), pp. 9899. 12. Larry Evers, personal interview with Lorenzo Salvatierra, 21 October 1976. 13. Translation by Washington Matthews (1907) quoted from Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature, ed. John Bierhorst (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. 307308. 14. Lorenzo Salvatierra, singer, Felipe Molina and Larry Evers translators, recorded on the videotape Seyewailo: The Flower World: Yaqui Deer Songs, produced by Larry Evers (University of Arizona Division of Media and Instructional Services, 1979). Distributor: Clearwater Publishing Company. 15. Helen Sekaquaptewa, singer, Emory Sekaquaptewa and Kathleen Sands, translators, from Four Hopi Lullabies: A Study in Method and Meaning, American Indian Quarterly 4 (August 1978):202203. 16. Barre Toelken, Instructors Manual, The Dynamics of Folklore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 6. 17. See Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Indian Perspective on American Indian Literature, in Literature of the American Indians, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: New American Library, 1975), pp. 111 135, and N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words, in Literature of the American Indians, pp. 96110. 18. Song/Poetry and LanguageExpression and Perception: A Statement on Poetics and Language, Sun Tracks: An American lndian Literary Magazine 3 (1977):2. 19. Natalie Curtis, The Indians Book (1907; rpt. New York: Dover, 1968); George W. Cronyn, The Path on the Rainbow (1918; rpt. New York: Liveright, 1962); Margot Astrov, The Winged Serpent (1946; rpt. New York: Capricorn Books, 1962); A. Grove Day, The Sky Clears (1951; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964); Jerome Rothenberg, ed., Shaking the Pumpkin (New York: Doubleday, 1972); William Brandon, The Magic World (New York: William Morrow, 1971). See Larry Evers, Cycles of Appreciation, in Paula Gunn Allen, ed., Studies in American Indian Literature (New York: MLA, 1983). 20. Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897). 21. Mary Austin, The American Rhythm (New York: Macmillan, 1923), p. 40.
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A Literary History of the American West 22. The American Rhythm, p. 38. 23. See Folklores Nature and the Suns Myth, Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975):345369. 24. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969); Simon J. Ortiz, A Good Journey (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1977); Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (New York: Seaver Books, 1981).
Selected Bibliography
Bibliographies Murdock, George P. Ethnographic Bibliography of North America. 4th ed. rev. by Timothy J. OLeary. 5 vols. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files Press, 1975. Comprehensive bibliographies for each of the North American tribes, regularly updated. Ruoff, LaVonne, and Karl Kroeber. A Basic Bibliography for Teachers Initiating Courses in Native American Literatures. Supplement to Studies in American Indian Literature 4 (1980). Available from Karl Kroeber, ed. SAIL, Dept. of English, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. 10027. Best short bibliography available. Regularly updated. Stensland, Anna Lee. Literature by and About the American Indian: An Annotated Bibliography. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1979. Series A number of scholarly publications regularly include oral literature. Among the most important of these are: The Journal of American Folklore The Bulletins and Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology Papers and Memoirs from the American Museum of Natural History General Collections Bierhorst, John. The Red Swan: Myths and Tales of the American Indians. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. A collection of national scope organized around topics. Evers, Larry, ed. The South Corner of Time: Hopi, Nawajo, Papago and Yaqui Tribal Literature. (Originally published as Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series, Volume 6.) Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1980. Thompson, Stith, ed. Tales of the North American Indians. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. A classic collection with voluminous notes and bibliography. Reprint of 1929 edition. Turner, Frederick W. III, ed. The Portable North American Indian Reader. New York: Viking, 1973. A good general collection of oral literature along with autobiography, poetry, etc.
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Tribal Narratives Deloria, Ella. Dakota Texts. New York: AMS Press, 1974. Contains original Dakota, literal and free translations by this Sioux scholar. Reprint of 1932 edition. Jacobs, Melville. The Content and Style of an Oral Literature: Clackamas Chinook Myths and Tales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Translation and analysis of eight stories. Kilpatrick, Jack F. and Anna. Friends of Thunder: Folktales of the Oklahoma Cherokees. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1964. Interesting collection which includes notes on beliefs and social systems. Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969. A collection of stories gathered by Momaday from his Kiowa kinsmen. Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. A classic account of the Winnebago trickster and hare cycles. Reprint of 1956 edition. Ramsey, Jarold. Coyote Was Going There. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977. A good overview of the narratives from Oregon tribes. Yazzie, Ethelou. Navajo History, Vol. I. Many Farms, Arizona: Navajo Community College Press, 1971. The emergence stories of the Navajo. Autobiography Crashing Thunder. Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of a Winnebago. Ed. Paul Radin. New York: Dover, 1963. Insightful account of a traditional Indian caught up in rapid change. Reprint of 1920 edition. Fire, John (Lame Deer) and Richard Erdoes. Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. The life of a Sioux medicine man, more critical of America than Black Elk. Lurie, Nancy Oestreich, ed. Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crushing Thunder: The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961. The life story of a seventy-five-year-old woman who was born in 1884. Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. New York: Pocket Books, 1961. The account of Black Elks visionary experiences and his accounts of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee. Reprint of 1932 edition. Sewid, James. Guests Never Leave Hungry: The Autobiography of James Sewid, a Kwakiutl Indian. Ed. James P. Spradley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. The life of a chieftain born in 1913. Underhill, Ruth. Papago Woman. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979. A clear and powerful account of the cultural changes in a Papago womans life. Reprint of 1936 edition. Song Bierhorst, John. Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature. New York: Farrar,
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A Literary History of the American West Straus and Giroux, 1974. Contains the Navajo Night Chant, helpful annotation. Curtis, Natalie. The Indians Book. New York: Dover, 1968. Songs from throughout the country, includes the musical notation for each song. Reprint of 1907 edition. Day, A. Grove. The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. Includes both song texts and commentary, organized by various regions of the continent. Reprint of 1951 edition. Underhill, Ruth. Singing for Power: The Song Music of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938. Poetic translations along with commentary. Criticism Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Studies in American Indian Literature. New York: Modern Language Association, 1983. Course outlines, strategies for teaching, and critical essays. Chapman, Abraham, ed. Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations. New York: New American Library, 1975. A good collection of essays, including those of N. Scott Momaday, Paula Allen, and Vine Deloria, Jr. Also contains essays by the controversial Hyemeyohsts Storm and Jerome Rothenberg. Kroeber, Karl, comp. Traditional American Indian Literatures: Texts and lnterpretations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. Essays by Kroeber, Jarold Ramsey, Dennis Tedlock, Barre Toelken, Tacheeni Scott, and Dell Hymes.
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Folklore in the American West

Our neighbors are the rattlesnakes They crawl up from the Badlands breaks; We do not live, we only stay; We are too poor to get away. of a Founding Father or a Pioneer Mother, hardly the phrasing of a history book or the rhetoric of a Historical Society pamphlet, but such are the expressions found routinely in the genres of folklorethose informal but traditional and recurrent ways in which the members of closely related groups pass along the shared values and attitudes which animate their everyday lives. Some culturally shared ideas are difficult to express in coldly technical or denotative language, precisely because their principal content is more emotional than intellectual. How does one express, for friends and relatives who already know the score, just how frustrating and disappointing the homesteading experience wasor how triumphant the second generation feels about the fact that their parents (some of them, at any rate) prevailed and actually obtained title to a snake-infested desert, supporting a family from its produce or its minerals? Clearly, the feelings involved are complex and deep, for they are a mixture of frustration and hard-won success, and they are best expressed, for insiders, at any rate, in the vernacular of everyday speech and the genres of everyday performance, that is, through jokes, songs, sayings, proverbs, customs, games-even food and buildings. The study of folklore analyzes these unofficial expressions of culturally shared ideas by looking at the articulations themselves, as they are found in the natural contexts in which people actually perform them to each other. Doctors and professors, as well as cowboys, tell certain kinds of jokes, anecdotes, and legends which testify to their ongoing shared concerns and anxieties about their professional situation; these oral traditions will be quite different from the traditions followed by the same people when at home celebrating Christmas or Chanukkah with their families, or the same people when they go to a Norwegian family reunion or a festival in their home town in Buster, Oklahoma. All of us are members of several folk groups, and we tailor our speech and our other informal behavior and expressions according to the group we find ourselves in at the particular moment. The concept of geographical region, then, especially one so potenARDLY THE WORDS
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tially open to subjective definition as The West, provides but one of many dimensions of a very complex and fascinating subject. Indeed, some folklorists are convinced that an entire region is too broad for folkloristic analysis, especially whenas is certainly the case in the American Westthere is a constant influx of traditional expression from other areas. Having said all that, what then remains to be discussed about the existence and nature of folkloredistinctive and ongoing informal traditional expression used on an everyday basisin the American West? The folklore discussed in this essay may have come into the West chiefly from other areas, but we know it has been adapted, used, discarded, and developed according to both the newer facts of life in the West, and the shared values of the people who settled the area. The process by which incoming folklore and cultural attitude are modified to suit the new physical and cultural setting, and the means by which this new environment then constitutes a living matrix in which local expressions are generated, is treated at length in an excellent essay, Regionalization: A Rhetorical 1 Strategy, by Suzi Jones. In it, she shows how folklore actually is used as a persuasive statement about regional identity, and suggests that regional folksongs, tall tales, names, and the like, although they may be presented in a laconic, offhand manner (especially in front of outsiders), provide some of the most telling readings on the depth of feeling in a locale. In the present essay, I will first mention a few of the many folk groups which have characterized the cultural life of the West, partly in order to show that the subject is far more complex than a brief essay would indicate, and then describe some of the genres of folklore which are particularly good examples of the regionalized tradition in the American West. The reader is requested to keep in mind, however, that these are a selection of the groups, forms, topics, and character types that are clearly important to our understanding of western culture: they are in no way a definitive listing, nor are they discussed very deeply. The interested reader should, thus, go further and deeper with any one of them.
WESTERN FOLK GROUPS
Most of the folk groups which have been prominent in the settlement of the West are multidimensional; that is, occupations which have their own lore and language have been developed or excelled in by members of certain ethnic or national groups which have as well their own insider lore. For example, much of the cowboy culture which has colored the life and attitudes (as well as fueled the stereotypes and myths) of the West was in fact brought north from Mexico and developed into a highly articulate culture by Spanish-speaking ranchers. Much of the terminology still used in the cattle country comes directly from Spanish buckaroos (vaqueros). 30
FOLKLORE IN THE AMERICAN WEST
The preference, in fact, for the word buckaroo by the cattle ranchers over the word cowboy is still a locally distinctive feature in some areas within the region we call the West. In eastern Oregon, parts of Idaho, and much of Nevada, in fact, use of the word cowboy marks someone as an outsider. With such deep-seated usage of Hispanic terminology remaining so central to local conception of insider culture, we would expect to find other kinds of cultural expressions from the same background central to the ongoing value system, but they are rare, a fact which testifies to the malleability and selectivity of the folklore process. The buckaroos, working together with other knowledgeable buckaroos, developed a rich insider lingo for dealing with horses and cattle. At home, among their familieswhere other customs and ethnic values come into playtheir folk expressions articulated those other constellations. Obviously, ranchers of Hispanic background continue to live in a richly colonial Hispanic culture, even though in the intervening years, not all Hispanic people have remained ranchers. Significantly this strong central role in the development of ranching in the West is not often depicted so fully in the popular media, where the Mexican most often appears as a later interloper, a foreigner out of place in the Anglo system. Although historians estimate that as many as thirty percent of the working cowboys were Hispanic or black, and although their influence is easily seen in western occupational speech and slang, the popular images which appear in films and dime novel format grow more directly out of later racist stereotypes which have been politically and sociologically more important to the public than acknowledgement of the deeper level of earlier indebtedness suggested by folklore. Among other things, this should indicate one important reason why the study of folklore adds something to our fuller view of western culture and history. But more germane to the point here is the suggestion that nearly all folklore in the West is similarly complicated. Not only is there sheepherder lore (both the lore of the sheepherders themselves and the ranchers who raised the sheep, and the lore about sheepherders passed along by thosefor example cattle rancherswho often saw the sheep ranchers as very odd people indeed, as outsiders to their own cultural views), but there is Basque sheepherder lore, as well as Basque lore, and lore about Basques by non-Basque people. Along the Northwest coast there is the lore of the fishing people (the fishermen themselves, as well as their families at home); but there is also the lore of the Yugoslav fishermen as contrasted to that of the Scandinavian fishermen. Throughout the West there are various kinds of miners; thus we will find the folklore of open pit and hardrock underground miners, coal vs. copper miners, and so on. Again, complicating the picture even more, there are the Cornish miners with their Tommyknocker stories, as well as the 31
Finns, the Irish, and transplanted Kentucky and West Virginia miners of Scotch-Irish background. In a place like Butte, Montana, this kaleidoscope creates a cultural complexity that cannot be covered by the word miner. So important were these cultural differences in Buttes past that they resulted in the formation of distinctly ethnic neighborhoods in that small city (Finntown, a part of Butte, has teetered on the brink of the large open Berkeley pit for some years, waiting for total destruction), and these differences have often led to fighting and rivalry among the people of the town. But the brotherhood forged by the grinding underground and pit mining work also created a rich set of values such as can be seen in the greeting card sent by a retired Irish miner to his Finnish friends on St. Patricks Day: Happy St. Urhos Day, you Finnish Bastard! The combination of rivalry and deep friendship, ethnic difference and occupational kinship, performed in the gruff humor of a working culture, would be difficult to express in technical or simply denotative terms. A similar kind of dichotomy is seen in the folklore of the lumber industry. Here, although loggers come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, the important split seems to be between those who work in the woods and those who work in the mills. At least in the Pacific Northwest, the people make a distinction between logger and lumberjack, the latter being someone who stacks lumber in a mill; used by a logger, the term suggests a negative connotation. Since many of the eastern lumberjacks who left Michigan and Wisconsin to become loggers in the Northwest were Scandinavian, we might expect that national identification to have exercised a strong influence on the lore of the occupation. And indeed, it seems persistent today as a form of proud humor: Swedes (as most Scandinavians were called) were reputed to be hard and faithful workers who felt no pain, and thus the stories about them became something like internal stereotypes of the logger image. A Swede, in one story, tries to show his foreman how he cut his hand off in the buzzsaw by trying to work too fast: Ooops, dammit, now dere goes da udder vun ! It is said that when a logger died on the job, his lower lip was pulled out to see if he had the distinguishing Swede characteristic: a hole the size of a quarter burned into the lip by snoose (moist, ground tobacco carried in the lip in preference to smoking). Young loggers trying to learn how to dip snoose were said to be passing as Swedes. For the forest workers, ethnic differences showed up more distinctively at home or at weddings or church socials in which ethnic foods were served and national dances allowed for a retention of older community expressions. Chinese and Japanese immigrants, once imported mainly to work on the railroads and the mines, slowly developed their community stability in America largely because they originally did not bring their families with them. Much of their early folklore was mens lore, expressed, of course, in 32
their own languages. Later, as wives and families joined the men, family lore (in the form of foods, customs, songs, and stories) grew apace, especially because there was so much sense of cultural surroundment and social isolation. A well-known phenomenon in folklore, often called marginal or peripheral distribution, accounts for the fact that people far from their original homes tend not so much to lose their traditions as to intensify them selectively by using them to adapt to the new situation while maintaining their own sense of normality. Many of the Japanese and Chinese customs found in the United States are actually older than the customs one can find in circulation today in the parent country. A Japanese lullaby, Naranda, sung to Japanese children born in America at the turn of the century, is still sung here, but is virtually unknown in Japan. Innovation along ethnically normal lines is also found in new contexts: thus, we find several Chinese dishes which were invented in America, or Japanese foods (such as sukiyaki) which have been altered by the addition of more meat (avoided once by Buddhists, and rare anyway in Japan), or the exchange of one condiment or vegetable for another more readily available in the new situation. Much could be said about the deep differences in folklore between Japanese and Chinese: how the one eventually settled mostly in rural areas and excelled in farming and developing previously marginal land, while the other, keeping large, extended family groups together, tended to settle in the urban areas and operated family-owned service businesses; how the vastly different cultures were classified together as the Yellow Peril, often coming under suspicion precisely because their folklore was so different and because it was practiced in the privacy of their homes (a custom which the Anglos saw as secretive and furtive). This outside stereotype came into political use during World War II when government experts testified that the very fact that the Japanese kept their culture alive secretly at home was a sure sign of their loyalty to the Japanese emperor, and the fact that no sabotage had ever been committed by a Japanese-American showed just how well-organized they were in their ultimate plan of waiting for the proper moment to strike. Such beliefs led to the internment without due process of 110,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry in 1942, but equally remarkable is that the same stereotypes (many of them based on what we call exoteric folklore) are today used to illustrate how successful the Asians have been in becoming American citizens: they keep their families together, they mind their own business and keep their teenagers off the street, and they keep their ethnic heritage alive, all qualities highly valued in modern America. For the same reasons they were once a threat, the Asians are now thought of as our model minority. Here is a striking example of the working of ethnic folklore and exoteric response in the American West. Of course, today, with the influx of Koreans since the 1950s and the Southeast Asians 33
since the early 1970s, the picture becomes increasingly complex, and one sees and hears the beliefs once applied to the Japanese and Chinese being applied to the newer arrivals. Folklore is alive and well in the American West, as elsewhere, and it behooves us to pay attention to its political and sociological ramifications. Nonetheless, the West envisioned by some academics who write about the region is not, I think, the present-day West with its ongoing realities and traditions, but the archetypical West in which certain recurrent ideas have functioned to define and express values shared by substantial numbers of the people who have seen themselves as central to the West. In this archetypical world, the Japanese and Chinese remain as outsiders, the Indians as implacable foes (or occasionally as spiritual guidesas long as they are not interested in holding onto much land), the women as supporting players who sometimes rise to glory, the men (and male values) as central issues of reality. In many ways, thus, the West has given dramatic voice to attitudes characteristic of the whole country, or has promoted American values revered by the whole culture. Other groups which are valuable subjects in the study of western folklore are the many religious groups which have made themselves at home here, often in the expressed belief that somehow the West offered them a possibility for community independence which they could not find elsewhere. What was it they found, or thought they saw here? If we knew more about their folk expressions, we could unlock still other cultural aspects of the western puzzle. Consider their variety: the Mormons in Utah and southern Idaho (archetypically, at least; of course the Mormons are not confined there); the Hutterites in Montana; the communalistic Aurora Colony in Oregon; the socialistic Puget Sound Utopian settlements; the extremely conservative Russian Old Believers near Woodburn, Oregon; the Buddhists and Shinto people in California and cities like Salt Lake; the Jews in every major city; the Catholics in the Southwest; the Protestants in the Northwest; the Amish in Oregon (once living near Amity, they suddenly picked up in the 1950s and moved to Florida); the Rajneesh community in Antelope, Oregon (temporarily renamed Rajneesh City). All of these groups have had an effect on the culture of the West, and therefore an effect on what it is we call the West. All of these have undoubtedly been regionalized to one extent or another. Each of these groups would show in its folk expressions some dimension of the western experience, and the study would be well worth the effort.
PRACTICAL THINGS OF TASTE AND BEAUTY
The first genre of western tradition to be discussed in this essay is material culture: those expressions whichby the use of cloth, wood, threads, 34
plants and other physical materialstransmit in concrete form concepts and designs and values parallel to the oral forms that will be discussed. Cooking would of course be one of these expressions: local recipes (and names for them), local uses of wild vegetables and game, preferences for regional styles of food preparation and seasoning, favorite fuels or woods for smoking, customs about who does the cooking. Some western families restrict the raising and use of sourdough to men; in others, men cook meals prepared outdoors, while women take charge of those produced in the kitchen and control the language that is used there. Largely but not exclusively a womans form of expression is quilting. Most of the western quilters we know about are women, but men show up far more often than one would expect. Some take up quilting because there is no woman in the family passing on a mothers or a grandmothers tradition; in other cases a man takes it up after retirement or after a difficult operation. Still others are lured into it by helping their wives add the quilting (back and filling, together with whatever decorative stitches are used to bind them together) to a piecework top. The regular alteration of geometric patterns naturally provides a physical statement of the stability and predictability which are highly valued by the agrarian society in which quilting became so central. Certain patterns are most likely to be given as gifts because they embody the thought or intent offered by the giver: for example, Double Wedding Ring, with its interwoven symbols of marriage, or Log Cabin, with its regular log walls and central spot (reminiscent of a hearth), is considered a proper gift for newlyweds, while erratic or humorous patterns like Drunkards Path or Turkey Tracks, because of their characterizations of wandering away from the straight path, are considered dangerous for newly married couples. Do quilters believe that the quilt exercises a magical influence on those who sleep under it? No, but they obviously see the quilt as a statement, and they want the statement to be consistent with community value and practice. Folklore does not, however, need to be consciously planned in order to display intent and cultural resonance. Other womens lore in the West (again, not limited to women but traditionally associated with female role and custom in the community) would include other arts or crafts such as embroidery (extremely important for the Russian Old Believers), rug hooking or braiding (mainly a practical way of reusing older materials, but subject to tremendous artistic variation), midwifery (almost exclusively a female tradition in the early West; older midwives will usually not even discuss it with a male researcher), and the performance of that great range of philosophical, medicinal, practical, and moral expression which falls under the deceptively simple rubric of housework. The housework itself is often done according to the traditions of rou35
tines long in the family: women report doing their washing and ironing on the same day their mothers did them, using certain procedures passed down in the family (like what order to wash clothes or dishes in), and even having the same attitudes toward color combinations that were thought normal by older female members of their families. Another material dimension of western folklore is folk costume (not in the sense of a party costume, but the everyday traditional use of clothing to mark boundaries between groups of people). House painters tend to dress in white, cowboys and fishermen in blue, loggers in black and gray. Fishermen may prefer a certain kind of rubber boot, while loggers may use any work boot as long as it fits the terrain (which often means wearing caulked boots, pronounced corks, which have hobnails on the bottom). Ways of wearing the clothing may also be traditional: for example, loggers in some parts of the West cut the cuffs or seams off the pantlegs; others insist on wearing a certain striped workshirt with the tail cut off; others dont appear without their red Loggers World suspenders (belts are dangerous in the woods, and besides, many loggers work in the summer with their pants hanging open for ventilation). Cowboys wear different kinds of chaps for different purposes and in different kinds of weather. Many working cowboys of today do not wear the kind of Stetson that has become known as the cowboy hat; rather, they prefer a small working cap with a visor to protect the eyes from sun-the kind distributed by tractor companies and baseball clubs. Currently, one can see more cowboy hats per square head in downtown Denver among young working men and women at play than on a similar number of working cowboys. Still another form of material expression in folk design is the folk boat: the distinctively local boat built by local people for local conditions and use. Usually these are modifications of some earlier kind of boat known to the first boatbuilder who tried regionalizing the idea. Practically every westem river, from the Salmon to the Colorado to the Rogue, has its own distinctive boat. They are practical, usually built of local materials, and although the users would probably be the first to say that their construction is more practical than aesthetic, there is often a very strong note of grace, balance and symmetry that demonstrates an ongoing taste in good design as well as technical command of functional detail. The fact that local styles remain relatively stable over the years is a good sign that ends more complicated than technical necessity are being served. These are visible articulations of a shared sense of the good, proper, and beautiful. The same can be said of traditional barns and outbuildings, fence styles and gates, mailbox supports and ranch entryways. So ubiquitous in the West is the high, two-posted entry with crossbeam that even weekenders from the city living in prefab or mobile homes will erect one soon after ob36
taining a piece of property in ranch country. In earlier times, the high entryway no doubt helped people to find the gate opening in a long fence stretching for miles across the range. And of course it had to be built high enough that people could ride through without dismounting. But its practical functions are nearly always augmented by personal decoration of very specific sorts: a plank with the family or ranch name may hang in the middle; a saddle may ride on the cross-piece; wagon wheels, single and doubletrees may dangle from overhangs; bison or cattle skulls, horse and oxen shoes, large models of the familys cattle brand, boots, hats and the like may be affixed over all. All of these are of course emblems of the ranch life, and the better they detail the accepted notions of the real ranch life of earlier times, the more they testify to the owners tenure in the country. Austin Fife showed some years ago how even the mailbox supports used throughout the West demonstrated a decided element of cultural choice: although government regulations stipulate what kind of supports may and may not be used, and although practicality and economics would argue for something simple and unadorned, one finds instead cream separators, welded logging chains, hand-held plows, milk cans, augers, metal tractor seatsall of them physical remnants of the way the previous generation did its work in the place. Technically, Fife pointed out, these items are throwaways, junk,: but in emblematic terms they are signs that say, Weve been here since this item was actually in use. The item, instead of having lost its meaning, has been intensified and specialized in its meaning, and has become an easily recognized icon. Anything can hold up a mailbox; not everything can proclaim local roots and community value. For similar reasons, the old Jackson Fork hay derrick (also known as the Mormon derrick), though not in regular use to stack loose hay for some years now, remains standing like a dinosaur in many a ranch yard, mute but eloquent testimony to the regional identity of the owner. Woe to the new foreman 3 from out of the area who saws the useless rig up into firewood. Fences, once the abomination of the cattlemen, have become in more recent years emblems of domain and familiar self-produced signs of ownership. There are local preferences for cedar posts, metal stakes, or diamond willow (gives the cattle a better shelter from wind in the open country, a Montana rancher soberly assured me), preferred ways of stretching or repairing wire fence, locally developed methods of anchoring fencelines (such as rock traps, bins of rock in eastern Oregon where land is too hard for post holes, explained to tourists as a means of catching rocks before they are blown out onto the road by high winds). Scraps of wire fencing are saved for use in repairing gates, machinery, and tackle. Oregon old-timer Reub Long once said, If heaven hasnt any old rusty patched-up wire fences, Ill never feel at home there. 37

FOLK SONGS IN THE WEST
Many of the songs sung traditionally in the West have survived not only the transcontinental journey, but the transoceanic voyage as well often with surprising fidelity to earlier versions. Of course, few folksongs have a single version which can reasonably be called the correct one, because constant variation in text and tune is the hallmark of the traditional process. Some older songs from England appear in western American versions in what first appears to be eroded condition. An old British broadside street ballad of some forty stanzas once became one of the most popular songs in the English language; it described in what we would today consider extremely melodramatic language the slow deaths of a wealthy husband and wife, and the later deaths of their two children. What remains in western American tradition are a mere three verses, the ones that detail the death of the lost children. Before we lament that erosion has taken its toll, however, we should note several important details: first, the part of the ballad which remains is poetically most pleasing, and in diction the least didactic and strained of the whole earlier ballad. So a good argument could be made here for the poetic tastes of American traditional singers. Another thing we might notice is that the song now makes a somewhat different point: instead of moralizing about the duties of adults to their minor charges, the ballad now places full spotlight on the plight of the children, without rationale, background, or moral lesson. Why would singers do this, and why would the song have been so popularly sung in the West? It does not seem to be the result simply of poor memory. One way to approach such a question is to ask about how and when a song was actually sung, and by whom. Here we begin to get a revealing picture: most elderly people in the West remember hearing this song as a lullaby sung to them by their mothers, who probably shared with other mothers along the wagon trails, and later on the western homesteads, the fear that their children might wander off and die in the woods. For reasons like this, one of the most popular songs ever to exist in England became also one of the most popular songs ever to be sung in the American West. Two Babes in the Woods Oh do you remember a long time ago When two little babes, their names I dont know They wandered away one bright summers day And were lost in the woods, I heard people say. And when it was night, so sad was their plight The moon had gone down and the stars gave no light 38
They sobbed and they sighed and bitterly cried And those two little babes laid down and died. And when they were dead, a robin so red Brought strawberry leaves and over them spread. And all the day long they sang their sweet song, 4 Those two little babes who were lost in the wood. Quite another kind of folk editing occurred when the equally popular British broadside The Unfortunate Rake went into folk tradition. It depicts the wayward son of a wealthy squires family dying of drink, general dissolution and venereal disease outside St. James Hospital in London. Already wrapped for burial, placed outside the hospital to make room for others, he is discovered by an old friend, to whom he tells his sad story. In some versions he also asks that his younger brother be warned to avoid the same fate; in most versions he requests a proper funeral with music, a procession and pallbearers. The song became very popular and quickly entered the song traditions of the sailors, who apparently felt some kinship of spirit for the poor victim. Naturally, however, they would not have been interested in singing about some rich kid from the country, so they inserted themselves in the role, and sang of a dying sailor lying wrapped in his cerements-to-be outside St. James Hospital, who then tells a shipmate what has happened and requests a proper sailors funeral with fife and drums and pallbearers. The song came to the American shore both in broadside (printed) form and in the oral traditions of the sailors, and it was quickly taken up by virtually all male-oriented occupations whose members often found themselves (or envisioned and hoped themselves) in the big city and threatened by the ravages of good old male behavior. The song came West, of course, and the interesting part of its history for our purposes is that it became The Dying Cowboy or The Streets of Laredo, now chastely bereft of its direct references to venery (replaced by the euphemistic it was first down to Rosies), but still insisting on a military funeral with fife and drum. Most Americans know the song only in its cowboy version, and most are unaware of its origin, which tells us something about the way this song has made itself at home in our preconceptions. Most people are also unaware that the song went in other geographical directions as well, and has continued to have an interesting history: it now exists in black tradition in the deep South as The Saint James Infirmary Blues, a fact which should keep us in mind of the subtle and powerful ways of regionalization. This rhetorical process can be nicely illustrated by following a song along its way west. Although some songs change widely as they pass through oral tradition, others, with minimal textual adjustment, achieve a considerable alteration in meaning or in application. The following was originally 39
a hymn, written by an Englishman, which became very popular among Americans partly, one imagines, because of its capacity to suggest with its rich and fertile imagery the promised land of the West, no doubt for many the Willamette Valley, goal of most of the Oregon Trail trekkers. One verse and the chorus of the hymn are sung as follows: Ive reached the land of corn and wine And all its riches now are mine; Here shines undimmed one blissful day, For all my night has passed away. Oh Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land, As on thy highest mount I stand: I look away across the sea Where mansions are prepared for me, And view the shining glory shore My heaven, my home, forevermore. By the time some of the settlers got to the Plains or the deserts, however, some were giving out, financially and physically. They settled down on ground quite unlike Beulah Land, and tried to make a go of it anyway. In their own generation, it is said that they began to express their frustration and disappointment in parody form; in any case, it is clear that their inheritors used the parodies as a form of local chauvinism: look at what weve licked! Weve reached the land of dying wheat Where nothing grows for man to eat, Where the wind it blows the fiery heat Across the plains so hard to beat. Dakota Land, South Dakota Land, As on thy burning soil I stand; I look away across the plains And wonder why it never rains, Till Gabriel blows his trumpet sound And says the rains just gone around. A New Mexico version stresses the wind, an incessant plague in that area, and ends with a couple of lines which are humorous for what they do not use as a rhyme word: This is a land of dusty roads, Of rattlesnakes and horny toads; It never rains, it never snows, The doggone wind just blows and blows. 40
New Mexico so fertile and rich We think you are a honey. [The last two lines are to the tune of the first line of Oh Christmas Tree.] In Kansas, or so it is said, the farms and homesteads were so far apart that parents despaired of ever getting their daughters married. Young women were advised to grab the first person who came along. Naturally, in folklore (though of course not in real life) the Kansas girls become famous as flirts: Oh Kansas girls, dry Kansas girls, With laughing eyes and sunny curls; Theyll sing and dance and flirt and play Til some sodbuster comes that way; Theyll grab him at the dugout door And stick by him forevermore. By the time the pioneers (those who could make it) arrived in western Oregon, they were beginning to see more rain and water than they had ever imagined possible. While the dry Dakotas may have struck the imagination as a hellish contrast to Beulah Land, mucky Oregon seemed like an overdose of Gods plenty. Moreover, we can tell that the Oregonians, while continuing the Beulah Land parody for their own reasons, had already become acquainted with the Kansas version, for they parodied as well its absurd suggestions that a girl could have sunny curls (even today, the sun is referred to in western Oregon as a UFO). In addition, we note that the courting situation is now a different one: Oregonians were beginning to settle in small towns, or in clusters of relatively nearby farmsteads. Their problem was not finding their daughter a husband, for the place was overrun with men. The bigger problem was keeping the house from filling up with mud: Ive reached the land of rain and mud, Where flowers and trees so early bud; Where it rains and rains both night and day For in Oregon [pronounced O-ree-gun] it rains always. O Oregon, wet Oregon As through thy rain and mud I run; I stand and look out all around And watch the rain soak in the ground, Look up and see the waters pour And wish it wouldnt rain no more. Oh Oregon girls, wet Oregon girls, With laughing eyes and soggy curls; 41
Theyll sing and dance both night and day Til some webfooter comes their way: Theyll meet him at the kitchen door Saying, Wipe your feet or come no more. Other songs, of course, are of very local origin; rather than reforming a song from some other area to local specifications, these grow directly out of local pride or frustration (usually the latter). Consider this verse and chorus from a song composed and later widely sung among the Mormon settlers of the area called Utahs Dixie, a hot, desert, forbidding land into which they were sent by their church. The area emerges in Mormon lore time and time again as a totally impossible place to live; yet the Mormon pioneers with dedication (if not aplomb) did settle the place and cultivate the land. They even raised grapes and made wine until the Church ruled against the use of alcohol. One relatively high personage in the church, J. Golden Kimball, is said to have declared in a sermon that if he had owned both St. George and Hell, he would have sold St. George and moved to Hell. When directed by higher Authority to go back and apologize for his remarks, he is supposed to have said: My brothers and sisters, the president of the Church has asked that I take back my intemperate remarks about the heat you experience here, but its so damn hot today, I aint gonna do it! More of Kimball later; here it should suffice to say that the settlers of the St. George area appear not to have been overjoyed by their task in the early days. Thus, it is difficult to accept Austin Fifes rhapsodic description of this song as epic, for it has much more parody than prophecy. Nonetheless, there is that subtle note of Just look what our parents and we were able to put up 5 with about it that cannot be denied. A reading of Juanita Brookss works gives a fuller account of these feelings and triumphs, but nothing functions as poetically as the lines: St. George and the Drag-on The sun it is so scorching hot it makes the water sizz, sir, And the reason that it is so hot is just because it is, sir. The wind with fury here doth blow, that when we plant or sow, sir, We place one foot upon the seeds and hold them till they grow, sir. Chorus: Mesquite, soaproot, prickly pears and briars: 6 St. George ere long will be a place that everyone admires. Their witty way of dealing with their churchs call to settle in the desert tells us far more about the local Mormon spirit than we could ever expect to learn from official documents. 42
The use of humor as a means of expressing frustration or even fear and hatred is well reported in the literature of psychology, but less often recognized in folklore, partly I think because many have taken folklore to be a 7 somewhat benign sort of expression for use in home entertainment. Equally interesting is the extent to which an apparently humorous folksong can give voice as well to factually accurate images of historical issues which grew out of deeply shared emotions. Whether the events in the following song ever really happened as reported is quite beside the point, for we know from the many examples of anti-Chinese activity from Rock Springs, Wyoming, to the Mother Lode country of California that the sentiments here dramatized are accurate. Chinese were considered superfluous, and on this basis laws were enacted and outrages perpetrated against them. Moreover, it was precisely in the courtroom where the technical crux of the matter was experienced, for the Chinese in most western states were forbidden to testify against white persons. This song is thusalbeit unwittinglythe cameo of a reality in the frontier experience, articulated in the humor of those whose own citizenship was clouded by the guilt of their denial of it to others. Judge Duffy Old John Martin Duffy was a judge of the court In a small mining town in the West; Although he knew nothin bout rules of the law, At judgin he was one of the best. One night in the winter a murder occurred, And the blacksmith was accused of the crime; We caught him red-handed and gave him three trials But the verdict was guilty each time. Now he was the only good blacksmith we had And we wanted to spare him his life, So Duffy stood up in the court like a lord And with these words he settled the strife: I move we dismiss himhes needed in town. Then he spoke out these words, which have gained him renown: We have two Chinese laundrymen, everyone knows 8 Why not save the poor blacksmith and hang one of those? Probably the best known kind of folksong in the West is the cowboy song, although it is difficult to call all of them regionalized, since many were written by former cowboys after they had retired and moved back to Chicago. But the poetic context and dramatic focus of the cowboy song make it an almost archetypical expression of western values. The solitary and geo43
graphically mobile male figure who cares more about his pard than about his lady-love, who works himself to exhaustion and quits only if his boss is unfair, who protects his horse and his equipment more than his own body, who is basically a moral puritan (except when he is on a spree), who is easily embarrassed but will shoot a liar without hesitationthis character is still so powerful in our imaginations that even a photo of him can be used to sell movies, cigarettes, and even politicians. His power as a rhetorical or iconic image can hardly be questioned. The song The Tenderfoot appears to ridicule the greenhorn, and ends with the advice to others that before taking up the cowboy life, one should first slit his throat (an ironic self-parody, for the song would have been sung by and for those who had already passed through the greenhorn stage); The Zebra Dun, conversely, tells of a man who only appears to be a tenderfoot (he looked so awful foolish and he talked so awful round, we thought he was a greenhorn just escaped from town), but who successfully stays on the wild bronco the boys give him and thereby earns a job as ranch foreman. In No Use for the Women, a young cowboy is attracted to a lady of questionable repute; when a gambler insults her picture, the young man shoots him and leaves town, followed by the inevitable posse made up of friends and acquaintances. His friend, the persona of the song, says: All through the long night we trailed him, Through mesquite and thick chaparral, And I couldnt help think of that woman As I saw him pitch and fall: If shed been the pal that she should have, He might have been raising a son, Instead of out there on the prairie 9 To die by the rangers gun. In the chorus, the cowboy asks that his friends bury him out on the prairie, where the coyotes can howl over his grave. In another equally well-known song the cowboy asks that his friends not bury him on the lone prairie, but instead see that he is taken back home where his women folk can cry over his grave (of course, in good cowboy style they bury him on the lone prairie anyhow). In one, a cowboy rubs hair tonic on his bare chest so that he can look like a hero, and dies in a gunfight, still hairless. In others, friends try to save each other from being trampled in stampedes, or keep each other company on the long trail rides. Some of the songs were apparently sung to quiet the cattle at night, butas with lullabyswe can easily suspect that the soothing was often self-directed. Once in a while there is a glimpse of real local detailsuch as in the Mormon Cowboy, where the persona decides to leave a party when he sees the others are drinking; the music was 44
provided by a colored man with his guitarI can hear him singing yet. This mixture of sentimentality with toughness, naive respect for women and raw misogyny, piety and blasphemy that we find in the whole range of cowboy song provides us with an extremely evocative character portrait of a type still very much alive in American culture and American literature. The stereotype of the cowboy as macho (a term, by the way, which Anglos use in a much more limited way than do our Hispanic countrymen) appears often in humorous understatement. This is the reverse of the hyperbole we find in the Tall Tales (below), but it serves a similar purpose: it reveals that what is being said is only a part of the message. Left up to the listener is the question of where reality really lies. As I was a-roundin Scorpion Butte on a routine cattle inspection, Who should I meet but Hairtrigger Pete, ridin hell-bent for election. The lion he was ridin at full speed was kickin up plenty of dirt, He used a Bowie knife for a bit and a rattlesnake for a quirt. The wildcat he carried under his arm chewed the loose end of the reins, A gila monster for a charm was drug by a barb-wire chain. A six-gun he carried in his right handI thought the durn fool would crack her, But all he did was spit in my face a pound of chaw tabacker. I asked him where hes goinwhat was his hurry all about; 10 He says A tough guy just hit town and hes just run me out!
MNCHAUSENS, LIARS, AND LOCAL CHARACTERS
By this time it should be clear that meaningful folk expressions about the West are not found in a single genre of folklore, for there are always overlaps and interchanges with other forms, such as Legend and local Tall Tale. In the latter, there is more than a humorously hyperbolic text in question, for most of the best texts we have available were narrated by people who themselves relished the role of the local liar. Here is a genre in which the performer is a living part of the tradition, and usually tells the stories as having happened to himself (even when the scholar can show without question that the story is several generations old). Often the storyteller is a local marginal character, a retired farmer or an early settler who has been bypassed by younger and more aggressive folks who do not appreciate what the good old days were all about. The local liar, then, is often not at the center of his communitys current life in practical terms, but is capable of projecting his communitys values in a way that all insiders will recognize (because they know where reality leaves off and hyperbole begins, and they also know what it is that local taste considers worthy of hyperbolic treat45
ment). In many ways, the western Tall Tale represents the inverse of myth (that is, the reverentially received and accepted story of the great, the powerful, the central): instead of describing the exploits of heroes and founders, or even of cowboys who may stereotypically characterize values which many people believe to be central to their culture, the Mnchausens glorify mistakes, coincidences, and odd occurrences, which are at the center of local values. They brag about local geographical or meteorological conditions which no one likes, they extoll the use of outmoded equipment, they savor the details of patently impossible events, and most of all they love to do this in front of an audience made up in part of local folks who know the score and in part of innocent outsiders who do not. In Wyoming lives an animal which looks very much like a jackrabbit except that it has horns like an antelope. The Jackalope, said to be a cross between an antelope and a jackrabbit, is very shy, and breeds only during lightning flashes in high desert rainstorms. Jackalopes are rarely seen except in taxidermic form, and their existence is thus attested to mainly by the eyewitness accounts of those who have dedicated their lives to the study of the beast (one of these, Roger Welsch, of Lincoln, Nebraska, was interviewed at length on national television by Charles Kuralt, and many viewers took the program as proof that such an animal actually existed). One imagines, however, that in the desert country of Wyoming and Montana, the question of veracity has less to do with the existence of the jackalope than it has to do with greening the visitors. The fact that the animal has been known for years in the alpine areas of Europe as the Hasenbock is no doubt of little interest or importance to the ranchers of Wyoming. Folk exaggeration runs from these examples of visual misinformation to lies that are acted out while the naive person watches (a mechanic pulls his hand back from a battery as if shocked: Did it get you? he is asked by a concerned observer. Nope, I was too fast for it.), to lies that come up casually in conversation after some peculiar action has taken place. As well, there are artful lies told in the first person (Mnchausens) and in the third person (Tall Tales), both of which will be discussed here in greater detail. First, however, let us admit that our main aim is not to make sober distinctions between truth and falsehood in western culture; to begin with, truth is too hard to capture. How would anyone describe the redwoods or the canyons, or the colors, or the heat/cold extremes for someone who had never experienced them? Indeed, the truth is hard enough to deal with: in Oregon, if an angler catches a sturgeon under three feet long or over six, it must be returned to the water. Explain that one without smiling to your relatives in Connecticut. There are, moreover, cases where a lie may also be simultaneously the truth; the story is told in Utah that after the Army took over Zion and began to force Mormons to renounce polygamy, one Swedish 46
immigrant left his three wives in the cemetery when he went to apply for U.S. citizenship so that he could say honestly of his wives, Vell, sir, dey are resting in da churchyard, and thus avoid getting rid of them. In an interchange between two residents of southern Utah, I heard that the farmers in St. George feed their chickens cracked ice in the summertime to keep them from laying hard-boiled eggs. Do you remember that time when the power went off? Why we had nothing but hard-boiled eggs to eat in this town for six weeks! When such a conversation starts up, especially when there are young people or strangers present, it can easily turn into an orgy of exaggeration. One hears that the cows have to keep one foot on their hay to keep it from being blown away, that a heavy logging chain hung from a post tells how hard the wind is blowing (when links begin snapping off the end and the chain is straight out, its a fair breeze), that one time the wind blew the streetlight and headlight beams off the roads (but of course that was back when the lights werent as strong as they are now), or that the wind blew all the dirt from around a well or a prairie-dog hole, leaving the hole standing in the air. On the Olympic Peninsula in Washington a farmer will tell you how his rain barrel overflowed during one storm; the water running over the lip of the barrel washed out the dirt under one side and the barrel tipped over: You know, it rained into the bunghole faster than the water could flow out the open end of that barrel, and before I knew it the water got all compacted in there, and it kept flowing out for a couple of months after the storm was over! Watered my stock on that one barrel the whole summer! I can show you the barrel itself if you dont believe me. Reub Long, a loquacious central Oregon rancher once said, We measure humidity by the amount of sand in the air. When it rains, we keep our hired man inwe want all the water on the land. The same rancher once told anyone who would listen that he had never seen rain until he was eighteen years old, and then he had run outside to see what the strange sound was of something hitting the tin roof of the ranchhouse. You know, one of those big desert raindrops hit me on the back of the head and knocked me cold. They had to throw six buckets of sand in my face to bring me around! The rapidly changing weather and resultant difficulties of raising livestock were never subjects of complaint in Longs conversations, but, as we have seen with other expressions above, the source of considerable humor through exaggeration. The reason Ive been able to produce some fast horses is that, where I graze them, they have to feed at thirty miles an hour to get enough to eat. One of his favorite stories, especially in front of strangers, was his account of how he tried to get rid of rats on a ranch he once bought. He had heard that if you caught one of them and painted it white, the others would think it was a ghost and leave the place. Long and a group of 47
buckaroo friends finally caught one of the rats at night, and to keep it from escaping, took it out into the middle of the road. Then, while they kneeled on it, they argued over which was the best way to apply the paint: with the grain of the hair or against it (did they want a shiny finish or a rough one?). While all this was in progress, someone came down the road in a car, and of course stopped at the sight of this strange crowd (one imagines that the stranger in the car in the story functions as the equivalent of the stranger listening to the story). What in the world are you doing there, for Gods sake? Why, were whitewashing a rat, replied Long testily, whereupon the stranger turned around in haste and drove quickly out of sight. Once a stranger asked Long if he didnt feel isolated, if he didnt have the need to 11 travel. Travel? he asked. Why, Im already here. This mixture of local chauvinism with exaggeration is the hallmark of western Tall Tale lore, and it continues to this day ever fresh: after the dry summer of 1984, a rancher in central Nebraska told Roger Welsch that he had had to go out and buy two bales of hay just to prime his baler. It is safe to say that every definable area in the West has at least one of 12 these creative liars, but the problem has been generally that their own families consider them an embarrassment and keep them hidden from sight. Occasionally a researcher inadvertently discovers such a person, and then we get a glimpse of an important character who would otherwise have remained unknown. Such was the case when a student, Susan Mullin, persisted over the objections of family members that Arthur cant be relied on to tell the truth; hes getting on in years, you know, so dont believe anything he tells you. What Mullin eventually collected was a tremendous range of Tall Tales, as recalled by Arthur Belknap from the first-person performances of his grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Finn (who had claimed l3 being the model for Mark Twains Huck Finn). Among Belknaps performances of his grandfathers daily narratives 14 was the well-known Liar too busy to lie (Motif # X905.4; AT 1920B). Some Eugene newspapermen had come up the McKenzie River to interview him and collect some of his lies, but he was too busy to lie to them that day. My best friend, Old Man Pepiot died just last night, and Ive been up all night working on his coffin. Now if you boys will just come back another time, why Id be happy to tell you some lies. The newspapermen of course apologized profusely for their intrusion, and went on down the road, where the first person they met wasnaturallyOld Man Pepiot. Other yarns also found widely in the Mnchausen tradition feature Grandad being caught in a tree or in a split stump (had to go all the way back to the house and get an ax to come chop himself loose), one which explained the great hunter bringing back only one wolf hide (he had been treed by a whole pack, and each time he shot one, the rest ate him up, so that finally, al48
though he had shot twenty, he had only one pelt to show for it, but of course used the hide as proof of the whole story), a version of the Great Hunt (hunter, with very few shots, kills an unbelievable amount of game, and often falls in water only to emerge with his pants full of fish) which was narrated only when outsidershopefully game wardenswere present so that when they said Do you know who we are?State game wardens! he could reply You know who I am? Huck Finn, the biggest damn liar on the McKenzie! Probably his best known story locally, outside the immediate circle of family and friends, concerns the naming of Finn Rock, a large monolith which stands beside the McKenzie River Highway. Local story (of course originally narrated by B. F. Finn himself) tells how Finn moved the rock to its present position by using a new buckskin harness which stretched as he drove his skittish team out across the roaring McKenzie. That didnt bother Grandad none, though; he just hung the harness on a tree, and when the sun came out, why over come the rock! said Arthur Belknap in one conversation. Later, when asked to repeat the story, he claimed that the stretching harness episode occurred when Grandad Finn brought a wagon-load of groceries home through the Oregon rain. The wagon got mired in the muck along the way, while the wet buckskin harness continued to stretch. That didnt bother Grandad none, though, said Belknap to Mullin, he just hung the harness on the gatepost and when the sun came out, why along come the wagon. With just two versions of the same story from the same narrator, we begin to understand more clearly one of the standard maxims of folklore study: no single version can be said to be the original or the correct one, for the narrators themselves are accustomed to using them in various ways depending on the circumstances. And the mere fact that there is a particular Finn Rock whose placement is explained by the story solves nothing: first of all, it is quite evident from its size and placement that this monolith has never been moved by anybody, and that the river is entirely unfordable at this point anyway; secondly, a bit of folklore research shows that the motif of the stretching buckskin is a standard element in Mnchausen lore, that it is extremely widespread, and that it predates the existence of B. F. Finn. Belknaps formulaic phrasing, however, places him in the long tradition of skilled oral performers from times previous to Homer up through the present. I hope it is clear that both the exaggerations and the understatement of proportionsespecially in terms not particularly flattering to the teller provide us with a very special style of hyperbole that is distinctly not found in the various sanitized productions of professional writers trying to satisfy the wishes of schoolteachers and politicians without enraging parents and voters. I refer here obviously to the well-meaning but phoney tall tales 49
promulgated by James Stevens and others and found chiefly in schoolrooms, not in the oral traditions of loggers or farmers, or anyone else. That Stevens knew better is apparent from his Big Jim Turner (1948), a novel flavored with the saltier songs and tales of the actual folk tradition. Even from as early as the fur-trapping era, western writers such as George Frederick Ruxton and Lewis H. Garrard had seasoned their writings with folklore, as a glance at a collection like B. A. Botkins A Treasury of Western Folklore (1951) will show. Westerners such as J. Frank Dobie, Stewart H. Holbrook, Mody C. Boatright and C. L. Sonnichsen have gained literary reputations from their accounts of folk traditions, and mostpractically allwestern authors have used folklore or fakelore or a bit of both in their works. The schoolroom has been so dominated by phoney materials, however, that the genuine seldom receives attention, and there are very few studies of the folk tradition (both the real article and the plastic) as it has inspired and been incorporated in the literature of the West. The West can be better understood by recognizing what it was that prompted writers like Stevens to manufacture a factitious folk tradition. Paul Bunyan was not born in the woodsat least not the Paul Bunyan we came to know, and perhaps for the wrong reasons love, in the fourth gradebut in the minds of authors who wanted to satisfy a demand of a much more political variety: the hero chock full of brag and fight and patriotism. The Paul Bunyan stories, along with Pecos Bill and other manufactured all-good and all-powerful western pseudo-heroes, were well laid to rest by folklorist Richard Dorson long ago, but they still keep showing up in the lesson plans of schoolteachers who probably would not mind dealing with the subtleties of style found in the real Mnchausen stories, but who apparently cannot incorporate stories like the few Bunyan yarns that actually exist into their curriculastories such as the one where Bunyan gets scared of heights while topping a tree in winter, and to get down quickly 15 urinates and slides down the icicle. Nor are they prepared to defend to the parents of their children a story which was told to me by the scion of an upstanding southern Utah Mormon family: My uncle tried ranching in the Dixie country, but his wife came from the East, and she wanted a garden and a lawn. Almost impossible, you know, in that country. So he had to take time to train himself a team of lizards. Every day, hed take them down to the Virgin (river) and fill em up on water, then bring em back up into the yard and beat the piss out of em. If nothing else, the imagery of violence, along with the expression of marital and agricultural frustration, combined with what I would call an economy (if not a chasteness) of wording, constitute folk poetry at its best. But then, the people who actually perform these yarns are not interested in creating national heroes or acceptable lesson plans: they are engaged in expressing locally perceived 50
truths using a very special kind of humorous hyperbole. It is hot and dry on the Utah and Nevada desert; it is unbelievably rainy on the Olympic Peninsula; the wind does blow furiously over much of the West. It is the shared attitudes and emotions on those bothersome subjects that reach expression through the Mnchausen, the yarn-spinner, and the local folk raconteur. One of the best living examples of this kind of expression was J. Golden Kimball, an important, but not highest-level, functionary in the Mormon Church. For his people, he became the epitome of faithful membership and individual pride. Not a Mnchausen, Kimball was nonetheless a marginal figure in much the same way as were the other characters mentioned thus far: not in the sense of being distant from the values and concerns of society, but, living in an ambiguous situation, speakers of those values in relief. Local characters like J. Golden Kimball perform a tightrope act between acceptable and non-acceptable, between religious and secular, spiritual and worldly expressions of behavior. The local drunk who is the only one known to speak the truth, the local clown, the town idiot, the village wiseacre, the practical jokerall of these provide traditional ways of expressing things which everyone feels or knows, but no one wants to be caught saying in public. Kimball, a member of the Council of Seventies, had been an animal-driver, and his colorful language and direct way of speaking were not always comfortable to the Mormon Church. He disliked pomposity and hypocrisy, and was quite uncomfortable with the citified bureaucracy of his growing church. When church President Heber Grant was afraid Kimball would disgrace the Church during a national radio broadcast from Temple Square, he wrote out the text of the inspirational talk Kimball was to present. But when the tall, high-voiced ex-muleskinner rose and began haltingly to read the crabbed writing, he turned and on national radio said Good Hell, Hebe, I cant read this damn thing! Eyewitnesses, among them the most faithful of Mormons, not only tell the anecdote with glowing admiration, but recall that afterwards the streets were lined with wellwishers who shouted encouragement to Kimball as, chastised, he walked to his home in the Avenues district. When a friend warned him that he might be cut off the Church (excommunicated) for his swearing, he is supposed to have said, Hell, they cant cut me off the ChurchI repent too damn fast! Almost run over by hotrodders near Temple Square, he is said to have shouted You sonsabitches! Have you no respect for the priesthood? Sitting on a public works committee for the city, he fought against what he considered to be frivolous improvements; in one case, speaking against building a bridge across the Jordan River (west of Salt Lake) where an easy ford existed, he said, We dont need a bridge over the Jordan; why, I can piss half-way across the Jordan. The chairman of the committee gavelled him into silence and said Brother Golden, I believe youre out of order! 51
I know Im out of order, was his immediate comeback; if I wasnt out of 16 order, I could piss all the way across the Jordan River! It is the stories, and not Kimball himself, which give us a hint as to his cultural importance (although, as mentioned, the intentional performance of the local character indicates in itself a willingness to assume a traditional role of formulaic behavior); Kimball himself seems to have been both aware of his role and wary of others enjoyment of it, for when asked if he wanted to hear the latest J. Golden story, he told a neighbor, Hell no! Seems like everytime something happens, they blame it either on me or on Mae West. He is still best remembered for his salty remarks in church, where strong language is officially discouraged, and for provocative remarks to his neighbors in a culture where neighborliness is a virtue: Some son-ofa-bitch stole my lawnmower. Wonder if its over here. Somehow, characters like Kimball play for white communities a role in real life similar to that of Coyote or the trickster in many Native American cultures, for they provide expression for that which simmers just under the surface, but for which the ordinary person has only a limited vocabulary. There are, of course, stock characters who appear more in folk narratives than in the real daily life of the West, although they certainly have their origins in shared ideals of behavior or sterotypes of culturally valid roles. In folk narratives these originals are intensifiedas they also are in popular literature: the Pioneer Wife or Mother (to say nothing of the archetypical Pioneer himself, with leather pants, beard, rifle, jutting chin and purposeful stride), the timid-but-triumphant man (often a nice greenhorn), the Doctor and the Itinerant Preacher, the Whore with the Heart of Gold, the Schoolmarm, the Town Tough, the Gambler, the Law Man, the Outlaw, the Villain Businessman, the Drunk. We needed to have them all, for they represent the variety of values we have developed in the West. Alongside the Chaste Schoolmarm and the Moral Minister, the Helpful Doctor, and the Brave Upholder of the Lawroles we have liked to see ourselves in and have thus cast many of our heroes and relatives in-we have also gambled on moving west, have sold ourselves (not always to the highest bidder), have prided ourselves at being tough, independent, and outside the Law (one of the reasons why Outlaws are more positively viewed than are criminals in our folklore: we fear Dillingers, but we kind of think that Jesse Jameses are all right; in any case we take no chances and hang a good high-powered rifle in our pickup truck). And although we may disapprove of drunkenness, somehow the drunk performs something of great sensitivity for us, perhaps because he becomes almost an icon of human weakness, indulgence, and pathetic frustration (preferable, in our society, to the suicide that would be considered the honorable response in other cultures). And especially when the drunk can be contrasted with others more nor52
mal who nonetheless fall below our expectations, the folk narratives have a way of articulating a mixture of irony, social criticism, and optimism for reform that quite stuns the imagination. In more recent years, Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason have capitalized on these traditional responses in the American audience; oral tradition has used the motif without pause. Still current in Reub Longs repertoire was the story of a frontier judge who was such a drunkard that one of the local businessmen, a prissy newcomer from the East, was moved to run against him in an election. On election day, as the citizens gathered to begin voting, the judge staggered out onto the porch in front of his office and said, I really feel sorry for you people today. You havent got much of a choice, because youve got to decide between a drunkard and a fool. Theres only one thing thats worth remembering as you vote today, friends, and its this: with a drunkard, you know that at least sometimes hes sober. And of course this is the same cluster of motifs cleverly brought together in Lee Marvins portrayal of the drunken gunfighter in the film Cat Ballou, an excellent example of the modern relationship between a popular medium and folk tradition.
LEGENDS AND OTHER TRUTHS
Unlike Mnchausens, legends are stories, or idea clusters, passed along by people who actually believe either that they are true or that at least they are very likely to be true, usually because they have come from unimpeachable sources like ones spouse or colleague. In some regards, legends are like rumors, and they pass through the same channels of the culture, propelled by our fascination with the almost unbelievable. Poodles are exploded in microwaves by old ladies ignorant of modern appliances, spiders are found in uncombed hairdos, escaped mental patients with hooks on arms accost people on lovers lanes, countless innocent women from the country are embarrassed by urban chefs into paying for recipes to Red Velvet Cakes, and 17 so on. I speak in the plural here, for unlike rumorswhich after all usually die out after a whilelegends live on and propagate themselves astronomically. It would be hard enough to believe that some old lady blew up her poodle in her microwave unless I had heard the original account of it from the wife of the doctor in Seattle who was summoned to treat her for the resultant heart attack. Even if I had an unquestionable report on the incident (well, the doctor, under close questioning by his wife, recanted and said that it was actually a colleague on the other side of Seattle), the reader has undoubtedly also heard an original account, also from someone who knows one of the principals. What are we to conclude, then: that there is an epidemic of little old ladies stuffing their poodles into ovens all over the country, or that the storyeven if it is based on a real occurrencehas somehow gotten away from the act and has begun to have a life of its own? 53
A folklorist would opt for the latter, carefully not calling the original a lie (or, God forbid, a myth, as it would be called by a journalist to indicate its falsehood), but noting, and then analyzing, its currency and function in oral tradition. Clearly the story has some function in our society, or it would not persist. Among other things, it portrays an older woman as ignorant of a newer electronic way of life, both a sexist and an agist stereotype which is found abundantly on other levels and in other kinds of expressions in our culture. Without going further into the fascinating array of modern urban legendsalready well discussed by Jan H. Brunvandlet me focus this kind of attention on an earlier, yet persistent legend of the West, that of Bigfoot, or Sasquatch. In this constellation of motifs and narratives, one central idea continues to emerge: alive in the mountains of the West is a kind of primate creature with shaggy hair and primitive build, one who is reminiscent of gorillas or larger apes but who apparently has some kind of social system like our own. The Bigfoots (the plural form is unclear, but I use here a parallel to the plurals of Webfoot and Tenderfoot) try to keep to themselves, but they are troubled by our civilization, and are often described as performing selected deeds of revenge (an empty oil barrel is found crushed by a logging crew, a Bigfoot steps out of the bushes and scratches the top of a government pickup truck, unsuspecting campers are scared off by a screaming Bigfoot, and so on). On occasion they kidnap a human, taking the prisoner back to their camp. Both male and female humans are usually forced to accept Bigfoot sexual attentions, and are seldom released afterwards. Police and others who have gone in search of missing persons are said to have had mysterious accidents, or to have disappeared themselves. The stories seem to cluster along certain mountain areas: the Siskiyous in northern California, the Cascades in West Central Oregon and Washington, and the coastal ranges of British Columbia, including Vancouver Island. One explanation for the persistence of these stories which cannot be ruled outespecially since there are many eyewitness reports by very credible persons, and since a number of anthropologists have busied themselves with the details of the issueis that there is such a creature. Holding this possibility in one hand, however, let us still look into the question of what function such a character would have in the folklore of the West, for it may be that we have somehow needed this creature, whether it actually exists or not, for the expression of something important in our culture. The reader will probably already have remembered the existence of similar creatures in the Old English Beowulf, and a few minutes reflection will also scare up from memory the Yahoos of Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift. What may not be readily known is that there is a wealth of wild man of the forest stories across northern Europe dating from very early times; 54
one sees reference to them in medieval woodcuts, in tapestries, and even in statuary. The wild men are depicted as covered with wavy, unruly hair, matted with twigs and bits of grass and leaves; the wild women are a bit less hairy and very voluptuous. They are shown as intruding on the affairs of civilized human beings by angrily rushing out of the woods to kidnap people. It may be that they represent, at least in some cases, a metaphorical statement about non-Christian or non-religious people, or even incarnations of the Devil; in other cases, they may represent earlier gods of the field and wood who were put into the shade (or out of business) by the advent of Christianity. But in all cases, they actually pictorialize a clash between the civilized and cultivated world and the uncivilized, uncultivated world. In other words, one of their functions seems to be to epitomize a condition of human existence against which civilization measures itself, and without which it has little meaning. Indeed, the image is at least as old as the Gilgamesh epic. In New England, especially in Maine, the legend of Yoho Cove (certainly not named by Jonathan Swift) tells how a local geographical area received its name when one of those Yohos came out of the woods and kidnapped a human girl who was out huckleberrying with her family. She was forced to mate with the Yoho, and escaped some years later, the Yoho running after her, ripping their child in half and throwing one half after her 18 departing boat. The same story is told in Kentucky, according to Leonard 19 Roberts, where the creature is called Yeahoh. All of the American stories stress the ape-like qualities of the animal, in contrast to the distinctly human attributes of the European variety, and they all have much in common (viewed in retrospect) with the images which have made King Kong such a compelling character in the popular media. What is there in the American West that would nurture such stories as if they had local roots? Well, for one thing, the West, with all its reducing of the land (and people) to cultivated properties, also featured a number of distinctly uncivilized central episodes, among them the treatment of the Indians during the change of ownership. In addition, the frontier was a mixture of excitement and danger, a kind of tenuous boundary between the known and the unknown. There were indeed Boggarts and Boogers which would come and get you; at least the imagination seems to have created that scene, and the paranoid, almost fanatic way in which wolves, rattlesnakes, and Indians were ruthlessly attacked, when for the most part they kept trying to move out of the way, is a vivid indication that the Order brought about on the frontier was paid for with a large dose of mental disquietude. It is also worth saying that many of the common motifs of the Bigfoot stories are also common in racial/racist narratives, beliefs, and jokes: uncivilized and aggressive behavior, strong and offensive smell, ape-like looks and movements, primitive culture, and 55
a taste for white women, to name only a few. Yes, whether there really are Bigfoots or not, we would have reinvented and reused them in the West, I believe, for our ghosts seem to require animation and narrative performance. Legends allow the scholar a chance at least to speculate about what sorts of emotions lie under the western surface nicely mythologized by historians but uncorked and set loose every now and then in oral narratives and by good writers. Not coincidentally, many of the local legends in the West have to do with monsters or mysterious animals who live under lakes (again, European antecedents come easily to mind, and they must surely have provided the cultural willingness to believe in the phenomenon), and what a strikingly appropriate image for further reflection and deeper scrutiny: the unfathomed lake with its hidden monster which comes into view every now and then and eats someone or bashes a boat to smithereens (or, more recently, swallows up a flight of Air Force jets without a belch). Jung would have been more than pleased to find this dream-stuff so widespread in oral tradition presented as living truth, for in psychological terms, thats precisely what it is. Bear Lake, Mono Lake, Crater Lake, Lake Chelan, even fresh water lakes along the Oregon coast: there is hardly a lake in the West that does not have its monster, or at least a subterranean passage that links it to another lake that does. Legends about founding fathers and the origins of place names are long-lived and similarly widespread. Is it really true that Brigham Young, on seeing the Salt Lake Valley for the first time, said This is the place? We may never know, but a vignette of Youngs prophetic spirit is certainly portrayed in the story (never mind that he had already heard about the place and had a bet on with Jim Bridger), and it is that element of course which gives the legend its force. It is also that which gives non-Mormon detractors, perhaps jealous of Youngs alleged sexual energies, the opportunity to say the line was actually spoken by one of Youngs wives, who really said, Brigham! This is not the place ! We may never know; fortunately for the folklorist, both utterances are important documents of real feelings in the area. Other place names have equally curious stories about them. Is it true that the French voyageurs and trappers were so starved for feminine company that in their fantasies the Grand Tetons had a symbolic force still carried by their name? What about other geographical features in the West which were given their names before anyone ever thought a woman or a preacher might read a map? Rooster Rock on the Columbia was clearly named for its phallic form, but by coincidence that word does not carry the automatic sexual association it did in earlier times. Not so lucky are the various Squaw-Teat Buttes about the West; most of them have been changed 56
by polite boards of geographers solicitous of formal standards of public decency, and are now known by more antiseptic, if less objectionable names. Probably because changing a name tends to change or qualify our deeper sense of feeling in local history, local people almost always reject these refinements, and go on using the older original terms along with the legends which provide their pedigree. A spot in Harney County, Oregon, is known by the term Whorehouse Meadows, because in earlier times an entrepreneur brought temporary quarters and fancy ladies out to provide for the wants of cattle and sheep men in the vicinity. In more recent years, the Bureau of Land Management quietly substituted Naughty Girl Meadows on its maps, and the U.S. Geographical Names Board tried to adopt the change officially, but an objection was lodged by the Oregon Names Board, which won its case in federal arbitration. Besides the fact that the girls were no naughtier than the boys, everyone locally thought the name change was idiotic because it took away the meaning of the place. Names (and their attached legends) have played a large cultural role in states like Utah, with its distinctive mixture of Indian and Book of Mormon names. The principal cities of Washington are named after Indians or Indian tribes, while the principal cities of Oregon are named after white settlers or the New England towns they came from. Even the brief legend told of Francis W. Pettigrove from Maine and A. L. Lovejoy from Massachusetts tossing a coin to decide if their city would be called Portland or Boston gives us a feel for the times: who was making the decisions, and what was the range of alternatives they allowed themselves? Here is the establishment of a solid New England male protestant stamp on Oregon, portrayed in a tableau scene of incredible economy of image. The various Murder Creeks, Bloody Washes, Bear-tooth Runs, and so on throughout the West also have their legends to give flesh to the name, and in each area the legends do not necessarily agree: Murder Creek, Oregon, was named because of a murder which occurred there, but there are at least six different accounts of who was murdered, and who was guilty (each one, of course, its narrator aware of the others, presents itself as the real one, passed on by a grandfather who knew the sheriff, or who was a school friend of one of the culprits and heard a private confession). The genre has also been used to make fun of places one especially does not like, or to praise places of special value. Walla Walla is supposedly the place they loved so well they named it twice; but one also hears that the name came about during a ritual bathing after the local tribes annual bean festival: the chief, waist-deep in water, broke wind, and the resulting sound, taken to be the chiefs command, was ever after applied to the spot (needless to say this is neither a real Indian legend nor a favorite anecdote of the Walla Walla Chamber of Commerce). Another story from Arizona tells how two grizzled prospectors argued for 57
years about what they would name their desert home. They finally decided to shoot the first person who came their way, then name the place after his last word. The unlucky visitor turned out to be a black cowboy who was duly shot and approached; he raised his head and with his last breath said, 20 You muh. . . . Some of the prominent beliefs found in western folklore include the assumptions behind the legends already cited (that monsters can, and thus probably do, live in deep lakes; that ape-like creatures can exist out of sight of human searchers for one hundred and fifty years; that there are ghosts, haunted houses, lost treasures and mines), as well as constellations of belief and custom like dowsing (finding water, oil, or minerals, even lost objects, by using an object held in the hand). Witching for water is still a widespread phenomenon in the West, sometimes being done by professional well-drillers, whose income, after all, depends on their success. Some western dowsers use two welding rods bent pistol-like, one in each hand, and watch to see where they suddenly move together or cross. Some claim that by using a piece of metal spring or a stick they can witch water from a map (moving in their imaginations over the area depicted there), or while riding along in a car, and some believe they can locate uranium and other metals, and even tell how deep they are. Other belief systems in the West include those of the fishermen along the coast, who still pass on and use a combination of the most ancient and modern beliefs imaginable. Many will not leave post on a Friday, one of the oldest of seafarers beliefs; some place a golden or silver coin under the radar housing (a modern variation of insuring or buying wind by placing a coin under the mast); and almost all fishermen honor Lady Luck in one fashion or another, chiefly by not pushing their luck, too far. If its raining, someone will note that since salmon love fresh water, the fishing will be bound to get better; if the weather starts to clear, someone will just as cheerfully point out that since salmon like warm weather and a rising barometer, the fishing will start to pick up. Neither belief really indicates what the fishermen think about fish behavior (besides, the two beliefs are contrary to each other), but both are based on a shared set of beliefs that encourage fishermen to speak only in positive terms about a change in the fishing; no matter what happens, the fishing will get better. Attitudes toward such animals as the rattlesnake, the coyote, and the wolf must be seen as principally cultural rather than based on cold rational observation, for the same animals appear in Native American tradition with totally different values, and one cannot rationally suggest that the In21 dians did not observe animals closely. The despised coyote, so expendable that he is trapped and shot in great numbers just to get rid of him, is nonetheless so symbolic of something ferocious in nature that his pelt is hung 58
ceremonially on fences in the West (is it simply a warning to other coyotes, la Reub Longs whitewashed rat? or is it, as Richard Poulsen surmises, a 22 deeper matter?). The good animals, that is, the ones which have cheerfully undergone domestication, are treated differently: note the traditional appearance of horses, cats, dogs, and even cows on the tombstones of westerners. Some ranching families in Montana place a cow or steer on every tombstone, and while a large Hereford steer standing over the word MOTHER may at first look a bit odd, it comes into better focus when we see the graves of neighboring ranchers with their singletrees used as flowerpot holders, and branding irons as grave decorations. Inscriptions including the names and pictures of animals indicate the locally valid occupations, interests, hobbies and talents of those buried there. These are not messages to outsiders, least of all to visiting professors, but to members of the local community who can read the language.
FAMILY FOLKLORE
2 3
Family folklore is found throughout the country, of course, but in the West, families are often also the contexts for occupational lore: prominent in the West is the family-operated ranch, where all family members participate in roundup, roping and tying, castration, and branding. One sees a ranch wife on horseback roping an escaping calf, another wife with cigarette dangling sitting on a calf while it is branded and castrated, while her ten-year-old son comes dragging another calf by its neck and forelegs, taking time only to shift his snoose to the other cheek and spit. These would be rare sights in a western movie, but they are not rare in the daily reality of ranchers, especially today, when ranch hands are hard to find and salaries hard to pay. But such a matter is not only a part of reality, it becomes also a part of custom, jargon, gesture, anecdote, and legend. It may not fit the public image of the cowboy, but it accurately expresses local community values about both occupation and family. Women, traditionally discouraged or prevented from coming aboard fishing vessels, are often found as integral units on family-owned and operated fishing boats in the West Coast fishery. This in turn has led to the employment of single women on board otherwise male-operated boats. Skippers who will still assure the listener that one never allows a woman on board are discovered nonetheless to have employed women on their very own boats. One can conclude from such evidence that fishermen are lying, of course, but it is far more likely that their oral traditions are simply carrying a set of values which still exist on one level, even though they may have begun to disappear on another. Attitudes and customs about family relationships can thus affect traditional attitudes 59
on other matters. Folk belief and custom seldom remain static in function, although the spirit of a region may persist for generations. Family legends found all over America testify to the seriousness with which people take their own family myth, or sacred story (the term is not too forced here, I think): stories of how ancestors crossed the ocean or crossed the Plains, why they settled in a certain place, why they left their original homeland, and so on, are not simply homey attempts to capture a few facts of history, but are usually delicately structured cameos of family, regional, religious, and cultural values. Succeeding generations who try to keep their hands clean delight in detailing how their grandparents had to learn to cook with buffalo chips, for it puts a slight reek of sainthood into their own plastic lives. Descendants of the Aurora Colony in Oregon recount how their founder, Dr. Wilhelm Keil, transported the body of his dead son Willie westward in a casket lined with lead and filled with alcohol; it is no wonder that his wagon train, preceded by a German band, had no trouble with the Indians, but in any case their sense of having come on a mission of religious peace and friendshipin contrast to many of their secular contemporariesis a strong feature of their own subsequent evaluation of themselves, even though the Colony as such no longer exists. A number of families in the West tell legends of close calls with the Indians or with large animals. An innocent child is followed all the way to the cabin door by a nice kitty whose footprints later identify it as a large and heavy cougar. A young boy living in the mountain West with no playmates keeps referring to his best friend Amos, who turns out to be not a fantasy friend but a giant rattler who threatens all who dare to come near the boy. A legend found in more than a dozen Northwest families was called Goldilocks on the Oregon Trail by Professor Francis Haines, who spent a large 24 part of his life tracing the story. He found that most of the early families in Oregon had a version of the story in their oral traditions, while none of them was able to find any account of it in the otherwise detailed journals that had been kept on the way West. The story, in its broadest outlines, goes something like this: On their way across the Plains, our familys wagon train was visited several times by the braves of Chief Josephs (or Sitting Bulls or Geronimos) band, who were always trading for provisions, ammunition, or horses. The Chief kept coming back to the wagon train day after day, and it turned out that his attention had been drawn to the cute little blond four-year-old girl who was to become our grandmother. He kept offering the little girls father more and more ponies for her, but the answer was still no. The father kept acting as though an eventual trade might be made, but finally, of course, he told the Chief that it had all been in fun, and that the girl was not for sale at any price. The Chief departed in great
60
sorrow, and the family says to this day that Grandma was almost sold to the Indians. It does seem strange that in families where a journal record was kept of daily temperatures, miles covered, trees sighted on the horizon, rivers crossed, and so on, there would have been no mention of this rather striking event. Even so, we are not entitled to make the snap decision that it must never have happened. On the other hand, as with the exploding poodle story of more recent times, we would be foolish to overlook the fact that the story is told by more families than coincidence would suggest could have been approached by that busy Chieftain. Moreover, the story has other familiar elements to it: dark, powerful, aggressive male is believed to be infatuated with a small, prepubescent, white girl. Aside from its misunderstanding of Indian canons of beauty, its stereotypical presentation of the clich of interracial sexual threat, so common in race-based stories, plus the common theme of a young female saved from doom by a male representative of the adult world (cf. policemen rescuing the stranded girlfriend from the back seat of the murdered boyfriends car in countless lovers lane legends) should suggest to us that at least the continued telling of the narrative does something more culturally complex than merely recalling an interesting incident in Grandmas early years, one which we now all chuckle over. Why do we chuckle at it, indeed? And why do we assume that Grandma would not have liked life among the Indians, especially in the company of so illustrious a leader as Chief Joseph?Why, the family could have been really famous then! With this suggestion, we begin to hear the hum of pioneer ancestors spinning in their cerements, for thats not what they had in mind, we may well imagine. The story seems to function, among other things, as a hallmark of early arrival on the scene, for most of the later pioneers, though they had no easy time of this journey into rain and mud, did not get confronted by the Indians in such an intimate way. There is a heady quality to being first in line for the spoils that no amount of fact-finding will ever eradicate.
CONCLUSION
The spirit of the West has been, inevitably, that of the imagined frontier, and its feeling remains in the air today. The way people perceived the frontier gave rise to recognizable types who could flourish and prevail there. These character types, and the customs by which they related to each other, naturally became enshrined in the oral traditions of a people who felt a need to create their own myths, their own testimonies of conquest and ownership, their own icons of meaning, and who felt driven to impress these human dimensions upon a land which already held a depth of symbolic meaning for
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those who had inhabited it earlier, those who were now expectedalong with their religion, culture, and languagesto commence vanishing. Perhaps it is this drive for establishment, and not simply the weight of superior numbers, that eventually assured that Euro-American regionalization would become the main thread of traditional culture in what we now recognize as the Mythic West. The Asians, after all, did not need to replace older Native American roots with their own, for they brought their own with them, and used these to intensify their cultural sense of who they were. The French trappers in the North and the Hispanic ranchers in the Southwest married in with the Indians and formed mestizo cultures which combined disparate models of cultural world view into new constellations. The blacks came, of course, but were mostly employed in establishing white power over the land and its inhabitants; not until the twentieth century was the land in any way to be viewed as theirs. For the Indians, the losers, cultural symbols still animated a deep relation with the area, but steady and unrelenting erosion by teachers and missionaries helped to destroy much of what was left after they had been separated from their land. It was mainly the white settlers from families whose traces go back to north-central Europe (the English, Irish, Scottish, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Swissindeed, one is tempted to say the Protestants, but that would be too simple) who needed to sweep away what had been there before them, who needed to believe that the frontier was a place of great hazard and disarray which they had been heroic enough to have brought into order, and who needed to create a blood bond with the land which would have the power to supersede everything prior to itself. The themes, topics, and motifs discussed in this essay are among the many lively stereotypes of the western life in America, and are to be found in virtually all levels of expression, from the everyday to the elite. The psychological costs of these traditions are suggested by the apparent schizophrenia of the themes themselves, as well as in the subtlety and delicacy of their expression in the folklore: kindness, independence, piety, naivete, charity, and hospitality, all in the same context as racism, pillage, plunder, conquest, and exploitation; an insistence on both roots and mobility; pride in family and rugged individualism; hyperbole and understatement. The westerner is an unabashed combination of outlaw and preacher, pioneer mother and dance-hall girl, buckaroo and oil baron, iconoclast and chauvinist. Perhaps it can be said of western folklore that, like all good poetry, it mediates, foregrounds, and makes palpable the most bothersome of these discrepancies in a way that not only entertains and edifies, but somehow as well gives voice to the otherwise inarticulate features of the culture. Everything done and said by and in a culture is unavoidably a part of its larger language, has meaning in its larger picture. In this sense, each cowboy, each 62
settler, each pioneer mothereither in real life or in song and storyis a metaphor for some important aspect of the western cultural view. Thus, the aggregate of everyday expressions available to us in the living record of folklore provides us the poetic grammar through which the emotional realities 25 of America in its penultimate phase are articulated and understood.
B ARRE T OELKEN , Utah
State University
Notes
1. Suzi Jones, Regionalization: A Rhetorical Strategy, Journal of the Folklore Institute 13 (1976): 105120. Attitudes toward the land which later appear as cultural expressions are discussed in Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974). 2. For a basic discussion of primary folklore genres, see Jan H. Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction, 2nd. ed. (New York: Norton, 1978). A description of the processes of tradition is given in Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Two helpful collections of essays on folklore, both edited by Richard M. Dorson, are Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), and Handbook of American Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). 3. See Austin E. Fife and James M. Fife, Hay Derricks of the Great Basin and Upper Snake River Valley, Western Folklore 7 (1948): 225239; this seminal article on a regionalized article of material folk culture is being reprinted in Louie W. Attebery, ed., Idaho Folklife (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), a volume of central importance for those interested in the traditions of the American West. 4. Collected from Herbert Arntson, Pullman, Washington, in December 1958; text and tune are found throughout the West with only minor variations. The original broadside may have appeared as early as 1597, according to Hyder E. Rollins, in The Pepys Ballads (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), vol. 3, p. 57. The ballad became so popular that it inspired parodies of
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A Literary History of the American West itself, some of which may be found in John Ashton, Modern Street Ballads (London: Chatto and Windus, 1888), pp. 124127. 5. A good start would be her Memories of a Mormon Girlhood, in Journal of American Folklore 77 (1964):195219. 6. A text and tune for this song are found in Austin and Alta Fife, Saints of Sage and Saddle: Folklore Among the Mormons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), pp. 330331. This work is an obligatory text for studying the traditions of Mormon settlers in the West. 7. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization. Folklorist Alan Dundes, for example, has continually tried to employ the perspectives of Freud in the analysis of folklore; others, like Joseph Campbell, have preferred a Jungian approach. But the main body of folklore discussion has been descriptive, functional, historical. 8. This text was collected by students Marion Cupp and F. C. Michel, from Henry Tams, a retired logger living in Moscow, Idaho, during the summer of 1959. Other song texts cited were collected by the author, unless otherwise noted. Other folksongs related to life in the Northwest can be found in B. Toelken, Northwest Ballads: A Collectors Dilemma, Northwest Review 5 (1962): 918; and in B. Toelken, Northwest Regional Folklore, in Edwin R. Bing ham and Glen A. Love, eds., Northwest Perspectives: Essays on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), pp. 2142. For Utah, Lester A. Hubbards Ballads and Songs from Utah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1961) is a standard. Folksongs from many other areas of the West are to be found in standard cowboy song collections, some of which will be referenced in the following note. 9. A full text and tune for No Use for the Women is given in Austin E. and Alta S. Fife, Cowboy and Western Songs: A Comprehensive Anthology (New York: Potter, 1969), pp. 177178; this is a fine collection with more detailed notes and deeper scholarship than John A. and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Macmillan, 1938)) itself a standard. The Fifes have also produced a critical edition of N. Howard (Jack) Thorps Songs of the Cowboys (New York: Bramhall House, 1966), a collection of cowboy religious songs, Heaven on Horseback (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1970), and a gathering of western verse from newspapers, personal journals, and western popular print entitled Ballads of the Great West (Palo Alto: American West, 1970). The Fifes have been indefatigable scholars in the field of western folklore, and have been ahead of most of their American colleagues in insisting that popular media (records, cowboy journals, etc.) be included in the raw materials of folklore scholarship. 10. Text and tune collected by Barre Toelken from Lewis Gordon at Logan, Utah, December 1955. 11. Reub Longs hyperboles are found throughout The Oregon Desert (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1969), which he edited and wrote with E. R. Jackman. Tall tales and other exaggerations which were his personal trademarks are still in healthy oral tradition in central Oregon.
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12. Jan H. Brunvand, Len Henry: North Idaho Mnchausen, Northwest Folklore I (1965): 1119. Susan Mullin, Oregons Huckleberry Finn: A Mnchausen Enters Tradition, 13. Northwest Folklore 2 (1967): 1927. 14. Recurrent single elements of folklore, called motifs, are catalogued for convenience in comparison and analysis in Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of FolkLiterature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-books, and Local Legends (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 195558). Within category X, Humor, Thompson especially designated the numbers X900 to X1899 for the classification of Lies and Exaggerations in traditional narratives. In another work designed to categorize entire narrative clusters (groups of motifs in recurrent use, recognizable plots), Thompson and Antti Aarne provide TaleType numbers for a similar range of materials: The Types of the Folktale, Folklore Fellows Communications 184 (Helsinki, 1961). The section called Tales of Lying uses Type numbers 1875 to 1965, and includes such well-known lies as 1882A, Man Caught in Tree Goes Home to Get Axe; 1889F, Frozen Words Thaw; 1889L, The Split Dog; 1889M, Snakebite causes Object to Swell; 1913, The Side-Hill Beast (short legs on one side); 1917, The Stretching and Shrinking Harness; 1920B, I Have Not Time to Lie; 1960M, Large Mosquitos Fly off with Kettle. Motif and Type numbers have not been given for most of the texts quoted in this article, for their appearance here is relatively unsystematic; standard practice in folklore analysis, however, would require a survey of all texts of a given item, and an account of their traditional provenance through reference to these basic research tools. 15. Dorsons commentary may be most easily found in his American Folklore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), in Chapter 6, A Gallery of Folk Heroes, pp. 199243. 16. The best printed collection of the J. Golden Kimball stories is Thomas E. Cheney, The Golden Legacy: A Folk History of J. Golden Kimball (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1974). A version of the Jordan River story is given on pp. 120121. Because of Kimballs peculiar high-pitched voice, it is even more illuminating to hear the stories told by a gifted raconteur who can approximate the original (as many indeed can do, because they remember hearing Kimball himself); a tour de force example is Hector Lees performance of J. Golden stories before a live audience on the record, J. Golden Kimball Stories, by Folk Legacy Records (#FTA-25), Sharon, Connecticut. 17. See Jan H. Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (New York: Norton, 1981), and The Choking Doberman and Other New Urban Legends (New York: Norton, 1984). 18. The Yoho Cove story can be found in Dorsons American Folklore, pp. 130131. 19. Leonard Roberts, South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales (Berea, Kentucky: Council of Southern Mountains, 1964),p. 162, with the title Origin of Man. 20. Unfortunately, not every western state has a work like Lewis A. McArthur,
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A Literary History of the American West Oregon Geographic Names, 5th ed. (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1982); its pages are a compendium of western folklore, history, and local legends. 21. This point is one of several issues taken up in Barry Lopezs Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner, 1978). 22. See Richard C. Poulsen, The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Material Culture of Western America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982). His chapter, Hawks and Coyotes on Western Fences: The Symbolism of Slaughter, suggests that the ancient custom of protecting oneself against lightning, hail, plague, and other misfortune by hanging the carcasses of certain animals on an entry or fence may still be an undercurrent emotional/cultural factor in the killing and display of predators in America. 23. A good place to start consideration of family folklore is with Steven J. Zeitlin, Amy Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker, eds., A Celebration of American Family Folklore (New York: Pantheon, 1982). 24. Francis Haines, Goldilocks on the Oregon Trail, Idaho Yesterdays 9 (1966): 2630. 25. I would like to express my deepest thanks to friends and colleagues whose conversation provided perspective and content for this chapter: Edwin Bingham, Jan H. Brunvand, Suzi Jones, Roger Welsch, and William Bert Wilson.
Bibliographical Note
In addition to the works cited in the footnotes to this chapter, those interested in the subject of western folklore should consult back issues of the Journal of American Folklore, the regional folklore journals Western Folklore and Northwest Folklore, and the historical society quarterlies of the various western states. Parts of Dorsons American Folklore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959) and Buying the Wind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) are given over to the West, and much of the material in Duncan Emrichs Folklore on the American Land (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972) is drawn from western sources. Less helpful than its title would imply is John Greenway, Folklore of the Great West (Palo Alto: American West, 1969), but it does bring together a variety of essays which originally appeared in the Journal of American Folklore. The many works published and edited by J. Frank Dobie and others connected with the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society are basic works for that region; all of them, of course, provide bibliographical resources for still further particular research. Especially useful is Mody C. Boatrights Folk Laughter on the American Frontier (New York: Macmillan, 1949). A sampling of Oregon traditions, with fine photographic illustrations, is Suzi Jones, Oregon Folklore (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1977); Jones also edited a catalog, Webfoots and Bunchgrassers: Folk Art of the Oregon Country (Salem: Oregon Arts Commission, 1980), which provides a rich selection of material traditions from the area. A similar exposure to Idaho material culture is given in Steve Siporin, ed., Folk Art of Idaho: We Came to Where We Were Supposed to Be (Boise: Idaho Commission
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on the Arts, 1984). In Louie Attebery, ed., Idaho Folklife: Homesteads to Headstones (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985) appear more than twenty essays on various aspects of folklore in that areamuch of it, of course, analogous to considerations which can and should be made for all western states. Jan H. Brunvand offers a collectors guide in his Folklore in Utah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1971); beyond that, the book is as well a small compendium of some of the most common folk traditions of the area. Works on particular genres of western folklore are not numerous, and have appeared with no consistency of coverage. A fine study of the Mnchausen is Roger Welschs Catfish at the Pump: Humor and the Frontier (Lincoln, Nebr.: Plains Heritage, 1982). Another work on local place names is Erwin G. Gudde, California Place Names (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). For an early compendium of essays on western folklife, see Austin and Alta Fife and Henry H. Glassie, Forms upon the Frontier (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1969). To appear in 1985 is Wayland D. Hands large edition of Utah Folk Beliefs (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press); it will surely become the standard upon which similar collections of beliefs in the other western states will be developed. Since nearly every western state now has, or is planning, a statefunded folklife or folk arts program, we can expect a number of works over the coming years to bring forth the kinds of materials which Suzi Jones, Steve Siporin, Louie Attebery, Hal Cannon, and Michael Korn have produced for Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Montana. Virtually every major university has a folklore program of some sort, and several have fine archives; an updated directory may be obtained from the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., 20540). Also available from the same source are bibliographies, discographies, finding lists, general information about folksongs and instruments, and the like; although these lists are nationwide in scope, they contain much that is regional in orientation. The American Folklife Center and the Folklife Program at the Smithsonian Institution, moreover, have sponsored various collecting, study, and publishing projects in the West; these two programs, plus the National Council for the Traditional Arts (1346 Connecticut Ave., N. W., Suite 1118, Washington, D.C. 20036) and the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (Washington, D.C., 20506), are reliable ongoing resources for information concerning projects in western American folklore.
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SECTION II
The Written Donne of Western Literature
Introduction
the West was crossed by a succession of explorers, fur trappers, merchants, soldiers, European noblemen, and eastern health seekers. So many of these sojourners wrote about their western adventures that their accounts make up a sizeable body of literature, most of it entertaining and some of it quite well written. In his chapter on that literature, J. Golden Taylor explains that those adventure narratives are the source for much later western literature. It bears repeating that The Journals of Lewis and Clark are the headwaters of western American literature in the same way that William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation is one of the fountainheads of American literature. And just as Nathaniel Hawthorne read Cotton Mather, so twentieth-century western writers seeking inspiration and substance for their novels have turned to the works of Francis Parkman, George Frederick Ruxton, and Lewis H. Garrard. Our perception of western literature can be sharpened not only by studying the early adventure narratives, but also by examining later accounts of western experience. To that end, there are chapters in this section on The Military and on Lawmen and Outlaws. From each of these studies, as well as from Barre Toelkens earlier chapter on western folklore, emerge several axioms about the relationship between western American life and literature. First, western themes and jokes can be traced to prototypes that were venerable among the Greeks and Romans. Second, the literary treatment of a historical theme or a folklore motif changes with variations in social thought and attitudes. As Kent Steckmesser notes in his chapter on Outlaws and Lawmen, before 1900 Billy the Kid generally entered the literature only as a consummate villain, but after the turn of the century, he was resurrected as a noble and persecuted demigod. The shift in the literary treatment of Billy seems to coincide with the closing of the frontier and the onset of rapid technological acceleration. Third, the rise of western myths calls forth a crusade of historians and novelists who live to debunk the myths in order to rescue their Holy Grail (i.e., Western Fact). Finally, witEFORE ITS MAJOR SETTLEMENT,
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THE WRITTEN DONNE OF WESTERN LITERATURE
nessing the clash between the forces of Myth and the armies of Fact, a third type of writer suggests the relative, pluralistic, shifting bases of truth. The western mind begins to recognize the historical process, and that recognition is expressed in increasingly ironic, modernistic forms. Even the legions of formula writers have sometimes shown an awareness that the Western is no monolithic, unshifting myth or fact, but a combination of both that varies with ones perspective. Other types of frontier writing have helped awaken us to that more complex view of western experience. Letters, diaries, journals, autobiographies, and biographies provide the basis for much western fiction and poetry. Although few of these sub-genres have been studied as they have developed in the West (Michael Kourys chapter on the military is a first attempt at such a study), a number of recent books on pioneer women use letters, diaries, and journals as evidence. Western writing in the areas of history, anthropology, archaeology, and social protest also often influences the literature, yet we have no historical survey of any of those forms as they evolved in our region. Some idea of how many hundreds of western books have been written in these sub-genres can be gathered by reading the chapters on History and Interpretation, Biography and Autobiography, Archaeological and Anthropological Writings, and Narratives of the Cattle Country in Southwest Hetitage (University of New Mexico Press, 1970) by Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce. The output of such books as are listed in those chapters by Major and Pearce is as voluminous in the Wests other sub-regions as it is in the Southwest. Studies of those other sub-genres could aid us in better understanding western writing of the middle ground, to use the term that Wallace Stegner applies to writing that falls somewhere between fiction and history. I defend the middle ground, Stegner says, as one who has strayed there several timesin The Preacher and the Slave, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, The Gathering of Zion, and Wolf Willow (On the Writing of History, in Western Writing, ed. Gerald Haslam [University of New Mexico Press, 1974], p. 27). Stegner is not the only western writer who has explored the middle ground between two genres. George R. Stewarts Storm, Fire, and Sheep Rock, Wright Morriss The Home Place, N. Scott Momadays The Way to Rainy Mountain, Mari Sandozs Old Jules, Richard Brautigans Trout Fishing in America, and Leslie Marmon Silkos Storyteller are other examples of western writing that combines several genres or explores the territory between them. Literary works of the middle ground provide strong evidence of the value to the literary historian of studying western works that might not be classified as belles-lettres. Even so early a western book as Mark Twains
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Roughing It (1872) relies on even earlier books such as The Vigilantes of Montana (1866) by Thomas J. Dimsdale. Since our response to a work of literature is conditioned by what we bring to that work, some knowledge of the Wests written donne must necessarily help to shape a response to a work of western belles-lettres, resulting in an aesthetic experience which is different from the response of a reader ignorant of the extra-literary background.
J AMES H. MAGUIRE ,
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Across the Wide Missouri The Adventure Narrative from Lewis and Clark to Powell
I
ROM THEIR VERY EARLIEST TIMES,
native Americans have been creating, evolving, and transmitting their vast store of varied sacred tradions to succeeding generations. The chapter on Native Oral Traditions has shown the affinity these peoples felt to all nature, the land itself and all that was upon it, and the infinity of the sky and moon and all its other mysterious manifestations. They saw themselves in true transcendental perspective as an integral part of the whole. The great Everywhere Spirit pervaded all. Many mariners, such as Drake, and overland adventurers such as the Russians at Fort Ross and the French coureurs de bois had made desultory observations of a few Indian tribes; but until the nineteenth century virtually nothing was known about western geography, flora and fauna, and climate and natural resources, and any significantly detailed knowledge of the native Americans was nil. Jeffersons letter of June 20, 1803, to Meriwether Lewis confirms this total ignorance of the West, and his instructions to Lewis mark the real beginning of systematic studies of the West, which have continued to multiply to the present day. Even as late as 1826, many people believed in the fiction that a great river, the Buenaventura, flowed from the Great Basin to the Pacific. Jedediah Smith on his first exploration of southern California intended to find out whether or not it existed. It is remarkable, then, that in a mere seven decades (the Biblical lifespan of a man)the period from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the explorations by John Wesley Powell of the Colorado River and its plateaus and canyonsthe unknown, fabulous West should become the known and largely exploitedWest. In discovering the last unknown river, the Escalante, and the last unknown mountains, the Henry Range, Powell removed the last blank space from the map of the West. In addition to the extensive Lewis and Clark materials and Powells reports, hundreds of notable books by and about mountain men, dudes, artists, explorers, scientists, describe the West during that seventy-year period of exploration. This chapter identifies some of the major western adventurers during this period and describes from both primary and secondary sources the nature of their responses to this experience. 71
There are numerous historical accounts of the maneuvering of Spain and France to consolidate their empires in the New World. It is likewise well known that the United States needed New Orleans as a water outlet for its produce from the whole eastern drainage area of the Mississippi River. Jeffersons emissaries who were negotiating to buy New Orleans actually fell into a totally unexpected prize when Napoleon, his schemes of riches in the West Indies failing, offered to sell the United States the whole of Louisiana. This acquisition made it possible for Jefferson to carry out his desire of more than a decade, to explore the vast unknown northwest. The fortunatebut likely unconstitutionalpurchase of Louisiana in 1803 seems to have whetted the American appetite not just to ask what the West was but to ask whose it wasand perhaps, more accurately, to devise pleasant conjectures about whose it ought to be. These speculations and rationalizations grew into the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, whose unabashed continental ambitions were realized in the notorious year of decision, 1846. The young nation (which had developed from the minds of those ever westward-imagining founders of Atlantic Coast plantations) thus found itself in two centuries embarked on conquering and supplanting the native inhabitants (while incidentally repudiating four hundred treaties with them) and exploiting its rich natural resources. Jefferson, who had first dreamed and planned the exploration of the West in 1792, finally saw its realization in 1804. He hoped the expedition would discover trading opportunities with the Indians and even with traders who were known to frequent the Pacific Coast in ships from the Orient, Europe, and elsewhere. In opening the West he did not foresee the opportunities for devastation of the physical land and the natives that the expedition unfortunately opened up to hordes of exploiters. But the expedition remains the greatest American adventure, and the journals are the most stirring and significant of their genre in American literature. Not only the expedition itself but also the particular excellence of the journals he instructed Lewis to keep originated in the fertile, universally inquiring mind of the American Leonardo, who wrote in 1790: . . . there is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
II
The general reader, particularly anyone who does not know the West, would likely find Ingvard Henry Eides American Odyssey: The Journey of Lewis and Clark (1969) a fascinating introduction to a study and appreciation of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, the greatest American epic. This would be especially true for readers who have no familiarity with the spectacular displays of nature these explorers saw and described along the upper
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THE ADVENTURE NARRATIVE
Missouri River, across the Rocky Mountains, and down through the Columbia River country they traversed. American Odyssey is an abridgement of the journals of both Lewis and Clark supplemented by a few passages from diaries of other members of the expedition. Eide travelled 57,000 miles during two years, taking thousands of photographs and tracing and retracing the entire route of the expedition from Silver Creek, Indiana, through final outfitting in St. Louis, to the Pacific Ocean. Selecting one out of twelve of the photographs and extensive passages from the journals to accompany them, he has produced what he calls a photographic chronicle. The pictures present with fidelity scenes described in the journals, even as to season, time of day, and the weather conditions. The result is both a realistic and a poetic evocation of the experiences Lewis and Clark had with nature in the West in its pristine state. Not in the book, because the falls were no longer there for Eide to photograph, is Lewiss ecstatic 1500-word account of the great falls which he discovered on Tuesday, June 13, 1805, epitomized by his phrase, the greatest sight I ever beheld. The falls were flooded by a dam placed in the middle of Great Falls, Montana, an instance to remind readers that many spectacular displays of nature in the West have been lost to progress. Eides book is still a rare achievement, and a delight for anyone who wishes to approximate Lewis and Clarks great experiences. An edition of the Lewis and Clark Journals more widely known than Eides is that of Bernard DeVoto, an authentic Rocky Mountain westerner who, ironically, loved Harvard and the Eastyet wrote on nothing but the West. He wrote three very highly regarded histories focusing on the West: The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), Across the Wide Missouri (1947)) and The Course of Empire (1952). These works reveal his obsession with the West, his high historical standards, and his moral stance as a critic. DeVoto was most fascinated with the great adventure, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the accounts recorded by the two leaders and other members of the party. Thus, the publication of DeVotos edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953) was inevitable. He had dealt with it in The Course of Empire and used some passages from that book in the introduction to the Journals. He repeated, for example, It is generally agreed that the Journals are an American classic, and certainly they are by far the most interesting as well as the most important original narrative of North American exploration. DeVotos principles in preparing his condensation for the general reader clarify exactly what the reader can expect: I have omitted no important event and no incident of more than passing interest. I have included as much as seemed possible of the daily routine and the continuous direct observation of the new country the expedition was traveling. I have also in-
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cluded representative descriptions of the flora and fauna and all important descriptions of Indian life, omitting anthropological details. He has interpolated appropriate passages from the journals of Private Whitehouse and Sergeants Ordway, Gass, and Floyd. My job, he says, was clearly to preserve Lewis and Clark, not to approximate Nicholas Biddles History. While DeVoto was studying the Lewis and Clark route and preparing this edition of the journals, he often camped in a majestic grove of cedars along the Lewis and Clark trail. It has been dedicated to his memory as the DeVoto Grove, and, by his request, his ashes were scattered there. DeVoto drew upon Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 18041806 ( 19041905), which consists of seven volumes of text and one of maps, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites; History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (1814), two volumes by Nicholas Biddle; and The History of the Expedition Under the Command of Lewis and Clark (1893), four volumes, edited by Elliott Coues. Though Thwaites and Coues are indispensable to students, much scholarship since their time has shaken some of their interpretations. DeVoto concedes that we have had no greater editor [of Lewis and Clark] than Coues, but it is well known that he had a highhanded way with texts, altering them as he saw fit . . . [making] changes in spelling, grammar, and wording. Nevertheless, Couess edition is likely the most readable narrative of the expedition and is recognized for its accuracy and authenticity; it is complete and readily available. Scholarship on the extensive Lewis and Clark materials has been impressive. Of central concern here is a meticulously edited volume which brings together all the basic documents that relate to the expedition itself: Donald Jacksons Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783 to 1854 (1962). The American Historical Review wrote of this book: This man-sized volume of just under 750 pages presents 428 documents covering all aspects of the great Lewis and Clark expedition: its authorization, planning, and outfitting; foreign reaction to it; Indian policy and diplomacy in connection with it; the natural history resulting from it; its financing; and Lewis tragic death (with an opinion as to whether it was murder or suicide) . . . a stupendous job. Jacksons volume can enrich ones understanding of the purpose of the expedition but even more importantly it can show why the journals bring such an all-seeing eye and intelligence to experience. Meriwether Lewis was Jeffersons close neighbor, friend, and protg; they spent many hours discussing political, philosophical, scientific, and other subjects. Jefferson regularly hung a mirror in a tree in front of Monticello when he had some free time, and Lewis, seeing it, would come over to talk. As private secretary to President Jefferson, Lewis was his confidant, and he proved, to Jeffersons
74
immense satisfaction, that he had the intelligence, integrity, resourcefulness, and courage to lead the expedition to the West Coast. This rapport between Jefferson and Lewis made Lewis highly responsive to Jeffersons famous letter of instructions of June 20, 1803. As instructed, Lewis punctiliously mapped the route, noted fully the plants, animals of all sorts, the land and its soil and other resources. Lewis observed Jeffersons instructions to treat the Indians well, yet not to take any unnecessary risks with the safety of his men. It is, then, Lewiss commitment to follow Jeffersons instructions explicitly and fully that gives the journals the richness of detail and the breadth of scientific data they have. It was likewise Lewiss absolute confidence in his good friend William Clark, and Clarks reciprocation of that trust and friendliness, that ensured the success of this great adventure. Lewiss letter of June 19, 1803, invites Clark to join him in equal command of the expedition, and Clarks reply of July 18, 1803, is a hearty acceptance. Lewis had written to Clark: . . . believe me there is no man on earth with whom I should feel equal pleasure in sharing them [its fatiegues, its dangers and its honors]. Clark replied: My friend I do assure you that no man lives with whome I would prefur to undertake Such a Trip. . . . Jacksons volume, making readily available in carefully edited form such materials as these, is invaluable. Another specialized book, magnificently edited, indispensable for serious readers of the journals, is Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists ( 1969) by Paul Russell Cutright. Cutright has retraced many times the route Lewis and Clark followed and has described in careful detail what they saw. They left careful descriptions of animals, birds, fish, plants, forest trees, and the first significant scientific study of the various Indian tribes. Cutright portrays the two captains as no editor before has done, as important precursors of specialized scientific scholars in such fields as botany, zoology, cartography, meteorology, and ethnology. While with Sacagaweas people, the Shoshoni, Lewis wrote the first ethnological study of consequence of any tribe in the West; and this and his study of the Chinooks on the Pacific are now considered classics. In identifying Lewis and Clarks pioneering efforts, Cutright has surely created here a book which many readers of Lewis and Clark had been hoping for. Each chapter recounts a portion of the expedition, summarizing the action of the group, but especially making note of natural phenomena mentioned in the records. At the end of each chapter are carefully documented lists: Animals New to Science; Plants New to Science; Lewis and Clark Herbarium; Indian Tribes Encountered; and Topographic Features Named and/or Discovered. Cutright has succeeded admirably in presenting in a clear, orderly fashion the vast body of natural history discovered by Lewis
75
and Clark. This book is likely the last word in establishing Lewis and Clark as pioneering scientific naturalists, and their journals show that they were the first, and still two of the best, western nature writers.
III
As Lewis and Clark embarked from St. Louis in 1804, they recognized it as the natural gateway west and set the pattern for the immense western traffic that was to follow. In approaching St. Louis through a region with few, and very poor, roads, immigrants found the covered wagon was the last resort. The huge homemade raft was the most practical conveyance for those determined to go west. It was relatively simple and inexpensive for the immigrant to construct a raft and load his wagon, cattle, horses, and other goods and his family on it and float down the Mississippi or the Ohio Rivers and their tributaries, and then to make their way on land either from Cairo or St. Louis to Westport or one of the other final outfitting towns along the Missouri. Walter Havighursts River to the West: Three Centuries of the Ohio (1970) is the best volume to recount the adventure and document the significance of the river traffic in the westward movement. Thoroughly researched, particularly well illustrated, it is a book that is satisfying, full and informing, and a pleasure to read. Satans Ferryman: A True Tale of the Old Frontier (1968) by W. D. Snively, Jr., and Louanna Furbee makes a realistic supplement to Havighurst, for it presents the dark story of one James Ford, who operated a ferry across the Ohio on the western route and a store where immigrants could get supplies. It was really a front to which Ford lured his victims and then robbed and murdered them. The evidence is welldocumented, and enhanced by photographs and rare old illustrations. A third invaluable study of rivers important in the western migration is a monumental book, The Great Platte River Road (1969) by Merrill J. Mattes. In twenty years of research, Mattes consulted over seven hundred original overland journals, and from these and other sources he records how many people traveled the road each year from 1841 to 1866 to an estimated total of 350,000. The book is divided into several sections with maps, illustrations of landmarks, and impressions made by the immigrants. Mattes provides massive documented detail with knowledgeable comment and analysis. No one could conceivably want to know more about this great primitive superhighway between 1841 and 1866 than he will find here. The Boston Newton Company Venture: Crossing to California in 1849 (1969) by Jessie Gould Hannon is an interesting account of one companys adventures moving west along the now very busy Platte corridor along with 30,000 others that year. Two popular illustrated volumes of travel along the Platte are Lambert Florins Western Wagon Wheels (1970) and Albert 76
and Jane Salisburys Here Rolled the Covered Wagons (1948). These books present hundreds of excellent photographs of historic buildings, graves, and monumentsand even wagon rutsalong the Oregon Trail. Both books indicate ingenious and resourceful research in the pictures and in the commentaries. John Francis McDermotts Travelers on the Western Frontier (1970) is a collection of twelve essays by such notable scholars as Archibald Hanna, Jr., Dale L. Morgan, John T. Flanagan, and John Porter Bloom. McDermotts essay is entitled Up the Wide Missouri: Travelers and Their Diaries, 17941861, containing an annotated checklist of ninety-five diaries. A somewhat lesser-known trail west has been mapped and knowledgeably described by Ferol Egan in his book The El Dorado Trail (1970). Starting from several gulf towns from Brazos Santiago to Galveston, the trail proceeds by a variety of routes, usually through Chihuahua or El Paso del Norte to the Pima villages to Alta California. It was especially important during the Gold Rush. Many also contrived to get to California around the Horn, as did Richard Henry Dana. His masterpiece, Two Years Before the Mast (1840), vividly describes his life as a merchant sailor and is one of the best accounts of life in California. He helped load cow hides and barrels of tallow on the ship bound back to Boston. Dana views the Spanish life in California askance, much as had Jedediah Smith, who had made the trip to California overland some eight years before Dana arrived. Whether they came around the Horn or overland on one of the routes that had proliferated after Lewis and Clark, a really amazing diversity of immigrants, both permanent settlers and adventurous visitors, arrived from all parts of eastern America and Europe. Many of them were moved to write about their western experiences, often very effectively. The first western writings of major significance were, of course, the journals kept by several members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. But many readers of the journals may well have come away wishing there had been more biographical detail, particularly about Sacagawea and the regular soldiers and guides. There is no lack of biographies of Lewis and Clark, although the mystery of Lewiss untimely death still remains. Much attention has been given to Sacagawea in the century and three-quarters since her arduous trek to the Pacific Ocean and return. More statues have been erected to honor her memory than to any other American woman. There have been countless sketches of her life, but until recently they have been almost entirely sentimental, unsupported legend, and very crass fiction. There has finally appeared what claims to beand certainly seems to bea carefully documented biography of the Indian woman, as she was usually referred to in the journals (or Janey, as Clark liked to call her). It is Sacagawea of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1980) by Ella E. Clark and 77
Margot Edmonds. This study traces her life from her abduction by the Minnetarees at age eleven from her Shoshoni village on the Salmon River far down the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. As one of Charbonneaus wives, she met the expedition leaders at Fort Mandan and there on February 11, 1804, gave birth to a baby, Jean Baptiste, whom she carried to the Pacific Ocean and back to Three Forks. The high point of this section of the book is her meeting her brother Cameahwait, chief of her Shoshoni tribe. Her good will ensured Lewis and Clark a friendly acceptance and enabled them to obtain horses and guides to the Columbia River. Though she recognized Beaverhead Rock and a few other landmarks near her old home, she was never in any sense a guide for Lewis and Clark as the myth has long held. The third part of the book is based on largely new sources and deals with her leaving Charbonneau and living among the Comanches where she married Jerk-Meat, with whom she raised a family. The final part shows Sacagawea on the Wind River Reservation living with Bazil (the son of Charbonneau and Otter Woman), who always called Sacagawea his mother. She and Bazil made a memorable appearance and were helpful at the 1868 peace treaty at Fort Bridger, when she was about eighty years old. In her old age, witnesses aver she was a pleasant, interesting person, yielding to the young peoples request to tell them about the great expedition and show them her Jefferson medal, which she cherished. She died on April 9, 1884, at about ninety-six, and Bazil arranged with the Reverend John Roberts to conduct a Christian burial service for her. She had been as brave and enduring of hardship as any soldier on the expedition and had been infinitely superior to her cowardly and brutal husband, Charbonneau. However, she was not a guide. Her great service was as the most convincing possible symbol of peace to any Indian tribe the expedition encountered, for no war party would ever have brought along a woman and her baby. Another significant recent volume is intended to rescue the ordinary people of the great expedition from the oblivion in which they have lain since they were paid off and discharged in St. Louis on October 10, 1806. The Men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1970) by Charles G. Clarke has also the rather instructive subtitle a biographical roster of the fifty-one members and a composite diary of their activities from all known sources. Clarke has discovered many elusive biographical details of the forty-five men known to have comprised the party and has discovered six more men not on the usually accepted roster. He has ferreted out lost details of many of the men by searching beyond various journals, biographies, and articles into archival documents, court records, genealogies, and personal correspondence. Clarkes is thus the first work to concern itself exclusively with the biographical data of the men. It further makes clear their personalities 78
and activities with a 252-page Personnel Diary, an abridgment from the journals which brings alive all the participants in the greatest of American exploring adventures. One of those participants, John Colter, is also the most likely candidate for the title of archetypal mountain man. When he was honorably discharged from the Lewis and Clark expedition at the Three Forks on Thursday, August 15, 1806, the captains outfitted him from their supplies for two years of trapping and agreed to sell the furs he had gathered privately during the return journey. To have been accorded this special favor indicates that Colter had served valiantly on the expedition. Two days later Colter set out up the river in company with Messrs, Dickson & Handcock, two Illinois trappers the party had met. Colters partnership with them lasted only six weeks, and after wintering with the Mandans he trapped with Manuel Lisas men for a while. In October, 1807, while on a five-hundred-mile trip to invite various friendly tribes of Indians to come and trade at the post Lisa had established on the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Bighorn, Colter discovered the famous geysers. He was the first white man to see these natural wonders of what is now Yellowstone National Park. In the fall of 1808 Colter was joined by his expedition friend, John Potts, and they decided to risk trapping in the Three Forks region, home of the dreaded Blackfeet. Though they were careful and watchful, they were surprised by a band of Blackfeet who killed Potts and captured Colter. Impressed by Colters show of bravery, they decided to give him a sporting chance to run for his life. Stripped of his equipment and clothes, he was given a head start before the Indians started after him. A. B. Guthrie has developed this stirring episode into an excellent short story, Mountain Medicine. The two decades following Colters famous run saw the heyday of the trans-Missouri fur trade. Enterprising men from business and the military, not really trappers at all, decided to learn the fur trade and try to meet the intense competition from the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and the Hudsons Bay Company, which was making increasing incursions into the Oregon country. His trading post on the Yellowstone having proved an unsuccessful trapping and trading base, Manuel Lisa organized a larger company to meet the competition. Called the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, it chose Major Andrew Henry as its field captain. In 1809 this company sent a well-equipped expedition up the Missouri, met Colter coming down, persuaded him to return with them as guide, and built a fort at the Three Forks in April, 1810. But Major Henry was not fortunate in his trapping endeavors. Indian traders and competing trappers caused him to divide the companys men into two brigades. He led one across the divide and built 79
his own fort on the Snake River in July, 1810. He kept no journal and little has been written of him. His most famous exploit was in joining General William H. Ashley in the 1822 Missouri expedition. IV Even more famous and influential than Ashley and Henry was John Jacob Astor, who immigrated to America from Germany in 1784 and opened a fur store in New York City. He soon became obsessed with entering the fur trade in the far West. In 1811 he sent a ship with men and supplies around the Horn to the mouth of the Columbia River, to be joined there by Wilson Price Hunt, Astors field marshal, who had led another group of Astorians overland. These two crews built Astors first fur trading post, which was named Astoria. It was actually on the site of Fort Clatsop, which Lewis and Clark had built for the winter of 1805-1806. Astor later encouraged Washington Irving to write the account of his fur exploits in the West: it is frankly a celebration of Astor and his prowess. He allowed Irving access to all his records of the business which were in his home in New York. Irving issued the book in 1836. There have been several editions since but by far the best is Washington Irving, Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rockies (1964), edited and with an introduction by Edgeley W. Todd. Irving wrote another book based on the adventures of a fur trader. Irvings source for this book was Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville, who, at the suggestion of Joseph Reddeford Walker, took leave of the Army in 1832 to make a three-year try for a fortune in fursand incidentally to experience the unparalleled adventure to be found in the West. He was conspicuously unsuccessful at fur, but he traveled extensively throughout the Northwest. The journals he kept reveal him as a careful observer with a rare ability to portray the charm of the western landscape and the excitement he felt in the stirring adventures with mountain men and Indians. Though he labored to transform his journal into an adventure narrative, he could find no publisher. Finally, at the home of John Jacob Astor he met Washington Irving, who was just finishing Astoria (1836). Bonneville offered to sell his manuscript and maps; Irving bought them for $1,000.00. The best edition is Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1961), edited and with an introduction by Edgeley W. Todd. Todd expresses a very high opinion of Irvings re-working of Bonnevilles manuscript: . . . certainly Bonnevilles name will continue to stand in the minds of most people as the subject of the finest literary and historical account contemporaneous with the great days of the western fur trade in the 1830s. Hiram Martin Chittenden, a later historian of the fur trade, cites Irvings Knickerbocker statement that Irving had rescued Bonneville from the widespread insatiable maw of oblivion. Most of Bonnevilles fur-trading con80
temporaries had to wait for writers from later generations to save them from oblivion. And there were many mountain men who deserved such rescue. St. Louis was showing signs of prosperity from the added wealth the fur trade was bringing when General William H. Ashleys now famous advertisement appeared in the St. Louis Missouri Gazette & Public Advertiser on Wednesday morning, February 13, 1822. It read:
TO
Enterprising Young Men The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred men, to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two or three years. For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry, near the Lead Mines, in the County of Washington (who will ascend with and command the party) or to the subscriber at St. Louis. Wm. H. Ashley Few of the thousand or so men who were attracted to the wild life of trapping beaver in the West following John Colters time had any more literary propensities than Ashley. A good many, such as Jim Bridger, were illiterate. A very small number, such as Jedediah Smith, kept journals with sometimes daily entries for extended periods. Others, such as Jim Beckwourth, dictated memoirs of varying degrees of credibility. Thus, what is most certainly known about the vast majority of mountain men is found in biographies based on historical research in fur company records, government archives, newspaper files, deeds, wills, and letters. The mountain men, understandably preoccupied with survival in a region of some singularly hostile Indians, also experienced incredible hardship in securing adequate food and shelter, particularly in winter; in many regions through which they pursued the beaver, these basic necessities were scarce or not to be found at all. At chance meetings of mountain menor especially at a rendezvousmuch of the conversation of these men who had chosen to live in harms way was certainly about who had gone under. Ironically, because of their very success as mountain men, in little more than a generation their way of life had gone under. Within forty years after Colters first beaver trapping in the Three Forks area, the trappers had virtually exterminated the beaver in the streams of the West. They had come west not only from the frontier states and territories such as Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas, but also from Virginia, the Carolinas, and everywhere else in the East, even from New England. They explored the great gates through the mountains, made friendly alliances of marriage in some Indian tribes and fought others with total abandon. Some mountain men returned to their homes to enjoy the 81
quiet life, but many remained all the rest of their lives in the West, drifting into such related occupations as trading with Indians or working in fur trading posts. Since they knew more than any others about the trails, streams, and mountain passes, it was natural that they would be sought as guides for the hordes of people who were heading west. They served as guides for missionaries, forty-niners, immigrants of all sorts, and the United States Army. Particularly attractive were the positions of guide and hunter for that marvelous gallery of dudes that found the West such a splendid playground from about 1830 to 1850. It is possible that many of the mountain men who became guides did not realize that, ironically, they were aiding in the destruction of the wild, free West they had left civilization to enjoy. Nor did they see that they were rushing American history inexorably from one age into anotherthat of settlers with plows and cows and barbed wire and law. And again it is ironic that perhaps they made their greatest contribution to the United States by their explorations in a region coveted by France, Spain, Russia, and England. The claims of these nations were severely mitigated by the mountain mans mere presence in the disputed territory.
V
The era of the mountain men comes to life in the works of a number of twentieth-century historians and biographers. Prominent among them is General Hiram M. Chittenden, graduated from West Point in 1884 and assigned to the Corps of Engineers with which he served with great distinction till his retirement in 1910. His The American Fur Trade in the Far West (2 vols., 1902, 1973) is considered one of the best comprehensive sources by most knowledgeable students of the mountain men and the fur trade. Hardly a scholar who has written on this subject since the appearance of Chittendens work has failed to cite him as an authority. An outstanding feature of the work is the skilled organization of the vast research into a coherent exposition of the mechanics of the fur business and the lucid, coherent narrative of the trade during the period it flourished from Lewis and Clark to the building of Fort Bridger in 1843. Another very useful history is David J. Webers The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 15401846 (1971). The mountain men centered at Taos contributed importantly to the wealth that flowed along the Santa Fe Trail. Even churchmen and government officials illegally entered this lucrative trade. In tracing this complex enterprise through more than three centuries, Weber has performed a feat of organization. Gordon Specks Breeds and Half-Breeds (1969) gives an excellent view of one aspect of the fur trade elsewhere treated only tangentially. He concentrates on the In82
dians, Negroes, French, and other racial groups and mixtures who were trappers. He presents a very good treatment of George Drouillard, Ed Rose, and Jim Beckwourth, for example. The Knopf prizewinning history, Americas Western Frontiers (1967) by John A. Hawgood, a scholar from England who has spent extended periods researching his subject in America, is a highly readable study of the West the mountain men and settlers won. Bernard DeVotos The Course of Empire and Across the Wide Missouri are indispensable. The former concentrates largely on showing how the United States relentlessly extended its boundaries from the Atlantic to the Pacific. DeVoto traces the ever-growing feeling of Americans that they must become a single society occupying this continental unit. The last half of the book describes the barriers to this progress and the violent competition of various national groups to win in what became a race for very high stakes. The twenty-three excellent maps which accompany the text are particularly elucidating. They show clearly The Spanish Entrances, Early Ideas of North America, Hudson Bay Region, Vrendryes Progress, Escalantes Journey, Santa Fe Trail, The Gates of the Continent, and several others. The last two chaptersWestward the Course of Empire, and The Passage to Indiaare a marvelously climactic expression of DeVotos unique enthusiasm about the West. Across the Wide Missouri restricts its main narrative to the seven-year period, 18321838, when the Scottish dude, Sir William Drummond Stewart, with his lavish retinue, trekked about the West. The Dramatis Personae DeVoto prefaces to the book indicates that he incorporated almost every major mountain man with each fur company from Colter to the dying out of the fur trade by mid-century. The Chronology of the Mountain Fur Trade and the notes and bibliography make the most congenial, reliable, concise guide to the general readeras the book itself will make him an enthusiast and a well-oriented amateur. Although the significance of mountain men has been recognized in many histories, they are seen in all their infinite variety in biographies, dictated memoirs, and personal journals. The most comprehensive collection of biographies is that edited by LeRoy Hafen, The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West (19651972) (nine volumes of text and one of bibliography). It consists of a 160-page account of the fur trade by Hafen and biographies of some three hundred mountain men written by more than seventy-five scholars. There are the notables like Jim Beckwourth, the five Bents, Kit Carson, Henry Chatillon (Francis Parkmans guide), Thomas Fitzpatrick, Hugh Glass, Moses Black Harris, Andrew Henry, Dr. John McLaughlin, Peter Skene Ogden, Daniel Potts, Etienne Provost, Osborne Russell, the four Robidouxs, Jedediah, Peg Leg, and three other Smiths, the five Sublettes, Old Bill Williams, Nathaniel J. Wyeth, Ewing Young, 83
and others. The biographies individualize these men of every capacity and personality. A number of the mountain men treated in the Hafen set are also the subject of first-rate biographies. Notable among these is that of William Old Bill Williams. Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man (1936) by Alpheus H. Favour, is one of the earliest and best of the biographies of mountain men. Favour (18801939) was born of Puritan ancestry in Natick, Massachusetts, and as a young lawyer went to practice in Prescott, Arizona. He early developed an interest in the fabulous adventures of William Shirley Williams. Born in North Carolina, brought up in Missouri near St. Louis, Williams was at first an itinerant preacher and missionary to the Osage Indians. Ironically, they converted him, and after acting as guide with the Lt. Sibley survey of the Santa Fe Trail, he went to the Southwest where he became acknowledged by othersas well as himselfas the master trapper. His long life was filled with hazardous adventures. He was a close friend of the noted Joseph Reddeford Walker, and he went trapping with and knew well the most famous trappers in the West. In view of Williamss usual integrity it is surprising to learn of his absconding with the money he received for selling some furs for the Utes. But it is as a guide in the southern Colorado Rockies with John Charles Frmont in Frmonts disastrous 1849 expedition that the worst-but totally unsubstantiatedcharges were made about him. Frmont charged that Williams cannibalized his companions in their desperate attempt to reach safety. Frmont proved himself ruthless in driving his men in that fateful attempt to cross the impassable southern Colorado Rockies in winter exactly as Zebulon Montgomery Pike had tried to do forty years before. Favours thoroughly researched account of Old Bill Williams was his lifelong endeavor, and in it he leaves a convincing portrait of Williams as a natural leader in whatever group he found himself. Favour notes with satisfaction that a river and a mountain and a city were named after him. Another especially noteworthy mountain man of varied accomplishments was William Sublette, partner of Jedediah Smith and David Jackson in the fur company they purchased from General Ashley in 1826. He had begun trapping as an Ashley man, joining the second expedition in the spring of 1823. John E. Sunders Bill Sublette, Mountain Man ( 1959) is comprehensive and detailed. One reviewer of this book has said: . . . the author shows a fine gift for bringing life to events long past; and several of Sublettes near-brushes with death find the reader holding his breath. . . . Sublette was a skilled trapper himself and the effective leader of brigades of company traders. He actually kept the company going while Smith was away on his two exploring expeditions along the Pacific coast. With unusual acumen he conducted the company business with suppliers in St. Louis. He 84
helped develop the rendezvous system, laid out the first wagon route through South Pass, and established what was later Fort Laramie. He helped to break John Jacob Astors early monopoly on the fur trade. Returning to Missouri, he amassed a great fortune in business and was influential in the founding of Kansas City. Jim Beckwourth, another Ashley man, must be at once the most colorful and controversial of the mountain men. Jim Beckwourth: Black Mountain Man and War Chief of the Crows (1972) by Elinor Wilson is a most meticulous study. Beckwourth was known as the Gaudy Liar largely because of the elaborate tales of his valor he dictated to T. D. Bonner, who published them as The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth (1856). The 1972 biography is based on evidence gleaned from records of Beckwourths travels in all parts of the West. The chief excellence, however, is the care with which Wilson has assessed these materials, distinguishing between what can be documented and corroborated from other sources and what is inherently contradictory or unlikely. She concludes Beckwourth was not nearly the Gaudy Liar he has been thought. Stanley Vestal in his Joe Meek: The Merry Mountain Man (1952) sees this Ashley man not as the chief liar but as the chief jester among mountain men. He did extensive trapping and Indian fighting with such stalwarts as Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Louis Vasquez, Moses Black Harris, and Kit Carson, to name a few. After the last rendezvous in 1840, he went on to Oregon as a settler, became a peace officer, a legislator, and an envoy from Oregon to consult President Polk. He was notorious for his practical jokes, tall tales, Jacksonian democracyand Indian women. He felt the old-time Indians were truly religious. Vestals account of Meek is highly informative, analytical, and pleasant reading. One of the most famous of the mountain men is the subject of J. Cecil Alters Jim Bridger (1962), a revised and enlarged edition of James Bridger: A Historical Narrative (1925). In this lifelong study Alter has compiled a comprehensive, coherent narrative of every known event in Bridgers life, including good detail of his relations with everyone else he met. For example, Alter describes the 1826 encampment on the Bear River, in Willow Valley, named Cache Valley by Beckwourth, who tells of the trappers caching seventy-five packs of beaver pelts. At this time Bridger was sent down the Bear River to find its mouth; in doing so he discovered the Great Salt Lake. Tasting the water he supposed it was an arm of the Pacific Ocean. The book, of course, describes Dr. Whitman extracting an arrowhead from Bridgers back at the Green River camp on August 12, 1835. It also recounts his troubles with the Mormons. Especially valuable are the numerous descriptions of Bridger: his speech, skill in sign language, his intuitive geographic sense, his character, and his values. Alter cites the evaluations 85
A Literary History of the American West of Bridger made by Father De Smet, Casper Collins, General Dodge, and others. This is a rich and satisfying account of one of the most skilled of mountain men. Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West by Dale L. Morgan (1953) is the preeminent biography of a mountain man by a western historian who has no superior. In a mere eight years in the West Smith became the mountain man outrance. For him this meant not only trapping beaver and leading successful brigades of trappers. It meant his becoming an entrepreneur and explorer, and seeing more of the West than any other man of his time. He had joined the Ashley party in 1822 and survived the 1823 massacre of thirteen of Ashleys ninety-man second Missouri expedition by the Arikara Indians. Within a year he was head of an Ashley party; in two years he was Ashleys partner, and a year later he bought Ashleys company as senior partner along with David Jackson and Bill Sublette. Smith and his men were at the 1825 rendezvous in Cache Valley and the area north of Salt Lake, which he considered his home of the wilderness. He set off for California in the spring of 1826, proceeding south through Utah and across Nevada and the Mojave Desert to the incredibly rich San Gabriel Mission with its vast meadows and fields, vineyards, and orchards. Smith and his men were astounded to see the herd of 40,000 cattle, 2,000 horses, 400 sheep, and all the rest. Smith records in his diary that he approached this Catholic stronghold with great trepidation, for he had heard tales that aliens had been detained and persecuted for their heretical religion or prosecuted as spies. He received from Father Jose Sanchez, however, a bountiful hospitality, new clothes, excellent food and lodging, wine, and even Segars. This stay at the mission is a rare portrayal of the meeting of three radically diverse racial groups: the Catholics with their combination of piety and earthiness, the Indians superficially converted and essentially enslaved, and the American mountain men, intruding aliens. Smith, with his Protestant sternness and austerity, was ill at ease in the presence of the Mexican and Indian women whose dress and behavior seemed improper. With chapter twelve, The California Quagmire, Morgan recounts the trials and tragedies of Smiths second (1827) expedition to California and on to Oregon. Following the same route as the year before, Smith approached the Mojave villages not suspecting that they dissembled well. Suddenly raising a war cry they fell upon the party and within seconds Brown, Campbell, Cunningham, Deromme, Gobel, Lacross, Ortago, Ratelle, Relle, and Robiseau were dead. Smith escaped. After visiting San Gabriel again, he picked up his men who had stayed in California the previous year and headed north for the Oregon country. Here he was set upon by the Umpqua Indians, who slaughtered nineteen of his men. Surviving this third mas86
sacre, he and his three remaining men straggled into Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. There Big Doctor John McLaughlin, his ardent Hudsons Bay rival, generously took care of all the needs of Smith and his men that winter and in the spring sent a party out to recover what could be found of Smiths goods. (A total of ninety-four mountain men of the Smith and Ashley brigades were killed by Indians between 1823 and 1829.) Smith sold his share in the company, left the rendezvous of 1830, and returned to St. Louis, where he reinvested his capital in trade goods and twenty-two mule-drawn wagons to enter the Santa Fe trade. Riding off some distance from the wagon train looking for desperately needed water, he was killed by Comanches on May 27, 1831. Everybody knows Smith was a religious manlikely one of the very few in this calling; he was most affectionately attached to his family, often referring to himself in letters as your unworthy son; he was especially solicitous of the welfare of his men. On one occasion when crossing the Nevada desert one of his men dropped to the sands dying of thirst, and Smith took a little brass kettle and trudged miles till he found water and came back to revive him. Morgans biography of Smith concludes with a passage by an unknown eulogist: . . . yet was he modest, never obtrusive, charitable without guile . . . a man whom none could approach without respect, or know without esteem . . . . he must not be forgotten. Having used every known source about Smith and given more than one hundred pages of notes, Morgan has here produced a masterpiece. The long-lost manuscript journal of Smiths first expedition to California, which Dale Morgan had confidently predicted would some day be found, was recently discovered and published: The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: His Personal Account of the Journey to California 18261827, (1977) edited with an introduction by George R. Brooks. It contains also the Daybook, both accounts and narrative, by Harrison G. Rogers, Smiths clerk, on which Brooks suggests Smith evidently drew occasionally to fill in details and events he had neglected to record. Jedediah Smiths journal is surely the best kept by a mountain man. Its genius lies in its meditative quality, its philosophic inquiring into the meaning of his actions and his life itself. Journal of a Trapper (1965) by Osborne Russell, edited by Aubrey L. Haines, is another notable mountain man document. Born in a little town in Maine, Russell found himself in Independence, Missouri, in April 1834, at the age of twenty, where he joined the Columbia River Fishing and Trading Company, which was fitting out for an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia. His book is particularly well written and is fascinating because of the authors intense interest in the new western environment. He is ecstatic about the Wind River Mountains and the mountains in the Yellowstone 87
and Three Forks regions. He is fascinated to find petrified sea shells on the mountains and geysers and an oil spring on a fork of the Popo-azia River, as he calls it. He takes books out of the Fort Hall Library when he goes trapping and meditates on politics, literature, religion, and the risks of death in the mountains. A few mountain men were so adept at avoiding death in the mountains that their exploits inspired legends, and none of the western adventurers was more legendary than Kit Carson. In Dear Old Kit: The Historical Christopher Carson (1968) Harvey Lewis Carter has tried to set the record straight, to replace the hero worship and legend with documented fact, and especially to repudiate one of the most egregious creators of a pseudo-Carson, Oliver P. Wiggins. In pursuing his task of presenting the historical Carson, he has let Carson speak for himself accurately for the first time. Carsons reminiscences were dictated, Carter has discovered, to John Mostin. But the inaccurate elaborations included by Dr. Dewitt C. Peters have here been excluded. Every person, place, and event Carson mentions is identified. The double column format adds to the ease of understanding the materials. The Kit Carson Memoirs, 18091856 are in one column and Carters extensively researched notes and comments are adjacent. Carters essay, Carson the Man: A New Appraisal is a concise summary of Carson as trapper, trader, army guide, and man of character. This last is a view that few Navajos, at least, have held of him since 1864 when he helped the Army defeat them and drive them on the Long March to Fort Sumner. Fort Sumner was a military post, but some forts such as Bents Fort and Fort Laramie began as fur trading posts that figured importantly in the lives of the mountain men. In the 1830s such outposts began to serve the travelers that flooded over the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail. By midcentury the demise of the fur trade was evident, and many of these trading posts were bought and made into forts by the army as the incursions of whites into Indian territories promoted hostilities. Histories of some of these forts, memoirs, and letters of soldiers, journalists, and travelers of all sorts bring to life the interrelationships of mountain men, Indians, soldiers, immigrants, missionaries, dudes, scientists, surveyors, and others. Brief mention of a few of these histories will clarify the major confrontations and conflicts that characterized life beyond the frontier during the period of exploration. Bents Old Fort was built on the Arkansas River in 1833 by the brothers Charles and William Bent and their partner, Ceran St. Vrain. It served on the Santa Fe Trail much as Fort Laramie did on the Oregon Trail. The southwestern Indians and mountain men traded their furs and pelts for supplies brought to the fort from St. Louis. Santa Fe traders, adventurers, and soldiers found the old fort a welcome place of accommodation, rest, and 88
celebration. David Lavender in his Bents Fort (1954) delineates the history and brings alive the people and activities associated with it. Kit Carson, Old Bill Williams, and Jim Beckwourth frequented the place, and travelers like Francis Parkman, George Frederick Ruxton, and Lewis Garrard stayed there briefly and left interesting descriptions. Many extolled the flapjacks, pumpkin pies, and other delectations prepared by Black Charlotte. With the murder of his brother Charles, governor of New Mexico, in an uprising in Taos, the decline of the fur trade, and the rising Indian hostilities, William Bent loaded his goods, employees, and family into wagons in 1849 and set fire to the fort. He moved down the Arkansas a few miles and built a new fort which he operated for eight years and finally leased to the army. He retired to his ranch on the Purgatoire where he died in 1869. It has been said by one scholar that no other book on the Santa Fe Trail can match Lavenders work. Lavender communicates a blend of narrative power, pictorial sense, scrupulous scholarship, and awareness of the great American melodrama. Some place Lavenders history alongside the works of Parkman and Prescott. The Old Bents Fort was reconstructed in exact detail and is now operated by the National Park Service. George E. Hydes Life of George Bent, Written from his Letters (1967), adds significantly to an understanding of the complicated relationships and often violent encounters between the Cheyennes and other Indians and the whites in the vicinity of Bents Fort. The subject of this biography is not William Bents young brother by that name, but his son by Owl Woman, his Cheyenne wife. She was the daughter of Gray Thunder, one of the most powerful of the Cheyennes. The fascinating study of authentic Indianwhite relations is based on George Bents letters to Hyde over a period from 1905 to the eve of his death in 1918. Bents Fort was only one of the more than two hundred civilian and military posts in the West. A good study of a number of those outposts is Robert G. Athearns Forts of the Upper Missouri (1967). Action-filled with struggles and danger, it was written by one of the most knowledgeable scholars on this subject: it makes a unique contribution in bringing together a diverse body of history, and explains the role these forts played over about eighty years in developing trade in furs, encouraging and protecting settlers, and in subduing hostile Indians, especially the Sioux. The soldiers were not just Indian fighters. Indeed, so important and pervasive was the militarys role in the exploration of the West that western military memoirs and histories constitute a vast body of literature which is discussed in a separate chapter in this volume. But several military memoirs and histories must also be mentioned in this chapter, because they demonstrate so well that soldiers were among the major western adventurers. George Winston Smith and Charles Judahs Chronicles of the Gringos: The 89
U. S. Army in the Mexican War, 18461848 (1968) consists of five hundred pages of accounts of eyewitnesses and combatants and is totally unlike anything else published on the Mexican War. Orrin H. and Lorraine Bonneys Battle Drums and Geysers (1970) presents the life and journals of Lt. Gustavus Cheney Doane, a soldier who seems to have volunteered for every exploring assignment in western Wyoming and Montana, the Yellowstone area and the Snake River country. Agnes Wright Springs Caspar Collins: The Life and Exploits of an Indian Fighter of the Sixties (1927, 1969) is an account of a genuine hero who led his 120 men on a charge into a force of 600 Cheyennes, 1,800 Sioux, and 200 Arapahoes. Soldiers were not, of course, the only government officials who helped to explore the West, and one of the most noted of the governments civilian employees was J. Ross Browne. A very welcome addition to western literature is J. Ross Browne: His Letters, Journals, and Writings (1969), edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Lina Fergusson Browne. Browne spent twenty-five years in the West, about twice as long as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Francis Parkman, Richard Dana, and Bayard Taylor combined. He traveled extensively throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, and Washington; and his letters, journals, articles, and reports constitute the fullest and most reliable account of life in the West left by a single person in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Browne was surely one of the most honest and fearless federal agents in American history. There is something poignant in seeing this immigrant heir to American democracy encountering in Californias own Gilded Age a luxuriant flowering of graft among government officialsand who with no apparent disillusionment was dismissed from his position for arguing relentlessly for its abatement. He was a compulsive writer, and his articles, forty-two of which appeared in Harpers alone, were some of the most popular of the time. His cartoons portray as no words can the ironic view he had of himself and the turbulent life in the West he experienced so fully.
VI
During the nineteenth century hundreds of notable visitors came to America to play, observe, or study. A large number were attracted to the West, and many have written perceptively about it. In 1870 Viscount James Bryce, English statesman and historian, made the first of five extended visits to study American government and civilization. Bryce was particularly interested in the West, about which he wrote in his classic work, The American Commonwealth (1888, 1978): The west is the most American part of America: that is to say, the part where those features which distinguish America from Europe come out in the strongest relief. Bryces opinion was shared by many other Europeans who wrote about 90
their adventure in the West. George Frederick Ruxton, a young English military man, explorer, and adventurer, crowded a great deal of adventure and literary achievement into his twenty-seven years. His name is familiar to and highly regarded by western scholars because he kept notebooks and diaries rich in authentic detail, from which he could distill superb scholarly articles on the ethnology of Indians and graphic accounts of his adventures. He captured the character and vernacular of mountain men and traders better than anyone else has done. No novelist could presume to achieve verisimilitude in portraying fictional mountain men without drawing upon Ruxton. He was certainly no greenhorn when at twenty-five he finally added the American West, Mexico, and Canada to his explorations. He had already served as a soldier in Ireland and Spain, had explored in Morocco and South Africa, and had considered exploring Borneo and the Indian Archipelago. Wallace Stegner observed in The Uneasy Chair (1974) that Bernard DeVoto had correctly suspected that Ruxton was a British agentand that Sir William Drummond Stewart may have been one too. However that may be, Ruxtons great affection for the wilderness West was genuine: Although liable to an accusation of barbarism, I must confess that the very happiest moments of my life have been spent in the wilderness of the Far West; and I never recall but with pleasure the remembrance of my solitary camp in the Bayou Salado, with no friend near me more faithful than my rifle, and no companions more sociable than my good horse and mules, and the attendant coyote which nightly serenades us. There are two books, both edited by LeRoy Hafen, which scholars agree are indispensable to an understanding of Ruxton and an appreciation of his contribution to western literature. The pieces in Ruxton of the Rockies, collected by Clyde and Mae Reed Porter (1950), are autobiographical writings, almost all of which were never before published. Ruxtons best-known work is Life in the Far West (1849; 1951, with a foreword by Mae Reed Porter). Though Ruxton would assert that Life in the Far West is no fiction, it is nonetheless fictionized history, for he admits about the incidents portrayed: I have invented not one out of my own head. They are all matters of history in the mountains, but I have, no doubt, jumbled the dramatis personae one with another, and may have committed anachronisms in the order of their occurrence. Actually little of the narrative consists of Ruxtons own experience; most consists of campfire tales he heard. The result is the liveliest and, in a sense, the truest historic portrayals of the mountain men; the analysis of the character of the mountain man indicates close observation. The mountain man, he says, has a loathing of the restrictions of civilization; according to Ruxton he makes quick determination and resolve in cases of extreme difficulty and peril. He has fixedness of purpose; 91
dash and daring with equal subtlety and caution; energy, enterprise, and hardihood of character; gaiety and dissipation. He concludes that these traits are basic in the American character. In the uninhibited West they are simply given full expression. Another Englishman, Thomas H. Gladstone, came to the United States in 1856, with John T. Delane, the editor of The Times the mighty London newspaper for which Gladstone was a correspondent. A kinsman of the eminent English statesman, Gladstone was deeply interested in the antebellum conflict over bleeding Kansas. Kansas, he said, seemed buried beneath a mass of contradictory assertions. In Washington he listened to congressional debates about the problem and determined to go to Kansas and make his own inquiry. After spending several months in the South studying its culture and racial attitudes, he went first to Missouri and finally to Kansas. He observed very closely and disinterestedly and reported what he saw there from the burning of Lawrence through a whole year of the depredations of the Border Ruffians. He compiled factual reports on every aspect of Kansas: the character of the settlers, their economy, the natural resources, its place as the beginning of both the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail. The Englishman in Kansas (1857, 1971) consists of the letters Gladstone sent to The Times. Marshall Spragues A Gallery of Dudes (1966) is an interesting collection of nine informative and entertaining sketches of European travelers (as well as Theodore Roosevelt), all of whom between 1833 and 1890 sought adventure or profit in the West. My dudes, says Sprague, were comic, but they had more than comedy to offer. They were highly educated, and they had traveled widely. Most of them saw the West in a broad and fresh perspective. One of Spragues best sketches is Scotsman on the Green, an account of Sir William Drummond Stewarts fabulous adventures from 1833 to 1843 in the heart of mountain man country. During this period he attended every rendezvous. He saw Dr. Marcus Whitman remove the iron arrowhead from Jim Bridgers back at the 1835 rendezvous on the Green. No doubt one of the most important things Stewart did was to take along the young New Orleans artist, Alfred Jacob Miller, on his 1837 excursion. Millers paintings, genre scenes, landscapes, and portraits of Stewart with mountain men, Indians, and buffaloes in the Rocky Mountain settings are generally believed to be some of the best portrayals of early western life. Stewart traveled usually with a retinue of at least fifty people, guides, hunters, gentlemen, and an immense amount of equipment. He met Chouteau, Bridger, Sheridan, Custer, Frmont, William Sublette, Ashley, Baptiste Charbonneau, and almost everyone else of importance in the West of his time. 92
In Stewarts 1843 hunting frolic he invited Matthew C. Field, assistant editor of the New Orleans Picayune, and a former actor, to join his party. Fields journal and reports to his newspaper, Prairie and Mountain Sketches (1957), edited by Kate L. Gregg and John Francis McDermott, show Field was an excellent reporter of everything of human interest, especially the ironic or humorous. He filled at least six notebooks with such happenings as an uproarious Fourth of July celebration six hundred miles beyond the frontier, three days of horse racing ten thousand feet above sea level across the Great Divide, and performing Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew for a large audience of Shawnee Indians. Field is as confident as he is humorous and sprightly. Sir William provided the best of food and drink, entertainment, and hunting. He seems, however, to have been rather arbitrary in keeping with the habitual exercise of his noble prerogatives. Some of his American guests resented this, since Field says he heard muttering in camp, including some sarcastic epithets for Sir William as His Omnipotence. He confided in a letter to his wife: I do most frankly beleive [sic] that I can eclipse Irving, Lewis & Clark, Farnham, Father De Smet, and all other writers in describing the grand and wonderful scenes of this region. Fields sketches are rich in content and delightful in style. Marshall Sprague has also written the introduction to the 1967 reprint of the Earl of Dunravens book, The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874 (1876, 1967). Twenty-eight years after Parkman scouted about Fort Laramie with the Oglala Sioux and hunted buffalo east of the Rockies, the Earl of Dunraven and his companions disembarked from the Union Pacific train in Corinne, Utah, with their famous guide, Jack Omohundro, and made their way north past Fort Hall to Virginia City, Bozeman, and the Yellowstone River. In recounting his hunting adventures, in carefully analyzing the Crow Indians, in describing the natural wonders of the Yellowstone Park region, Dunraven proved himself a writer of considerable talent. In analyzing Indian-white relations and in providing sparkling, ironic humor, his book is likely the best of all the reports left by European dudes about their western experiences. Europeans were not the only sojourners in the West. Many Americans from the eastern regions went west for adventure or for their health. In the spring of 1831, Josiah Gregg, a young medical doctor, joined a traders caravan setting out for Santa Fe, because he had been advised to take a trip for his health. He became a merchant in the Santa Fe trade for the next nine years, all the while recording in his notebooks the most insightful observations of the land and its people, Mexicans and Indians, that have been written. He served as a correspondent in the Mexican War, but in 1849 he joined the Gold Rush to California, where he died, on an ill-supplied expe93
dition, of exposure and starvation. His book, Commerce of the Prairies (1844), edited in 1967 by Milo Milton Quaife, has been regarded as a classic since its publication. Quaifes edition is an abridgment containing only those chapters which comprise his personal narrative. About half of the original book (which contained his treatises on geography, minerals, animals, Indian tribes, etc. of the Southwest) has been omitted. Susan Shelby Magoffin had a copy of Dr. Greggs Commerce of the Prairies, and her own book is, after his, one of the best accounts of the Santa Fe trade. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico (1926), edited in 1962 by Stella M. Drumm with a foreword by Howard R. Lamar, is the diary of Magoffins trip down the Santa Fe Trail in 18461847. She was accustomed to ease and comfort, being from a wealthy and historically noteworthy family. At eighteen she married Samuel Magoffin (twenty-seven years her senior), for sixteen years a prosperous merchant in the Santa Fe trade. She traveled in style: a mule-drawn carriage with driver and two servant boys, her dog, books and all comforts; and she had a maid with a separate carriage. Her diary is a very personal response to the daily routine of swearing teamsters, frightening visits by Indians, as well as her accounts of nature roses and antelopes and buffaloes. The notes by the editor and foreword by Lamar make clear the political and economic situation in 1846. In that year of decision which saw Susan Magoffin, George Ruxton, and Francis Parkman on the Santa Fe Trail, a seventeen-year-old Philadelphia youth named Lewis Hector Garrard also traveled along that route, and he later described his adventures in Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail (1850; 1955). At Westport Garrard outfitted himself for the trip, buying a paint horse for fifty dollars. He traveled the Santa Fe Trail in the company of Ceran St. Vrains merchant caravan heading for Bents Fort. Unlike Susan Magoffin, who was offended by the colorful epithets of the French Canadian teamsterssacre enfant de garce!Garrard was amused. Like her, he observed the method of burial on the prairie; like her, he noted the pas por aqu signatures on Pawnee Rock, herds of buffalo, and skulking, begging, or spying Indians. He had a sensitive ear for the vernacular of the mountain men and traders and was immensely amused to find a trader with the Cheyennes named, of all things, John Smith. He was fascinated by the Indians pipe ceremony and wrote a rhapsody on the enlivening delights of the untaught savages. The character of the New Mexican interests him, but unfortunately he proves to have the typical American racist bias of the period: The New Mexicans, when weakest, are the most contemptible, servile objects to be seen; and with their whining voices, shrugs of the shoulder, and dastardly expression of their villainous countenances, they commend themselves unreservedly to contempt.
94
Just as unflattering as Garrards descriptions of the New Mexicans are Francis Parkmans sketches of the Indians. Parkman was not yet twentythree when he left his prolonged studies at Harvard in the spring of that critical year 1846 for a tour of curiosity and amusement in the wilderness far beyond the Missouri River frontier towns. Parkman, who had received his LL.B. degree in 1846, was very well educated and widely traveled; he was no greenhornlike Magoffin at eighteen and Garrard at seventeenwhen he started West. He was an expert rifleman and after his three summer seasons of roughing it through the woods, mountains, rivers, and lakes of New England and eastern Canada was a master at the arts of survival in the wild. All of thisand the trip westwere part of Parkmans preparation for realizing his lifes work. At eighteen he had dedicated himself to writing the comprehensive history of the long struggles between Britain and France, with their Indian allies, for control of North America. His purpose, then, was not just a pleasure excursion: he wanted to observe the least-tamed of Indians, particularly to see how skilled they were in battle, both in strategy and execution of cooperative plans. Along with his cousin, Quincy Shaw, Parkman arrived at St. Louis by train and put up, of course, at the Planters House while outfitting for the trip. He had the good fortune to hire Henry Chatillon as guide and hunter. He hired another French Canadian, Deslauriers, as muleteer, cook, and camp tender. They took the steamboat to Westport and made a brief stop at Fort Leavenworth. Here they were right on the very frontier; and what Parkman was soon to see was a surprising and ironic array of the contradictions between civilization and the wild brought together. They sought out the trader to the Kickapoo Indians (almost certainly William H. Hildreth). The trader, Parkman says, was a blue-eyed, openfaced man who neither in his manner nor his appearance betrayed any of the roughness of the frontier. . . . His home was clean, cool, and neatly carpeted and his wife, a charming Creole beauty who lived on the sunny side of life, served them excellent claret and lunch. There Parkman saw with something near astonishment a very mischievous looking knife resting on a set of Milton in a well-stocked bookcase. DeVoto has observed that it is strange Parkman should have been totally oblivious to the Mexican War going on at the time. Virtually his only allusion to the war is about a derelict soldier he found at Bents Fort, whom he dubbed Tete Rouge, and helped to get back to Fort Leavenworth. Many have wondered, also, at Parkmans total lack of appreciation for the flood of immigrants he saw headed west. Parkman could see no sense in their abandoning their homes to risk their lives trying to get to Oregon or California.
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A Literary History of the American West He was disgusted with the Mormons he met because they always wanted to preach their religion to him, an agnostic, or as his sister said a reverent agnostic. The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman, edited by E. N. Feltskog in 1969, is the only edition a scholar or serious general reader would use. It is definitive in its collating the carefully considered changes Parkman made from his field notes (which he first dictated to Shaw) through subsequent editions. Feltskog traces meticulously what Parkman did with the manuscript through the serial publication in Knickerbocker Magazine (1847, 1849), and in each of the eight book editions to follow to the 1892 edition, which he uses as his copy text. Feltskog has noted and compared some seven thousand substantive variants comprising three hundred pages, plus one hundred more pages of introduction and bibliography. Having access to the scholarship of Mason Wade and others, in addition to Parkmans original field notes, Feltskog shows how Parkman consciously adopted changes in style and point of view. In the notebooks Parkman records his adventures and dangers with uninhibited exuberance and delight; but, as Feltskog demonstrates, in his rewriting he removes himself successively into a more objective, less personal point of view. Back in St. Louis Parkman gave Chatillon his fine rifle as a parting gift and wrote a beautiful rhapsodic passage on his natural grace and sterling character. It is the culmination of a great book, and Feltskog has made it available to readers as it has never been before.
VII
Twenty-three years after the adventures of Parkman, Ruxton, Garrard, and Magoffin on the Santa Fe Trail, a one-armed Civil War veteran traveled down the last great stretch of unexplored territory in the American West. That veterans achievements as an explorer, scientist, dedicated public servant, and writer are widely recognized today and give Major John Wesley Powell heroic stature. Piercing through misconceptions to reality, Powell enunciated entirely new concepts about the arid West at least seventy-five years before they were generally accepted and acted upon. Powells encyclopedic knowledge of the arid plateau region was not even approximated by anyone else of his time. And the wonder of it all is that he was largely self-taught. He emerged from a desultory, miscellaneous attendance at a few schools and colleges, to take a position as professor of geology, and he soon became the outstanding geographer, enthnologist, and explorer of his time. On May 10, 1869, a Union Pacific locomotive and a Central Pacific locomotive drew up nose-to-nose at Promontory Point, Utah, to celebrate the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Just two weeks later Powell 96
got off a Union Pacific train at Green River, Wyoming. He brought with him four specially designed boats, built of oak in Chicago, partially decked with air-tight compartments for buoyancy and watertight storage spaces. Powells flagship, so to speak, had a captains chair bolted to its deck and was named the Emma Dean. The Indians of the region had long held the river in dread and warned Powell not to enter that Great Unknown with its mysterious evils. The people of Green River cheered as the party pushed their boats into the swift water. The walls of the canyon narrowed. The travelers noted the chiseled names of some who had crossed: Escalante in 1776; Ashley some fifty years later; and Frmont and Gunnison. Buried in darkness and gloom the men in the boats must have reflected that those men whose names they saw were merely crossing the river in carefully selected safe places. Powell and his men repeatedly heard the roar of falls aheadoften at places where there were no friendly beaches for landing and portage. Damage to boats, loss of equipment, spoilage of food, and constant anxiety were routine. In 1874 the editors of Scribners magazine persuaded Powell to write a series of four articles, but it was not till 1875 that the full account of the river adventures, and the ethnographic, geographic, and geological chapters were published as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Tributaries. Powell must rank as one of the most reluctant of authors, for it was only after Mr. Garfield, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives, refused to consider Powells request for more funds for scientific explorations that Powell agreed to write the book. Powell reported this interesting genesis of his book: Thereupon Mr. Garfield, in a pleasant manner, insisted that the history of the exploration should be published by the government, and that I must understand that my scientific work would be continued by additional appropriations only upon my promise that I would publish an account of the exploration. I made the promise, and the task was immediately undertaken. Ironically (since Powell said he had no interest in that work as an adventure), The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Tributaries, as it was revised and enlarged in 1875, became one of the best adventure narratives in American literature. The exploration on which it was based was not made for adventure but purely for scientific purposes, geographic and geologic, and I had no intention of writing an account of it, but only of recording the scientific results. It is fortunate for American literature that he kept and preserved a journal. My daily journal, he wrote, had been kept on long narrow strips of brown paper, which were gathered into little volumes that were bound in sole leather in camp as they were completed. Powells most valuable scientific publication was Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions (1878). He worked effectively with politicians and was 97
the chief moving force in getting the government to establish in 1870 the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region with himself in charge. His major accomplishment here was to map the Plateau Province. He took a leading part in founding the U.S. Geological Survey. He founded and became director of the Bureau of Ethnology in the Smithsonian Institution. He promoted the establishment of the Bureau of Reclamation. The best way to put the famous 1869 run of the Green and Colorado in context with the other explorations in the Plateau Province is to read Wallace Stegners Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954; 1982). Stegner traces Powells 18671868 exploration from Cheyenne south to Denver, across the Rockies at Middle Park, to Browns Hole, and on the Green River. He makes a detailed factual and literary analysis of Powells narrative of the 1869 run of the Colorado. This is followed by recounting Powells 1870 expedition of the region and the 18711872 second run. Stegner considers that Powell took undue liberties in the published account of what purports to be only the 1869 adventure by freely interpolating materials from the 18711872 trip. Powell has taken exactly the same kind of liberty with his notebook as did Parkman, Garrard, and Ruxton before him. Stegner says: . . . it contains some peculiar suppressions, alterations, and additions of fact that would be thoroughly justified in fiction . . . but have a sinful and hangdog look in a scientific monograph. Stegner is a harsh critic of Powells style as well as the content of his book. He says Powell overdramatizes by rhetoric and tone the dangers encountered. But it is interesting to conjecture how a staid and decorous literary critic might report the experience if he had been ensconced in the bow of the Emma Dean clinging to those oak rails as the boat plunged and bucked her way between jagged boulders down the white rapids of the Colorado. He might have evoked a tone of greater anxiety and supported it with stronger diction than Powell used. Down the Colorado: John Wesley Powell: Diary of the First Trip Through the Grand Canyon, 1869 (1969) is an abridged reprinting of Powells The Exploration of the Colorado River. Numerous photographs and drawings made of both the 1869 and 1871 expeditions are included with annotations accompanying the text. The outstanding feature of this edition, however, is the forty-eight-page gallery of four-color photographs by Eliot Porter, one of Americas leading photographers of nature. Passages focusing on the courage, hardship, and determination of Powell and his men recounted in the narrative are effectively juxtaposed in this edition with photographs of breathtaking beauty of the world of color, light, and gloom through which they traveledand survived. Porters photographs give an entirely new and pleasurable dimension to reading Powell. 98
VIII
In summary, this sampling of some sixty volumes bearing directly or indirectly on western adventure reveals that a great diversity of people with varied aims were involved. The significance, and even the basic meaning, of some of these primary documents left by the adventurers has been made more apparent to readers by later historical, biographical, and scientific studies. The Journals of Lewis and Clark for example, generally admitted to be the premiere classic in the genre, have been greatly clarified and enhanced by the historical study by Jackson and the scientific study by Cutright. Morgan did equally well in his exhaustively researched Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West. Feltskogs literary analysis of the nine editions of Parkmans The Oregon Trail is a masterful piece of research. Finally, an excellent historical study of the arid Plateau Province, the region of Powells explorations and writings, has been made by Stegner in his Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. It has been a long time since Jefferson instructed Lewis to map his route, to describe and, when possible, take specimens of natural resources, and to treat the Indians well. Many Americans today look backor about themand wonder what went wrong with Jeffersons ideals for the West. One who wondered was the late Archibald MacLeish. His poem Burying Ground by the Ties deals with immigrant laborers who worked on railroads and in mines and other enterprises. Wildwest is about Crazy Horse and the battle on the Greasy Grass. And in Empire Builders, in a bitterly sarcastic tone, MacLeish presents Harriman, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Mellon, and Barton: You have just beheld the Makers Making America: They screwed her scrawny and gaunt. He repeats makers making America eleven times. All but a few readers innocent of American vernacular would realize with a shock what MacLeish means. Interspersed between the passages about the empire builders is what purports to be a letter from Lewis to Jefferson in which the explorer describes the beauty and richness of the western land waiting for her Westward people!
J. GOLDEN T AYLOR , late
of Colorado State University
99
Alter, J. Cecil. Jim Bridger. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. (First published by author under title James Bridger, Trapper, Frontiersman, Scout and Guide: A Historical Narrative, in Salt Lake City by Shepard Book Co., in 1925.) Athearn, Robert G. Forts of the Upper Missouri. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Biddle, Nicholas, ed. Travels to the Source of the Missouri River and Across the American Continent to the Pacific Ocean. Performed by Order of the Government of the United States, in the Years 1804, 1805, and 1806 [by Lewis and Clark]. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1814. Bonner, T. D. The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians. London: S. Low and Son, and New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856. Bonney, Orrin H. and Lorraine. Battle Drums and Geysers: The Story and Journals of Lieutenant Gustavus Cheyney Doane, Soldier and Explorer of the Yellowstone and Snake River Regions. Chicago: Swallow, 1970. Brooks, George R., ed. The Southwest Expedition of Jedediah S. Smith: His Personal Account of the Journey to California 18261827. Western Frontiersmen Series, vol. 18. Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark, 1977. Browne, Lina Fergusson, ed. J. Ross Browne: His Letters, Journals, and Writings. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969. Bryce, James Bryce, Viscount. The American Commonwealth. Folcroft, Pennsylvania: Folcroft Library Editions, 1978. (First published by Macmillan of London and New York, in 1888.) Carter, Harvey Lewis. Dear Old Kit: The Historical Christopher Carson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968. Chittenden, Hiram Martin. The American Fur Trade of the Far West: A History of the Pioneer Trading Posts and Early Fur Companies of the Missouri Valley and the Rocky Mountains and of the Overland Commerce with Santa Fe. Fairfield, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1973. (First published in 3 volumes in 1902 by F. P. Harper of New York. ) Clark, Ella E., and Margot Edmonds. Sacagawea of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Clarke, Charles G. The Men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Biographicul Roster of the Fifty-one Members and a Composite Diary of Their Activities from All Known Sources. Western Frontiersmen Series, vol. 14. Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark, 1970. Coues, Elliott. The History of the Expedition Under the Command of Lewis and Clark, to the Sources of the Missouri River, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, Performed During the Years 180456, by Order of the Government of the United States. 4 vols. New York: F. P. Harper, 1893. Cutright, Paul Russell. Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969.
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Dana, Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast. Boston: H. M. Caldwell, New York: A. L. Burt, and New York: Harper, 1840. DeVoto, Bernard. Across the Wide Missouri. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. . The Course of Empire. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. . The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. . The Year of Decision: 1846. Boston: Little, Brown, 1943. Dunraven, Earl of. The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. (First published by Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin Dunraven in London by Chatto and Windus, and in New York by Scribner, Welford & Armstrong, both in 1876.) Egan, Ferol. The El Dorado Trail: The Story of the Gold Rush Routes Across Mexico. American Trails Series. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Eide, Ingvard Henry. American Odyssey: The Journey of Lewis and Clark. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969. Favour, Alpheus Hoyt. Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936. Feltskog, E. N., ed. The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman. Madison and Milwaukee: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. (First published by author in 1849 under the title The California and Oregon Trail: Being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life by G. P. Putnam of New York.) Field, Matthew C. Prairie and Mountain Sketches. Edited by Kate L. Gregg and John Francis McDermott. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957. Florin, Lambert. Western Wagon Wheels. Seattle: Superior Publishing, 1970. Garrard, Lewis Hector. Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail: or, Prairie Travel and Scalp Dances, with a Look at Los Rancheros from Muleback and the Rocky Mountain Campfire. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. (First published in 1850 by H. W. Derby of Cincinnati and A. S. Barnes of New York.) Gladstone, Thomas H. The Englishman in Kansas, or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971. (First published in 1857 by Miller and Co., and G. Routledge and Co., both of New York.) Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies. Edited by Milo Milton Quaife. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. (First published in 2 volumes by author under the title Commerce of the Prairies: or, The Journal of a Santa Fe Trader, During Eight Expeditions Across the Great Western Prairies, and a Residence of Nearly Nine Years in Northern Mexico, in New York by H. G. Langley in 1844.) Hafen, LeRoy, ed. Life in the Far West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951. (First published under the same title, by author George Frederick Ruxton, in Edinburgh and London by W. Blackwood and Sons, in 1849.) . The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West. 10 vols. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 19651972. . ed. Ruxton of the Rockies. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. (First published by author George Frederick Ruxton under the title Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. London: J. Murray, 1847.) Hannon, Jessie Gould. The Boston-Newton Company Venture: Crossing to California in 1849. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969.
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A Literary History of the American West Havighurst, Walter. River to the West: Three Centuries of the Ohio. New York: G. P. Putnams, 1970. Hawgood, John A. Americas Western Frontiers: The Exploration and Settlement of the Trans-Mississippi West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. Hyde, George E. The Life of George Bent, Written from His Letters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Jackson, Donald, ed. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 17831854. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962. Lavender, David Sievert. Bents Fort. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1954. McDermott, John Francis. Travelers on the Western Frontier. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. Magoffin, Susan S. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico. Rev. ed. by Stella Drumm. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962. (First published by editor under the title Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magofin, 18461847, by Yale University Press of New Haven and Oxford University Press of London, both in 1926.) Mattes, Merrill J. The Great Platte River Road: The Covered Wagon Mainline via Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie. Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society, 1969. Morgan, Dale L. Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, and Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953. Powell, John Wesley. Down the Colorado: John Wesley Powell: Diary of the First Trip Through the Grand Canyon, 1869. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969. . The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Tributaries. Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872 Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1875. . Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1878. Russell, Osborne. Journal of a Trapper. Edited by A. L. Haines. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. (First published by author under the title Journal of a Trapper; or, Nine Years in the Rocky Mountains: 18341843 : Being a General Description of the Country, Climate, Rivers, Lakes, Mountains, etc., and a View of the Life Led by a Hunter in Those Regions. Boise: Syms-York, 1914.) Salisbury, Albert and Jane. Here Rolled the Covered Wagons. Seattle: Superior Publishing, 1948. Smith, George Winston, and Charles Judah. Chronicles of the Gringos: The U.S. Army in the Mexican War, 18461848. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968. Snively, W. D., Jr., and Louanna Furbee. Satans Ferryman: A True Tale of the Old Frontier. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968. Speck, Gordon. Breeds and Half-Breeds. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1969. Sprague, Marshall. A Gallery of Dudes. Boston and Seattle: Little, Brown, 1967. Spring, Agnes Wright. Caspar Collins: The Life and Exploits of an Indian Fighter of the Sixties. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969. (First published in New York by Columbia University Press in 1927.)
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Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1982. (First published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin in 1954.) Sunder, John E. Bill Sublette, Mountain Man. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 18041806. 8 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 19045. Todd, Edgeley W., ed. The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U. S. A. by Washington Irving. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961. (First published by author Washington Irving under the title: The Rocky Mountains: or, Scenes, Incidents and Adventures in the Far West; Digested from the Journal of Capt. B. L. E. Bonneville in Philadelphia by Carey, Lea, and Blanchard in 1837. At the same time, under the title The Adventures of Captain Bonneville; or, Scenes Beyond the Rocky Mountains of the Far West in London by R. Bentley and in Paris by Baudrys European Library and A. W. Galignani. ) . Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains by Washington Irving. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. (First published by author Washington Irving under the title Astoria; or Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains in Philadelphia by Carey, Lea and Blanchard in 1836. At the same time, by Richard Bentley of London and Baudrys European Library and A. W. Galignani, both of Paris.) Vestal, Stanley. Joe Meek: The Merry Mountain Man, a Biography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, and Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1952. Weber, David J. The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 15401846. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Wilson, Elinor. Jim Beckwourth: Black Mountain Man and War Chief of the Crows. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.
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of the West, as represented in its literature, is rich in both scope and detail. As C. L. Sonnichsen wrote in From Hopalong to Hud: All our wars and feuds from Canada to Mexico have been fictionalized, exposing our secret thoughts about ourselves and our friends and enemies (p. 177). Since nearly every major officer in the Indian Wars left at least one memoir, since enlisted men wrote a number of outstanding narratives, and since quite a few officers wives left remarkably readable accounts of life on the army frontier, western American novelists and dramatists have long been able to turn to that rich donne when portraying the military. One battle alone, Custers Last Stand, has generated over 2,500 books and pamphlets, a record unequalled by any other American battle. So important and pervasive was the presence of the Army in the nineteenth-century West and so massive and influential has been the outpouring of books about the frontiersmen in blue that the mind and literature of the West cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of that military legacy. The many excellent histories of the Indian wars give the background necessary for understanding what led to frontier conflicts and what happened when the troops saw action. Records left by officers and enlisted men tell the reader what that military experience was like for those who lived it, while reports by scouts and war correspondents add detail and variety to those accounts. By virtue of fine writing, some primary accounts have risen above the level of mere factual reporting and have become important works of western American literature in their own right. Other primary accounts have formed the basis of novels and dramas about the military in the West. Warfare with Indians began during the years of Puritan settlement and was almost continuous in the West during the nineteenth century. So many scholars have turned their attention to those dramatic conflicts that a list of the military histories of the American West would constitute an entire book, though no such bibliography has yet been published. Such a mass of historical material could provide a lifetime of reading, and it has already proven to be a rich resource for authors who have wanted their fictional portraits of the West to be historically accurate. Of the hundreds of historians of the western military, Robert M. Utley
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has written the best compilation of the experiences of the frontier army. Utleys Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848 1865 (1967) and Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 18661890 (1973) also offer the best assessment of the Armys value, for Utley has the knack of seeing beyond detail to understand and relate important general historical patterns. In The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1961), for example, he explains the inevitability of that final conflict at Wounded Knee, showing that it was not only a massacre, but also a tragedy which initiated the death throes of an entire nation. In addition to Utleys studies, there are military histories of the American West that (I) study a single encounter (J. W. Vaughns With Crook on the Rosebud and The Reynolds Campaign on Powder River) ; (2) cover an entire campaign such as that on the Little Bighorn (Edgar I. Stewarts Custers Luck and John S. Grays Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876 ) ; (3) provide a synthesis of previous works, drawing reliable conclusions from them (Dan L. Thrapps The Conquest of Apacheria and General Crook and the Sierra Madre Adventure and Odie B. Faulkss The Geronimo Campaign ) and (4) popularize the subject, making it come to life by using a novelists techniques (Fairfax Downeys Indian Fighting Army and Paul I. Wellmans Death on Horseback ). Many other histories of the frontier army are difficult to categorize. One good example is William H. Leckies The Buffalo Soldiers (1967), a readable and concise account of the part played by the black cavalry in the Indian Wars. Leckie builds a strong case for the black cavalry, which could point to fewer desertions, an outstanding combat record, and better discipline than that of any white regiment, yet which suffered the indignities of the worst post, the worst food, the poorest weapons, and the bitterest duty. Histories such as Leckies give the reader valuable background information, but any author who desires first-hand material for his work of fiction can turn to a multitude of sources written by actual participants. The most famous of the western officers is George Armstrong Custer, whose many talents also included writing. My Life on the Plains (1874) has been regarded since its publication as one of the most graphic accounts of nineteenthcentury military life. Custer also wrote for the leading magazines of the day, beginning with his contribution of fifteen articles to a sportsmans periodical called Turf, Field and Farm. Seldom one to shy from any form of publicity, in this case Custer may have chosen to write under the pen name Nomad because he criticized superior officers. The Nomad letters were edited by John M. Carroll and republished in a privately printed edition of fifty copies in 1978, and two years later the University of Texas brought out another edition with a commentary by Brian Dippie. Although My Life on the Plains has remained in print almost continuously since its original pub105
lication, Custers Nomad is his unique contribution to written accounts of the military in the West. Although their names never became household words, three other generalsNelson A. Miles, O. O. Howard, and George Crookalso took part in major campaigns against western Indians, and wrote down their experiences. Unfortunately, neither of the two autobiographies by Miles carries any hint of the numerous controversies his naked ambition provoked. Although a real account of his battles would have been more entertaining as well as illuminating, Miles wrote idealized versions with a view toward furthering his political aspirations, which included the White House. Serving the Republic (1911) is merely an abridgement, with a bit of updating, of his previous volume, Personal Recollections and Observations (1896), which is the better of the two. In spite of their weaknesses, both of Miless autobiographies are invaluable contributions to western military history and lore, for no other officer could match his list of successes, which included the Red River Campaign in Texas, the conquest of the Sioux and Cheyenne in the aftermath of Little Bighorn, the surrender of Geronimo in Arizona, and the surrender of Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce. In contrast to Miless political ambitions, General O.O. Howards major concerns were spiritual. Called the praying general, Howard had lost an arm at the Civil War battle of Fair Oaks. His Indian experiences took him from the Seminole War in the steaming Florida Everglades to the frigid expanses of Alaska, and he numbered among his adversaries Cheyenne, Sioux, Nez Perce, Apache, Piute, and Bannock. Yet, in keeping with his nickname, Howard wrote with compassion about the Indians and also served as a peace commissioner, learning the frustrations of such a position. That he was more a student of Indian life and custom than most of his fellow officers is reflected in the complete title of his major book: My Life and Experiences Among Our Hostile Indians: A Record of Personal Observations, Adventures, and Campaigns Among the Indians of the Great West with Some Account of Their Life, Habits, Traits, Religion, Ceremonies, Dress, Savage Instincts, and Customs in Peace and War (1907). Unlike those of Howard and Miles, the military experiences of General George Crook are not remembered because of his own record of them. Instead, the essence of Crooks campaign against the Apache was captured in the writing of John Gregory Bourke, Crooks aide-de-camp from 1872 to 1893. President of the American Folklore Society and an amateur anthropologist, Bourke wrote two books which alone would attest to his skill as a writer: In the Sierra Madre (1883) and MacKenzies Last Fight with the Cheyennes (1890). But the crown jewel of his work is On the Border with Crook (1891). 106
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Reading works by and about leaders such as Crook, Howard, and Miles gives one the commanding generals views of the Indian campaigns. To gain a sense of the more mundane details of being an officer in the western army, a reader must turn to other, though equally deserving, memoirs of officers from lieutenants to major generals. In fact, so rich is the field with first-hand views of command during the Indian Wars that probably no other war in United States history is so thoroughly represented by accounts of participants. For an account of the monotony, boredom, and tedium of the real Indian wars, few books can stand beside Captain Eugene F. Wares The Indian War of 1864 (1911). Although it is easy to dismiss Wares experiences simply because he participated in no great events, saw no action, and performed no great deeds of valor, such a dismissal is short-sighted because it is his detailed account of frustration and fear which marks The Indian War of 1864 as an outstanding source. In truth, Wares experiences lie much closer to the norm than do those depicted in most other books written about this period of western history. In his account, too, one can read the prejudices that were so prevalent in our frontier army. It is often said that love for the Indian in the frontier years was in inverse proportion to distance from him. Ware saw no noble Red man, no sadly vanishing heritage, but he recorded in his memoir the attitude of many line officers. Like Wares account, the most striking impressions of Lieutenant John Bigelow, Jr.s On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo are those of the frustration and boredom that an Indian campaigner had to endure. Although the Apache Wars of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico had many chroniclers, Bigelows book is not only an invaluable account of this type of warfare, but it also provided the artist Frederic Remington with his first major assignment as an illustrator. Originally published in Outing Magazine (a popular periodical of the day), Bigelows On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo was rescued from obscurity by Arthur Woodward and Westernlore Press in 1958. It is a story worth reprinting again. With the exception of Custers Last Stand, no incident in the Indian Wars became more clouded in controversy than did the surrender of Geronimo, for both Crook and Miles fostered champions espousing their rights to the honor of vanquishing the Apache leader, and many a good case was presented for both generals. None of those writers, however, had credentials superior to those of Britton Davis, one of the promising junior officers selected to serve with the Apache scouts. When Davis wrote The Truth About Geronimo (1929), his characterization of Geronimo as a thoroughly vicious, intractible [sic] and treacherous man was supported by firsthand knowledge; and his contention that it was Crook who really defeated Geronimo will probably stand muster also. A key participant in many of the 107
important events of the last Apache campaigns, Davis writes of them with surprising skill. Honors for the most unusual memoir must certainly go to George A. Armes, an officer who was court-martialed seven times. Although few with a record such as that amassed by Armes would want to see their story in print, he details his own Army career with incredible candor in the aptly titled Ups and Downs of an Army Officer (1900). Courts-martial were not uncommon in the Army of the West, but Armess seven must be near the record. He provides the reader with an accurate picture of the tendency to indulge in courts-martial almost as a diversiona tendency which was one of the effects of distance, boredom, and danger on the frontier army. Many of the charges were petty and tied up numerous senior officers for months on end. Ups and Downs gives the researcher an insight into a side of the army that is not usually exhibited. Officers such as Armes, Davis, Bigelow, and Ware had first-hand knowledge of western campaigns, but even more striking was the experience of the armys scouts. One of these, Luther S. Yellowstone Kelly, revealed his education and modesty in his memoirs, Yellowstone Kelly (1926), edited by Milo M. Quaife. In his foreword to Kellys book, Nelson Miles described his first meeting with the scout whose military career spanned the period from the Civil War through the Spanish-American War: He had recently killed a large bear and cut off one of its huge paws, and upon this he inscribed his name and sent it to my tent, as he had no cards at the time! Miless comparison of Kelly to Daniel Boone, David Crockett, Kit Carson, and William F. Cody may be dramatic, but it is hardly exaggerated. Kelly remembered most fondly the time he spent on the frontier, and it is that period which is covered in his memoirs. Enlisted men, as well as officers and scouts, gained their share of immortality by leaving written accounts, though fewer of their records exist. Any study of the enlisted mans part in this drama must begin with Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay (1963). By any standard, Don Rickey has provided a basic book for students of the Indian Wars. By interviewing over three hundred living veterans, Rickey produced Forty Miles, which provides a look at the life of the frontier soldiers that could not be experienced by just one person. Rickey examines every detailfrom campaigns, clothing, and food, to education and moralsand establishes a landmark contribution. When Rickey wrote Forty Miles, he said of a slim and very rare volume called Fighting Indians in the 7th United States Cavalry: The book contains more material on rank and file than does any other. . . . First published in 1879, the book was reprinted sometime in the late 1920s. There can be little doubt that the author, Ami Frank Mulford, has illuminated the enlisted mans daily life. Mulford was one of the Custer avengers, those men 108
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who enlisted in the wave of patriotism following the 7th Cavalrys near destruction at Little Bighorn. The army was not, as many others have discovered before and after him, all he expected. But, because he faithfully recorded all that he saw, Fighting Indians in the 7th United States Cavalry is indispensable to a study of the enlisted man and the Indian Wars. In Rekindling Camp Fires (1926), Lewis Crawford tells the story of Ben Arnold (Connor). Arnold was an enlisted man in the 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, and much of his duty saw him in the small posts and stage stations of Wyoming during the Civil War. His experiences there compare to those recorded by Eugene Ware. In Rekindling Camp Fires there are few spectacular Indian fightseven few skirmishes. Mostly what comes through is the boredom, the loneliness, and the tedium of frontier duty. Of course, the enlisted man had less time than the officer to be bored. It fell to his lot to build the forts or outposts, often grow his own food, clean the stables, man the guard posts, and do all other necessary tasks that ensured simple survival in the often hostile environment. Old Neutriment (1934) also details the day-to-day life of the enlisted man. In addition, it provides what is unquestionably the most personal account of the Custers that exists. As history, Old Neutriment is often unreliable, because it is colored by the unshaken devotion that its author, John Burkman, gave to the Custers. By that same token, this book explains how Custer led men, how he came to be loved by some, hated by others. Though not intentionally, the book even details Custers faults. Of John Burkman, Elizabeth Custer wrote, His horizon was encompassed by two horses, some dogs and one yellow-haired officer. Perhaps modesty would not permit Mrs. Custer to admit herself to John Burkmans horizon, yet she was certainly a part of it. Second only to Elizabeth Custer in his admiration of her husband, Burkman, who could neither read nor write, devoted his life to the Custers. In his later years he had but one friend, D. D. ODonnell, who wrote Burkmans reminiscences in note form and turned to Glendolin Damon Wagner, a novelist living in Billings, Montana, to write the book. Fortunately, Mrs. Wagner remained true to the spirit and letter of old John Burkman. The honor of himself and his country weighed lightly in the scale against the glorious? name of Geo(rge) A. Custer, the hardship and danger to his men, as well as probable loss of life were worthy but little consideration when dim visions of an eagle or even a star floated before the excited mind of our Lieut. Colonel. Thus does Private Theodore Ewert, in the first paragraph of his diary, clearly show that all enlisted men did not share John Burkmans high regard for George A. Custer. Ewerts diary is a bitter invective against officers in general and the Custers in particular. Private Theodore Ewerts Diary of the Black Hills Expedition of 1874 (1976) gives an insight into 109
the feelings of the enlisted man and paints a picture of his existence that is starkly real. Ewerts own character was complex, and his education far exceeded that of the average enlisted man in the frontier army. He had managed to attain the rank of Captain in the Civil War, but drunkenness brought him a dishonorable discharge. His affinity for the military apparently undiminished, Ewert enlisted several more times. He gained the rank of sergeant on two different occasions. During his enlistment in the 7th Cavalry, he kept this remarkable diary, which accurately reflects the attitude of numbers of enlisted men toward their officers, civilians, and the system that kept them in such lowly status. Ewerts diary cannot be overlooked by serious researchers. Something about George A. Custer drove or inspired men to write about him. David L. Spotts, in Campaigning with Custer and the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry (1928), gives his impressions of Custer, which coincide with those of Theodore Ewert. Spotts does give a good first-hand narrative of the exasperation and difficult conditions faced by the soldier of the field. He served in a volunteer regiment, and his account records the difference in attitudes of the volunteer soldier and the professional one. Another enlisted man, William White, was notably intelligent and observant. He was often selected from among the ranks of the 2nd Cavalry for special assignments, such as Lieutenant Gustavus C. Doanes exploration of the Snake River, escort duty for Secretary of War Belknap, and other unusual duties. White was not typical of the enlisted ranks, being both better educated and a member of the International Order of Good Templars, an early-day temperance organization. His observations show none of the bitterness of Ewert, and are broader-based than those of Spotts. He saw much action, including the Sioux War of 1876, and left a thoroughly delightful memoir. White told his story in the 1930s to Thomas B. Marquis, author of two previous books: Memoirs of a White Crow Indian (1928), an account of frontiersman Thomas H. Leforge; and Wooden Leg, a Warrior Who Fought Custer (1931), an Indian account of the Custer battle. Marquis maintained his reputation as a skillful writer when he wrote down William Whites story in Custer, Cavalry and Crows, but the book was not published until 1976. An enterprising newspaper correspondent could sometimes gain almost as much first-hand battle experience as a scout, enlisted man or officer. Newspaper reports written by the gem of the lot, as General Charles King aptly described correspondent John F. Finerty, were collected and published in 1955 as War-Path and Bivouac: The Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. In the tradition of all great war correspondents, Finerty wrote from the point of action, often setting aside his pen for his rifle. He earned the honor of 110
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being praised by George Crook in his dispatches to General Sheridan. A classic, Finertys War-Path and Bivouac has been reprinted several times, making this outstanding account readily available. Another collection of newspaper reports, Pine Ridge 1890 (1971) is unfortunately almost unknown because of its limited printing of only two thousand copies. Written by William Fitch Kelley for the Nebraska State Journal of Lincoln, these daily dispatches stood as the only relatively unbiased appraisal of this most tragic affair until recent times. Kelley was the only reporter with the 7th Cavalry at the actual engagement; and while it may never be definitely established who initiated the tragedy of Wounded Knee, here is Kelleys account: As this task was about completed the Indians, surrounded by Companies K and B, began to move. All of a sudden they threw their hands to the ground and began firing rapidly at the troops, not twenty feet away. With renewed interest in the role played by women, more accounts of individual wives of the frontier army continue to see print, although the only attempt, to date, to create an overall picture of the role played by the wives and dependents of the Indian-Fighting Army is that of Patricia Y. Stallards Glittering Misery (1978). The title of her book well describes the lot of the majority of army dependents, most not nearly so fortunate as Elizabeth Custer, nor, perhaps, so exceptional. Widowed by the fight on the Little Bighorn, Elizabeth Bacon Custer faced life with but a small insurance policy and an ambitious plan. She wanted to devote the rest of her life to perpetuating her image of George Armstrong Custer, and found the answer to both her problem and her goal in writing books about him. The income derived from the sales of these books allowed her to devote her energy to the promotion of her husbands image. Her experiences on the frontier have been read by more people than all other accounts by wives of the frontier army put together. She authored three books: Boots and Saddles, or Life in Dakota with General Custer (1885); Following the Guidon (1890); and Tenting on the Plains, or Genl Custer in Kansas and Texas (1893)all still in print today. All three give an excellent look at the duties and responsibilities, as well as the privileges, of a senior officers wife. As such, her experiences differ considerably from those of a lieutenants wife. Since Mrs. Custer moved in a rather elite circle, even for a lieutenant colonels wife, her books abound with interesting people. She gives the picture of an idyllic existence, writing of her entire lifetime on the frontier as one of enjoyable, though occasionally trying, circumstances. Through her eyes, Custer emerges as a knight in armor mounted on a white charger, right out of a fable of old. Even given this rather glaring lack of objectivity, Elizabeth Custer left some of the most readable, as well as reliable, accounts of frontier life as seen by a woman. That George Armstrong 111
Custer dominates American thought and writing on the Indian Wars is her achievement no less than his. Another fine account of army life penned by a frontier wife is that of Frances M. A. Roe. Since Mrs. Roes husband was a second lieutenant, her experiences differ markedly from those of Elizabeth Custer. No more accurate picture has ever seen print, however, than Army Letters from an Oficers Wife (1909). From her initial introduction to army rank, leaving her sorely confused, to her sophistication as the wife of a captain, Frances Roe leaves a complete view of army life as seen by dependents. Sadly, Army Letters from an Officers Wife has never been reprinted. However, Martha Summerhayess Vanished Arizona: Recollections of the Army Life of a New England Woman (1908) has been reprinted. Martha was brought to tears when her first efforts at cooking with giant mess equipment failed. Tears gained her nothing but a stern reprimand from her husband, who admonished her: You are pampered and spoiled with your New England kitchens. As would other wives, Martha soon learned to cook in tin cans and to improvise. In Southwest Classics, Lawrence Clark Powell calls her book a story that is peerless in the literature of that time and place. Not only is Martha Summerhayess Vanished Arizona a primary source for that period when the Apaches had been only temporarily contained, it is also a love story unique in the literature of the Southwest. Not the kind of unreal story seen on the screen or told by Zane Grey, but nonetheless romantic in its evocation of the life led by a frontier officers young bride (p. 273). Two wives of Colonel Henry B. Carrington also left their memoirs. The first, Margaret I. Carrington, wrote Ab-Sa-Ra-Ka, Land of Massacre: Being the Experience of an Officers Wife on the Plains (1879), while the second, Frances C. Carrington, wrote My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearney Massacre (1910). Though separated by thirty years, both women shared the same publisher as well as the same husband. As revealed in her memoirs, the life of Frances Carrington was embittered by the loss of her first husband, Captain William Grummond, in the Fetterman Massacre. Ironically, his commanding officer at the time was Colonel Carrington. It was a small army. Regardless of its diminutive size, the armys adventures loomed large in the popular imagination. Fiction seized upon the Indian Wars as a popular topic even before the conflicts themselves had ended. Certainly no one had a better background for writing military fiction set in the West than Charles King (18441933), who had participated in actions against the Apache, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and the Nez Perce. Although he never wrote a major work of fiction, he was prolific and his books were widely read. King retired from active duty in 1879, and began writing books which enjoyed instant popularity. His first novel, The Colonels Daughter, appeared in 112
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1883. In subsequent novels, King moved from the Northwest ( A Daughter of the Sioux, 1903) to the Southwest (An Apache Princess, 1903). Perhaps his best work is The Queen of Bedlam: A Story of the Sioux War of 1876, published in 1889. The object of the title, Old Bedlam, stands today in reconstructed glory as the bachelor officers quarters at Fort Laramie. More recently, novels about the military in the West have been written both by popular and by serious western authors. Popular author Ernest Haycox, for example, wrote the first significant Custer novel, Bugles in the Afternoon (1944)a classic Western. Haycoxs book was surpassed as the best Custer novel by Will Henrys No Survivors (1950). Actually, Will Henry is a pseudonym for Henry W. Allen, who also writes under the name of Clay Fisher. Besides No Survivors, Allen as Will Henry has written Chiricahua (1972), I, Tom Horn (1975), and From Where the Sun Now Stands (1960). While Allens work ranges from Montana to Arizona, perhaps his most unusual work is titled To Follow a Flag ( 1953), later republished as Pillars of the Sky, which is a fictionalization of Edward J. Steptoes Washington Territory campaign. As Clay Fisher, Allens best military work is Red Blizzard (1951). Whether as Will Henry or as Clay Fisher, Allen has often made use of a simple but effective device that makes the reader believe he is reading history. In I, Tom Horn it is the discovery of Horns handwritten autobiography in a Wyoming cabin; in Pillars of the Sky it is a monument to a forgotten battle; and in No Survivors it is the footnote that explains that what follows is the journal of John Buell Clayton, from the papers of the Clayton family of La Grange, Georgia. In each case the reader is given enough detail to enhance the credibility of the story. Luke Short is the pen name of Frederick D. Glidden, another author of popular Westerns who has also written novels about the military West, including Station West (1947) and Ambush (1950). In The American Western Novel, James K. Folsom has written of Station West that where the traditional detective is seen as one whose profession requires of him the ability to discover the truth beneath enigmatic facts which others find completely baffling, the Western hero is conversely seen as one whose ability to understand the significance behind often confusing facts enables him, should occasion require, to assume successfully the role of detective (p. 116). Luke Shorts Ambush is a novel about the Indian-Fighting Army. Appearing first in serial form beginning on January 1, 1949, in the Saturday Evening Post, Ambush was published by Houghton Mifflin and later made into a motion picture starring Robert Taylor. The setting is the Southwest, and the foe the implacable Apache, ever a favorite subject of popular writers of Westerns. Serious novelists have also found the military in the West an inter113
esting subject. In 1960 Paul Horgan published his classic of Apache warfare, A Distant Trumpet. While it does not strictly adhere to history, it is a fine account of that particularly savage episode of American history. Horgans book was also to see life on the big screen, but not with the same success as Shorts Ambush, perhaps because Horgans novel focuses more on characterization than on action. In Paul Horgan, James M. Day says of A Distant Trumpet that the heart of the book lies in the maturing of Matthew Hazard from an inexperienced company commander to a mature man and soldier. Day adds that Horgans characterization of Kitty Mainwaring is convincingly done-the only woman Horgan ever has effectively portrayed. The wife of the third-ranking officer in the post, her life is centered on bitter frustration at her social position and her husbands failure to better it, and most of her time is spent in daydreaming about sexual conquests she plans and revenge she hopes to take on the other officers wives for imagined social slights (p. 25). Horgans use of the military-Indian conflict as a backdrop for his psychological character studies is proof that an imaginative writer can breathe new life into subjects that have already been written about in scores of books. That the last fictional word on Custer has not yet been written is demonstrated by Douglas C. Jones in his masterful The Court Martial of George Armstrong Custer ( 1976). Joness book is all the more remarkable because it is his first work of fiction. Each previous novelist approaching the Battle of the Little Bighorn has had one seemingly insurmountable problem to overcome; since no white man survived, how could the story be told and credibility maintained? The device most often used (as in No Survivors) is the persona of a renegade fighting with the Indians. However, since to have any white survivor is to depart from the facts, Jones took this device to its ultimate conclusion. His survivor is Custer himself. Even in the telling of the story, Jones has devised a brilliant ploy: a court martial. Here each person can relate his own tale, and even Custer has his say. That each character, or in this case each witness, performs with great historical fidelity, is testimony to the fact that Jones has researched the era and the event in depth. From bestseller in hardcover, to mass market paperback, to a television production as a program in the fine Hallmark Hall of Fame series, The Court Martial of George Armstrong Custer will unquestionably be a major influence on future fiction about the West. As if to prove that he was no one-shot author, Jones went on to write two more excellent works in the field of military western fiction. The first was Arrest Sitting Bull (1977), followed by A Creek Called Wounded Knee (1978). Both can be considered part of the Custer story, for Sitting Bull is the last major survivor from the Custer tragedy, and many consider Wounded Knee the final act in the drama begun on the Little Bighorn in 1876. 114
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Twelve years before Joness first Custer novel was published, an eastern author had already conclusively shown the value to novelists of the huge number of primary accounts and of secondary histories of the Indian Wars in the West. Written in the New York Public Library, where its author supported his fictional creations with a historical background gathered from primary and secondary sources, Thomas Bergers Little Big Man (1964) is one of the best American western novels, as Delbert Wylder contended in a Western American Literature article. Bergers solution to the no-survivor problem was to create Jack Crabb, a white character who was raised by Indians, but who was one of Custers scouts at the Little Bighorn, being saved only because one of the Indians recognized him. Both Berger and Jones changed some historical facts in order to make their readers see an overall historical truth; their fictions provide interpretations of western history. The vast treasury of histories and primary accounts of military life in the nineteenth-century West is bound to stimulate new fictional works with new interpretations. But since succeeding generations of western novelists will have for models novels like those by Berger and Jones, western military fiction, growing in complexity and allusiveness, will become a body of historically grounded literature as philosophically and aesthetically resonant as that based on the Trojan War or the War of the Roses.
M ICHAEL K OURY , Fort
Collins, Colorado
115
Primary Sources Armes, George A. Ups and Downs of an Army Officer. Washington, D.C.: n.p., 1900. Bigelow, John. On the Bloody Trail of Geronimo. Edited by Arthur Woodward. Los Angeles: Westernlore, 1958. Bourke, John Gregory. An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre. New York: Scribners, 1886. . MacKenzies Last Fight with the Cheyennes. New York: Military Services Institution, 1890; rpt. Fort Collins: Old Army Press, 1970. . On the Border with Crook. New York: Scribners, 1891. Carrington, Frances C. My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearney Massacre. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1910. Carrington, Margaret I. Ab-Sa-Ra-Ka: Being the Experience of an Officers Wife on the Plains. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1879. Crawford, Lewis. Rekindling Camp Fires. Bismarck, North Dakota: Capital Book Co., 1926. Custer, Elizabeth B. Boots and Saddles, or Life in Dakota with General Custer. New York: Harper and Row, 1885; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. . Following the Guidon. New York: Harper, 1890; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. . Tenting on the Plains, or Genl Custer in Kansas and Texas. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1893; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. Custer, George A. My Life on the Plains. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1874. . Nomad. Edited by Brian Dippie. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Davis, Britton. The Truth About Geronimo. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929. Ewert, Theodore. Private Theodore Ewerts Diary of the Black Hills Expedition of 1874. Edited by Lawrence Frost & John M. Carroll. Piscataway, N.J.: CRI Books, 1976. Finerty, John F. War Path and Bivouac The Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition. Chicago: Donohue & Nenneberry, 1890; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961. Howard, Oliver O. My Life and Experiences Among Our Hostile Indians. Hartford: A. D. Worthington & Co., 1907. Kelley, William Fitch. Pine Ridge 1890. San Francisco: P. Bovis, 1971. Kelly, Luther S. Yellowstone Kelly. Edited by Milo M. Quaife. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926. Marquis, Thomas B. Custer, Cavalry and Crows. Edited by John A. Popovich. Fort Collins: The Old Army Press, 1976. . Memoirs of a White Crow Indian. New York: The Century Co., 1928.
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. Wooden Leg, a Warrior Who Fought Custer. Minneapolis: The Midwest Co., 1931. Miles, Nelson A. Personal Recollections and Observations. New York: The Werner Co., 1896. . Serving the Republic. New York: Harper, 1911. Mulford, Ami. Fighting Indians in the 7th United States Cavalry. Corning, New York: Paul Lindsay Mulford, 1879; rpt. Fort Collins: The Old Army Press, 1970. Rickey, Don. Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. Roe, Frances M. A. Army Letters from an Officers Wife. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1909. Spotts, David L., ed. Campaigning with Custer and the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. Los Angeles: Wetzel Publishing Co., 1928. Summerhayes, Martha. Vanished Arizona: Recollections of the Army Life of a New England Woman. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1908, 1963. Wagner, Glendolin Damon. Old Neutriment. Boston: Ruth Hill, 1934; rpt. New York: Sol Lewis, 1976. Ware, Eugene F. The Indian War of 1864. Topeka, Kansas: Crane, 1911. Secondary Sources Carroll, John M., ed. The Black Military Experience in the American West. New York: Liveright, 1971. Downey, Fairfax. Indian-Fighting Army. New York: Scribners, 1941; rpt. Fort Collins: The Old Army Press, 1970. Faulk, Odie B. The Geronimo Campaign. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Gray, John S. Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876. Fort Collins: The Old Army Press, 1976. Leckie, William H. The Buffalo Soldiers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Smith, Rex Allan. Moon of Popping Trees. New York: Readers Digest Press, 1975. Stallard, Patricia Y. Glittering Misery: Dependents of the Indian Fighting Army. Fort Collins: The Old Army Press, 1978; and San Rafael: Presidio Press, 1978. Stewart, Edgar I. Custers Luck. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. Thrapp, Dan L. The Conquest of Apacheria. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. . General Crook and the Sierra Madre Adventure. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. Utley, Robert M. Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866 1890. New York: Macmillan, 1973. . Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 18481865. New York: Macmillan, 1967. . The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961. Vaughn, J. W. The Reynolds Campaign on the Powder River. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961. . With Crook on the Rosebud. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole, 1956. Wellman, Paul I. Death on Horseback. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1947. 117
A Literary History of the American West Fiction Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Dial Press, 1964. Fisher, Clay. Red Blizzard. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951. Haycox, Ernest. Bugles in the Afternoon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1944. Henry, Will. Chiricahua. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972. . I, Tom Horn. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975. . No Survivors. New York: Random House, 1950. . To Follow a Flag. New York: Random House, 1953. Horgan, Paul. A Distant Trumpet. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1960. Jones, Douglas C. Arrest Sitting Bull. New York: Scribners, 1977. . The Court Martial of George Armstrong Custer. New York: Scribners, 1976. . A Creek Called Wounded Knee. New York: Scribners, 1978. King, Charles. An Apache Princess. New York: Hobart, 1903. . The Colonels Daughter. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1883. . A Daughter of the Sioux. New York: Hobart, 1903. . The Queen of Bedlam: A Story of the Sioux War of 1876. London: F. Warne, 1889. Short, Luke. Ambush. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. . Station West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947.
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been subjects for literature since before the time of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Those famous characters perfectly exemplify the essential ingredient for successful dramatization: conflict. And their counterparts in western American literature have been popular for the same reason. Stories about American sheriffs and outlaws, whether featuring historical characters or wholly fictional ones, are variations on a time-tested and classical theme. The outlaw has a larger role in literature than does the lawman. His exploits seem to offer more in the way of dramatic possibilities, and as Eugene Manlove Rhodes said, outlaws are more interesting than in-laws. Novelists, playwrights, and folk singers have been much more sympathetic to the outlaw than have historians. Indeed, they have helped carry on a romantic tradition that contrasts sharply with ascertainable historical data about crime and criminals. Coleridges willing suspension of disbelief seems applicable as an explanation for the continuing popularity of stories about Romantic Outlawry. The plots and character portrayals in outlaw narratives fit into familiar patterns. Often we have a basically decent man who becomes the victim of one or another kind of persecution. After insufferable provocation, he turns on the persecutors and makes revenge his raison dtre. His enemies, who are corrupt officials and sheriffs, evil politicians, or land-grabbers, ordinarily have the law on their side. Powerful and immoral, they manipulate the legal machinery for their own selfish ends. Implicit in such plots is the assumption that legal law can be and often is divorced from moral law. In such situations the outlaw may be seen as a hero, since he defies corrupt authority in defense of the higher cause of social justice. Despite his crimes, the outlaw is a humane character. He is kind to women and children, and he does not mistreat animals. He has a sense of humor, is loyal to his friends, and gives to the poor what he has taken from the rich. This idealized outlaw or good badman is the most prominent character-type in both folklore and literary tradition. The contrasting picture of the outlaw as a vicious psychopath and back-shooter is much less in evidence. Many of the narratives that fit into this pattern are quasi-historical. An early example is seen in the literary treatment of the California bandit Joaquin Murieta. * As an historical personage, Murieta is almost as shadowy
*The name has been spelled in various ways, though the presumed descendants of the family in Sonora use Murrieta, which is the common Spanish spelling.
AWMEN AND OUTLAWS have
a figure as Robin Hood himself. Scant records provide only sketchy documentation for crimes committed by a Spanish-speaking outlaw in the early months of 1853. Yet a down-on-his-luck newspaperman, John Rollin Ridge, decided to make him into a hero. Hence The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) is largely an imaginative work written for commercial purposes. Like many subsequent books about outlaws, it could be classed as either historical novel, or fictionalized biography. The formula employed by Ridge is almost prototypical. His Murieta is not innately depraved, but is a victim of persecution. A mob of AngloAmerican gold seekers rape his sweetheart, hang his brother, and beat him into unconsciousness. Thus revenge becomes Murietas main pursuit, and he exacts a retribution by means of a series of holdups and killings. But despite these crimes, the outlaw retains his humanity. He has a frank and cordial bearing which distinguished him and made him beloved by all with whom he came in contact. Many acts of generosity as well as bravado reveal him to be one of the most accomplished outlaws of all time. Ridges formulaic book was not immediately successful, but in the long run it created one of the Wests Robin Hoods. This was evidenced by the appearance of Murieta folklore (much of which is of questionable authenticity), dime novels, plays, novels, and other biographies. By the 1880s, even respected historians were using Ridges Life as the source for extended discussions of the outlaw. None of the novels, such as Charles Parks Plaything of the Gods (1912), did much to make Murieta known to the AngloAmerican audience. But ultimately one writer, Walter Noble Burns, did help to popularize the legend. His 1932 opus, The Robin Hood of El Dorado, ran to 304 pages compared to Ridges ninety. The difference is accounted for by a lot of ginger bread work: old timers reminiscences; a number of invented episodes; the conversations and philosophical reflections of the outlaws. Written much like a movie script, Bumss book was in fact made into a film which made Murieta known to the national audience. During the post-Civil War era, the sub-literature of the dime novels featured many stories about outlaws. In 1877, the firm of Beadle & Adams began the cycle when it issued such a novel about Deadwood Dick, a fictional road agent in the Dakotas. The eighties then saw hundreds of other novels based on the exploits or imagined exploits of Jesse and Frank James, Billy the Kid, Sam Bass, Murieta, the Dalton gang, and other less wellknown criminals. Such subject matter was logical for this peoples literature, which was addressed to farm boys and workers for whom the polite literature of the day had no meaning. Ambivalent attitudes toward the outlaw are revealed in these stories, the clearest examples being those about the James brothers. Such publishers
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as Frank Tousey and Street & Smith issued numerous James Boys titles, and the portrayals vary from the villainous to the heroic. Early issues frequently depict Jesse James as a murderous enemy of society, who deserved his death at the hands of turncoat Bob Ford. But then the writers transform him into a saintly do-gooder. In this role he is seen paying off farm mortgages, bouncing children on his knee just before bank robberies, and saving young women from lustful bad outlaws. He also becomes the traditional avenger, finishing off the cowardly Pinkerton detectives who, in bombing the James farm, had injured Jesses revered mother. However, the moral issues involved in depicting outlaws in a favorable way are ever-present. Indeed, public pressure seems to have caused both Tousey and Street & Smith to terminate their respective James Boys series in 1903. In nineteenth-century accounts, Billy the Kid is a fiendish executioner, a smirking psychopath, in virtually all the stories about him. In The True Life of Billy the Kid by Don Jenardo and in John W. Morrisons Life of Billy the Kid, A Juvenile Outlaw (both 1881), he is a demon who has a heart only for anatomical purposes. He takes sadistic delight in each of the twenty-one murders with which the authors credit him. The Kids reputation as the Robin Hood of New Mexico was created in post-1900 interpretations, a most impressive example of literary turnabout. In some of the myriad dime novels, the writers depict lawmen as appealing personalities. Often there is a detective from the East, such as Old King Brady, who comes west and tangles with the James Boys or Billy the Kid. However in the Diamond Dick novels, published between 1878 and 1911, we have a more identifiably western figure. Diamond Dick, Junior, is a crack shot and an expert cowhand. Tall, blond, and handsome, he dresses in a semi-Mexican costume. The plots show him and his father justifying their reputations for maintaining law and order on the Western plains. In one series of stories, Diamond Dick enters Hole-in-the-Wall and takes Butch Cassidy into custody, but the wily outlaw eventually escapes. The best-known historical lawman to appear in the dime novels is James Butler (Wild Bill) Hickok. He was well known to the New York writers, having been featured in a Harpers magazine article and having acted in a touring stage play with Buffalo Bill Cody. Hickoks brief tenure as a law officer in Kansas prompted some stories about him in which he brings various miscreants to book. Such is the case in Prentiss Ingrahams Wild Bill, the Pistol Prince, an 1881 paperback that combines actual biographical details with fictional episodes. Wild Bill successfully grapples with Indians and bears, and cleans up on hooligans at Hays City and Abilene. One legend which enlivens the narrative is Hickoks encounter with the McCandless gang. For this desperate affray, in which one man whipped ten despera-
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does, killing eight of them, the title of Wild Bill was bestowed upon the famous borderman. This kind of exaggeration showed the potentialities for making lawmen into heroes. Yet the outlaw dominated in popular literature, and folklore did as much as printed fiction to keep him in sharper focus. Some of the folklore about outlaws is of dubious authenticity, because it derives from commercial and literary sources rather than oral tradition. But some of the folktales and songs are genuine, including those about Sam Bass and Jesse James. Bass was a cowboy who turned train robber. He held up a Union Pacific express and returned to East Texas with the loot. The squatters there made a hero out of him because, so folk tradition maintains, he was quite liberal in handing out the stolen twenty-dollar gold pieces. Bass was gunned down by the Rangers in 1878, after being betrayed by gang member Jim Murphy. Almost immediately a folk song appeared that made the outlaw into a Robin Hood. It praised his character: A kinder-hearted fellow you seldom ever see; and it condemned Jim Murphy: Oh, what a scorching Jim will get when Gabriel blows his horn. The Ballad of Jesse James was probably percolating through folk channels shortly after that outlaws death in 1882, although printed versions dont appear until about 1900. There are some three dozen variants of the ballad, but they all make Jesse a folk hero. Most of them include a stanza in which he took from the rich and gave to the poor. They also humanize him: he had a hand, and a heart, and a brain. And not surprisingly they castigate his slayer, Bob Ford, as a dirty little coward. Folktales, many of them embodying classic motifs, also began to be attached to Jesses name. Jesse and Frank encounter a widow who is about to lose her home because she cant meet the mortgage. The kind-hearted brothers lend her the necessary money, and then retrieve it by holding up the banker as he rides back to town. Jesses trickery is highlighted as much as his generosity. He reverses the shoes of his horses to lead posses in the opposite direction; assuming a disguise and a bumpkins demeanor, he joins a posse searching for himself. And the outlaws primitive sense of humor is also revealed. Seated on a train next to an unsuspecting detective, he tells the man that he is in the tombstone business. Unconsciously, the creators of such lore were helping fashion American counterparts of Old World folk figures. As Theodore Roosevelt observed, there is something very curious in the reproduction here on this continent of essentially the conditions of ballad growth which obtained in medieval England, including, by the way, sympathy for the outlaw, Jesse James taking the place of Robin Hood. The Trickster, for example, is a well-known figure in world folklore. While real-life outlaws do pull tricks to
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escape capture, folklore expands such episodes (or invents them) for an audience which evidently enjoys seeing the pursued outwit the pursuer. Folklore in Missouri and elsewhere also saw Jesse and Frank James as rebels-with-a-cause. The post-war policies of the Republican administration seemed vindictive to some of the former Southern adherents. Hence the James gangs robberies of what were presumed to be Yankee-owned banks and trains seemed heroic rather than criminal to many. The Boys left farmers alone, so folk tradition said, and robbed only pot-bellied monopolists. Identification of any outlaw with such concepts is one sign of an emergent Robin Hood legend. The post-1900 period saw the Western emerge from its paperback origins into the respectability of hardbound publication. Owen Wisters The Virginian (1902), which marked the changeover, incorporated a subplot involving rustling. The title characters friendship with the rustler Steve introduced the dilemma of personal loyalty in conflict with the obligations of social and legal codes. This dilemma was to be explored in many later novels where outlawry was the theme. A group of writers headed by Zane Grey, and including William MacLeod Raine and Charles Alden Seltzer, began to fill in what would become the classic format of the Western. Their fictional heroes, regardless of occupation, were larger than life size. Grey strove for authentic historical background in his novels, but his characters were all superheroes. There never was an actual gunfighter to match Jim Lassiter in Riders of the Purple Sage. The rustler Oldring in that same novel was extraordinarily humane, too much so to reflect the outlaws of the real world. Yet Greys novels, populated as they were with robbers and rustlers, reveal many aspects of western development. Historically, there was a thin line between lawmen and outlaws, and such personalities as Frank Canton or Henry Brown might be cited as examples of those who stepped from one side to the other. Fiction writers used this situation quite frequently. What might be called the mixed-identities plot, reminiscent of Restoration drama, is a recurrent one. The suave and respectable banker or rancher is secretly the mastermind of a rustling operation. The desperate outlaw on the other hand is actually a cattle detective or a U.S. marshal working under cover. Such is the case in one of Greys most popular novels, Nevada (1928). This is the story of gunman-outlaw Jim Lacy, who, it turns out, is really a detective for the Cattlemens Association. Or in Shadow on the Trail (1946), Wade Holden is a survivor of the Sam Bass gang. However his good badman status is achieved when he breaks up a rustling gang in Arizona, with the result that the pursuing Texas Rangers decide to let him go free. Another standard for Grey and others is the frame-up plot. The hero
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is forced into outlawry, at least temporarily, by an ingenious villain who traps him with a murder indictment or a rustling charge. The protagonist must clear himself of the frame-up, because the legal machinery is either inoperative or under the control of the villain. In the novels, characters placed in such situations always express their admiration for the common law which is administered through the courts. But they also recognize that the unsettled conditions of the frontier society in which they live make this law inapplicable. Consequently, the hero of the story, whether nominally lawman or outlaw, must accomplish what the official legal system cannot. This extreme freedom of action, the absolute individualism, is what makes many Westerns part of a romantic tradition. While Grey and others were shaping the main tradition in novelistic fiction, some authors were reinterpreting the characters of actual outlaws. In 1903, Walter Woods wrote a play entitled Billy the Kid. The drama viewed this outlaw sympathetically, as a wronged and misunderstood youth, thus reversing the dime novel portrait of a smirking psychopath. Woods used the dramatists prerogative of rearranging history, allowing the Kid to escape to Mexico in the final act instead of being killed by Pat Garrett. Interestingly, Garrett himself had helped lay the foundation for this more favorable depiction by co-authoring The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, published in 1882. Garrett was politically ambitious, so in this biography he would hardly say that the outlaw hed shot was an insignificant punk. Instead, the Kid becomes the peer of any fabled brigand on record. At any rate, the Woods play marked the beginning of a revisionist cycle which was to see Billy the Kid transformed from a self-centered mercenary into a romantic idealist. The major contributor to this changed interpretation was Walter Noble Burns. His pseudo-biographical Saga of Billy the Kid (1926) is often placed on the fiction shelf by discerning librarians. Burns did indeed interview New Mexicans who had known the outlaw some forty-five years before. But time had softened memories of that violent era, and in addition Burns fully intended to make the outlaw a legendary figure. So the Kid is under mystic protection, and destined for a genial immortality. The novelistic qualities of the Saga were fully appreciated by a Hollywood studio, which purchased the film rights and produced the first major Billy the Kid in 1930. Burns also stimulated the creation of folklore about the outlaw. A music publisher sent a copy of the Saga to the Reverend Andrew Jenkins, and suggested that he compose a song based on it. The result was the ballad Billy the Kid, which is thus of commercial and literary rather than folk origins. However, most of those who hear renditions of it, most notably that recorded by Woody Guthrie, assume that it dates from the cow camps of the 1880s. This ballad helped to circulate some of the legends about the Kid; 124
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viz., There are twenty-one men I have put bullets through / And Sheriff Pat Garrett will make twenty-two. The lawmen of history also received literary attention in the twenties. Garrett and Hickok were the best known of these, and both were interesting because of controversial aspects of their careers. In Garretts case this was the view (held by Bums among others) that he had been a Judas for shooting his erstwhile friend, the Kid. But Eugene Manlove Rhodes in his fiction cast the lawman in a favorable light. Pas por Aqu (1926) is a novelette about an outlaw, Ross McEwen. After robbing a store, he is pursued across the New Mexico desert by a relentless posse. Stopping at a small ranch, he finds the inhabitants ill with diphtheria. McEwen elects to give up his chance to escape, and instead stays to nurse the family back to health. Pat Garrett finally catches up with the fugitive, but instead of turning him in, permits him to go free, having decided that McEwen has atoned for his crime by being the Good Samaritan. The theme of this story, the relationship of moral justice to formal justice, is what gives it its near-classic quality. As for Hickok, biographers in the twenties had begun to pick apart his legendary fight with the so-called McCandless gang. Novelists, on the other hand, depicted him in a more traditional way, as a stock western hero. Emerson Houghs North of 36 (1923) for example, is about a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas. It features a heroine, Taisie Lockhart, who finds all kinds of trouble along the way. In Abilene, where Wild Bill is the marshal, he helps her out of yet another scrape by capturing a band of rustlers. This and other fiction helped to make Hickok, despite the historical revisionism, the personification of the virtuous law-bringer. In the twenties and thirties a new crop of writers began working with western themes. Quite a few of these authors, such as Ernest Haycox and Max Brand (pseudonym for Frederick Faust), served an apprenticeship in the pulps. Such magazines as Western Story and Triple X attracted a huge readership during this period. And a composite picture of the western lawman was drawn in the hundreds of these stories in which he was often the central character. Physically, he is tall, broad-shouldered, and narrow-hipped. Of North European descent, he is often described as blondish and blue-eyed. The eyes are an unusual feature. They are friendly until danger appears; then they blaze, smolder, or glint with steely determination. The lawmans reflexes are always lightning-like or cat-quick. Extraordinarily adept with weapons, especially the six-shooter, he invariably outdraws and outshoots the thugs who challenge him. He has a physique that makes him well-nigh indestructible, for in story after story he suffers up to a half dozen bullet wounds without any crippling effects. Morally, the men are thoroughly dedicated to the law. They uphold it 125
with a seriousness that comes from knowing that they carry the burden of establishing civilization in an untamed land. Fictions lawmen personify a Puritan-like concept of Absolute Good as they tangle with villains who represent Absolute Evil. And observing a code of fair play, they give the lawless all the breaks in the inevitable gunfight. There is little correlation between this character-type and the actual law officers. Aside from the great variety of physical types represented in the group, the gun-wielding feats in Westerns are clearly exaggerated. Modern tests with weapons of the 18651890 period, such as the Colt .45, have proved the impossibility of many exploits described in fiction. Fanning the gun, bulls-eye accuracy, and the lightning draw are among the conventions which have had to be discarded. Similarly, the actual peace officers seldom took big risks for the sake of law and order. And many of them lived in something of a moral shadowland. Individuals like Hickok or Wyatt Earp were only semi-professionals, working as lawmen on an irregular basis. Like others they supplemented their incomes by engaging in private enterprise on the side, such as gambling or saloon-keeping. This conduct, rather questionable by present-day standards, contrasts markedly with the absolute dedication and professionalism of the lawmen in western fiction. Nevertheless, the popularity of the mythical lawmen was proved by the widespread acceptance of novels such as those written by Max Brand. Brand published dozens of Westerns, some under other pseudonyms, and was Zane Greys rival in commercial success. Like Grey, he was known for his king-sized heroes. Typical of the mythological cast of his novels would be Singing Guns (1938). In this one, Sheriff Caradac enters the hole-inthe-wall country to kill the feared outlaw Rhiannon. But the latter wounds Caradac, and then nurses him back to health. In return, the sheriff helps Rhiannon to go straight. The two thwart an effort by villains to seize a longburied treasure, and, at the conclusion, Rhiannon is cleared of all charges against him. Brands choice of language indicates that he sees the two characters as demigods. Caradac observes at one point: That thrust of the eyes, far off, gave him a feeling of omniscient divinity. So the Homeric gods glanced down from snowy Olympus to the plains where men lived. So he and Rhiannon lived among the clouds until the winds parted them as with a hand and let their looks go dizzily down. Rhiannon, like Caradac, is a superman. In one day he shoots and skins a deer in five minutes, shoots a running horse through the head at thirty feet, and picks up a man and jumps with him out of the way of a falling derrick. The hazy, idealized locale of the story also suggests the mythic quality of Brands novels. By 1940, the Western had reached its maturity, and the lawman126
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outlaw theme had been thoroughly explored. A model of popular fictions achievements at this point might be Law Badge, published under the pseudonym of Peter Field. The story is loosely based on New Mexicos famous Lincoln County War of 1878. The two major characters, Fay Dutcher and Clark Rayburn, correspond to Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett (although Garrett was not a participant in the War). The mercantile firm of Shane & Purcell resembles historys Murphy and Dolan partnership. Rayburn and Dutcher are cowboys employed by Cass Gunnison, who is contesting Shane & Purcells efforts to dominate the territory. But with the law on their side, and aided by the Army, Shane & Purcell drive Gunnison and his men into the hills. There Gunnison is killed, and his employees scatter. Dutcher turns outlaw, forced into it, he argues, by the injustices committed in the name of the law. Rayburn, however, obtains a pardon from Santa Fe, and then becomes a marshal in Arizona. A year after leaving New Mexico, Rayburn is persuaded to return. He is elected sheriff on a reform ticket. But on the day of the election, Fay Dutcher holds up the local bank, killing Purcell in the process. Rayburn is thus forced to hunt down the outlaw band made up of his former comrades. He finally kills Dutcher in a gunfight, and then resigns as sheriff. Aside from its artful adaptation of an historical episode, the novel satisfactorily explores the complexities of law in a frontier society. Clark Rayburn questions the value of that law when it requires him to shoot his old friend. But he decides that it was all in accordance with his faith in the intangible symbol of the law. None had been more quick than he to learn that the law had a way of forcing a man to one side or the other in the unrelenting fight it waged for supremacy over the range. Rayburn had seen to it that he got on the right side in time. For better or for worse, the die was cast and he must go on. This is in many ways a paradigm of the situations mirrored in countless novels about the West. By this period also, the legends of the more notorious outlaws continued to unfold in media other than the novel. Jesse James was the subject of Elizabeth Beall Gintys play, Missouri Legend. First acted on Broadway in 1938, it portrays a clean-living outlaw who loves his wife, is religious, and has a sense of humor. He is also the Robin Hood of the Ozarks, a characterization exemplified by his gift of money to a helpless widow. And that same year, Billy the Kid, a nimble-footed cow thief in real life, became the subject of an Aaron Copland ballet. The Kid inspired more literary attention than did Jesse James. Among the possible reasons for his appeal to the imagination are his youth, his comparatively small size (5'8" and 140 pounds), his frequent light-heartedness, and his association with an idealistic cause, i.e., the losing side in the Lincoln County War. The Mexican background also lent an aura of romance to 127
his exploits. The result may be seen not only in numerous biographies but also in a succession of novels which portray him as a likeable youth who became a victim of persecution. In this group are Edward Beverly Manns Gamblin Man (1934) and Charles Neiders Authentic Death of Hendry Jones (1956), the latter a thinly disguised California version of the Kids career. There is also a smaller body of fiction which harkens back to the dime novel stereotype of the devil-in-human-form. Nelson Nyes Pistols for Hire (1941) makes the Kid a cold-blooded mercenary who shoots people in the back. Edwin Corles Billy the Kid (1953) also makes him a steely-eyed executioner, with subzero emotions. He threatens to gun down the husband of a Mexican woman with whom hes having an affair. However, the authors claim that this novel tells the story of Billy the Kid with veracity would have to be challenged. There is a similar counter-tradition in the case of Jesse James, although that individual has been less extensively (or successfully) featured in literature. Will Henrys (pseudonym for Henry Allen) Death of a Legend (1954) reversed the usual rebel-with-a-cause interpretation, replacing it with the picture of a psychotic gunman, an incredibly wicked man. In this novel the outlaw shoots without reasonor remorse. However, the legend had become so well-established that its death was an impossibility. In the postWorld War II period, Louis LAmour emerged as the successor to Zane Grey and Max Brand in popular appeal. Like Grey, LAmour takes great pains to achieve accuracy in such details as clothing, weapons, and locale. But his characters belong in the same mythic land with those of Brands. His outlaws are likeable rogues of the good badman type, while his lawmen are the traditional lantern-jawed paragons of dedication and durability. Catlow (1963) is a good example of the reworking of the ageless hounds-and-hares theme. The title character is nominally a criminal, striving to steal a Mexican gold shipment. His antagonist, Marshal Ben Cowan, doggedly pursues the outlaw on both sides of the border. But ultimately, after they take turns rescuing each other from Indians and gunmen, Catlow is able to ride off to live a redeemed life. While LAmour may be said to represent the traditional type of Western, the 1960s and '70s also saw a different brand of fiction being published. This was the tongue-in-cheek story where satire and humor were principal ingredients, although the humor was often of an ironic or even bitter kind. Thomas Bergers Little Big Man (1964) devotes two chapters to a Wild Bill Hickok whom readers had never encountered before. He is portrayed as a paranoid individual plagued with self-doubts. Hickok teaches the narrator (Jack Crabb) the finer points of gunfighting, but he is ultimately revealed as an unhappy hero suffering from eye trouble as well as psychological handicaps. 128
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In True Grit (1968), Charles Portis wrote a novel which may have the universality to become a classic. The teenager Mattie Ross is the main character, but much of the action is dominated by U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn. His character certainly deviates from the traditional lawmen of earlier fiction. He is fat, one-eyed, and often liquored-up. He does conform to literary precedent by killing the principal outlaw (Ned Pepper), and then saving the life of the young heroine. But instead of ending with these virtuous acts, the novel describes Cogburns sordid subsequent career: he loses his badge after killing a man under dubious circumstances; he hires on with the infamous Texan invasion of Wyomings Johnson County; and at his death he is working with a carnival sideshow. This tarnished figure seems to reflect some of the scepticism about the western experience that was surfacing during the period of the Vietnam War. At the same time, other writers continued to create serious Westerns, using the by-now-familiar historical episodes and personalities with considerable sophistication. Amelia Beans Time for Outrage (1967) was a novel based on the Lincoln County War, and showed great knowledge of the finer points in the historiography of that affair. Billy the Kid plays a minor role, for as an Authors Note explains: Bonney never was at any time during the war a leader of any group or contingent. Ron Hansens Desperadoes (1979) is a historical novel about the Dalton gang. Most of this novel is based on verifiable fact, says the author in his preface. The story does indeed parallel history as it follows the brothers from their early days as Indian Territory lawmen to the bloody bank robbery fiasco at Coffeyville, Kansas. This book demonstrated the possibilities of realistic rather than romantic fiction about outlaws. The hardscrabble farms, muddy roads, and one-horse towns of the time are recreated in merciless detail. Novels like this illustrate the continuing possibilities for experimentation with the outlaw character type. It is noteworthy that some of historys better-known lawmen and outlaws have not been well developed in literature. Butch Cassidy and Wyatt Earp come to mind, since both have received considerable exposure in television and film. It appears that certain conditions must be met before a literary tradition can emerge. These include a gestation period in which the individuals exploits can be seen as usable for purposes of imaginative interpretation. Wyatt Earp was not a well-known personality before 1931. But before he died in 1929, Earp had related his life story to Stuart M. Lake, who published it as a biography, Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. This promoted the lawman as a notable figure in western history, and he has been the subject of much non-fiction. But there has been no comparable development of a literary tradition like those featuring Garrett or Hickok. Among the few 129
efforts in this direction is the ubiquitous Will Henrys Who Rides with Wyatt (1955). This portrays a vengeance-bent Earp who takes the law into his own hands as he tracks down his brothers slayers. Similarly, Cassidy (Robert Leroy Parker) appeared late in the history of western outlawry, with a corresponding delay in literary recognition. Cassidy was featured in some of the dime novels at the turn of the century. He also was the subject of folktales in the Rocky Mountain states. Like Jesse James, he helps the proverbial Poor Widow pay off her mortgage. But these beginnings were not followed by a cycle of biographies and novels comparable to those devoted to James or Billy the Kid. Perhaps Cassidy had been born a bit too late for the usual legend to jell. The outlaw and lawman have endured as subjects for literature since they embody that elemental conflict which has always been part of the human condition. They are characters in a kind of primitive literature, akin to the Icelandic sagas, which seems to be formulaic rather than innovative. Max Brand exaggerated only slightly when he described his technique: The basic formula I use is simple: good man turns bad, bad man turns good. Naturally, there is considerable variation on the theme . . . There has to be a woman, but not much of a one. A good horse is much more important. But uncomplicated though most of the narratives have been, they still seem to speak to universal concerns. They depict a kind of maximal freedom of decision and action which many readers find appealing. Since most people live under a variety of constraints, they can experience this freedom only vicariously. Furthermore, such stories in their American settings have nostalgic qualities. They take place in the late 1800S, a less complex period in the national history and one when industrialization had not yet affected the West in a major way. So the outlaw in particular represented a pastoral ideal. In a sense, he served as surrogate for all those other westerners who disliked industry, corporations, and progress. His crimes seemed excusable when the victims were wealthy exploiters of the land and its people. For such reasons, it is safe to predict the continued appearance of these figures in western literature.
KENT L. STECKMESSER, California
State University, Los Angeles
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Note
1. Such folktales are printed passim in B. A. Botkin, ed., A Treasury of Western Folklore: The Stories, Legends, Tall Tales, Traditions, Ballads, and Songs of the People of the Great Plains and Far West (New York: Crown Publishers, 1951), Wayne Gard, Sam Bass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1936), Homer Croy, Jesse James Was My Neighbor (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949)) and William Anderson Settle, Jr., Jesse James Was His Name: or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious James Brothers of Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966).
Primary Sources Bean, Amelia. Time for Outrage. Garden City: Doubleday, 1967. Interesting novel about New Mexicos Lincoln County War, with Billy the Kid playing a minor role. Beldon, H. M. Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folklore Society. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1955. Contains a standard version of the ballad about Jesse James. Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Dial Press, 1964. Novel with an unconventional depiction of Wild Bill Hickok. Botkin, B. A. A Treasury of Western Folklore. New York: Crown Publishers, 1951. Includes a useful section on Law and Order, Ltd. Brand, Max. Singing Guns. New York: Dodd, Mead Company, 1938. A typical popular Western using the outlaw vs. lawman theme. Burns, Walter Noble. The Robin Hood of El Dorado. New York: Coward-McCann, 1932. A fictionalized biography of the California bandit Joaquin Murieta. . The Saga of Billy the Kid. Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1926. Represented as a biography, this book has a great deal of fictional material. Corle, Edwin. Billy the Kid. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1953. A novel which depicts the Kid as a cold-blooded killer. Field, Peter. Law Badge. New York: William Morrow, 1940. A well-written novel which explores the conflict between obligations to the law and personal friendship. Garrett, Pat. The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid. 1882. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954. Garrett helped create the legend of Billy the Kid. Ginty, Elizabeth Beall. Missouri Legend. New York: Random House, 1938. A play with a sympathetic characterization of Jesse James. Gray, Carl. A Plaything of the Gods. Boston: Sherman & French, 1912. A pretentious novel about Joaquin Murieta. Grey, Zane. Nevada: A Romance of the West. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928.
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One of Greys most popular novels, it tells of an outlaw who is really on the side of the law. . Shadow on the Trail. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946. Another of Greys novels dealing with a good badman. Hansen, Ron. Desperadoes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. An historical novel about the Dalton gang. Henry, Will. Death of a Legend. New York: Random House, 1954. A novel in which Jesse James is the embodiment of evil. . Who Rides with Wyatt: The Strange and Lonely Story of the Last of the Great Lawmen. New York: Random House, 1955. One of the few efforts at fictional interpretation of Wyatt Earp. Hough, Emerson. North of 36. New York: D. Appleton, 1923. A traditional Western with Wild Bill Hickok as one of the characters. Ingraham, Prentiss. Wild Bill, the Pistol Prince. New York: Beadle & Adams, 1881. A quasi-biographical narrative. Jenardo, Don. The True Life of Billy the Kid. New York: Frank Tousey, 1881. A purported biography with many imaginative details. LAmour, Louis. Catlow. New York: Bantam Books, 1963. An outlaw-againstlawman story by a best-selling novelist. Mann, Edward Beverly. Gamblin Man. New York: William Morrow, 1934. A novel with a sympathetic portrayal of Billy the Kid. Morrison, John. The Life of Billy the Kid, a Juvenile Outlaw. New York: John W. Morrison, 1881. A typical early dime novel featuring a bloodthirsty Billy the Kid. Neider, Charles. The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956. A novel set in California, but based on the Lincoln County War and the career of Billy the Kid. Nye, Nelson. Pistols for Hire. New York: Macmillan, 1941. Billy the Kid is a despicable back-shooter in this story. Portis, Charles. True Grit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. A classic novel involving a memorable character who is a U.S. marshal. Rhodes, Eugene Manlove. Once in the Saddle and Pas por Aqu. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. The second of these is Rhodess classic tale of an outlaw and the lawman Pat Garrett. Ridge, John Rollin. The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. 1854; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. This book started the whole Murieta legend. Woods, Walter. Billy the Kid. In Americas Lost Plays. Vol. 8. Edited by Garrett Leverton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940. This 1903 melodrama did much to romanticize Billy the Kid. Secondary Sources Adams, Ramon. Burs Under the Saddle. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. A combined bibliography and critique which evaluates a number of books about outlaws and lawmen for their historical accuracy. 132
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. Six Guns and Saddle Leather: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on Western Outlaws and Gunmen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. The standard, exhaustive bibliography on the subject. Boatright, Mody C. The Western Bad Man as Hero. Publications of the Texas Folklore Society 27 (1957): 96105. Perceptive essay. Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1971. A sophisticated analysis of plots and characters in western fiction and films. Clough, Wilson. The Cult of the Bad Man of the West. Texas Quarterly 5 (Autumn 1962): 1120. Westerners seem to exult in their badman traditions. Deutsch, James I. Jesse James in Dime Novels: Ambivalence Towards an Outlaw Hero. Dime Novel Roundup 45 (February 1976): 1319. Discusses the changing interpretations of the outlaws character in the sub-literature. Dobie, J. Frank. Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1942. Includes a short chapter on the badman tradition. Dykes, J. C. Billy the Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1952. An informative, extensively annotated study of the Billy the Kid interpretations. Easton, Robert. Max Brand, the Big Westerner. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970. Fine discussion of the work of one of the most popular of western authors. Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel. New Haven: College and University Press, 1966. Has an illuminating chapter on Good Men and True which is about sheriffs and badmen. Inciardi, James A., et al. Historical Approaches to Crime. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Books, 1977. Contains a good section on The Wild West Industry; how dime novelists and magazine writers exploited western themes, especially outlawry. Jackson, Carlton. Zane Grey. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973. Excellent critical analysis of Greys works, including those with rustlers and sheriffs as characters. Jones, Daryl E. Clenched Teeth and Curses: Revenge and the Dime Novel Outlaw Hero. Journal of Popular Culture 7 (Winter 1973): 652665. Astute analysis of revenge theme. . The Dime Novel Western. Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1978. Good survey of the major themes in the genre. Lee, Hector. Tales and Legends in Western American Literature. Western American Literature 9 (February 1975): 239254. Discusses some of the legends about outlaws. Leithead, J. Edward. The Outlaws Rode Hard in Dime Novel Days. American Book Collector 19 (December 1968): 1319. Useful analysis of novels about the James brothers. Settle, William A., Jr. Jesse James Was His Name. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966. Good discussion of folklore and fiction about the outlaw. Sonnichsen, C. L. The Wyatt Earp Syndrome. American West 7 (May 1970): 2628, 6062. An examination of contemporary Westerns, with special attention to Earp.
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A Literary History of the American West Steckmesser, Kent L. The Western Hero in History and Legend. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. Traces the legends of Wild Bill Hickok and Billy the Kid in literature and folklore. . Robin Hood and the American Outlaw: A Note on History and Folklore. Journal of American Folklore 79 (June 1966): 348356. Discusses the prototypical pattern for the Robin Hood type of outlaw. Wilgus, D. K. The Individual Song: Billy the Kid. Western Folklore 30 (July 1971): 226234. Discusses the authorship and recording history of the ballad.
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SECTION III
Beginnings of Genres in the West
Introduction
H A T REN WELLEK and Austin Warren have said of literature in general is now especially true of western American literature: The history of genres is indubitably one of the most promising areas for the study of literary history (Theory of Literature [New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956], p. 251). What varieties, or genres, of literature have flourished in the West? To answer that question to everyones satisfaction, one would have to settle the continuing and probably unresolvable argument about what constitutes a genre and about how many genres there are. Nevertheless, while remaining aware of the disagreements about the nature and number of genres, one can proceed to study the evolution of the categories or kinds of literature that have traditionally been viewed as identifiable groups. The chapters in this section of A Literary History of the American West trace the early development of the western novel and story, western poetry, drama, the nature essay, and movies. Most western American literary criticism has been devoted to the novel. Critics offer various reasons to explain the focus of attention on that one genre: I) novels are the only genre of western literature worth studying; 2) the West is too vast to treat in a short work; 3) the novel comes closest to giving a sense of the Wests most distinctive featureits wide open spaces; 4) since 1890, the western novel has served as a repository for the frontier spirit; and 5) not only the western novel, but all American novels have enjoyed great popularity. Whatever the reason for their popularity, frontier and western novels evolved through the stages in the history of all American novels: from the beginnings until 1810, a stage of imitating the Gothic and sentimental novels of Europe; from 1810 to 1865, the more philosophical fiction of romanticism; from 1865 to 1890, novels of local color and realism; from 1890 to 1920, the stage of naturalism; from 1920 to 1960, modernism; and from 1960 to the present, postemodernism, including the fiction of fabulators who attempt to replace the former rationalist sense of time with a mythic sense. In following that broad evolutionary pattern, the western novel has obviously not been unique, but it has been distinctive
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because it treats the particular landscape and history of the West. From Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, from Willa Cather to Leslie Silko, from Mary Hallock Foote to Wallace Stegner, western novelists have depicted the West as a land of little rain, a land of mountains and deserts and prairies, a land of Anglos and more than a dozen other ethnic groups, and above alla land of wide open spaces. Frontier and western novels are also distinctive in having as their prototypes a series of novels by one author: James Fenimore Cooper. In his chapter on Cooper and other precursors of the western novelists, James K. Folsom says that Cooper explored the pull between two contrary sets of values, represented on the one side by civilization and on the other by wilderness. Folsom adds that the combination of the novel of action with the novel of reflection is Coopers greatest single legacy to subsequent western story, both philosophically and from the point of view of technique. Coopers Leatherstocking Tales, along with the works of other early frontier novelists such as Timothy Flint, David H. Coyner, and Emerson Bennett, provided the inspiration for the avalanche of dime novels that poured off the presses from 1860 until 1895. Following Cooper and the dime novelists, Owen Wisters The Virginian (1902) and the works of Zane Grey served as models for the popular western novel, which is discussed by Michael T. Marsden and Jack Nachbar in Part Three of A Literary History of the American West. It seems fairly clear, according to John R. Milton, that the serious Western novel (as distinguished from the popular western) is descended from the western travel narratives and journals of exploration, from the nonformulaic side of Cooper, and from the mixture of determinism and mysticism as found in the naturalism of Frank Norris ( The Novel of the American West [University of Nebraska Press, 1980], p. 106). The serious western novel had become a distinct class of fiction at least by the 1920s, and writers labeled western were usually Anglo males who wrote mostly about the Old West, Willa Cather being one of the few exceptions. Unfortunately, so much attention has been paid to Anglo male writers and so little to other groups that many readers are unaware of the many excellent western novels written by women, by immigrants, by ethnic groups, by Mormons, and by contemporary writers who have created what William Bloodworth calls the literary Western. As those groups of novels are studied from new theoretical perspectives such as the reader response approach, we may soon gain a significantly enlarged and altered view of the western novel. A new view of the novel may also usher in new approaches to the novella and the short story and to sub-genres of the western novel. For years western short stories have been collected in anthologies of all sorts, the best among the most recent being J. Golden Taylors Great Short Stories of the 136
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West (1967) and Philip Durham and Everett L. Joness The Western Story: Fact, Fiction, and Myth (1975). Gerald Haslam offers in his chapter an historical survey of the genre as it has developed in the West. So many western writers (Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Steinbeck, among others) figure so prominently in the history of the American short story that a critical history of its western branch should reveal it to be one of the richest cultural assets of the region. And, in another somewhat neglected field, who can consider the work of L. Frank Baum, Will James, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mary OHara, and Fred Gipson without seeing how great has been the Wests contribution to American childrens literature? A similar point can be made about detective fiction just by mentioning Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and James M. Cain; and many science fiction writers are westerners whose works often have a western setting. The western novel is not, however, the exclusive property of westerners, nor even of Americans, as Richard H. Cracroft explains in his chapter on world Westerns. From the days of Cooper to the present, Europeans and other foreigners have written novels about the American West. Reading such fiction enables us to see ourselves as others see us; and the existence of so many hundreds of world Westerns confirms the wide and enduring popularity of western fiction. Although western fiction of all sorts is regarded as among the regions assets, some critics think our poetry is among our liabilities. However, while contending that fewer than a dozen pre-1960 western versifiers can be called poets, most critics will admit that many recent western poets have written outstanding works. Why did it take the West so long to find its poetic voice? In the absence of a critical history of western poetry, many students of western American literature have arrived at the view that Jay Gurian expresses: We have plenty of Western American verse, but little poetryand no poetics. We have no attitudes by which poets can discipline their imaginative responses to the Wests landscape, history, folklore, language, or simply its humanity. From before Bret Harte till after John Neihardt, western verse has lacked wit, irony, paradox, metaphor, or symbol. Instead, it has been a single dimension response to a giant landscape and a noisy history. Excepting Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Yvor Winters, the consciously western poet has not attempted to transmute this landscape, or its history, into troubling emotion or complex idea. As a cause, and as a result, western poetry is without literary criticism. (Western American Writing: Tradition and Promise [Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, 1975], p. 95) 137
In a brief note about Gurians essay, A. Thomas Trusky says that like most critics of western American poetry, [Gurian] overlooks women poets and critics and the influence of Native American and Hispanic poetics as well. Truskys Western Poetry, 18501950, included in this section of A Literary History of the American West, shows that by the 1930s Ferril, Winters, Robinson Jeffers, Sharlot Hall, Alice Corbin, Genevieve Taggard, Mary Austin, Hildegarde Flanner, Peggy Pond Church, and Norman Macleod had found a western voice that could express itself in poetry. Although Trusky says that The history of early western poetry . . . [is] no more a record of failure and obscurity than is the history of any other regions early poetic efforts . . . , he explains in some detail why fine poets like Hall, Corbin, Macleod, and Church have been neglected. Thanks to Truskys literary sleuthing and his efforts as one of the founders and editors of Boise State Universitys Ahsahta Press, the possibility of a western poetics now seems much greater than it appeared to Gurian in the 1970s. The development of western drama has lagged behind that of poetry and the novel. Although at least a dozen outstanding plays constitute the basis for a nascent tradition, by rights, drama should be far more advanced than any of the other genres in the West, since most western cities built theaters almost before they constructed churches, schools, or jails. In Salt Lake City, for example, the theater built by the Mormons in 1862 was widely regarded as one of the best in the entire country; and almost from their beginning, the Mormons had enthusiastically staged great world dramas. The would-be dramatist of Salt Lake, or of any other western city, had few good contemporary models for inspiration, however. Most nineteenth-century American dramas were mediocre. It was, in fact, a western playWilliam Vaughn Moodys The Great Divide (1906)that is said to have signaled the beginning of modern American drama. Though many promising western playwrights succumbed to the lure of Broadway, the strong regional movement of the 1930s kept some of them at home, including E. P. Conkle, Virgil Geddes, and Lynn Riggs. Of those three, Riggs came closest to rivaling easterner Eugene ONeill, but most audiences know only Oklahoma ! and not the play it is based on: Riggss Green Grow the Lilacs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood and Freudianism left their mark on the plays of western dramatists such as William Saroyan and William Inge. From the absurdist Beatnik plays of the late 1950s and early 1960s to the wild surrealism of Sam Shepard in the late 1960s and early 1970s, post-Sputnik western drama seemed to have little connection with earlier regional plays that dramatized historical events or the lives of local, often rural, westerners. Shepards recent fame and a sudden surge of new ethnic plays by westerners are signs of a new phase in the development of western drama: an attack on the petrified, popularized for138
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mula myths of the Old West and on the technological junkland that much of the contemporary West is rapidly becoming. While western drama attacks the present by surrealism, and the traditional western novel shows its disgust by ignoring the Space Age West in favor of a mythic past, the twentieth-century western nature essay criticizes our industrial-technological throw-away culture by showing us what we are destroying in our onslaught against the land. In his chapter in this section, Thomas J. Lyon writes that the western nature essay is like poetry in that both genres seek to establish continuity between man and nature. In their most recent stage, then, most of the genres in western American literature picture our present way of life as leading in the direction of destruction. The nature essay, according to Lyon, did not begin as one of the prophets of doom. Instead, it emerged from passages of descriptions in the reports of western exploration and fur trapping, reports written by Lewis and Clark, Prince Maximilian, Osborne Russell, and John Charles Frmont; and it grew to encompass whole pictorially accurate books on aspects of western nature, books such as Thomas Nuttalls A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory (1821). Around the turn of the century, John Muir and Mary Austin brought the western nature essay to a new and higher stage, one that not only saw nature clearly, but also pondered its philosophical significance. After World War I, a new school of western nature essayists appeared- government scientists such as Aldo Leopold, Robert Marshall, and Olaus Muriewho recorded the essence of thousands of hours of in-the-field observations of wildlife and the natural environment. And when Joseph Wood Krutch moved to the deserts of the Southwest, western American literature was blessed with a twentieth-century Thoreau. Lyon says that current western nature essayists such as Edward Abbey write with an urgency forced upon them by their sense that time is running out because of our destruction of the natural world. Given the importance of its message, why hasnt western nature writing been studied before? It has been, not so much as literature as Lyon discusses itbut as documents in the history of the idea of wildernessas Roderick Nash examines it in his Wilderness and the American Mind. Nash does not restrict his study to the West, but Peter Wild does so restrict his in Pioneer Conservationists of Western America, a collection that includes a wealth of biographical details. What Lyon emphasizes is that the best of the nature essays should be read not simply as scientific reports, but more importantly as literature that can, through the aesthetic process, reshape our perception and thereby help us to achieve greater harmony with nature and with ourselves. Paradoxically, a study of this genre can give us a better understanding of other western genres. To understand the poetry of Robinson 139
Jeffers or Gary Snyder, for example, one needs to have some sense of how they see the land. Those critics who see only heartless inhumanism in Jeffers and only naive primitivism in Snyder fail to recognize in their work the wisdom that comes from a close and perceptive look at the land and its creatures. Perhaps such critics have also been unduly influenced by western movies. From its beginning, Hollywood has given us various versions of the West, as William T. Pilkington explains in his chapter on western movies. In fact, one of the first American movies was Edwin S. Porters The Great Train Robbery (1903). More than three-quarters of a century and thousands of western movies later, English departments have added film courses to their curricula, and scholarly journals such as PMLA and Western American Literature have published critical studies of moviessigns that this twentieth-century celluloid form of popular entertainment has been accepted for what it is: an art form so closely akin to drama and the novel that the criticism of it has found its natural home among literary studies. Western radio and television programs are also beginning to receive critical attention, as in Ralph Brauers The Horse, the Gun, and the Piece of Property: Changing Images of the TV Western (1975). Additional genres or sub-genres exist in western American literature. But in seeing literature only in terms of dozens of generic divisions, one runs the risk of sounding like Shakespeares Polonius with his labels: tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragicalhistorical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. To avoid that risk and to shed more light on the literature, the following chapters treat only the major types of western literature; in the second part of A Literary History of the American West, there are chapters on major authors and on the sub-regions of the West; and in the third part, chapters on current trends in western literature. Our intention is that this variety of approachesa sort of critical triangulationwill establish more cogently the nature and value of western American literature. As one part of that method of triangulation, the following study of the early development of genres in the West is essential, since, to return to Wellek and Warren, The literary kind is not a mere name, for the aesthetic convention in which a work participates shapes its character (p. 215).
J AMES H. MA G U I R E ,
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Precursors of the Western Novel

I
HE SEMI-ARID REGIONS
within the boundaries of the United States and are conventionally referred to as the American West posed a cultural challenge to the westering Anglo-European settlers of which the magnitude has only fairly recently been realized. Only since Walter Prescott Webbs epoch-making study The Great Plains (1931) have systematic attempts been made to understand the enormous cultural adaptations made inevitable by the staggering environmental differences between the trans-Mississippi West and the well-watered area east of the Father of Waters. These differences are most obviously seen in terms of the striking contrasts among the inhabitants of both regions: the Horse Indians, though ethnically related to their eastern cousins, are culturally totally divorced from them; differences between the agricultural Pueblo Indians and their eastern agricultural counterparts are more striking than are similarities; the eastern farmer has been metamorphosed into the western rancher; and his prosaic farmhand into the romantic cowboy, the hired man on horseback, in Eugene Manlove Rhodess evocative phrase. Yet these obvious differences, striking and important as they admittedly are, have caused many observers to rush into the tempting but unsound conclusion that the trans-Mississippi American Westespecially in its literary reflectionshas absolutely nothing to do with that eastern America which preceded, and in a sense produced it. In fact, many of the same factors which drove Americans across the wide Missouri had brought them across the Big Water some centuries before. Horace Greeleys famous remark Go West, young man, go West is, from this perspective, only an echo of Bishop Berkeleys almost equally well-known line, Westward the course of empire takes its way, of a century earlier: and though present residents of California may unthinkingly assume the line was written with their university in mind, in actuality it was written much earlier, in honor of another infant western collegeYale. In one sense, of course, fascination with the strange and novel is a perennial human trait. The equally reliable tales of humans abducted by gods and spacemen (in some modem versions the two are equated) have probably fascinated Homo sapiens since he first learned that a fire was just as
of the North American continent which lie
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desirable a place to socialize as it was to roast his dinner; but at least in the European imagination these traditional tales had, over the centuries, developed a kind of presumed historicity more or less unique to western society. Prester John had given way to Marco Polo, and the stories of the cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders, though they may have beguiled Desdemona did not fool Othello for one minute. The reason behind this is not far to seek. One need remember only that that same Renaissance which produced one of the greatest cultural awakenings the West was ever to know produced a scientific revolution as well, of which a disciplined curiosity was its intellectual expression and an age of exploration its technological offshoot. Richard Hakluyts Voyages (15891600) had proved so popular that they had been continued by Samuel Purchas (d. 1626) in several further volumes as Purchas his Pilgrimes and imitated by a host of others. The prestigious British Royal Society had been founded in 1660 with the encouragement of navigation and discovery as one of its primary aims, and with the New World as one of its primary targets. Yet the New World explored by the English was substantially different from the other lands discovered by them, if only because it was not the seat of an older and more sophisticated civilization, but quite the reverse: it was, to their eyes at least, a virgin land on which their destiny might be writ afresh without the hindrances of the past. What chronicle to write on this tabula rasa was the problem, then as now, facing the literary recorder. In this regard it is important to remark that, although the early colonists might well know what they were fleeing from, there was little agreement concerning what in fact they were fleeing toward. The most articulate view, at least at first, stemmed from the notions of eighteenth-century primitivism, for which Jean Jacques Rousseau was the most widely quoted, though by no means unique, spokesman. Rousseaus famous remark that man is born free, and yet is everywhere in chains had an obvious political implication: remove man from his chains and he would again be free. Once free, the nobility of his nature would emerge and then, again to quote Bishop Berkeley, there shall be sung another golden age. Perhaps the clearest American spokesman for this view was a transplanted Frenchman, one J. Hector St. John de Crvecoeur, whose Letters from an American Farmer (1782) painted an optimistic picture of what man might make of himself in this New World, freed from the artificial restraints imposed on him by a landed gentry, a whimsical aristocracy, and an established church. Although the Letters are not primarily fiction (except perhaps in the sense that Huckleberry Finn uses the term when he claims that Mark Twain told, in Tom Sawyer, the truth mostly, except for a few stretchers), they do contain fictional elements, most notably in the third letter, signifi142
PRECURSORS OF THE WESTERN NOVEL
cantly titled What Is an American? This letter contains the story of one Andrew the Hebridean, an imaginary immigrant whose person is the archetype of the American colonizer and whose history is the archetype of the American success story. Thus early in American writing the longing for a new start and the rewards it will bringtwo themes of primary importance to subsequent western writinghave become inextricably entwined in American myth. Yet this optimistic view of the flowering of human destiny in the Garden of the Lord, a new Eden untainted by artificially imposed restraints, though persuasive, by no means carried the day. It rang peculiarly hollow in the ears of the American Puritans, many of whom had selected the infant colonies as a desirable position from which to view the Battle of Armageddon which they presumed to be imminent. In 1741, only forty years prior to Crvecoeurs Letters, Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God had darkly warned that probably the bigger part of adult persons that ever will be saved, will be brought in now in a little time, a clear prophecy that the end was near. Nor did one have to be of Edwardss millennial persuasion to discover the logical flaw in Rousseaus views: for if man was born free, but is everywhere in chains, who made the chains? The lines of the debate were clearly drawn and passionately argued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The prime metaphor in the controversy was nature, and the debate, which often discussed external nature, equally often concerned itself with two contrary views of human nature. Was man basically a noble creature whose innate goodness was entrapped within a cage of artificial and whimsical social restraints? Or was he, as William Bradford had warned in Of Plymouth Plantation (1630), a being whose nature was hopelessly corrupt, and to whom liberty was merely a euphemism for license? The obvious focus for this debate was the native inhabitant of the New World, the Indian. Was this classic man in a state of nature a noble savage, as good primitivist theory would have it, or was he, as actual contact in the field suggested, merely a savage whose nobility was presumed rather than demonstrated? Mary Rowlandsons extremely successful Narrative (1682) of her earlier captivity among the Indians during King Philips War (167576) had established a durable literary genre still popular today, the so-called captivity narrative which details the harrowing experiences of white captives among fiendish Native Americans. Timothy Flint, whose first novel Francis Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot ( 1826) can make a good claim to being the first Western ever written, later penned The Shoshonee Valley: A Romance (1830) specifically to refute the wild and pernicious sophism of Rousseau, that the savage is happier, than the social state, a 143
philosophical position firmly adhered to by the novels protagonist William Weldon, who discovers the magnitude of his logical error when he and his family are murdered by the supposedly peaceful Shoshoni. By 1830 Flint is working within a well-established tradition, pioneered most successfully by Charles Brockden Brown in Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), in which the Indians are ruthless and implacable enemies. Somewhat unfairly, James Fenimore Cooper was viewed by his nineteenth-century compatriots as the primary American literary spokesman for Rousseaus position, and it is not surprising then that many attacks on Rousseau focus on Cooper. Perhaps the best example is Robert Montgomery Birds excellent novel, now unfortunately generally ignored, Nick of the Woods or the Jibbenainosay: A Tale of Kentucky (1837), which is written, he tells us, to set the record straight, for Cooper had thrown a poetical illusion over the Indian character by depicting him as a new style of the beau-ideal. Not so: in his natural barbaric state the Indian is a barbarian, and thats that. This contrary tradition was from its inception representative of a western rather than an eastern point of view, serving an avowedly political purpose in justifying harsh policies toward the Indian opponents of American westward expansion. The point is interesting in another way as clearly exemplifying a further legacy to modern western American writingthe profound western regional distrust of what Vardis Fisher was much later to call the Eastern establishment. Even when East and West were both east of the Mississippi, the westerners sense of himself as markedly different from his eastern compatriots had emerged and was clearly reflected in his writing. A serious literary argument pitting easterner against westerner erupted very early in American letters. This debate, which is with us yet today, expressed itself primarily in terms of an apparently straightforward question: who, it was asked, was better able to express the facts of western life, the easterner working from book knowledge or the westerner who knew the western experience at first hand? The western position, simplistically stated, was that the eastern writer simply got his facts wrong, and since he knew nothing of the bases of western life could not possibly be expected to say anything sensible about it. As early as 1827, in a review of James Fenimore Coopers recently published The Prairie, Timothy Flint clearly articulates what is to become a perennial western American literary complaint. The Prairie, it will be remembered, represents Coopers one extended literary foray into the Great Plains, an area which Flint knew well, and about which he had written Francis Berrian only one year previously. Flint, as an avowed proponent of that progress he feels inevitable when the Great Plains are opened to the benefits of civilization, has little use for the more tragic view of history proposed by Cooper, and the basic thrust of his argu144
ment is that Coopers profound reservations about the course of progress are not well taken. Philosophically, the point is certainly arguable, yet Flints line of attack is curious. Basically, he dismisses Coopers argument because Cooper has gotten his facts wrong. Of all natural scenery, Flint sniffs, one would think, a prairie the most easy to imagine, without having seen it, but apparently even this simple task is beyond Coopers abilities. We shall read him with pleasure only, Flint concludes, when he selects scenery and subjects, with which he is familiarly conversant. The analogical reasoning behind this line of argument is, though tempting, implicitly misleading; for Flint has adduced, as the sole criterion for literary merit, simple and absolute fidelity to literal fact. Flints argument is certainly valid to a degree, and Mark Twain, also writing from a western perspective, is later (1895) to expand it in Fenimore Coopers Literary Offenses, justifiably one of his most famous essays. Twain mercilessly exposes what Flint had also noted in another place ( 1828), that in Coopers writing probability is violated at every step. Twains account of how, in The Deerslayer, five of six Indians miss an easy jump into a passing boat must strike a sympathetic chord in any readers who have felt their enjoyment of much western story nullified by the sheer preposterousness of the action. The litany is familiar, and needs no more than brief mention: incredible feats of marksmanship and woodcraft, impossible coincidences, and the like which fill much western fiction can be traced back, in some cases specifically, to eastern misapprehensions about the West in general and to the legacy of Cooper in particular. At the same time, the case is not so open and shut as Flint and Twain make it appear. The difficulty goes to the heart of the whole concept of western literary realism, and indeed to a more wide-ranging discussion of the nature of realism in American fiction generally. The question finally comes down to an ambiguity in the American literary experience existing from its origins. Is reality primarily definable in external terms, or is it instead the expression of some kind of internal state? In his 1851 preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne was to see the dilemma clearly. He, following a nineteenth-century critical commonplace, divided imaginative literature into two types, exemplified by what he called the Novel and the Romance. The novel, he said, aims at a very minute fidelity . . . to the probable and ordinary course of mans experience. The romance, contrariwise, although it too must present the truth of the human heart, may present that truth under circumstances . . . of the writers own choosing or creation. To the nineteenth-century novelist, one great literary problem becomes that of how to present these two contrary aspects of the truth of the human heart within one story, to find a vehicle which combines the reality of factual detail with that other reality 145
represented by the romance. The magnitude of the problem may be seen in Hawthornes handling of The Scarlet Letter (1850), which he prefaces with a long essay, The Custom House, ostensibly explaining how the manuscript of the romance came into his possession, but actually an attempt to provide a novelistic balance to his romantic story, thus arriving at a fictional truth combining both novelistic and romantic aspects of fiction. Whatever his actual beliefs, Hawthorne liked to adopt the literary stance that the separation of novelistic and romantic elements in his own fiction was not completely fortunate. Each perspective was valid, he would argue, but each by itself incomplete. To the student of western literature, Melvilles Moby-Dick (1851), often mentioned as a kind of frontier novel of the sea, is perhaps more interesting. Melville attempts the same union of these two different aspects of the truth of the human heart by combining the romantic story of the monomaniac Captain Ahabs pursuit of the Great White Whale with the novelistic cetology chapters which fill much of the novel. Of particular significance for western story is the fact that in Moby-Dick the cetological (novelistic) chapters become less evident as the story progresses, while the (romantic) story of the hunt becomes more important. In one sense, then, Moby-Dick represents a penetration through the external world of everyday reality into a realm equally real in another, mythical sense, yet not primarily factual. The Great White Whale may finally be understood only in terms of the contradictory meanings we project upon him. Something of this penetration through the comfortable surface world we know into a more sinister internal world we only sense is at the heart of darkness in many western novels which can superficially be dismissed as blood-and-thunder or pure escape. Mary Rowlandsons Narrative of her Indian captivity, mentioned earlier, depends upon precisely this effect of penetration through the comfortable surface to an understanding of that malevolence which lies concealed beneath it. She has, literally and metaphorically, gone West to grow up with the country, and her newly won maturity is achieved only at the price of her loss of innocence. The reality she has discovered in the West is a reality of terror, one which she would just as soon forget. Offhandedly she tells us, after her safe return to her family, I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me. Her dream of westering has turned into a nightmare. Penetration through experience, then, rather than travel over it is the perspective romantic western fiction offers which novelistic fiction cannot. It is useless to condemn Coopers The Last of the Mohicans on the grounds that it is unrealistic, in the sense of being shaky in its factual bases. The point can readily be conceded without denigrating Coopers genius, for his 146
purpose in that novel is not primarily to take us on a journey across country; rather the journey takes us finally to an apocalyptic vision of inner space, a vision true to our internal perceptions of reality in which identities merge and things become their opposites rather than to the external world where Mingoes, Delawares, French, and English are easily labeled. In the last analysis, the most important legacy of earlier American writing to western fiction is one of ambiguity. The great debate which had gone on ever since the first English explorers penetrated into the Great Plainsthe debate over whether this new land was the Garden of the Lord or, contrariwise, the Great American Desertis one to which presumably there is a factual answer. In fact, as Henry Nash Smith pointed out in Virgin Land ( 1950), the answer depends as much on the predispositions one brings to the problem as it does on the alleged facts. Whether what we see is a reflection of the world outside or a projection instead of our inner wishes and, on occasion, hidden fears is a philosophical problem at least as old as the Republic. From its forebears western writing inherits a method of exploring this problem in terms of discussion of a series of profound and unsettling paradoxes. What is the West itselfthe Garden of the Lord or the Great American Desert? Who inhabits the Westnoble savages or merely savages? Most important of all, whatrealistically consideredare the chances for a new start when you bring your old self with you?
II
This discussion has attempted a brief overview of the very different and often contradictory strands in American culture which were later to develop into the western novel, which even in its earlier and not specifically western forms occupied an important place in American letters. Nevertheless, in any discussion of precursors of the western novel one name, that of James Fenimore Cooper (17891851), is clearly preeminent. The biblical statement that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country is nowhere better applied in American letters than to this first great American novelist. While Americans, particularly those of a literary bent, have spent the century and a quarter since his death engaged in redfaced apologies for his work, Europeans have acclaimed him as a serious philosophical novelist. Moreover, while Americans have uniformly regretted Coopers legacy to subsequent western story as escapist and juvenile, European writers have done him the honor of copying almost slavishly his treatment of American western themes. Indeed, it has only been comparatively recently that the West of the European Western has followed its American model from the Mississippi Valley to the Great American Desert. The Europeans may have a point: only the most fanatic Cooper-phobe would seriously claim that the so-called spaghetti Western represents a great leap 147
forward, at least from the standpoint of speculative philosophy, over the model pioneered by Cooper more than a century and a half ago. Cooper, in common with many subsequent western writers, was not himself a child of the frontier, a fact which has been adduced by unsympathetic readers to explain his alleged lack of ability. Born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, he removed to Cooperstown, New York, in 1790, where his father William Cooper had, five years previously, acquired a patent of thousands of acres of land at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River. The story goes that Coopers mother, unenthusiastic about the move, was carried bodily from her Burlington home and deposited in the wagon which was to take the family to their new western residence, clutching the infant James in her arms. The specific anecdote may well be apocryphal, though it is clear enough that his mother opposed the move; when coupled with the unsympathetic portrayal of his father (as Judge Temple) and of Cooperstown (Templeton) in The Pioneers (1823), the first written of the Leatherstocking Tales, and the fact that Cooper was later to adopt his mothers family name of Fenimore as part of his own, the inference that his mothers skepticism about the West was at least partially Coopers is inescapable. Indeed, this pull between two contrary sets of values, represented on the one side by civilization and on the other by the wilderness, is basic to Coopers fictional exploration of the American West, which he sees as a trope of the ironies in the human condition and, more profoundly, as a master metaphor for his ultimately tragic vision of the world. Cooper drifted into a literary career by chance. Disgusted with a novel he was reading aloud to his wife, he remarked that he could write a better one himself, and when challenged to do so produced Precaution (1820), a novel based partially upon Jane Austens Persuasion (1818), whose themes, as well as title, are echoed in Coopers work. Although Precaution is no masterpiece, its modest success encouraged Cooper, who quickly produced three of his best novels which among them surveyed those literary territories he was later to explore at length and ultimately bequeath to subsequent literary investigators: The Spy (1821) is a revolutionary war romance; The Pioneers (1823), a novel of the frontier; The Pilot (1823), a story of the sea. Common to all is the general method of organization: the novelistic territory of each is a symbolic location where two sets of opposed values struggle for domination. In The Spy, set in revolutionary Westchester County, New York, this territory is the neutral ground, contested by both British forces and American rebels; in The Pilot a similarly conceived territory, neither land nor sea, is evocatively named the shoal waters; and in The Pioneers the location is the recently settled Templeton (Cooperstown), a frontier hamlet symbolically located midway between civilization and wilderness. 148
Let us consider The Pioneers in more detail, since it is both the first of Coopers western novels and of his Leatherstocking Tales, on which his subsequent reputation almost entirely depends. The Pioneers, though in many respects a flawed novel, is nonetheless a fascinating one, for in it we can watch Cooper, almost unawares, writing himself into the theme which will preoccupy his literary world for nearly twenty years, through four more Leatherstocking TalesThe Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827)) The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841)and a multitude of other novels and shorter works, not all strictly western in their subject matter. Coopers first thought in writing The Pioneers was obviously satirical. Modeling himself on Hugh Henry Brackenridges enormously popular recent polemic novel Modern Chivalry (published at intervals between 1792 and 1815), Cooper intended to poke none-too-good-humored fun at what he saw as the ridiculous buffoons inhabiting Templeton. All the stock character types are present: the uneducated doctor, the comic-opera Frenchman, the sailor ashore, the drunken Indian, the boorish backwoodsman, and more. Yet soon the fable Cooper tells develops a life of its own, and imparts its own pattern to the sterile caricatures with which he had begun. The drunken Indian is metamorphosed into Chingachgook, the last chief of the Delawares, a once-proud people whose destiny has come to nothing; his funeral speech, modeled upon the famous oration of Chief Logan, remains even today one of the most masterful and moving set pieces in all American western writing. The boorish backwoodsman is transformed, in the course of The Pioneers, from a figure of fun originally conceived as the comic Natty Bumppo, into the dignified Leatherstocking, the tragic hero of an American myth, trapped by the ironies of progress in a world he never made. The general thrust of the novel itself has been altered from relatively superficial satire to a thoughtful investigation of the ironies inherent in the American errand into the wilderness. The tales master images have become those of spoliation and death. No longer a light-hearted (however heavy-handed) attempt to reform manners through laughter, The Pioneers finally echoes Tacituss somber comment on the brutal Roman conquest of Britain, which might almost serve as the novels motto: desertum faciunt et pacem vocan t-they make a desolation, and call it peace. In order to understand a further dimension of the Leatherstocking Tales, it is important to note one other aspect in Coopers original conception of his hero: that Natty Bumppo is initially visualized as an old man. Indeed, in none of the Tales except the last is Natty a youthful hero, and his advanced age offers an important clue to Coopers novelistic craft. For by presenting his spokesman as one more advanced in years than those around him, Cooper is able to introduce a reflective dimension into his story, in which the wisdom of age may (and in candor it should be admitted, far too 149
often does) comment upon the inchoate and apparently incomprehensible world of the action itself. This combination of the novel of action with the novel of reflection is Coopers greatest single legacy to subsequent western story, both philosophically and from the point of view of technique. The problem faced by the author of western tales, then as now, has always been how to assimilate the raw materials of a blood-and-thunder story into a novel of some philosophical respectability. Failures to do so have been legion, enough so that their mere enumeration serves in some quarters as a ritualistic denial, in lieu of thoughtful criticism, of even the possibility of a significant literature dealing, as western American literature in part inevitably must, with stories of adventure. Successes, however, are also to be found, and in most of them Coopers legacy is plain. Though Cooper may presently be without critical honor in his own country, he is not forgotten there except, alas, by those too much at ease in Zion.
J AMES K. FO L S O M ,
University of Co!orado
Although many studies of midwestern life and culture exist, most are primarily of interest to the social historian rather than to the literary critic. The best overview of the development of midwestern literary culture is still William H. Venables Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (1958), originally published in 1891. Henry Nash Smiths pioneering investigation of the mythic American West, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), contains many useful insights about the American West generally and a brilliant assessment of the importance of James Fenimore Cooper to subsequent western writing. The literary Indian has been the focus of many studies. Albert Keisers The Indian in American Literature (1933) is still useful, although it should be supplemented with Roy Harvey Pearces The Savages of America: A Study of the lndian and the Idea of Civilization (1953), a brilliant analysis of European cultural attitudes toward Indian
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life. Leslie Fiedlers discussions of Indians in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) and The Return of the Vanishing American (1968) are inevitably thoughtprovoking, although controversial. The works of James Hall and Timothy Flint are often hard to find, although good biographical and critical studies exist of both. In addition to Venable (above), the student of Hall should consult John T. Flanagan, James Hall: Literary Pioneer of the Ohio Valley (1941) and Randolph C. Randall, James Hall: Spokesman of the New West (1964); of Timothy Flint, John E. Kirkpatrick, Timothy Flint: Pioneer, Missionary, Author, Editor, 17801840 (1911) and James K. Folsom, Timothy Flint (1965). James Fenimore Coopers phenomenally high reputation in nineteenthcentury America and his relative neglect in the twentieth have led to a curious anomaly in scholarship dealing with his work. In contrast to the case of most major American writers, critical interpretations of Cooper are better than modern editions of his writing. In view of the lack of any definitive critical edition of Coopers works, the Leatherstocking Tales are best approached through the one-volume abridgement The Leatherstocking Saga (1954), edited with a superb introduction by Allan Nevins. Robert E. Spillers Fenimore Cooper: Critic of his Times (1931) contains the best study of Coopers social thought. The various essays in M. E. Cunningham, ed., James Fenimore Cooper: A Re-appraisal (1954) offer a fascinating study of modern attempts to restore Cooper to literary respectability. Finally, the best short study of Cooper of primarily literary rather than biographical emphasis is Donald A. Ringes James Fenimore Cooper (1962). Biographies of Cooper are generally of limited value to the literary scholar because of their bias toward justifications of Coopers thorny and difficult personality and the limitations placed on biographers by nineteenth-century codes of decorum toward official biographies. Best is Thomas R. Lounsburys James Fenimore Cooper (1883), to be supplemented by James Grossmans James Fenimore Cooper (1949). The 1922 edition of Coopers Correspondence is unsatisfactory; in its place the student should consult the two-volume Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper (1960), edited by James F. Beard. Beard is presently engaged in writing Coopers biography which, upon appearance, should prove definitive. A longoverdue scholarly edition of Coopers works is presently in progress. The Leatherstocking Tales, together with the four revolutionary war novels and the European travel books will appear shortly, with the rest to follow.
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The Western Story
and international antecedents, the short story is conceded to be both the youngest and most American of major literary forms. The western story, as a particular variation on that form, has been among the most popular in literary history, a haven for readers trapped in an increasingly urban and complex world. As Jack Schaefer noted in 1955, while not all western stories are escape fiction, the overpowering majority of them are. Throughout the twentieth century, however, as Schaefer further recognized, some gifted writers of short fiction have abjured the compelling formula of code Westerns and sought to produce significant literature set in the West. Until the recent past, however, they were often trapped by readers assumptions. In the three decades since Schaefers observation, the postWorld War II generation has emerged, a generation that has deepened and broadened the ranges of subject and technique. There are, in effect, two traditions of western stories, one popular and commercial, the other literary and less commercial. Both can be traced to the early nineteenth century. The initial systematic examination of the short story is conceded to be an article by Brander Matthews, Short-Story, which appeared in The Saturday Review of July 5, 1884. Matthews pointed out that the new form was not merely brief fiction, but brief fiction of a particular type. The difference between a Novel and a Novelette is one of length only . . . . But the difference between a Novel and a Short-story is a difference in kind, he wrote. A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its unity of impression. He also gave credit to Edgar Allan Poe: by his precept and by his practice [he] had revealed the possibilities of the short-story and [he] had known what it ought to be. Poe had, in an 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthornes Twice-Told Tales published in Grahams Magazine, contrasted the characteristics of the novel with those of the tale, noting that the latter could be read at a single sitting, thus achieving the immense force derived from totality. He suggested, further, that skillful writers seek a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out of a tale. Matthews was correct in asserting that Poe did not formulate a system for evaluating stories, but Poe nonetheless did clearly offer the first significant attempt to define the developing genre, and his definition is esESPITE ITS ANCIENT
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sentially as old as the form and may have been a significant factor in its development. Poe, himself, Robert Marler has convincingly argued, wrote tales, not short stories. The former were products of romantic imaginations, so they emphasized the supernatural over the natural; moreover, their characters tended to be stylized, sometimes archetypal figures, not infrequently allegorical in intent, while figures in short stories tend to be recognizably human first, then perhaps symbolic. Another major distinction, as William Peden explains, is that the short story, brief and unwinking, tends to ask questions rather than suggest answers, to show rather than to attempt to solve. Popular tales being published in America during the mid-nineteenth century had, Marler argues, degenerated into formulaic, romantic, often stereotypical patterns in which characters showed no internal life and were frequently employed to illustrate popular ideals and values; they had, in fact, taken on many of the characteristics that popular western stories in this century displayed, and that is no coincidence, since most code Western short fiction is not a variety of short story but of the simpler tale. The short story was the product of not mere literary experimentation, but of a realistic, often painful recognition of the individuals place in an increasingly urban, industrialized world. It represents, that is, a literary birth of modern consciousness. The more complex form emerged in the eighteen fifties, when Herman Melville, who had produced tales (The Bell Tower), moved beyond that form in concept and style to produce short stories (Bartleby the Scrivener). Marler points out that the critical commentary of the three masters of short fiction (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville) describes a smooth transition from the tale to the short story. Melville, with his almost contemporary theory of fiction-he sought to create a readable surface for his stories that would conceal deeper, more important meanings-and with his recognition of encroaching dehumanism in the modern world stands at a crossroads in the history of American fiction. It has continued to be a busy intersection in western writing, as writers have traveled both the West-thatnever-was and its fictive evocations, and the harsher reality of many contemporary short stories. The difference between the tales of B. M. Bower or Clarence E. Mulford or Charles Alden Seltzer and the stories of Dorothy Johnson or Walter Van Tilburg Clark or Raymond Carver illustrates this contrast. Washington Irvings sketches were also important components in the development of short fiction in the American West, for many modern writers employ variations of that form to recreate regional experiences; the Texas sketches of Elroy Bode, for example, or the stories of Chester 153
'A Literary History of the American West
Seltzer (Amado Muro) are obvious examples. In The SketchBook (181920), which included Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving built a link between eighteenth-century essayists and the short story tradition that was to follow. I consider a story merely a frame on which to stretch the materials, Irving explained, mentioning also the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life and the half-concealed vein of humor that is often playing through the whole. . . . By emphasizing setting, scene, and atmosphere in his work, Irving set the stage for local color writing and the tendency to stress description that would dominate the western story as it developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Two other nineteenth-century factors were important in the development of the western story. Most obvious was the recognition and employment of elements of oral literature-particularly the tall taleby gifted writers. The stories of Bret Harte and Mark Twain brought together elements of native humor and western regionalism in a manner that Irving had only hinted was possible. Harte himself believed folk humor was the single most important element in the emerging short fiction of his time: Crude at first, it received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condensed, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant, or a miracle of understatement. . . . It gave a new interest to slang. . . . It was the parent of the American short story. The second factor was less evident but nonetheless vital: American publishing. Ian Reid explains that the absence of international copyright regulations led to a proliferation in America of cheap reprints from overseas. As a result, American publishers were seldom keen to sponsor work by local novelists. . . . The short story, on the other hand, could find a ready public through the gift annuals and periodicals of the time. The commercial story, cradle of the popular code Western, was born as a consequence. By the turn of the century, then, five traditions had emerged, not mutually exclusive-indeed, frequently blendedyet each individually important: the oral yarn, the sketch, the tale, the short story, and that compendium of subject and style that has come to be called the commercial or popular story. It was the merging of these forms with the unique and frequently fantasized subjects offered by the Great West that led to the western story or, more accurately, western stories, for two traditions evolved. An awareness of the West and its literary potential had evolved even before the maturation of the short story. Irving and James Fenimore Cooper are generally conceded to be the first major writers to recognize and effectively employ western settings and subjects. In 1832 Irving wrote his West154
THE WESTERN STORY
ern Journals after a journey to the frontier. He followed with A Tour of the Prairies ( 1835), Astoria ( 1836), and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837). Even more important were Coopers Leatherstocking novels, the first (The Pioneers) appearing in 1823, the fifth and last ( The Deerslayer) in 1841; James K. Folsom has convincingly argued that Cooper captured the epic scope and mythic power of frontier experiences. Ironically, myth-in the popular sense-came to be the range of commercial Westerns a century later. In any case, the West as literary material was established by midcentury, as were the pressures of urbanization and industrialization which created both audience and attitude. In the sixty-plus years following the publication of Coopers final Leatherstocking novel, two other major events presaged modern western stories. First, following the Civil War, was the development of the popular western hero in dime novels, a figure that seems to have extended little altered from Natty Bumppo to Rooster Cogburn; indeed, most of the original versions bore a striking resemblance to Leatherstocking, a hunter and trapper. Observes Henry Nash Smith: the persona created by the writers of popular fiction was so accurate an expression of the demands of the popular imagination that it proved powerful enough to shape an actual man in its own image. Second, Owen Wister published The Virginian in 1902; a large, relatively sophisticated audience read it and altered, however slightly, the image of the western hero, adding gentility to temper the preexistent toughness, courage and cleverness, but the centrality of that epic figure, by now transformed into the cowboy rather than the trapper, was undisturbed. What is more, the audience itself broadened; Wisters West was acceptable. During the three decades that followed, a gifted cadre of writers emerged. Some, like Zane Grey and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), wrote and further defined the commercial story. Others, such as William MacLeod Raine and Steward Edward White, worked most effectively with variations on the oral tradition combined with aspects of both the literary and commercial short stories. Still othersEugene Manlove Rhodes is the classic example here-continue to confound critics who cannot decide whether they were major writers or merely gifted commercial authors. A surprising number of writers from that period had lived on or near the frontier. Rhodes had been a working cowboy, as had W. C. Tuttle, Henry Herbert Knibbs, and James B. Hendryx. Willa Cather knew first hand the rigors of life on the plains; so did Hamlin Garland. Jack London had been an oyster pirate. As Harry E. Maule notes, these writers and others of their generation, conscientious craftsmen all, some of them artists, were above all natural story tellers and for the most part wrote out of experience and direct observation. 155
It was during this period that popular literature merged with a new medium, motion pictures, to solidify the stereotypical western story, the horse opera. It might be fairly stated that while one school of writers explored the possibilities of the code Western with its constant setting, melodramatic characters, and rich appeal to popular myth, history and nostalgia, another sought to write fiction that reflected the complexity and drama of human existence in a western setting. Of course, many writers have done both, but among the more distinguished modern practitioners of the former have been Frederick Faust (Max Brand), Henry Wilson Allen (Will Henry), Frederick D. Glidden (Luke Short), Ernest Haycox, and Louis LAmour, while William Saroyan, Jarvis Thurston, William Eastlake, Johnson, Clark, and Schaefer have been among the celebrated writers in the latter tradition. Popular Westerns, with their many variations, benefited from the development of two twentieth-century versions of dime novels: pulp magazines and the twenty-five-cent paperbacks, both of which provided writers with ready markets and an arena for apprenticeships. Slick magazines Colliers, Saturday Evening Post and Argosy, among othersalso published Westerns, with writers such as Rhodes, Schaefer, and Johnson featured; it is no coincidence that those three work in the tradition of the literary Western, a tradition that has grown in importance since World War II. Louis LAmour, the most successful modern writer of commercial Westerns, has over his thirty-plus years of publishing increasingly deepened his products, moving away from formulaic presentations. He explains, My intention has always been to tell stories of the frontier, the sort of stories I heard when growing up; that is, LAmour has added elements of the oral tradition to commercial roots-which include components of the sketch, the tale and the story-as his work has matured. In fact, literary Westerns have created an awareness of complexity and of formal variations that have elevated the level of popular Westerns and moved the finest commercial practitioners toward more original, perhaps more significant work, blurring boundaries between the two. Observes Henry Wilson Allen, Everybody suddenly wants to be the Boris Pasternak of the Purple Sage. It must also be pointed out that the large numbers of older, formula western stories continue to be reprinted, so their appeal appears little diminished. Wallace Stegner has written of the dilemma of western writers who feel trapped by a history that may be more popular fantasy than reality; he observes that you dont choose between the past and the present, you try to find the connections, you try to make the one serve the other. Michael Marsden and Jack Nachbar have suggested that one reason the popular Western has endured is that writers like Haycox, Faust, and LAmour are really telling versions of one, long epic tale unfolded over an extended period of time through the efforts of a number of skilled storytellers. 156
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The popular western story remains just that, popular. But it has changed. More accurately, it has been changed by the persistence of literary storytellers who have rejected formulas and insisted upon bringing the variations of modem writing to western materials in their continuing quest for truth. If the code Western has been a vehicle for escape, the literary story has been a vehicle for exploration. As the two traditions move together, it is the literary Western-progeny of the classic short story and the modern consciousness that produced itthat dominates and deepens the western story.
G E R A L D W . HA S L A M,
Sonoma State University
Durham, Philip, and Everett Jones, editors. The Western Story: Fact, Fiction, and Myth. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. This anthology divides its contents into three sections: Fact, Fiction, and Myth, an interesting if not entirely successful approach. Elder, Gary, editor. The Far Side of the Storm: New Ranges of Western Fiction. Los Cerrillos, N.M.: San Marcos Press, 1975. Controversial, revisionist collection which seeks to expand both subjects and styles. Contains interesting, if overwritten, introduction. Henry, Will. Will Henrys West. Edited by Dale L. Walker. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1984. Along with a generous sampling of Henrys fiction, this volume contains a revealing introduction. Kopp, Karl, and Jane Kopp, editors. Southwest: Towards the Twenty-First Century. Corrales, N.M.: Red Earth Press, 1981. Among the finest of revisionist anthologies. Valuable introductory essay. Marler, Robert. From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850s. American Literature 46 (May 1974): 15457. Traces the pivotal development of the short story as a unique form, suggesting that Herman Melville is the key figure. Maule, Harry E., editor. Great Tales of the American West. New York: The Modern
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A Literary History of the American West Library, 1945. This collection contains most of the best magazine writers from the first half of this century, plus Maules own revealing introductory essay. A classic anthology. Pattee, Fred Lewis. The Development of the American Short Story. New York: Harper and Row, 1923. Classic study of the most American of literary genres. Surveys earlier scholarship. Schaefer, Jack, editor. Out West. London: Transworld Publishers, 1959. This twovolume collection features two insightful Editors Notes. Volume One contains the original 1955 note, while the second volume has an updated version. Taylor, J. Golden, editor. Great Western Short Stories. Palo Alto: American West Publishing Company, 1967. This comprehensive anthology is enlivened by Taylors chapter introductions, and also includes Wallace Stegners History, Myth, and the Western Writer. West, Ray B., Jr. Short Story in America 19001950. Freeport, N.Y. : Books for Libraries Press, 1968. A valuable survey by a distinguished western editor. Summarizes much earlier scholarship.
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by the shock of seeing western films in translationon hearing the white-Stetsoned cowman growl Hnde Hoch! while his lips are forming the English words, Better put up your handsor when confounded by the greater shock of seeing German actors playing Cowboys und Indianer in German-written, Germanproduced western films, do some Americans experience an intellectual epiphany, a realization that Europeans (along with Asians, South Americans, Australians, and nearly everyone else) have distinctive, indigenous, deep-seated literary and cultural traditions regarding life in the American West. This literature-based mythos has shaped their thinkingin Europe at leastfor more than 150 years and continues to shape non-American thinking about the American West, the United States, and its inhabitants. The occasional American who probes beneath postcard views of Europe may witness the Karl May Festival of the West at Bad Segeberg, watch Spanish youth don sombreros and play at rancheros, or read over the shoulder of an engrossed commuter on the Paris Mtro as he enjoys a George Fronval Westernperhaps the popular Les Prospecteurs de la Sonoraor observe English school-children as they exchange school uniforms for after-school play in plastic buckskins and fake coonskin caps. Such an observer soon understands that the myth of the American West belongs not only to North Americans, but to all mankind. And the origins and continuity of that myth lie in the literary milieu of several countries, only one of which is the United States. In fact, a closer examination of the reading habits of men and women and boys and girls-in nearly any literate nation will demonstrate the power of the American Western, regardless of geo-politics, to sweep its readers into exotic adventures beyond the borders of their own land and time into a Never-Never land in the American Far West. And an even closer examination of the literature of European nations reveals that most of these nations have a longstanding Wild West literary tradition which rivals and in some ways exceeds that of the United States. The sheer weight of the thousands of western novels and stories written by European authors has evolved a European-American western literature which, while little known and even less understood by North Americans, and though often more awkward than its American counterparts in its attempts at artistry and at cul-
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tural, anthropological, and topographical authenticity, not only mirrors nationalistic pride and national values, but often depicts a West stranger and more fantastic than the West evoked in the wildest American dime novel. I It was not long after the discovery of America that European writers began to shape exotic images of the garden of the New World and its savage but courtly inhabitants. By the eighteenth century such images had become received cultural traditions as Europeans thought of America as an Arcadia inhabited by Noble Savages possessed of Edenic manners and civilization, an image enhanced not only by titillating Indian captivity narratives, but by countless persuasive America Lettersepistles sent home to friends and relatives by hordes of European emigrants to America, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. This distorted and romantic vision of the New World was heightened by Franois-Ren Vicomte de Chateaubriand (17681848), a disciple of Rousseau, who gave America a special touch of gloire. Drawing upon his own six-month-long visit to the United States, Chateaubriand wrote Atala (1801), Ren ( 1802), and Les Natchez (1826), and popularized, throughout Europe, in many translations and editions, his highly imaginative, romantic rendering of the American landscape and the Noble Savage. The beautiful garden of Chateaubriands paradise was peopled by savages who combined Edenic simplicity with all of the attributes of the best of European culture including a surprising frequency of blushing, weeping and faintingto present, in statuesque poses, beautifully chiseled bronze bodies topped with hair as fine as a veil of gold. 1 The impact of such splendor on nineteenthcentury European readers was equally remarkable, and they turned avid literary attention to this brave new world, / That has such people in t! Chateaubriands enormous success in touching this mythic chord prepared the European reader for the works of James Fenimore Cooper. After The Pioneers, Coopers first work published in Europe, burst upon the continental consciousness in 1823, each of his works met with a phenomenal reception. In his excellent study, Ray Allen Billington writes that Coopermania raged at fever heat for more than a decade in Europe; and such 2 enthusiasm continues to the present, with only a slightly abated intensity. The Pioneers, for example, was published in France and England in 1823, almost simultaneous with its publication in the United States, and within a year it was translated into two German editions and, shortly thereafter, into Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, and, during the next decade, 3 into other European languages. Through the remainder of the nineteenth century, many additional translations of Coopers works appeared regularly 160
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in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and in every other European nation, as well as in Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Russians compared Cooper to Shakespeare, the Germans compared him to the Teutonic knights, the French called him le Walter Scott des sauvages, and an early Spanish review of The Last of the Mohicans praised him for his ability to 4 awaken in the reader a voluptuous feeling of noble sensibility. Coopers enormous popularity and the reception of Chateaubriands American novels combined, then, with a vigorous romanticism, unrest evoked by widespread political upheaval, and testimonials from the increasing horde of emigrants to the New World to stir in Europe, especially in Germany, Norway, France and England, an appetite for a fiction which would satisfy the ravenous hunger of Europeans for things American, things western. This appetite would attract to the American West the attention of some of the bestand the worstEuropean writers and begin an outpouring of literature (and, later, films) which continues to the present. The collected impress of such fiction on the European imagination has shaped and continues to shape a distinctively European, mythically powerful, but often distorted image of the American West and its inhabitants. A few limited examples from representative European nations will make this point clear.
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It seems to have been the Germans who were most nearly affected by the Europamdigkeit that seemed to flood Europe in the wake of the political and social unrest of the nineteenth century. Such restiveness, stirred by a vigorous German romanticism, turned German minds to effecting literal or imaginative escape into the American West, the land vaguely realizing westward, where thousands of Germans found focus for Johann Wolfgang von Goethes poetic declaration, Amerika, du hast es besser. German response to the myth of the West as exploited in the exotic novels of Chateaubriand and the Leatherstocking (L e d e r s t r u m p f ) Saga of Cooper spawned a host of imitators, and it was not long, as D. L. Ashliman notes, until stories of Western adventure constituted a substantial portion of 5 nineteenth century Germanys recreational reading. Hundreds of German, Austrian, and Swiss writersmost typically and notably Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Armand Strubberg, Friedrich Gerstcker, Balduin Mllhausen, and Karl Maydrew upon first-hand (and imaginary) experiences in the Far West to produce a body of uneven but exciting western fiction which not only influenced and continues to shape German attitudes but had a profound impact upon the thought of other European readers and writers as well. Even the German Boy Scout movement, Die Pfadfinder (Pathfinders), takes its name and some of its philosophy from the works of this influential band of German Western writers. 161
One of the earliest and most important of these writers is Karl Postl (17931864)) a Moravian monk who wrote under the name of Charles Sealsfield. During his lifetime Sealsfield was called der grosse Unbekannte (the great unknown one) because of his success in keeping his identity secret from the time he fled his monastery until after his death in Switzerland. Sealsfields eighteen volumes, most of them about life in the American Southwest, began appearing following the first of his five visits to the United States. Though Sealsfield insisted that he had not been influenced by Cooper, his popular first novel, Tokeah; or, the White Rose (1829), followed the publication of Coopers The Last of the Mohicans by three years and follows Cooper in relating the poignant story of the last chief of a oncepowerful tribe. Sealsfields best-known work is Das Kajtenbuch ( The Cabin B o o k , 1841), which contains his best-known story, The Prairie on the Jacinto, a tale of the Texas war for independence. An important link in the European novel between Cooper and the popular western works of Karl May at the end of the nineteenth century, Sealsfield criticizes American materialism and coarseness, especially in comparison to a superior German culture, but he glorifies the westward movement and the hardy American frontiersman and is full of praise for American liberties, especially the freedom of the press, and he underscores the importance of such freedom for Germans who were struggling through a troubled era of repression and reaction. His works became best sellers not only in his native land but in France, England, Austria, Hungary and the Scandinavian countriesas well as in the United States. He is, claims Carl Wittke, a novelist of merit who rightly deserves the place belatedly accorded him as an important figure, both in the history of literature and the 6 history of immigration. 7 Following the lead of Sealsfield, Otto Ruppius, and others who transformed American adventures into German fictional fantasies, Friedrich Armand Strubberg ( 1806- 1889) hammered away on one key-his own adventurous life in Texas during his quarter of a century in the Southwest. Strubberg, who wrote his novels under the pen-name of Armand, fled Germany in 1826 following an illegal duel to become an agent for a number of German princes who quixotically sought to establish a feudal state in 8 America. The results of his long years in the Southwest are found in his subsequent fifty-seven novels and his popular book of western adventures, Amerikanische Jugd- und Reiseabenteuer aus meinem Leben in den westlichen lndianergebieten Amerikas ( Hunting and Travel Adventures from My Life in Western Indian Territory, 1858). It is Friedrich Gerstcker (18161892), however, who is often credited with being the first writeranywhereof pure Westerns. In 150 volumes of travel accounts and adventure novels, nearly all of which deal 162
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with the American West, Gerstcker may have been the first to portray a West conditioned by terrain, frontier social organization, and the realities 9 of time and place. After Gerstckers first period of residence in the United States (18371842), during which he left a job as a clerk in a New York City cigar store to hunt game and travel from Niagara and Ontario to Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, he returned to Bremen, where, in 1844, he published his first book, Steif- und Jugdzge durch die Vereinigten Staaten Nord Amerikas (Rambling and Hunting Trips Through the United States 10 of North America). Gerstckers many volumes are distinctive, for they fuse authentic experiences from his three trips to the United States with an intensive interest in outlawry to create a coarsely naturalistic picture of the American frontier which reflects the real lives of farmers and frontiersmen who live amidst outlawry and frontier justice. His most popular novels, for example, Die Flusspiraten des Mississippi ( River Pirates of the Mississippi, 1848)) Die Moderatoren (The Moderators, n. d.) , and Die Regulatoren in Arkansas (The Regulators in Arkansas, three volumes, 1846), all loosely string many bloody adventures in plots which feature outlaw depredations, organized pursuit, apprehension, and swift retribution. In Die Regulatoren in Arkansas, Gerstcker glorifies lynch law with the vivid mass execution, at the end of the novel, of sixty-four outlaws! Though Gerstckers novels are artistically inferior to Sealsfields works, they were immensely influential in promoting German emigration to the American West and they continue popular even today. Like Gerstcker, Balduin Mllhausen was an authority on life in the Far West. He drew on his experience as an artist-topographer on Paul Wilhelm von Wurrtenbergs expedition to the Rocky Mountains (18511852), on the Whipple expedition (18531854), and on the Ives expedition up the Colorado River (1858), to create a western fiction grounded in authen12 t i c i t y. Mllhausens first novel, Der Halbindianer ( The Half-Breed ), appeared in 1861, and was followed by an outpouring of 178 volumes of travel accounts, narratives and novels, books so widely read that Mllhausen became the most popular German writer in Europe during the decades of the 1860s and 1870s. His most highly praised and best-known novel is Das Mormonenmdchen (1864)) in which he rails against the Mormon Church in Utah and solemnly warns European girls against the seductive enticements of Mormon missionaries. More typical of his adventure novels, however, is Der Halbindianer, in which the half-breed son of a southern planter attempts, through a series of thrilling adventures, to prove himself the rightful heir to his fathers estate. Crammed with authentic information and anthropology about the West and its inhabitants, this novel illustrates Mllhausens sustained ability to tell a fast-paced, exciting tale. It is, however, Karl May (18421912) who combines the best traits of
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A Literary History of the American West all theseand many otherGerman writers to triumph and to endure. It is Mays distinctive image of the American West, spun through nearly forty volumes of western lore translated into twenty languages, including Braille and English, which led Der Spiegel, a Geman newsweekly, to proclaim that May has advanced to be a kind of Praeceptor Germaniae, whose influence, without doubt, is greater than that of any other German author between 13 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann. Mays influence on the German and European mind is phenomenal, perpetuated as it is in more than forty-five million copies of his works sold in Germany alone since his death and an estimated current sales of one million volumes each year. His readers have come from every social and educational level and include Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer and Thomas Mann, and since 1970 the Karl-May-Gesellschaft has published an annual Karl May Jahrbuch in which scholars probe every aspect of Mays personal life and literary development. Mays life was an unlikely one to lead to such prominence. Born in Saxony to a poor weaver family, May overcame a period of blindness to excel in school. His ambition of becoming a teacher, however, was destroyed when he was convicted of the theft of a watch. Unable thereafter to gain a teachers certificate, May drifted into crime and was arrested for fraud and for impersonation of a Leipzig secret service agent. Convicted several times of fraud, May spent a total of eight years in prison. It was during his prison terms that he turned his lively imagination to outlining, writing, and even publishing adventure tales for sensational German tabloids, and on his release from Zwickau prison in 1874 he began a new career as an editor for family magazines and as a free-lance writer. May published volume after volume about the adventures of his two alter egos, Kara ben Nemsi, in Arabia, and Old Shatterhand, in the American West. His collected works, still in print, in paper- and hardback, fill seventy volumes, nearly half of which are set in the American West. Steeped in the western writings of his forerunners, May combined extensive reading with a fecund imagination and exhaustive research in atlases, geographical and ethnological journals, encyclopedias and dictionaries to depict an authentic American West. May himself never visited the United States until shortly before his death, but increasingly he drifted into the error of insisting that his tales were true-to-life accounts of his own adventures. He began signing public relations photographs of himself taken in sombrero, buckskins, and hip boots, armed with his famous Henrystutzen (Henry Rifle) and Brentter (Kill-Bear), weapons which, in Europe, are better known than Natty Bumppos Kill-Deer. Mays insistence on perpetuating this fraud on his readers led skeptics to expose his prison background and May found himself, like Cooper, involved in numerous libel 164
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lawsuits which would continue for the rest of his life. His stormy career, further threatened by a scandalous divorce and rapid remarriage, did not, however, impair book sales, and his influence continues unabated. Today, thousands of fans gather at Bad Segeberg in Schleswig-Holstein to enjoy the annual Karl May Festival, established in 1952. Karl May films continue to be produced and patronized by millions of Europeans, and a variety of products, from Old Shatterhand card games and dolls to Winnetou camping equipment, continue to attract the European buyer. Indeed, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou have become tangible and universal European symbols of the American western experience. In Winnetou I May introduces his readers to Old Shatterhand, a short, blond, cigarsmoking German named Karl (called Scharlih by his sidekick, Winnetou). Karl, a staunch and brilliant young Catholic, has come to the United States as a tutor. He soon joins a railway surveying party, carrying the two amazing rifles given him by Mr. Henry, the famous gunmaker, who perceives in Karl the makings of an unparalleled Westmann, as May calls his frontiersmen. Tutored by other German Westmnner, Karl soon earns his nickname in hand-to-hand battle with a band of Kiowa Indians. Disdaining weapons, the powerful Karl lays out his opponents with one blow of his fist and is immediately christened with the battlename of Old Shatterhand. So there I was, Karl-Old Shatterhand says, equipped, without my assent, with a war name that I have carried ever since. That is the custom in the 14 West. Mays works are packed with such authentic customs, and generations of Europeans have grown to maturity certain that Americans christen each other with such names as those found in Mays works: Old Surehand, Old Death, Old Firehand. As the surveying party moves West, Old Shatterhand and his companions are captured by the Mescalero Apaches and are taken to the tribal pueblo, where Shatterhand, through strength and wits, saves himself and his party and becomes a blood brother to Winnetou, the son of Intschutschuna, the Apache chief. Winnetou educates the brilliant Shatterhand in the ways of the Indian, and Shatterhand thus adds Apache and Navajo to his astounding store of languages, which eventually includes English, French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic (six dialects), Sioux, Comanche, Snake, Ute and Kiowa. But that is not all: at one point Shatterhand foils a robbery by two Chinese coolies who plot their crime, alas, within earshot, not realizing that Old Shatterhand had also spent time in China during his long 15 and far-flung world travels, and had an excellent command of Chinese. Winnetou and Shatterhand (and his wonder horse Hatatitla) enter into a classic relationship which will last fourteen remarkable years and make them more famous through the German West than Deerslayer and Chingachgook or the Lone Ranger and Tonto in the United States. It is a 165
noble companionship, in which Winnetou is almost an equal to his white brother. Winnetou is, sadly, the last chief of his tribe, a tribe which is being destroyed in the Gtterdmmerung which May sees as being played out between the white and red man. Winnetou, however, is more than a mere Indian; he is a red demigod. Handsome, brilliant, educated and sensitive, he has an earnest, manly, beautiful face, the cheekbones of which barely stood out; [it] was almost Roman, and the color of his skin was a dull, light 16 brown, with a breath of bronze floating over it. When Shatterhand first sees Winnetou at home, he is stunned by the Indians gentle and civilized aspect: [Winnetou] was dressed in a light, linen robe, wore no weapons and held a book in his hand. On the cover of the book, in great gold letters, the word Hiawatha was legible. This Indian, this son of a people that many consider as savage, could apparently not only read, but possessed the mind and taste for culture. Longfellows famous poem in the hand of an Apache Indian! I l7 would never have dreamed of such a thing! Nscho-tschi, Winnetous sister, falls deeply in love with Shatterhand. Though he has strong feelings about miscegenation, Shatterhand holds out hope for her, if she will become an educated Christian. En route to St. Louis and a Catholic school, Nscho-tschi and her father, the chief, are murdered by Santer, an evil Yankee. Shatterhand is thus relieved of the hindrance of Mays only heroine and is launched into two additional volumes of Winnetou, both devoted to the pursuit and destruction of Santerand the pathetic death of Winnetou. So, from St. Louis to San Francisco, from Yellowstone to Mexico, Shatterhand and Winnetou roam the West, lending assistance and moral admonition, defending the oppressed, restoring order, avenging murders and rescuing captives from unenlightened savages, perverted Yankees, evil half-breeds, and scheming Mormons. And through it all, Germania is triumphant. May thoroughly Teutonizes the Westand Winnetoufilling the region with transplanted German customs and hearty Westmnner who, on doffing their coonskin caps, reveal their origins through German songs, German reading, and German customs. Mays transplanted Germans radiate the spirit of nationalism that had moved von Fallersleben to pen the stirring Lied der Deutschen, with its ringing refrain, embodied in Mays German West, Deutschland, Deutschland ber alles, / ber alles in der Welt . From Sealsfield through May, Howgh , Uff uff and Ich habe gesprochen join with Hnde hoch! as ubiquitous western counterphrases as familiar to modern Europeans as When you call me that, smile, or Hi-ho Silver are to Americans. And modern German writers, from Franz Kafka 166
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and Friedrich von Gagern to the mysterious B. Traven, have continued to turn to the West for subject matter and background. In whatever form, Germans have responded deeply for nearly two centuries to western exotica, escape, entertainment and art, and have demonstrated the truth of Herbert Frenzels assertion that the epochs of European knighthood and the American frontier are the two realms of fantasy most attractive to German writers. Sensitive to this attraction, such German writers have transformed die l 9 Heldensaga Amerikas into a powerfully mythic and heroic epoch which continues to speak to our time-auf Deutsch ! III From the steppes of Russia and the cities of Poland and Italy to the villages of the Spanish plains, the zest for literature of the American West continued through much of the nineteenth century. This fervor, centered primarily in Germany, spilled over the borders of German lands into every nation of Europe. In every case, the western works of popular German writers, including those already considered, and others not considered (such as the fifty-nine western adventures of Wilhelm Frey, or Fricks), thrilled Europeans from Holland to Greece. Nineteenth-century Norwegians, for example, elevated Frey and Mllhausen to top position among their nations most popular writers and read the translations of English Western author Mayne Reid as well. And in the twentieth century Karl May continues a best seller in many European nations. Such German success stimulated writers throughout Europe to turn their pens to western subjects. Emilio Salgari, in Italy, and Ferenc Belnyi, in Hungary, joined Frances Gustave Aimard and Englands Mayne Reid in producing hundreds of sensational western adventures. And the enthusiasm endures. A recent Hungarian anthology, Vadnyugat (Wild West ) featuring stories by Owen Wister, Bret Harte and Vardis Fisher, sold fifty thousand 20 copies-one for every five hundred citizens and Frances George Fronval published six hundred books about the American Westfifty-four of them 21 about Buffalo Billbetween 1925 and his death in 1975. Several Spanish writers continue to produce as many as sixty titles each year, titles such as 2 2 The Gallows Can Wait and Two Men Too Many in Tucson. Norway is typical of Scandinavianand European-response to the West. After the nineteenth-century fervor for travel accounts gave way to Westerns toward the end of the century, Norwegians turned to foreign generally Germanfiction about the West. It was not long, however, until Norways own Rudolf Muss began a career in which he would write more 23 than five hundred accounts of wildly fictitious Indian fights, accounts read with such zest that Muss has earned a place among the five top-selling au24 thors in the history of Norwegian literature. Professor Billington notes 167
that western titles were so much in demand in Norway that some authors, such as the writer of Among the Gold Prospectors of California, falsified their titles in order to gain readers. This book, for instance, is really about gold 25 prospecting in Australia. The Norwegians love affair with the Western continues. Few modern Scandinavians have been able to resist the attraction of Westerns by Norways Kjell Halbing (1935 ), who writes under the pen name of Louis Masterson. Masterson, formerly a banker, has published over sixty novelsmost of them written before he made his first visit to the United States. One of Norways most widely read authors, he has sold nearly twenty million books about a hero named Morgan Kane, an Old Shatterhand kind of scout-Westmann, but with a sex life, and thus a difference. Mastersons books have become popular in British Commonwealth countries since they first began appearing in English translation in 1970. His works, along with the popularity of a number of Wild West magazines, attest to the continuing interest of Scandinavian readers in the phenomenon of the American West in Europe. It is the French, however, who are probably second only to the Germans in their zest for western fiction. Since the era of Rousseau, the French have manifested a nostalgia for the primitive life. And while the French were generally immune to the America fever of nineteenth-century emigration, they were not immune to the lure of the West, which La Salle had called the best land in the world, and which Chateaubriand praised with such vigor. The French West, whether in the modern fiction of George Fronval, or in the traditional French Westerns of Paul Duplessis, Gabriel Ferry, or Gustave Aimard, transforms the American West into a region mirroring French customs, values and desires, and the result is a West which is just as excitingand just as distortedas the German and Scandinavian Wests. Two of the best-known writers of French Westerns are Paul Duplessis and Gabriel Ferry. In Les Mormons (1859), Duplessis joined Mllhausen, Karl May, Mayne Reid, and others in distorting Mormonism by recounting how the president of the Mormon Church persuades two Parisian sisters to enter his harem. They must be rescued by their brother, who bravely follows them across two continents. Duplessiss other well-known works, such as Les Peaux-Rouges ( The Redskins, 1864), are also chase novels packed with ambushes, scalpings and Indian warfare. Even more popular, however, were the works of Gabriel Ferry, especially his famous Les Coureurs de bois ( Trailblazers of the Woods, 1850), about Apaches, buffaloes fighting bears, and famous chasesa book made equally popular in Germany through Karl Mays
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redactionand Les Squatters ( The Squatters, 1858), set in savannahs which resemble more the early American wilderness of Chateaubriands Atala than the authentic topography found in the works of Gustave Aimard. It is, however, in the more than eighty western novels of Gustave Aimard, the pen name of Oliver Gloux (18181883), that French Wild Western tales reached their peak. Aimard, whose works were equally popular in other European countries, was called the French Fenimore Cooper, and wrote with an authority gained by spending nearly twenty years in North and South America. An awkward writer, a clumsy creator of flawed plots and painful deus ex machina endings, Aimard conveyed to the European reader copious amounts of authentic information about Indian customs and folkways and generally inaccurate information about American attitudes towards the Indian. His books, which swarm with alligators and fights between man and cougar, portray the Yankee as pious, hypocritical 26 and greedyand Mexicans are not much better. Again, it is the French who leaven the lump of the world. Aimards novels, written between 1848 and 1875, had enormous sales, 27 even in England. His first success, and one of his best novels, is Les Trappeurs de lArkansas (The Trappers of the Arkansas, 1858); thereafter he produced an astounding number of books, such as Les Pirates des Prairies (Pirates of the Prairies, 1858), often at the rate of one book a month; these were then translated automatically into several European languages. Aimard repeats his protagonist from volume to volume, sometimes slightly changing the name. Valentine Guillois, his most important character, is, like Old Shatterhand, Aimards alter ego. Valentine is a Parisian who wanders the West doing good, fighting for principles, and engaging in thrilling adventures. But whether the character is Valentine or Loyal Heart, who pursues Indians and villains with two giant bloodhounds, Aimards characters do not live. His creative strength lies not in believable characters or art, but in stirring narration coupled with apparent authenticity. The result thrilled Europe for most of three decades. But if the European response to the American West is of a pattern, the English response followed a slightly different cut. Unlike the continental nations, the British were not really weary of themselves; the British Empire was riding the crest of rampant nationalism and imperialism, and Britons, full of dreams, looked at the American West less through the eyes of seekers than through the eyes of exploiters; less as settlers than as conquerors. In England, material progress was ascendant, and the American West was the place to prove ones mettle, to sink or swim, with pluck and luck. English Westerns thus seem to have been based on the assumption that no one
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would really want to leave England permanentlythough many didjust as no one would really want to live in the cultural slough that was the United Statesor the American Westthough many did. Little influenced by the works of Cooper, Englishmen were overwhelmed by Buffalo Bills Wild West Show, and by the flood of dime novels in Beadles American Library and Beadles Sixpenny Tales. This flood moved British interest in the frontier from Coopers forests to the prairies of the plainsman, where, probably because of shared culture and language, British Western authors showed more awareness than their European neighbors of current American western history, from mountain men and Mormons to the Gold Rush and the hard life of the settler. A further incentive to look Far West were the contributions of George Frederick Ruxton, the first and one of the major novelists of the fur trade. Ruxton, a lieutenant in the British army, travelled extensively in the American Southwest, and, in his incomparable Life in the Far West, which he first published serially in Blackwoods Magazine (1848), he became the first writer to utilize the mountain man for the stuff of fiction. His portrait of the ways of the mountain man has had remarkable influence upon the imaginative literature of the fur trade, and his transcription of mountain man lingo has become part of the lingua franca of the literary trapper as found in the works 28 of Fergusson, Manfred, White, and Guthrie. Unlike continental writers, however, most English writers about the West directed their fiction at a juvenile audience. Captain Marryat, Bracebridge Hemyng, Robert M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, and Mayne Reid are typical of British writers who wrote about the American West during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Again and again they recount how a young man, falsely accused of improper conduct, clears his name by a trip to the American West, a trip fraught with manly danger and rewarded by 29 eventual restoration of his name and wealth. But while these writers portrayed English manners and life, on desert and prairie, as superior to all others, they made every attempt to educate their youthful audiences, filling their pages with fact and geography, often at the expense of plot and art. Captain Frederick Marryat (17921848), famous for his nautical novels, turned from his seafaring tales to write the popular The Travels and Adventures of Monsieur R. Violet in California, Sonora, and Western Texas (1843), an exciting story heavily plagiarized from Josiah Greggs Commerce 3 0 of the Prairies and G. W. Kendalls Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition. Robert M. Ballantyne ( 18251894), who lived in the Canadian West for six years, far exceeded Marryat as a Western writer in producing seventyone popular books about the West, each laden with Scottish-Presbyterian strictures against alcohol and tobacco and insisting upon the white mans responsibility to convert the red man to Christ. His accomplishment was 170
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book after book of exciting adventure couched in less-than-exciting prose. Equally popular were Bracebridge Hemyngs (18411901) stories in the Jack Harkaway series: Jack Harkaway on the Prairie, Jack Harkaway out West, and many others. G. A. Henty (18321902), however, raised the juvenile Western to a higher artistic level in transforming his visits to the gold fields of California and his ability to write good historical novels into exciting western tales laden with British pluck, intelligence, tenacity, and breeding. Typical of Hentys western works is The Golden Canyon, about two young Englishmen who, with a mysterious map as their guide, pack into the badlands of Arizona in search of a lost gold mine. Overcoming Indians and other obstacles, they return home wealthy, buy shares in a shipping company, and never return to the golden West. Captain Bayleys Heir likewise recounts how Frank Norris, who is wrongly accused of theft, flees England for adventures in the West which enable him to achieve wealth, restore his name, marry his sweetheart, and stand for Parliament. Most important among British Western writers, however, is Captain Mayne Reid ( 18181883), often called the Giant of the Westerns because of his more than fifty books about the American West, books which earned him the reputation of being the foremost British adventure writer of 32 his day. Reid was born in Ireland but turned from his apparent destiny as a Presbyterian minister to serve with distinction as a captain in the U.S. Army (18401849), seeing action with General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War. Returning to England full of qualified love for Americans and their institutions, Reid published his first book, The Rifle Rangers, in 1850. His second novel, The Scalp Hunters (1851), called by Bernard 33 DeVoto one of the best Wild West novels, firmed up his resolve to write for a somewhat more sophisticated audience and attempt to do more 34 than tell an exciting story. The Scalp Hunters is the tale of a Creole who has been hired by a Scalp Hunter to hunt Navajos and Apaches; he enjoys many harrowing adventures which culminate in the rescue of the Scalp Hunters daughter from the Indians. He leaves hundreds of dead bodies in the wilderness as testimony of his skill, and more than a million copies of the book sold in Britain alone during the next forty years testify to the con35 tinuing thrills the novel has generated among readers. Reids many novels, including those he wrote for Beadle between 36 1868 and 1877, are usually set in the Llano Estacado and southern Texas, where lovely, wooden heroines and noble, static heroes soon find their courses of true love interrupted by villains who steal the heroines. The hero then sets off in pursuit, the thrills of which become the major thrust of the book, culminating in a last-minute rescue, after which the deserving hero marries the lovely girl. This plot is authenticated by the appearance of a 171
31
variety of villainsintellectually and morally inferior Indians, wicked Catholic priests, and dastardly Mormons, all of whom must eventually bow to the superior skills of the English hero. Reids mountain men, however, speak the argot established by Ruxton, and Reids liveliest character, Old Rube, hero of The Scalp Hunters and The War-Trail (1857), is a profane, sinful character reminiscent (in his disappearances) of Old Bill Williams. He has a distinct air of reality about him. Once, for example, when telling about eating turkey buzzard, Old Rube recounts how he seized the bird by the leg, killed and then skinned it; an eager listener then asks, And ate it? To which Old Rube replies, in time-honored trapper fashion, No. It 37 ate me. Through all these hundreds of English novels about the American West, Rule, Brittania sounds loudly, as the British follow their continental counterparts in turning the alkali deserts and sagebrush flats of the American West into a British moor. Thus By Jove, I say, and other manifestations of the Kings English dot the pages of English western fiction, and one very British adventurer, explaining the West to the young heroes of G. Manville Fenns To the West (1891), says: Nothing like a good tea meal out in the wilds to put life into one. Why Ive known days when weve been ready to break down, or give up, or go back; then weve formed camp, got a bit of fire on the way, boiled the kettle with a pinch of tea in it, . . . and been 38 fit to do anything after. Such is the British-American West!
IV
The enduring fascination of European and British readers and writers with the stuff of the Wild West seems to obviate Carl Wittkes assertion that the phenomenon is nothing more than a phase of nineteenth-century ro39 manticism. It is much more. The fascination for the West endures unabated and has now spread to South America, Japan, Australia, Turkey, Egypt, and Israel. The non-American American West has in recent decades received yet additional impetus through the western film, and Westernsin film and book-are produced and enjoyed today not only in Turkey and Japan, but in the German Democratic Republic, in Czechoslovakia and 40 Italy, and are seriously studied in France. With a literary interest which is now approaching two centuries in duration, it is apparent to even the most chauvinistic American westerner that other nations have a literary and cultural claim on the American West which is every bit as significant as that of the American nation itself. There is and continues to be something attractive in that mythic complex of ro172
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mance and adventure, of confrontation and flight, that is the American West. This delightful attraction may be sensed, though not defined, in a passage from Les Coureurs de bois, by Gabriel Ferry as redacted by Karl May. The narrator, speaking of the threat of lurking Indians and wild animals, says, No one could imagine more terrible enemies; the silent forests and the immeasurable prairies are witnesses of heroic deeds which our new European history could never displaydeeds which are reminders of the terrible 41 battles of which we read in our sagas and legends. From Chateaubriand and Charles Sealsfield and Gustave Aimard to Karl May, Mayne Reid and Louis Masterson, these terrible battles are revitalized and reenacted in a region which seems ever destined to exert mythic power as the Garden of the World, the Battleground of the Godsthe, in whatever language or accent, American West.
R ICHARD H. CRACROFT , Brigham
Young University
Notes
1. Carl Wittke, The American Theme in Continental European Literature, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28 (June 1941): 6. 2. Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. 3. I am indebted to the late Professor Billington for his studies of the European response to the American West and for this exhaustive study, a landmark in the field. 3. See Haldvan Koht, The American Spirit in Europe: A Survey of Transatlantic Influences (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), p. 108. 4. John D. L. Ferguson, American Literature in Spain (New York: AMS Press, 1966 [1916]), p. 39. 5. D. L. Ashliman, The American West in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1969), p. 142. This is the best study to date of the German image of the American West. 6. Wittke, pp. 1011.
173
A Literary History of the American West 7. For more on Otto Ruppius see Frederick F. Schrader, Otto Ruppius, a Career in America, American-German Review 9 (Feb. 1943): 2833; also Ashliman, pp. 2839. Several of Ruppiuss fifteen volumes are Wild Westerns in the style of Gerstcker and May; the best known of these is his Der Prrieteufel ( T h e Prairie Devil, 1861 ) . 8. See Preston A. Barba, Friedrich Armand Strubberg, German American Annals 14 (Sept.Dec. 1912): 175225; 15 (Jan.Apr. 1913): 363; 15 (May Aug. 1913): 115142. Barba, Emigration to America Reflected in German Fiction, German American Annals 16 (Nov. Dec. 1914): 202212. 9. Harrison R. Steeves, The First of the Westerns, Southwest Review 53 (Winter 1968): 82. 10. This title has occasionally been mistranslated and published as Wild Sports in the Far West. 11. See Alfred Kolb, Friedrich Gerstcker and the American Frontier (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1966); also Wittke, p. 11. 12. See David H. Miller, The Ives Expedition Revisited: A Prussians Impressions, Journal of Arizona History 13 (Spr. 1972): 125; Ashliman, The American West in Twentieth-Century Germany, Journal of Popular Culture 2 (Summer 1968): 8292. 13. Karl der Deutsche, Der Spiegel 16 (Sept. 12, 1962): 73. See also Richard H. Cracroft, The American West of Karl May (M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1963), and The American West of Karl May, American Quarterly 19 (Summer 1967): 249258. 14. May, Winnetou I (Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1951; first published 1897), p. 154; trans. Richard H. Cracroft. 15. May, Der Schwarze Mustang ( The Black Mustang; Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1951; first published 1896), p. 51. Trans. by Cracroft. 16. May, Weihnacht im Wilden Westen ( Christmas in the Wild West; Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1953; first published 1897), p. 250. Trans. by Cracroft. 17. May, Winnetou I, p. 154. 18. See Ashliman, The American West in Twentieth-Century Germany, p. 85. Note that von Gagern, an Austrian, treats the West in three of his major works, Der Marterpfahl (1925), Der Tote Mann (1927), and Das Grenzerbuch (1927). B. Travens major theme, claims Ashliman, is the conflict between contemporary Mexican Indians and the ruthless advance of civilization (Ibid., p. 86). 19. Herbert Frenzel, introduction to Western Saga: Klasische Wildwestgeschichten (Cologne and Berlin, 1964), pp. 2324. 20. Billington, The Wild West in Norway, 1877, Western Historical Quarterly 7 (July 1976): 273. 21. Billington, Land of Savagery, p. 317. 22. Land of Savagery, p. 318. 23. Billington, The Wild West in Norway, p. 273. 24. Billington, Land of Savagery, p. 37. 25. Billington, The Wild West in Norway, p. 272.
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26. Virgil L. Jones, Gustave Aimard, Southwest Review 15 (Summer 1930): 465. 27. Aimards success in England is due, in part, to the effective translations of his work by Sir F. C. Lascelles Wraxall, the translator of Les Misrables. 28. See Richard H. Cracroft, Half-Froze for Mountain Doins: The Influence and Significance of George F. Ruxtons Life in the Far West, Western American Literature 10 (May 1975): 2943. Also Neal E. Lambert, George Frederick Ruxton, Western Writers Series No. 15 (Boise: Boise State University, 1974). 29. James K. Folsom, English Westerns, Western American Literature 2 (Spring 1967): 313. 30. See J. Glen McKellar A Study of Captain Frederick Marryat and His Contributions to the English Nautical Novel (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1967). 31. See Eric Quayle, Ballantyne the Brave: A Victorian Writer and His Family (London: Hart-Davis, 1967); Billington, Land of Savagery, p. 51. 32. See Joan D. Steele, The Image of America in the Novels of Mayne Reid: A Study of a Romantic Expatriate (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1970); and Roy W. Meyer, The Western American Fiction of Mayne Reid, Western American Literature 3 (Summer 1968): 115132. 33. Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), p. 404. 34. Meyer, p. 115. 35. Meyer, p. 117. 36. Albert Johannsen points out (II, 235) that it is difficult to determine the precise number of novels written by Reid; some were issued under different titles, and some books may have been only edited by him, though he has received attribution. Johannsen credits Reid with seventy-five tales of adventure. Most bibliographies list between fifty and sixty titles. (See Meyer, p. 115.) In fact, England was flooded by dime novels (penny dreadfuls) about the American West. As Johannsen has noted, over 144 titles in the Beadle series were available in England, not to mention the hundreds of titles from the presses of Beadle imitators. Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels, 3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950); see especially, I, 113120; II, 48, 235. Billington, Land of Savagery, p. 48. 37. Meyer, pp. 118119. 38. Folsom, p. 7. 39. Wittke, p. 26. 40. Bobi Wolf, Westerns in Eastern Europe, The Pacific Historian 21 (Spring 1977): 29. Kent L. Steckmesser, Paris and the Wild West, Southwest Review 54 (Spring 1969): 168ff. 41. Gabriel Ferry, Les Coureurs de bois; trans. by Karl May, Der Waldlufer (Bamberg: Karl May Bcherei, 1959), p. 41.
175
Primary Sources
May, Karl. Der Schwarze Mustang. Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1951. First published 1896. . Ich: Karl Mays Leben und Werk. Edited by Roland Schmid. Bamberg: Karl May Bcherei, 1959. Karl Mays autobiography. . Weihnact im Wilden Westen. Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1953. First published 1897. . Winnetou I. Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1951. First published 1897. See also English trans. of Winnetou I, II by Michael Shaw. New York: Seabury Press, 1977.
Secondary Sources
Arnesen, Finn. Why Norwegians Love Westerns. The Roundup 24 (Oct. 1976): 14. The editor of Norways leading Western magazine tracks the popularity of the Western in Norway. Ashliman, D. L. The American West in Nineteenth-Century German Literature. Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1969. This is the most important work to date on the German Western, a point of departure for future studies. . The American West in Twentieth-Century Germany. Journal of Popular Culture 2 (Summer 1968): 82-92. An important, focused summary of Ashlimans dissertation. Barba, Preston A. The American Indian in German Fiction. German American Annals 15 (MayAugust 1913): 14374. An important early study of the Indian in German fiction, somewhat dated but still valid. . Balduin Mllhausen, the German Cooper. Americana-Germanica Monograph Series 17 (1914): 1144. An early but very helpful, though laudatory, treatment of Mllhausen. . Cooper in Germany. Indiana Univ. Studies No. 21.. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1914. A still useful survey of Coopers immense popularity in Germany. . Friedrich Armand Strubberg. German American Annals 14 (Sept. -Dec. 1912): 175-225; 15 (Jan.April 1913): 363; 15 (MayAug. 1913): 115 142. A good bibliographical sketch focusing on Strubbergs extended residence in the United States. Betts, Raymond F. Immense Dimensions: The Impact of the American West on Late Nineteenth Century European Expansion. Western Historical Quarterly 10 (April 1979): 149166. Billington, Ray Allen. Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. A definitive work of scholarship, Billingtons last effort. The bibliographical notes and careful scholarship are the springboard for any study of the American West in European literature and culture. . The Wild West in Norway, 1877. Western Historical Quarterly 7 (July
176
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1976): 271278. Reprints portions of The Frontiersmans Daughter, a Norwegian western drama. Bohm, Viktor. Karl May und das Geheimnis seines Erfolgs. Vienna, 1962. A fine study, in German, of Mays popularity in Germany. Cracroft, Richard H. The American West of Karl May. American Quarterly 19 (Summer 1967): 249258. A useful summary, in English, of Cracrofts M.A. thesis. . The American West of Karl May. M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1963. The most helpful and useful study, to date, in English, of Mays western works. Half-Froze for Mountain Doins: The Influence and Significance of George F. Ruxtons Life in the Far West. Western American Literature 10 (May 1975): 2943. Traces the very specific impact of Ruxtons Life in the Far West on later mountain man novels. Dworczak, Karl Heinz. Karl May, Das Leben Old Shatterhand. Salzburg: Pfad Verlag, 1950. A laudatory but important biography of Karl May. Fairchild, Hoxie N. The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1928. A study of the development of the Indian image in European thought. Folsom, James K. English Westerns. Western American Literature 2 (Spring 1967) : 313. An interesting treatment of the difference between American and English novels about the West. Fullerton, Ronald A. Creating a Mass Market in Germany: The Story of the Colporteur Novel, 18701890." ]ournal of Social History 10 (March 1977): 265 283. A discussion of those changes in popular German reading tastes which enabled a mass-market interest in the Western. Haertl, Paul. Cooper in Germany. American-German Review 3 (June 1937): 1820. Coopers significant impact in Germany. Heller, Otto, and Leon H. Theodore. Charles Sealsfield: Bibliography of His Writings. St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1939. A bibliography of Sealsfields (Postls) many works. Hewett-Thayer, Harvey W. American Literature as Viewed in Germany, 18181861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958. A useful survey of U.S. literature in early nineteenth-century Germany, including copies of a number of reviews. Jackson, John B. Ich bin ein Cowboy aus Texas. Southwest Review 38 (Spring 1953): 158163. A humorous description of differences in German and American comic book Western heroes and villains. Johannsen, Albert. The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels. 3 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. The definitive work on the dime novel, a number of which were published in Europe. Jones, Virgil L. Gustave Aimard. Southwest Review 15 (Summer 1930): 452468. An interesting survey of Aimards life and western works. Koht, Haldvan. The American Spirit in Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949. The effect of U.S. migration on European thought and politics.
177
A Literary History of the American West Kolb, Alfred. Friedrich Gerstcker and the American Frontier. Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1966. A study of the mythical elements in Gerstckers work. Lambert, Neal E. George Frederick Ruxton. Western Writers Series, No. 15. Boise: Boise State University, 1974. An excellent, brief treatment of Ruxtons life, including solid analyses of his western travel narratives. McDermott, John. The Frontier Re-examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967. A collection of helpful essays on the shifting image of the frontierin Europe and the United States. Mann, Klaus. Cowboy Mentor of the Fhrer. Living Age 352 (Nov. 1940): 210. Thomas Manns brother attempts to link Mays attitudes on race and Germany to Hitler. Meyer, Roy W. The Western American Fiction of Mayne Reid. Western American Literature 3 (Summer 1968): 115132. A good introductory survey of Reids life and western works. Miller, David H. A Prussian on the Plains: Balduin Mllhausens Impressions. Great Plains Journal 12 (Spring 1973): 175193. Interesting detail concerning Mllhausens experiences in western survey parties. Pearce, Roy H. The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the ldea of Civilization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953. A landmark study of the American Indians impact on western thought. Prahl, Augustus J. America in the Works of Gerstcker. Modern Language Quarterly 4 (June 1943): 213-224. A survey which probes Gerstckers attitudes about American riff-raff and backwoodsmen. Quayle, Eric. Ballantyne the Brave: A Victorian Writer and His Family. London: HartDavis, 1967. An important biography of a little-known British writer, some of whose works are set in the Far West. Read, Helen Appleton. Karl May, Germanys James Fenimore Cooper. The American-German Review 2 (June 1936): 47. A dated introduction to May; of historical interest only. Rieupeyrout, Jean-Louis. La Grande Aventure du Western. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1964. An important history of the western film in Europe. Robinson, Jeffrey. Le Cowboy. Westways 66 (April 1974): 4041. A brief discussion of the career of French Western writer George Fronval. Russell, Don. The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. An account, among other things, of Buffalo Bills Wild West Show tours of Europe. Steckmesser, Kent L. Paris and the Wild West. Southwest Review 54 (Spring 1969): 178184. A popular but thoughtful appraisal of the Wild West vogue in France. Steele, Joan D. The Image of America in the Novels of Mayne Reid: A Study of a Romantic Expatriate. Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1970. An excellent survey and analysis. Thorp, Willard. Cooper Beyond America. In James Fenimore Cooper: A Reappraisal, ed. Mary E. Cunningham. Cooperstown, N.Y.: New York National
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State Historical Assoc., 1954. A thorough summary of Coopers influence in Europe. Uhlendorf, Bernard A. Charles Sealsfield: Ethnic Elements and Problems in His Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922. In this very helpful study, the author reprints passages from Sealsfields western works. Wechsberg, Joseph. Winnetou of der Wild West. Saturday Review, Oct. 20, 1962, pp. 5253, 60. A light survey of the Karl May phenomenon, reprinted, with notes by Richard H. Cracroft, in American West 1 (Summer 1964): 3239. Wittke, Carl. The America Theme in Continental European Literature. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28 (June 1941): 340. An important pioneering article on the impact of the West in European letters. Wolf, Bobi. Westerns in Eastern Europe. The Pacific Historian 21 (Spring 1977): 2438. A sketchy review of the impact of the Western in Slavic countries.
179
Western Poetry, 18501950

HEORIES EXPLAINING THE OBSCURITY which has cloaked many early poets of the West are numerous, yet none provides an explanation for the anonymity which has shrouded the efforts by western poets of the Victorian Age and the contributions of twentieth-century western poets like Sharlot Hall, Alice Corbin, Norman Macleod, Peggy Pond Church, and their counterparts. Perhaps eastern publishers have favored their own regions poets, but it is not clear that they have done so at the expense of poets in the West. In fact, powerful eastern publishing houses have issued works by the great majority of noteworthy western poets, often establishing 1 or insuring what reputations they had in their day. It is also true that these eastern firms have published flocks of forgettable western thrushes. The California poet and essayist, Hildegarde Flanner, has observed that no westerner has ever been forced to leave the region in order to write poetry. Nor has it been necessary to make pilgrimages east to publish. The westerner seeking to publish a book of poems during the century from 1850 2 to 1950 had a variety of outlets close at hand. Commercial firms, like Anton Romans in San Francisco, Binford and Mort in Portland, or Caxton Printers in Caldwell, Idaho were ready to serve, as were the small, private, or literary presses, like those of the Grabhorns in San Francisco, Vaida and Whitney Montgomerys Kaleidograph Press in Dallas, the Ward Ritchie Press in Los Angeles, or Alan Swallows firm in Denver. Western 3 university presses also provided crucial outlets for regional poets. Some poets in the West even banded together to publish, as a cooperative ven4 ture, their own works. Yet it must be admitted that few western publishers commanded national attention as powerful and prestigious eastern firms did, conspiracies of commerce, geography, and population being what they were. Another explanation of the early western poets obscurity holds that prerequisites for good poets are good readers and good critics, that the West has provided neither requisite and, therefore, has had fewif anypoets of immortal note. There may be some merit in this syllogism, although immortal poets may be a rare commodity, regardless of time or place. Many westerners in the nineteenth century were preoccupied with manifesting their destinies, destinies which involved trapping, panning, ranching, and 6 plowingnot necessarily poetry readings. Because he was virtually ignored at home, Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, the splendid poseur known to San Franciscans as Joaquin Miller, had to sail to England in 1870 to earn his
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popular and critical sobriquet, Byron of the Sierras. Yet most students of western poetry agree today that our English cousinspresumably good readers and criticserred in their approbation of Miller. These same students would point out, paradoxically, that Robinson Jefferss great poems were produced in the glamorous isolation of Big Sur, and that critical bulls issued by Yvor Winters at Stanford still provoke discussion.7 Some early western poets seem to have chosen or been fated for obscurity. Mary Barnard published one volume of poetry in the 1930s, but then directed her energies to translating Greek poetry and writing a highly regarded study of myth. Peggy Pond Church (Mrs. Margaret Church) and Hildegarde Flanner (Mrs. Hildegarde Monhoff) decided to meet the demands both of family and of Muses. Other poets, like Thomas Hornsby Ferril, have had families and, simultaneously, multiple business careers. Still other western poets, like Hazel Hall and Norman Macleod, have battled personal health problems while striving to maintain literary activities. 8 The nature of the genre suggests yet another reason why many early western poets are not better known. Those writing in the second half of the nineteenth century were perhaps unduly burdened with excess Old World baggage: classical mythologies, poetic vocabularies, and traditional poetic forms unsuited to the American, specifically trans-Mississippi, experience. In time, however, twentieth-century poets like Sharlot Hall, Alice Corbin, Peggy Pond Church, Hildegarde Flanner, and H. L. Davis wrote poems in language appropriate to the new land and its ancient and emerging cultures. At the same time, poets like Hall, Corbin, Mary Austin, Genevieve Taggard, Norman Macleod, and Thomas Hornsby Ferril were successfully interpreting the West in light of New World and modem mythologies. Finally, it is possible the reputations of western poets are, in truth, no more wrapped in winding sheets than are those of their contemporaries from other regions. Or are they wrapped at all? After all, untold numbers of readers around the globe have had their social consciences stirred by Edwin Markhams Man with a Hoe, while generations of Americans have memorized Joaquin Millers Columbus. Seattles young Audrey Wurdemann won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for poetry amidst a scandal as fine as any ever concocted by Tammany. 9 Thomas Hornsby Ferril of Colorado and Ted Olson of Wyoming were selected as winners of the Yale Younger Poets Award (in 1926 and 1928, respectively). Ferril and Montanas Gwendolen Haste had poems selected as Nation poetry award winners in the twenties, the same period Braithwaite selected work by Oregons Hazel Hall for inclusion in his annual anthology of best poems, And Oregons H. L. Davis was awarded Poetry magazines Levinson Prize in 1919. Too, these poets have been honored within the region as well as without. California named Ina Coolbrith its poet laureate in 1915, the nations first state laureate. 10N e 181
braskas John Neihardt became that states laureate in 1921, while Colorado, the nations second state to establish the position, crowned Nellie Burget Miller laureate in 1923, the same title recently bestowed upon Denverite Ferril. The history of early western poetrywhich is, then, no more a record of failure and obscurity than is the history of any other regions early poetic effortshas its origins in the closing years of the eighteenth century, though its substantial development did not begin until after 1850. The earliest poems by whites in the West were international in flavor. William Shiels reprints in Sewards Icebox the Russian original and a translation of the 1799 Song which was composed and chanted by A. A. Baranov at the dedication of the first European settlement, Fort St. Michael (Old Sitka), in Alaska. While the Russian poem was apparently first published in Moscow, a Spanish poem, Al Bello Sesco, printed in 1836 on the Zamorano press, the first in California, is the first poem composed and published in the West 11 by a white. T. M. Pearce has drawn attention to Albert Pikes ode, The Fall of Poland, written in Santa Fe February 1, 1832, and printed in Pikes Prose Sketches and Poems Written in the Western Country (Boston, 1834). In the 1840s Samuel Lucas (The Sandwich Islands, 1841) and Robert Grant (Kapiolani, with other Poems, 1848) sent their volumes of verse to England for printing, as did John Lyon (The Harp of Zion, 1853) and one of Brigham 13 Youngs wives, Eliza Roxy Snow, from Utah. The first volume of serious poetry written by westerners and printed in the West is generally held to be the 1865 Bret Harteedited Outcroppings; being a Collection of California Verse; aside from being the first western poetry anthology, it is a totally undistinguished collection of nineteen versifiers, 14 mainly San Franciscans. In response to the outcry from overlooked bards, May Wentworth was selected to edit a more inclusive anthology and, in 1866, the Wests first multi-state anthology, The Poetry of the Pacific, was published. Containing work of a quality dismayingly similar to that found in Hartes collection, Wentworths had the supposed virtue of including almost three times as many poets. Together, these two volumes represent the first of a type of publication which became a fixture in western literary history: the poetry anthology. By the 1930s, when the country, deep in the Depression, hearkened back to its regional roots for solace and strength, a 15 torrent of western anthologies was published. State and regional anthologies, regardless of their uneven literary merit, are valuable in that they often contain poems by poets whose volumes have disappeared (John Knoxs, for example), or poems that only appear in hard-to-locate periodicals (Norman Macleods early poems, for example). Furthermore, these anthologies not only provide a record of the development of individual writers, but they also illustrate changing attitudes towards landscape, cultures, and poetry itself. 182
After Hartes and Wentworths anthologies, and into the first decade of the twentieth century, the best poets in the Westwith one exceptionare largely unremarkable poets. (The exceptionJoaquin Milleris merely notorious.) Technically, thematically, and stylistically their verse illustrates an ability to rise sometimes to the literary conventions of the Victorian Age. Bret Harte, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, John Rollin Ridge, Frances Fuller Victor, Edwin Rowland Sill, Ella Higginson, and George Sterling are such poets. Today, Harte is admired chiefly for his prose; Coolbrith, for her early, slender, personal lyricsand for surviving not only San Franciscos 1906 earthquake and fire but also her contemporaries (born in 1841, named laureate in 1915, she died in 1928). Victor is esteemed for her historical research and writings. Ridge, known as Yellowbird, was one-quarter Cherokee, although his posthumous Poems (1868) l6 passes perfectly as white. Born in the Midwest and raised in Oregon, Joaquin Miller published first Specimens (1868) and then Joaquin et al (1869). They are now collectors items only because of Millers flamboyant later career in England and California. Millers performances at Byrons grave, in London literary salons, and on Oaklands Hights (as the poet spelled it) l7 have been well documented; his contribution to western ars is that he drew the first serious national and international attention to poets of the 18 region. Most attempts to translate the Old West into memorable verse failed because the early poets ignored their unique locale and experiences, writing ethereal, abstract, universal poems, and because they dressed and/or addressed their locale and experiences inappropriately, using language and literary conventions suitable for Greeks given to epithets at sunrise or Britishers given to elegies in a Stoke Poges churchyard. On the other hand, the versifiers in the West who did strive to use the regions poetic possibilities 19 and did express themselves in the American tongue also failed. Arizonas Sharlot Hall is one of the first poets to somewhat successfully use the physical and cultural environments of the West. Westering with her family to Arizona from Kansas in the early 1880s, Sharlot Mabridth Hall was thrown from her horse and suffered a serious, lingering spine injury which, in the 90s, confined her to bed. During this period she began writing. Throughout the next twenty years, at the urging and with the advice of her mother, Hall wrote her best poems. In addition, she managed two ranches (hers and her parents), wrote for and edited Charles F. Lummiss magazine Land of Sunshine (later retitled Out West ), served as Arizonas Territorial Historian, and undertook various historical society projects and expeditions (see her published diary, Sharlot Hall on the Arizona Strip ). She later founded what is now the Sharlot Hall Historical Society and Museum in Prescott, Arizona. In 1910, when her first volume of poems, Cactus and 183
Pine, was published in Boston, it received enthusiastic reviews and sold out. Hall was apparently intent on establishing regional verisimilitude, for she wrote poetic headnotes which set the scene or stated the theme in evocative language, thereby providing not only a historic context for the 20 poem, but also a literary one. Two poems typical of Halls most interesting efforts are Sheep Herding and The Occultation of Venus. Sheep Herding Many years ago a herd of sheep was feeding its way down from the region around the San Francisco peaks by way of the Verde valley to the desert for the winter. The shepherd sickened and died alone with his sheep. For some weeks thereafter a shepherd dog very wild and thin, came once in a while to a ranch house on Clear Creek and snatched a little food set out by the woman of the ranch and hurried away. At last he was found to be herding the sheep and guarding the dead body of his master. He had taken the sheep in a small circle to feed and water but had always returned to bed them where he could watch his masters body. In the early and more lonely days of sheep herding it was not uncommon to find the solitary herder insane from loneliness and one poor man in the state asylum long ago would throw himself on the ground and try to eat grass like a sheep. Another counted incessantly, over and over, keeping tally on imaginary sheep. A gray, slow-moving, dust-bepowdered wave, That on the edges breaks to scattering spray, Round which the faithful collies wheel and bark To scurry in the laggard feet that stray. A babel of complaining tongues that make The dull air weary with their ceaseless fret; Brown hills akin to those of Gallilee On which the shepherds tend their charges yet. The long, hot days; the stark, wind-beaten nights; No human presence, human sight or sound; Grim, silent land of wasted hopes, where they Who came for gold have oft times madness found; A bleating horror that foregathers speech; Freezing the word that from the lip would pass; And sends the herdsman grovelling with his sheep, Face down and beast-like on the trampled grass. . . . . . 184
The collies halt; the slow herd sways and reels, Huddled in fright above a low ravine, Where wild with thirst a herd unshepherded Beats up and downwith something dark between; A narrow circle that they will not cross; A thing to stop the maddest in their run A guarding dog too weak to lift his head Who licks a still hand shriveled in the sun. The Occultation of Venus In March, 1899, I saw the occultation of Venus and the moon from the high hilt behind the old mining camp of Congress. It was about three oclock in the morning when we climbed the hill to wait, wrapped in Indian blankets for the wind was cold off the northern ranges. The sky was an inky blue, with stars like needle points; the desert below was a sea of black shadow, with a few lights in the town, where others were getting up to see the star and moon meet. The beat of the huge stamps in the mill shook the air and seemed to make the stars quiver and twinkle. Down in the caon a camp of Mohave-Apache Indians crooned and sung as they waitedfor some one had told them that the moon would eat the big white star. When star and moon touched and the star disappeared they begun wailing their wild death songs, and when after what seemed a long time the star shone out on the other side of the moon they shouted and fired their guns in rejoicing. A jeweled crown for an old mans brow, That mystical, splendid tropic sky Arched low oer the desert, reaching far Its weary leagues wind-parched and dry: So bare and lone and sad it lay, The gray old land that seemed to yearn With a human longing for some caress From its granite barriers, grim and stern. Shouldering up to the very stars The strong peaks lifted their solemn might; And through their rock-gapped pinnacles burned The wondrous glory that charmed the night. Like a giants scimeter wrought in gold 185
The late moon rose in the dawn-touched east, And close beside white Venus shone, As once she shone on shrine and priest. Like a souls white flame the planet passed Alone the moon rode proud and high O wait of God! the lost star swung A silver sphere in the hither sky; (Is it so, O Life, that thy light is lost In the disk of Death if we could but know?) And the old land blushed with sudden youth In the tender fire of the morning-glow. These two poems illustrate ways in which western poets began to emancipate themselves and to claim the West in verse. Hall writes about what she knows and describes it in vivid, concrete images. Her language is generally free of poetic cliches and stock classical allusions (how tempting it must have been to extend the Christian reading of Sheep Herding with additional biblical allusions, how ripe the time to drop Diana, Aurora, Joveor Jehovahby name, mid-Occultation of Venus!) Rooted in close observation, the subjects of her poems are those typical of western poetry: the regions landscapes and its cultures (Native American, Hispanic, white). The Occultation of Venus is especially notable for juxtaposition of the religious (Native American, Christian) and the scientific. Between these myths or world views exist a tension and an interplay that are characteristic of western poetry in general and that reach their apex in the period from 1850 to 1950 in the poems of Thomas Hornsby Ferril. In her valuable Preface to the second edition of Cactus and Pine (Phoenix, 1924), Hall expresses her western loyalties and also relates how the new edition came about. Noting that plates of the Boston edition had been melted down in a World War I munitions factory and were shot at the Hun, Hall wryly proposes that her poems have done their part in winning the war in a decidedly original way for poetry. Unfortunately, although this second edition is revised and expanded, it is also riddled with typos and is, at least in this respect, inferior to the earlier, eastern one. In 1953 a third, posthumous collection of Halls work, Poems of a Ranch Woman, appeared. These poems, many apparently composed after 21 the death of Sharlots mother and when Sharlot was distracted by other professional concerns and demands, are primarily lesser lyrics and cowboydialect poems. During Halls lifetime (18701943) many other western poets made diverse attempts to capture the West in literature. Charles Erskine Scott Wood, best remembered todayif at allas the young military aide who 186
recorded Nez Perce Chief Josephs surrender speech, published his longwinded Psalm- and Socratic-styled philosophical dialogue, Poet in the Desert 22 (1915), which makes diffident use of southeastern Oregon scenery. In the teens and early twenties, Robinson Jeffers began publishing his poetry, which employed Greek, Biblical, and Freudian myth set against the land and seascape of the Monterey peninsula. Other poets, however, tried less and less to convey regional truths in foreign vessels and limited themselves, as Hall often did, to writing about western scenes and cultures. Many of the poets in this group studied and emulated the regions indigenous poetic traditions. Before the turn of the century, ethnologists had been transcribing and translating Native American oral poetry. And so, too, poets in the West became interested in Native American verse. In Nebraska, Jefferss contemporary, John Neihardt, began production of his epic poems which chronicle Indian and white history in the West. More accomplished than Neihardt, who is the subject of a separate chapter in this volume and whose verse is usually and justifiably damned with the faint praise some passages are poetic, are the works of those New Mexico writers who were frequently associated with or from the artist colonies at Taos and Santa Fe. These writers 23 were among the first to win the West for poetry. Alice Corbin arrived in Santa Fe in 1916. Her poetic talents, until that time, were fragile and undeveloped, despite her being a seasoned editor and anthologizer (see notes 8 and 15). Corbins poetry, like her health, improved greatly in New Mexico. In 1920 she published a seminal work, Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico. In this volume Corbin not only draws on Native American myths and poetic techniques (as in the Tesuque Pueblo Corn Grinding Song), but she also makes use of Hispanic culture (as in Cundiyo , Una Anciana Mexicana, Old Juan Quintana, and El Coyotito which is based on a Spanish song). Corbins The Sun Turns West ( 1933) is less dependent on region than Red Earth but is, nevertheless, also a valuable collection. Other New Mexico poets of note during the twenties and thirties include S. Omar Barker, Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Peggy Pond Church, Haniel Long, Willard Spud Johnson, and Fray Anglico Chvez. Barkers Vientos de las Sierras (1924) is a pleasing yet idiosyncratic book from an au24 thor who shortly abandoned literary poetry for cowboy verse. The peripatetic Austin, who came to New Mexico in 1924 to stay, wrote a valuable study of Native American poetics, The American Rhythm (1923), and published some Native American translations in Children Sing in the Far West (1928). Bynners Indian Earth (1929) is his only volume of regional import, while Long is best known for lyric poems and prose writings. Of the poets in this group, Peggy Pond Church is the most significant. 187
Margaret (Peggy) Pond Church was born in 1903 near what is now known as Valmora, New Mexico. Amongst the group of unheralded western poets deserving of scrutinya group that includes Sharlot Hall, Alice Corbin, Genevieve Taggard, Norman Macleod, and Hidegarde Flanner Church is perhaps the least recognized. Unlike the other serious poets discussed in this chapter, Church has never had her books issued by an eastern 25 or midwestrern press. Until the recent reprinting of The Ripened Fields (1954; 1978) and the publication of her New & Selected Poems (1976), Churchs poetry was for many years unavailable. Thus, it was ignored. Upon examination, however, we see in Church a writer of great range and profundity. Like Hall, Corbin, and Austin, she draws on Native American and Hispanic culture to inform her writing, as poems like Even the Mountains Are Ripe, Sheep Country and the following poem, which depicts the flagellant southwestern religious cult, the Penitentes, make clear.
AbiquiuThursday in Holy Week Is there any way I can be sure to remember Abiquiu? How the sun went down suddenly Behind the hills, and the river darkened. Everything Became sound only laid upon silence where had been lately Bright houses and people moving past them, and dogs and children. The moon was a long time coming up. It came up so slowly. The hills grew tall and terrible before it. The long mesa Behind Abiquiu was a huge blackness, growing blacker On the slow silver sky. The fields had been ploughed a little and we stumbled through them Guiding our steps by grasping the budding willows Beside the acequia. We didnt belong here. This wasnt our world. We should never have come here at all. We shivered and laid our lengths along the border Of the field, a wall of low stone. The trail from the morada Went past that wall. We heard something wailing High in the hills. We waited. 188
A little beyond midnight they came out of the morada And went past the wall, three of them, one singing; One with the pito, the Penitente flute that is more sorrowful Than any sorrowful sound that was ever uttered In music. The third man marched With body bent a little forward. At the end of each line of singing He brought the woven whip across his shoulders With a lashing sound, rhythmical, like an accent; A sound that was dull and harsh, as though already Blood softened the lean back. A lantern flickered In the hand of the singer. Its swinging shadow Was swallowed soon in darkness. I, under the cold stars, there in the cold night, watching This greatest of remembered tragedies enacted By men who as soon as Easter was over Would go back to their ordinary way of living To the fields they must finish plowing and sowing; To the sheep that would be lambing soon in the canyons; To the ditches that must be cleared to flood the orchards, Each man when his turn came, from the mother acequia Men whose brown, wind-lined faces I had often seen passing, In wagons loaded with wood brought down from the mesas Behind Abiquiu, or driving burros Slowly, as if in some other country, along the highway. I crouched there against the cold stone, prone on the cold earth, listening, Thought: There is something they know, these men, that we have forgotten; They remember, here in these mountains, here at Abiquiu on this spring night, On this unforgettable Thursday before Easter, That to imitate simply, unaware even of any special meaning, A great and tragic action, is to be lifted by it For a moment out of commonplace living toward greatness. 189
Other poems by Church, like those of Robinson Jeffers, draw on Greek culture (Prelude to Act IV, For the Hippolytus of Euripides). Also like Jefferss poems about World War II, some of Churchs poems are prophetic 26 and didactic (The Nuclear Physicists and Ultimatum for Man). Church can also write beautiful lyric poems, as her second volume, Familiar Journey (1936) attests, and she is capable of mastering traditional poetic forms, as her sonnet sequence The Ripened Field: 15 Sonnets of a Marriage illustrates. Some of her more recent poems in her New & Selected Poems are written in free verse and are personal, yet quite accessible. Proof that the poetical West had been won in the twenties and thirties is also seen in the work of poets outside New Mexico. Before his move to that state, Witter Bynner taught briefly at Berkeley where two of his students were Genevieve Taggard and Hildegarde Flanner. Taggards and Flanners careers provide an instructive contrast. Taggards best work was published before 1930 (For Eager Lovers, 1922; Hawaiian Hilltop, 1923; Words for the Chisel, 1926; Travelling Standing Still, 1928). She is to be highly regarded because she is able to resist the cliches of Hawaii, its lotus blossoms, dusky-skinned natives, and technicolor sunsetsstill of grave danger to the unwary poet. However, Taggards poetry became increasingly political, she devoted more attention to writing critical studies ( The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, 1930), moved east, and began teaching. As a result, her poems became more diffuse. Unlike Taggards, Hildegarde Flanners earlier collections of poetry (in 1920, 1921, 1924, and 1929) are conventional, delicate, what critics used to term feminine. They were often beautifully printed and bound; otherwise, they are not unique. Flanner did not publish a volume in the 1930s, although she stayed in the West, married, and continued writing. Taggard, by contrast, published three volumes during this decade, four in the next. However, Flanners remarkable collection, If There Is Time, was published in 1942 by New Directions, followed by In Native Light (1970) and a selection of old and new western poems, The Hearkening Eye ( 1979). These three volumes reveal a maturation of the poets philosophies, interests, and techniques. Flanner is not distressed at being labeled a conservationist and some of her poems are concerned with ecological issues, as this 1932 sonnet reveals. Tin Cans at Keeler Here in the desert is a pallid lake That once was murmurous upon its bed With sparkle lapping on the inland shore. Only dust remains and it is dead And not a single water rears its head 190
And no blue brook with shiver of great drops Comes this far boiling keenly on the land. Man stole the water and the stricken lake Lies like a trance and staring in the sand No flash nor spread of wave, no wet shimmer. Just one thing shines here under the bare skies A heap of cans, new-dumped. The enormous glitter Beats in the air and quivers where it lies. And the brood of dirty brightness multiplies. In Colorado, Nellie Burget Millers second book, her first collection of regional poetry, In Earthen Bowls (1924), was published and received good reviews, as did her 1936 volume, Pictures from the Plains. Alan Swallow, who was to publish Millers poems (The Sun Drops Red, 1947), called Miller 27 the only state laureate deserving of the title. Millers fellow Coloradoan and, later, state laureate, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, began his distinguished career by winning the Yale Younger Poets Award for High Passage (1926). Ferrils 1934 Westering was considered by Swallow to be the most impressive collection of western poetry. On the basis of these two volumes, most critics rank Ferril second only to Jeffers among early poets of the West; both are considered major western writers and each is discussed at length in separate chapters in this volume. In Oregon, Howard McKinley Coming published two valuable collections (These People, 1926; The Mountains in the Sky, 1930). In Wyoming, Ted Olson was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1928 for A Stranger and Afraid. Olson later moved to New York and there published Hawks Way (1940), vaguely indebted to western terrain. In 1930, Gwendolen Hastes 28 series, Montana Wives appeared in a strong collection, Young Land . T h e same year, John Knox published his sonnet sequence about Texas and the Southwest, Through a Glass Darkly. In 1931, Montanas Grace Stone Coatess Mead and Mangel Wurzel was issued; unfortunately, her next volume, Portulacas in the Wheat (1932), was not as impressive. In California, the now-adult child prodigy, Julia Cooley Altrocchi, published her poetic epic, Snow-Covered Wagons: A Pioneer Epic: The Donner Party Expeditions, 1846-1847 ( 1936). Three years later, New Directions issued Cool Country by Oregons Mary Barnard, her sole collection until her recent Elliston 29 Prize-winning Collected Poems ( 1979). With the advent of World War II, regional and national concerns in the 1940s gave way to global concerns, and wartime exigencies affected poetry in not unexpected ways. Poets went literally and metaphorically off to war. They often ceased writing poetry, or they focused their attention on themes and subjects non-regional, or strovegenerally unsuccessfully (witness Ferrils 1944 Trial by Time )to unite matters regional with those 191
global. With paper supplies limited, book production was curtailed. Interest in regional poetry dropped. The few notable collections of western poetry published during the 1940s are, not surprisingly, usually compilations of writings completed decades before publication: Yvor Winters, Poems (1940); Lincoln Fitzell, In Platos Garden: Poems 19291939 (1940); H. L. Davis, Proud Riders (1942); Nellie Burget Miller, The Sun Drops Red: Collected Poems of Nellie Burget Miller, 19301947 (1947); Janet Lewis (Mrs. Yvor Winters), Poems, 1924 1944 (1950). Notable collections of newer verse include Hildegarde Flanner, If There Is Time ( 1942) ; Wilson O. Clough, Forward to Wyoming (1944) and We, Borne Along ( 1949); Peggy Pond Church, Ultimatum for Man (1946). However, two important poets began to establish themselves in this decade: 30 Kenneth Rexroth in San Francisco and Theodore Roethke in Seattle. Norman Macleod, whose fifth collection of poetry, Pure as Nowhere, was published in 1952, is a fitting figure with which to conclude this centurylong survey of western poets, for Macleod has devoted his life to literature and has produced a number of memorable volumes of western poetry; yet he 31 is neither well known nor are his contributions fully recognized. Born in Salem, Oregon, in 1906, Macleod was raised and educated primarily in the West and the West informs his best work. In the twenties and thirties he was a frequent contributor to western, national, and international literary periodicals and anthologies. Macleod is important, also, because of his role as founder and editor of Little Magazines. In the thirties, like Genevieve Taggard, Macleod made the East his base of literary operations. He published volumes of poetry (Horizons of Death, 1934; Thanksgiving Before November, 1936) and prose. In 1939 he founded the New York City Poetry Center, the nations first and foremost community poetry center, and he served as its director for three years. But during this decade he suffered breakdowns, disease, marriages-and-divorces; his earlier political 32 involvement plagued him during the McCarthy era. In the forties he published two more volumes of poetry (We Thank You All the Time, 1941, and A Man in Mid-Passage, 1947) and edited influential literary reviews. Yet, despite his numerous publications and significant contributions to regional, national, and international letters, Macleods name is known to few, even 33 among students of western literature. Macleods obscurity is due, in part, to the nature of his publications: although published by eastern presses, Macleod was never adopted by a major publisher. His work has always been difficult to obtain. His personal problems also adversely affected his career. The poet expresses his misgivings about that career in Like Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce, from his 1952 collection.
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Like Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce Since I can no longer remember the poems of my youth (nor even the five fingers which brought them to birth) I recognize that I am issue of a lean length of men whose serial inheritance is taxed by time, deep distortion or anger until the man I now am is less memory than shadow; so like Chief Joseph the Nez Perce I see the receding saw of rock roaring in a cataract to sunset breathe the bitterroot valleys and touch with despair a tender ness that is not anywhere, and tasting the larkspur of retreat hear the black drums reminding tomorrow the son I then will be will renounce not only the men who were his anchor in the past but also his race, name, those poems he will never know; there fore he will die as I will die grey as the ultimatum motorized transport move upon, atomizing our tablet in this worlds mind. Macleod clearly intends the poignant and brutal comparison on which his poem is based to describe how he believes the world views his life and achievements. In a larger sense, and after scrutinizing the first century of western poetry, we might presume that the poems speaker is not only Norman Macleod, but also the voice of Hall, Corbin, Taggard, Austin,
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Flanner and Church, who have, in essence, provided us with a record of the literary homesteading of the West, a record that threatens to be both forgotten and atomized.
T OM T RUSKY , Boise
State University
Notes
1. For the apparently different situation faced by western prose writers seeking publication by eastern firms see Vardis Fisher, The Western Writer and the Eastern Establishment, Western American Literature 1, no. 4. (Winter 1967): 244259; Alvin Josephy, Jr., Publishers Interests in Western Writing, W e s t ern American Literature 1, no. 4 (Winter 1967): 260266; and Wallace Stegner, Born a SquareThe Westerners Dilemma, Atlantic (January 1964), pp. 4650. 2. The first presses in the West began operating in 1834 in California and New Mexico, according to Roby Wentz, Eleven Western Presses: An Account of How the First Printing Press Came to Each of the Eleven Western States (Los Angeles: International Association of Printing House Craftsmen, 1956). 3. Notable among early university presses publishing regional poetry were those at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. University interest in regional poets and poetry was widespread in the West. H. G. Merriam at the University of Montana, B. A. Botkin at the University of Oklahoma, Glenn Hughes at the University of Washington, Wilson O. Clough at the University of Wyoming, Bernice Slote at the University of Nebraska, Mabel Major at Texas Christian University, T. M. Pearce at the University of New Mexico, and Yvor Winters at Stanford not only wrote poetry and edited distinguished poetry publications, but also dedicated themselves to inculcating an understanding and appreciation in their students of works by the regions poets. 4. In a series of remarkable volumes issued by Writers Editions of Santa Fe in the 1930s poets Alice Corbin, Peggy Pond Church, Haniel Long, Willard Spud Johnson, Fray Anglico Chvez and others joined together to underwrite their
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own publications. An incomplete accounting of the group may be found in Jack D. Rittenhouse, Southwest ImprintsWriters Editions, Booktalk 4 (December 1975): 34. 5. Interestingly, however, in the United States the craft of printing as a fine art is generally said to have begun on the West Coast. 6. San Franciscans, as described by Franklin Walker in San Franciscos Literary Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1939), were atypical westerners in their dedication to and cultivation of the arts, especially literature. 7. Although it is true that Winterss critical writings are not primarily concerned with regional poetry, he greatly influenced future poets and professors of poetry in the West (see, for example, his anthologies, Twelve Poets of the Pacific and Poets of the Pacific); too, his attitudes had a not inconsiderable effect on western essayist, poet, and publisher Alan Swallow (see Swallows essays, The Sage of Palo Alto and An Examination of Modern Critics: 6: Yvor Winters, reprinted in Swallows An Editors Essays of Two Decades) . 8. The reputation of an Edenic, regenerative, health-restoring West undeniably has attracted talented ailing foreigners who, staying on, have contributed greatly to literature of the region, as the career of Chicago Poetry magazine cofounder and co-editor Alice Corbin, who moved to Santa Fe for reasons of health in 1916, attests. Indirectly, the reputation of a health-giving West was responsible for the arrival of other poets in the West: Norman Macleods father, who had problems with his drinking, was sent to Zion to recuperate; while in the West he met his future wife, Normans mother. 9. Twenty-four-year-old Wurdemann, according to her obituary in the New York Times (20 May 1960, p. 30), was the youngest poet ever to win the award. The lovely young poet had married professor and poet Joseph Auslander in 1932, shortly after Auslanders first wife died. Auslander taught at Columbia University which administers the Pulitzers; in any event, Wurdemanns poetic talents were questioned. Kunitz and Haycraft, in Twentieth Century Authors, quote a review in the Boston Transcript of a 1938 Wurdemann volume: The tone she tries for is bigger than the throat that utters it, and the Times obituary notes, Her verse, like herself, was young and pretty, shy, quiet, graceful, artless. In any case, Wurdemann does not draw on the West for whatever informs her poetry. IO. Ann Hafen, Laurels for the Ladiesthe Poets Laureate of Colorado, Colorado Magazine 30, no. 3 (July 1953): 215223, claims that Colorado was the first state to have an official Poet Laureate ( 1919). Hafen appears to be splitting legal hairs over the definition of the term official. I I. California Imprints, 18331862: A Bibliography (Los Gatos, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1961), pp. 4041. 12. Why the volumes were sent to England for publication is not clear. Wentz reports that Christian missionaries had a press in Hawaii in 1822. 13. Best known to later generations of Mormons for her hymns and Relief Society work, Snows Poems Religious, Historical, and Political, I (Liverpool, 1856) and II (Salt Lake City, 1877) are, according to Latter-day Saints scholar Maureen
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A Literary History of the American West Ursenbach Beecher, superficial, maudlin, trite and unimaginative. Beecher is quoted in Cindy Lesser Larsen, Whoever Heard of a Utah Poet?: An Overview of Poetry in the Early Church, Century 2 (Fall 1979), p. 41. Most verse by early Mormons, as Larsen also concludes, is more zealous dogma (or platitudinous doggerel) than competent poetry, as evidenced by John Sylvanus Davis, The Bee Hive Songster (1868); Augusta Joyce Cocheran, Wind Flowers of Deseret (1881); Hannah King, Epic Poem, a Synopsis of the Rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (1884); Reba Beebe Pratt, The Sheaf of a Gleaner (1886); J. H. Ward, Ballads of Life (1886); Alfred Osmund, Poetical Works (1891); and The Daughters of the Utah Pioneers anthology, Pioneer Poets and Poems (1942). Only Sara E. Carmichael (Poems, 1866) possessed some poetic talent, and she, castigated by her Utah peers for being of dubious faith, married a non-Mormon, left Utah, and spent the last years of her life in an institution for the insane. Robert Buchanan, Saint Abe and His Seven Wives: A Tale of Salt Lake City (1872), is a high-spirited bit of verse satire which purports to be authentic tales of travels in Zion undertaken by a Gentile. In Cissy Inclines to Piety, Buchanan tells of a cowpoke who loses his gal to a sixty-year-old Mormon who already hasthe cowpoke notes disgruntledlyfour wives. Buchanans collection may be one of the earliest poetic portraits of Deseret by a non-Mormon. That Mormons even attempted to publish poetry in the third quarter of the nineteenth century in Salt Lake is, however, remarkable testimony to not only their religious dedication, but also their dedication to the art of poetry. Wentz (Eleven Western Presses, p. 33) notes that the cost of ink and paper in Salt Lake at this time was five to six times the price for these items in the East. 14. William Gallagher, ed., Selections from the Poetical Literature of the West (1841) and William T. Coggeshall, ed., Poets and Poetry of the West (1864), despite their titles, anthologize no poets from west of the Mississippi. 15. The better anthologizers took their cue from Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbins famed collection of Poetry contributors, The New Poetry, which was first published in 1917, went through three editions and twenty printings by 1950, and included many of the Wests better poets. Superior western anthologies are: B. A. Botkins annual Folk-Say collections (19291932); Mabel Major and Rebecca W. Smith, The Southwest in Literature: An Anthology for High Schools (1929); D. Maitland Bushby, The Golden Stallion: An Anthology of Poems Concerning the Southwest and Written by Southwestern Poets (1930); B. A. Botkin, The Southwest Scene (1931); H. G. Merriam, Northwest Verse: An Anthology (1931); Rufus Coleman, Western Prose and Poetry, retitled The Golden West in Story and Verse (both 1932); Hilton Ross Greer and Florence Elberta Barns, New Voices of the Southwest (1934); Yvor Winters, Twelve Poets of the Pacific (1937); Ray B. West, Rocky Mountain Reader (1946) and Writing in the Rocky Mountains (1947). (The last two volumes contain poems by Ellis Foote, a Utah poet; if a Mormon, Foote is the first interesting and experimental poet from Zion. ) Anthologies of limited interest include: Ann Winslow, Trial Balances (1935), which contains a number of western poets who rise to prominence in the
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16. 17.
18.
19.
1950s; Cantando: Border Poets (1939), interesting for a few fine poems on ethnic groups in the West; Elizabeth M. Stover, Son-of-a-Gun-Stew: A Sampling of the Southwest (1945), notable for its inclusion of black poet Kate McAlpin Crady; Charles Lee, North East South West: A Regional Anthology of American Writing (1945), which collects good regional poets seldom anthologized; Alfred Powers, Poems of the Covered Wagons (1947); Earl Clifton Peck, Lore of the Lumber Camps (1948); Yvor Winters, Poets of the Pacific, Second Series (1949); and Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce, Signature of the Sun: Southwestern Verse, 19001950, especially valuable for the editors informative essays and extensive bibliography. Representative of western state poetry anthologies is Kinder and Spencer, Evenings with Colorado Poets, a popular, mediocre volume which went through three editions. The most famous contributor to the first edition (1894) was Helen Hunt Jackson, who appears in a photograph on the frontispiece as a stolid, aged matron. By the 1926 third edition (which includes poems by Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Nellie Burget Miller), Jackson has magically shed both avoirdupois and years; shes now engraved as a coy, dimpled dumpling. Such is the deceptive nature of most state anthologiesfew are of consistent high quality, few can be recommended wholeheartedly. Those which may be are: George Sterling, Genevieve Taggard, and James Rorty, Continents End: An Anthology of Contemporary California Poets (1925); Alice Corbin, The Turquoise Trail: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry (1928); and Joseph Henry Jackson, Continents EndA Collection of California Writing (1944). Of lesser interest are state anthologies published by Henry Harrison during the 1930s: California and Washington (both 1932), and Colorado and Oregon (both 1935). These poets are studied in Franklin Walker, San Franciscos Literary Frontier, cited above, and Alfred Powers, History of Oregon Literature (Portland: Metropolitan Press, 1935). See M. M. Marberry, Splendid Poseur: Joaquin MillerAmerican Poet (New York: Crowell, 1953); O. W. Frost, Joquin Miller (New York: Twayne, 1967); Benjamin S. Lawson, Joaquin Miller, Western Writers Series, No. 43 (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1980). Miller also drew disciples, notably two Japanese, Takeshi Kanno and Yone Noguchi. Noguchi lived on the Hights and wrote oddly moving prose poems in unmastered English (Seen & Unseen, or Monologues of a Homeless Snail, 1897; reprint 1920). The interest western poets have had in the OrientGary Snyder comes to mind-is first evidenced by Millers travels in the Orient as a correspondent and in his friendship with Noguchi. Two such poets are Nevadas W. N. Weare and Oregons Valentine Brown. During the 1870s while an officer at Californias state prison, San Quentin, Weare utilized that institutions setting for a number of poems that appeared in his 1879 volume Songs of the Western Shore. Weares prison poems, as well as his poems like Carrie: The Tragedy of Lake Tahoe, are often relatively free of clanking classical allusions and poetic language, but they are, unfortunately, sentimental, melodramatic, and technically pedestrian. Valentine Browns work is more distressing. Between 1900 and 1925, Brown
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A Literary History of the American West published six volumes of verse, some of it written before the turn of the century. A Portland real estate developer who typeset, printed, and bound his own books, Brown admits in the querulous preface to his fourth book, Tales and Other Verse (1904), that no publishereastern or westernwould accept his work. And with reason. 20. Halls headnotes should not necessarily be presumed to have been composed for an eastern dude audience. Many headnotes were not included in the 1910 eastern edition of Cactus and Pine, but were added (or expanded) in the 1924 western edition, as if Hall wished to educate and entertain most of all her Arizona readers. Poems in the text reprint headnotes from the second edition, bodies from the first edition. 21. Sharlots mother was no small influence. The first edition of Cactus and Pine has a dedicatory poem to the young poets mother. The second edition adds a frontispiece photograph of the poet and Mrs. Hall. Sharlots father apparently thought little of his daughters careers and literary achievements. For speculations on her parents influence and attitudes, see James J. Weston, Sharlot Hall: Arizonas Pioneer Lady of Literature, Journal of the West 4, no. 4 (October 1965): 539552. 22. See Edwin R. Bingham, Shaping a Regions Culture: Charles Erskine Scott Wood in Oregon, Oregon Rainbow I, no. 4 (Winter 1976). Bingham discusses Woods prose writings and marriage to Sara Bard Field and reprints a few of Woods successful western poems first printed in Poems from the Ranges (1929) and included in Woods posthumous Collected Poems ( 1949). 23. Two literary colonies have been important in the development of early poetry of the West: Carmel and Taos/Santa Fe. For the history of Carmel, see Franklin Walker, The Seacoast of Bohemia (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1973), and Michael Orth, Ideality to Reality: The Founding of Carmel, California Historical Quarterly 48 (1969): 195210. Less has been written about the literary contributions of Taos/Santa Fe. For a general overview of activities at these Southwest centers, see Kay Aiken Reeves unpublished dissertation, The Making of an American Place: The Development of Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, as an American Cultural Center, 18981942, Texas A&M University, 1977. 24. Barker and other Cowboy Poets are amply discussed in Lee Steinmetz, Immortal Youth Astride a Dream: The Cowboy in Western American Poetry, a paper delivered to the Western Literature Association Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 6 October 1979. 25. As the bibliography of primary sources for this chapter makes clear, the most important western poets were published by eastern presseswith the exception of Alice Corbin, whose Red Earth was issued by a Chicago press, and Peggy Pond Church, all of whose titles were published by western presses. 26. Church, who saw the boys school owned and operated by her husband confiscated for the Los Alamos Project, has a decidedly different outlook on science than does Thomas Hornsby Ferril. 27. Swallows evaluation was made long before John Haines, William Stafford, and
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Thomas Hornsby Ferril were named laureates of, respectively, Alaska, Oregon, and Colorado. 28. A number of the Montana Wives poems are included in Hastes Selected Poems (1976), which also contains poems she wrote after having moved, like Olson, to New York. 29. During the first decades of the twentieth century there were also westerners writing poetry which did not depend on region for subject matter, themes, or techniques. Usually these were poetic dilettantes, like Colorados Alfred Damon Runyon (Tents of Trouble, 1911; Rhymes of the Firing Line, 1912), and Arthur Hugh Chapman (Out Where the West Begins, 1917); the only American buried in the Kremlin, Oregons John Reed (Sangar and The Day in Bohemia, 1913; Tamburlain, 1916); Idahos Vardis Fisher ( Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna, 1927); and Nevadas Walter Van Tilburg Clark (Ten Women in Gales House, 1932). Of these poets who transcended region, only Oregons Hazel Hall (no relation to Sharlot Hall) produced distinguished verse. Hall, whose poetry was recently published in her second posthumous collection ( Selected Poems, 1980)) led a tragic, invalided life. Her other publications include Curtains (1921), Walkers (1923), and the posthumous Cry of Time (1928). 30. A case may be made for including works by Kenneth Rexroth in this discussion of western poets of the 1940s, for many of his poems did depend on western scenery and events. However, Rexroths influence was most apparent in the 1950s and 1960s, and a large number of his poems were translations or based on foreign originals. See Donald Hall, Kenneth Rexroth and His Poetry, The New York Times Book Review (23 November 1980), 9, 4344, and my bibliography of primary and secondary sources for this chapter. Less of a case may be made for inclusion in this chapter of part-time San Francisco resident Kenneth Patchen. 31. See my Norman Wicklund Macleod, Poet from the West, Prairie Schooner 50, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 257268. See also Alan Wald, Tethered to the Past: The Poetry of Norman Macleod, Minnesota Review II (1978): 107111. 32. Macleods concern with social and political issues in the thirties was similar to Genevieve Taggards and many other artists and intellectuals of the time. Macleods interest in these issues may be due in part to his upbringing in Missoula and his personal acquaintanceships with mineworkers, loggers, farmers, hoboes, and Wobblies (members of the IWW). The topic of western poetry and politics has not been addressed, to my knowledge, although Louis Filler, Edwin Markham, Poetry, and What Have You, Antioch Review 23, no. 4 (19631964): 447459, provides a provocative re-reading and re-evaluation of the poet Markham. Nor has an analysis been made of the political and sociological philosophies of western black poets like William Lightfoot Visscher, Black Mammy: A Song of the Sunny South and Other Poems, 1st ed. (Cheyenne, Wyoming: 1885); 2nd ed. (Cheyenne, Wyoming: Bristol & Knabe, 1886); John Mason Brewer, Negrito (San Antonio, Texas: Naylor, 1933); Benjamin Franklin Gardner, Black (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton
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A Literary History of the American West Printers, 1933); and Kate McAlpin Crady, Free Steppin (Dallas, Texas: Mathis, Van Nort, 1938) and Travelin Shoes (Dallas, Texas: Mathis, Van Nort, 1948). 33. For example, Macleods poems do not appear in any of the current regional anthologies of the West.
Primary Bibliography of Twenty Western Poets Austin, Mary. The American Rhythm: Studies and Re-expressions of American Songs. 1923, 1930; rpt. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1970. . Children Sing in the Far West. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. Barnard, Mary. Collected Poems. Portland: Breitenbush Press, 1979. . Cool Country. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1939. Church, Peggy Pond. Familiar Journey. Santa Fe: Writers Editions, 1936. . Foretaste. Santa Fe: Writers Editions, 1933. . New & Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1976. . The Ripened Fields: Fifteen Sonnets of a Marriage. 1954; rev. ed. Santa Fe: Lightning Tree Press, 1978. . A Rustle of Angels. Denver: Peartree Press, 1981. . Ultimatum for Man. Stanford University, California: James Ladd Delkin, 1946. Coolbrith, Ina. A Perfect Day. San Francisco: John H. Carmany, 1881. . Songs from the Golden Gate. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1895. . Wings of Sunset. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929. Corbin, Alice. Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico. Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1920. . The Sun Turns West. Santa Fe: Writers Editions, 1933. Corning, Howard McKinley. These People. New York: Harold Vinal, 1926. . This Earth and Another Country: New and Selected Poems. Portland: Tall Pine Imprints, 1969. . The Mountain in the Sky. Portland: Metropolitan Press, 1930. Davis, H. L. Proud Riders. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942. . Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1978. Ferril, Thomas Hornsby. (See separate chapter listing in this volume.) Flanner, Hildegarde. The Hearkening Eye. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1979. . If There Is Time. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1942. . In Native Light. Calistoga, California: James E. Beard, 1970. Hall, Hazel. Cry of Time. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928. . Curtains. New York: John Lane, 1921. . Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1980. . Walkers. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1923.
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Hall, Sharlot. Cactus and Pine. 1st ed. Boston: Sherman, French, 1910. 2nd ed. Phoenix: Arizona Republican Print Shop, 1924. . Poems of a Ranch Woman. Compiled by Josephine Mackenzie. Prescott, Arizona: Sharlot Hall Historical Society, 1953. Haste, Gwendolen. Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1976. . The Young Land. New York: Coward-McCann, 1930. Jeffers, Robinson. (See separate chapter listing in this volume.) Long, Haniel. My Seasons. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1977. Macleod, Norman. The Distance: New and Selected Poems (19281977). Pembroke, North Carolina: s.n., 1977. . Horizons of Death. New York: Parnassus Press, 1934. . A Man in Mid-Passage: Collected Poems, 1930-1947. Columbus, Ohio: Cronos Editions, 1947. . Pure as Nowhere. Columbus, Ohio: Golden Goose Press, 1952. . Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1975. . Thanksgiving Before November. New York: Parnassus Press, 1936. . We Thank You All the Time. Prairie City, Illinois: Decker Press, 1941. Miller, Nellie Burget. In Earthen Bowls. New York: D. Appleton, 1924. . Pictures from the Plains and Other Poems. New York: The Poets Press, 1936. . The Sun Drops Red: Collected Poems of Nellie Burget Miller, 19301947. Denver: Sage Books, 1947. Olson, Ted. Hawks Way. New York: The League to Support Poetry, 1941. . A Stranger and Afraid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928. Rexroth, Kenneth. The Art of Wordly Wisdom. Prairie City, Illinois: Decker Press, 1949. . In What Hour. New York: Macmillan, 1940. . The Phoenix and the Tortoise. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1944. . The Signatures of All Things: Poems, Songs, Elegies, Translations, Epigrams. New York: New Directions, 1950. Taggard, Genevieve. For Eager Lovers. New York: Boni, 1922. . Hawaiian Hilltop. San Francisco: Wycoff & Gelber, Lantern Press, 1923. . Origin: Hawaii; Poems. Honolulu: Donald Angus, 1947. . To the Natural World. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1980. . Travelling Standing Still: Poems 19181928. New York: Knopf, 1928. . Words for the Chisel. New York: Knopf, 1926. Winters, Yvor. Collected Poems. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1960. . Poems. Los Altos, California: Gyroscope Press, 1940. Secondary Bibliography of Western Poetry Bangs, Carol Jane. Women Poets and the Northwest School. In L. L. Lee and Merrill Lewis, eds., Women, Women Writers, and the West. New York: Whitston, 1979. Concludes Gwendolyn (sic) Haste is not a member of a school of western women poets who draw primarily on cultures and landscapes beyond the Pacific Northwest. Bentley, Beth. Mirror in the Shadows: Hazel Hall, 18861924. Concerning Po-
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A Literary History of the American West etry 13, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 712. Analysis of Halls poetry and comparison of her writings with peers Teasdale, Wylie, Millay. Dalmas, Victor. The Poetry of Norman Macleod. Department of English, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, 1974. Unpublished Masters thesis. Ferril, Thomas Hornsby. (See separate chapter listing in this volume.) Gardner, Geoffrey, ed. For Rexroth: The Ark 14. New York: The Ark, 1980. Essays, poems on, by, and for Rexroth. Gurian, Jay. The Possibility of a Western Poetics. Colorado Quarterly 15 (Summer 1966): 6985. Challenging essay which proclaims the West has had little poetry and no poetics. Gurian, like most critics of western American poetry, overlooks women poets and critics as well as the influence of Native American and Hispanic poetics. Larsen, Cindy Lesser. Whoever Heard of a Utah Poet?: An Overview of Poetry in the Early [L.D.S.] Church. Century 2 (Fall 1979), pp. 3261. Lesser, writing in Brigham Young Universitys student literary magazine, concludes no one has-and with good reason, considering the poor quality of early Mormon verse. Major, Mabel, and T. M. Pearce. Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with Bibliographies. 3rd ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972. Basic source for the literary Southwest. Marable, Mary Hays, and Elaine Boylan. A Handbook of Oklahoma Writers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939. Valuable bio-bibliographic data. Powers, Alfred. The History of Oregon Literature. Portland, Oregon: Metropolitan Press, 1935. 809 pages of fact, unfact, and good gossip. Indispensable, despite inaccuracies and (dis)organization. Rhodemhamel, Josephine, and Raymond Wood. Ina Coolbrith. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1973. Standard biography, bound in lavender. Ross, Morton L. Alan Swallow and Modem, Western American Poetry. Western American Literature I (Summer 1966): 97104. Chronicles Swallows futile attempts to define western poetics during his thirty-year career as western publisher, critic, and poet. Saul, George Branson. Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1967. Hazel Hall is the topic of one appreciative essay which asserts her contributions to American poetry have been ignored. Swallow, Alan. Poetry of the West. South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964): 7787. Survey of western poets (with special praise for N. Miller, Ferril, and Winters) and attempt to define western poetry. (See Ross, above.) . Two Rocky Mountain Poets. Rocky Mountain Review 3 (Fall 1938): 13. (Rpt. in West, Rocky Mountain Reader, below.) Trusky, A. Thomas. Norman Wicklund Macleod, Poet from the West. Prairie Schooner 50 (Fall 1976): 257268. Chronicles Macleods activities and achievements from the 1920s to 1970s; with notes and bibliography. . ed. Women Poets of the West: An Anthology, 18501950. 2nd ed. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1979. Representative selections by fourteen women poets from eleven western states; introduction by Ann Stanford; with biobibliographies.
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Wald, Alan. Tethered to the Past: The Poetry of Norman Macleod. Minnesota Review 11 (1978): 107111. Careful analysis concludes Macleods best work was rooted in his experience. Walker, Franklin D. San Franciscos Literary Frontier. New York: Knopf, 1939. Classic study of San Franciscos golden age, circa 18501900. Includes poems by and analysis of Harte, Coolbrith, Stoddard, Ridge, Sill, Sterling, J. Miller, and others. Walker, Robert H. The Poets Interpret the Western Frontier. Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1961): 619635. Effects of Manifest Destiny, landscape, and experience on western poetry, 18761905. West, Ray B., Jr., ed. Rocky Mountain Reader. New York: Dutton, 1946. Anthology contains critical essays by Clough, Ferril, Swallow, and West. . Three Rocky Mountain Poets. In Writing in the Rocky Mountains, pp. 4565. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1947. Analysis of Ferril, Olson, and Ghiselin. Volume has useful annotated bibliography. Standard Sources See authors listed in Boise State University Western Writers Series, Steck-Vaughn Southwest Writers Series, Twayne Series, and the Major Reference Sources on the West at the back of this volume.
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Western American Drama to 1960

URING THE FORMATIVE STAGE of American drama, which lasted until around 1890, most American plays consisted of slapstick and sentimentalism, and plays about the frontier and the West were not exceptions. Beginning in the 1890s, there was a rise of realism in American drama, a trend which culminated in the production in 1906 of William Vaughn Moodys The Great Divide, said to mark the beginning of modern American drama and notable for its use of a western setting and western characters. Most subsequent plays about the West never received the kind of notice given to works by eastern and southern dramatists such as Eugene ONeill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. But western playwrights Sidney Howard, Lynn Riggs, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, and William Inge did write plays that were acclaimed by audiences and reviewers and that constitute a significant part of the literary heritage of the American West. Until recently even most specialists in western American literature have known little about any western dramas, probably because few critical studies and literary histories-with the exception of Felix Spers From Native Roots (1948) and Ima Honaker Herrons The Small Town in American Drama (1969)even mention more than one or two western plays. Western American drama is still largely an undiscovered territory waiting to be explored and mapped. Any survey of western drama should begin with at least some mention of Indian myth-dramas and Spanish folk plays, not only because of their influence on the first Anglo playwrights, but also because they have provided such an important stimulus for contemporary western writers. In Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism(1950), Frank Waters has explained that Navaho myth-dramas serve at least three important functions: to perpetuate the myths and legends of the tribe (p. 243); to teach in the medium of their own parables the universal truths of life (p. 249); and to cure illnesses of the body and mind (p. 258). The mythdramas of many other western American tribes have similar functions; and their thaumaturgic and therapeutic aspects seem to have fascinated contemporary western playwrights such as Sam Shepard, who has shown in plays such as Operation Sidewinder that he recognizes the magical and healing elements in Indian ritual. Another early form of western drama, the Spanish folk play, has also
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WESTERN DRAMA TO 1960
been a strong influence on contemporary dramatists. Folk plays appeared in the Southwest soon after the founding of Santa Fe and were usually dramatizations of some biblical story, although Los Comanches is a historical drama based on a battle with the Indians. Roberto J. Garza says that Chicano theatre remained alive in the Southwest from the days of the folk dramas and of Teatro Carpa (a traveling vaudevillian theatre for the masses) to the rise in this century of Mexican folk-theatre groups that provided a cultural center for Chicanos but that failed to convey that espiritu of La Raza which was about to manifest itself (Contemporary Chicano Theatre, pp. 16). Whatever the failings of the Spanish folk plays and the Mexican folk-theatre groups, they were probably the main inspiration for Teatro Campesino, which Luis Valdez founded in the 1960s, and for plays by Valdez, such as Zoot Suit (1978), plays which have been part of el renacimiento, the rebirth of Chicano literature. Another early western cultural group, the Mormons, produced no firstrate dramas, in spite of the support which the Latter-day Saints Church, almost from its beginning, had given to the theatre. Mormons had staged plays even before their westward migration, and in 1862 they built the Salt Lake Theatre, which was for years one of the finest theatres in the country. It was a little surprising, John S. Lindsay wrote in his history The Mormons and the Theatre (1905), that with the love of the drama so universal in Utah so few contributions to dramatic literature were offered by local authors for representation on the stage (p. 155). In this century, the Mutual Improvement Associations annual publication of a book of plays often contained original Mormon dramas, but according to Lael J. Woodbury, No 1 pro-Mormon drama has yet achieved commercial success. . . . Until the 1970s, most Mormon dramatists wanted to write plays that would defend and glorify their religion; and as a result, their plays are often little more than sermons in dramatic form. Anti-Mormon dramas enjoyed great commercial success in the 1800s, but they are no better artistically than the pro-Mormon plays. William Lysander Adamss Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils (1852), Thomas Dunn Englishs The Mormons (1858), and Clubs Deseret Deserted (1858) portray the Mormons as lying, stealing, murdering hypocrites. Joaquin Miller made a small fortune with his anti-Mormon play The Danites in the Sierras (1877)) although he wrote in a later preface to the work: I have always been sorry I printed it, as it is unfair to the Mormons and the Chinese. Aside from their historical value as social documents of religious bigotry, the anti-Mormon plays are chiefly interesting in their frequent use of the theme of mistaken or lost identity; however, what O. W. Frost says about Millers Forty-Nine (1881) applies to all the anti-Mormon dramas: It is little more than a curious exhibit of popular nineteenth-century American comedy, a rollicking 205
and tearful entertainment without substance and without serious purpose (Joaquin Miller, p. 106). Although not polemical like the pro- and anti-Mormon plays, other western American dramas of the formative period (from the 1850s to 1890) were also artistic failures, and no other early western playwright achieved financial success as Miller had done. But in spite of such artistic and financial failure, some of the frontier dramas have a few redeeming features. Alonzo Delanos A Live Woman in the Mines (1857), for example, deserves to be better known for its lively frontier dialogue: Whoora! for a live woman in the mines. Whatll the boys say? theyll peel out o their skins for joy. . . . Injins and grizzlies clar the track, or a young airthquake will swaller you. If copies of A Live Woman had not become almost as rare as the First Folio of Shakespeares plays, perhaps Delanos use of frontier dialogue might have had some influence on later western playwrights. In western drama, only the robust frontier boasts in Roadside (1930) by Lynn Riggs equal the colorful lingo in A Live Woman, but the probability that Riggs had read Delanos play is small. A Live Woman in the Mines could be performed in the rough-and-ready atmosphere of Californias Gold Rush camps, but more sedate eastern audiences might not have paid to listen to an evening of frontier hyperbole. What easterners did pay to see were less linguistically exuberant plays such as Frank Hitchcocks Davy Crockett (1872), which portrays a frontiersman who is more of a genteel Natty Bumppo than a boasting ring-tail roarer. And Augustin Dalys Horizon (1871) is largely a bowdlerized caricature of the actual West-complete with eastern dudes, drunken Indians, bumbling soldiers, and a stage Chinaman. The main redeeming feature of Horizon is Dalys satire, which sometimes resembles Mark Twains; but unfortunately, Dalys debt to Bret Harte is too obvious to escape notice. Harte himself wrote quite a few plays, but only three were staged and none was successful. Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876) combines elements from several of Hartes stories, but its moralism, bad dialogue, and lack of dramatic tension make it a flop. Ah Sin! (1877), the result of Hartes unhappy collaboration with Mark Twain, was also an artistic and financial failure. Mark Twains curtain speech contains what is probably the best critical comment on the joint effort: I never saw a play that was so much improved by being cut down; and I believe it would have been one of the very best plays in the world if the managers strength had held out so that he could cut out the whole of it. Twain apparently recognized that he and Harte had talents more suited to prose narrative than to drama; and in Hartes case, other writers were more successful in dramatizing his stories than was Harte himself. A good example of such adaptation is Bartley Campbells My Partner ( 1879), which borrows a theme from Harte. Campbells characters boast 206
that California is as good as heaven, but the evil actions of many of them seem better suited to hell. Like most nineteenth-century American dramas, Hartes plays and the dramatic adaptations that others wrote from his stories were melodramas, a form especially well suited to be a part of theatrical productions that were like Wild West shows. William F. Buffalo Bill Cody had, in fact, begun his career in 1871 as an actor under the direction of Ned Buntline, the 2 pen name of E. Z. C. Judson, the most prolific of the dime novelists. A year later, Cody started his own company, commissioning frontier melodramas; and through a kind of theatrical mitosis, one of Codys actors, John Wallace Captain Jack Crawford, began his own company and wrote three frontier melodramas. According to Garff B. Wilson, nineteenth-century frontier melodramas enjoyed great popularity and are the prototypes of twentieth-century movie and T.V. Westerns. During all this time, Wilson says, the genre has followed the same basic formula of melodrama: The hero is the rough but valiant and resourceful frontiersman; the heroine is a pure, modest maiden with hidden strength in her character; the villain is either an ugly gunslinger or a suave, polished hypocrite; the conflict that develops runs a predictable course, but after the perils, fights, narrow escapes, and misunderstandings have occurred, the villain and his bad guys are defeated; 3 the hero and the good guys are victorious. By the beginning of the 1890s, at least two playwrights began to add more realistic details to plots that were still basically western melodramas. By then, too, western stereotypes were quite familiar to American audiences; the frontier melodramas were dramatic equivalents of dime novels and novels of local color. Such playsCharles Townsends The Golden Gulch (1893) is a good exampleusually had, in addition to the formula plot outlined by Wilson, a cast that included a Chinaman, a taciturn Indian, a smooth villain, an eastern dude, a coarse but warm-hearted local girl, and a hero. Such stereotypes were effectively used in a satirical comedy by Charles H. Hoyt, A Texas Steer (1890), in which a group of Texans try to get what they can from the government in Washington, D.C. In their naivete the Texans are like other Americans, but their frontier barbarism is depicted as a western trait. But Hoyts use of the stereotypes was an exception; many of the western plays of his fellow dramatists were as predictable as B-grade Western movies and were about as aesthetically satisfying, too. Augustus Thomas and David Belasco, the two 1890s dramatists who tried to do more than produce Westerns with predictable plots, never managed to write plays without some trace of Bret Harte-like sentimentality. Both Thomas and Belasco, however, did manage to make their dramas 207
more realistic than the typical play of that period. Thomas traveled to many western states, gathering facts about local settings, characters, and events, facts which he would later work into his dramas. Unfortunately, he could never resist the temptation to make at least part of a play melodramatic or overly romantic. In Mizzoura (1893), for example, is filled with the details of an actual train robbery, but the characters seem straight from a story by Bret Harte. Thomas could, however, create realistic characters. The rancher and his wife in Arizona (1899) are based upon actual people, and they give the play a strong air of reality; the rest of the play, though, is conventional melodrama. Belasco, too, used actual incidents as the basis for his dramas, but he seemed fascinated by events that, however real, seem quite improbable, and his characters seem more like outcasts from Poker Flat than like typical westerners. In addition, Belascos The Girl I Left Behind Me (1893) resembles Thomass Arizona in tacitly condoning the racism, sexism, and militarism of the age, and Belasco distorted the Spanish land grant conflict in The Rose of the Rancho (1906). But Belasco will long be remembered for The Girl of the Golden West (1905), which, in spite of its improbabilities, gives a sense of Gold Rush life that almost approaches the exuberance and playfulness of Mark Twains Roughing It and which was the basis of Giacomo Puccinis La Fanciulla del West (1910), the first grand 4 opera to be written on an American theme. Like Belasco and Thomas, William Vaughn Moody worked hard to make his plays more realistic, using an actual incident as the basis for The Great Divide (1906)) the drama that is said to have revolutionized American theatre. Moody had heard about a woman who, in order to save herself from being raped by three westerners, had told one of the men that she would be his if he would save her from the others, which he did by buying her. In The Great Divide, the woman is Ruth Jordan, daughter of an old New England family, and the rough westerner who buys her is Stephen Ghent. Ruth stays with Ghent, who has fallen in love with her and treats her well, and she has their child; but her Puritan conscience wont permit her to remain in a relationship which had such an unholy beginning, so while Ghent strikes a bonanza, she works like a peon, making baskets that she sells to get enough money to buy herself back. She eventually does so and then returns to her New England home. Ghent follows her, losing his own fortune to redeem her familys. When he confronts her, saying that since they love each other, he wants her to return to him and to ignore what first brought them together, she forces him to see that she had to leave because they had come together not out of love but from the force of violent domination. Having forced that concession from him, Ruth then consents to go back with him. As the summary shows, The Great Divide has some of the melodramatic elements common to other western dramas of the period. Yet as Martin 208
Halpern has explained, Moody used conventionalities to express profound and moving ideas. Ruth and Ghent both undergo a painful transformation. Though the adventure-craving part of Ruth initially finds Ghent attractive, she rejects him at the insistence of the Puritan side of her personality, which recognizes that evil cannot be ignored. After arguing for the individual freedom offered by the frontier, Ghent ultimately recognizes that Ruth is right in insisting that they cannot ignore the evil which first brought them together. Halpern compares their moral and emotional struggle to that of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter. The Great Divide is also strikingly similar to Owen Wisters The Virginian (1902), primarily because the romance of Molly Stark and the Virginian proceeds in many respects like that of Ruth and Ghent. Both the Virginian and Ghent woo New Englanders, and both men are candid, sometimes blunt, westerners. In both the novel and the play, when the cowboys win their ladies the West seems to have triumphed over the East, but a closer look shows that the American system of values, including male dominance, is the final victor. What Halpern says of Moody is true of Wister as well: Moody is concerned not with widening the Great Divide between East 5 and West but with closing it. . . . Moody achieved for American drama a little bit of what Mark Twain had done for the American novel when he wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Maurice F. Brown puts it, The Great Divide brought realism and symbolism in an effective combination into the American theatre, offering 6 a native model on which dramatists might build. For almost another two decades, however, no western playwrights succeeded in following Moodys model, although two western writers who were well known for their work in other genres made the attempt. Mary Austins The Arrow-Maker (1911) and Jack Londons The Acorn-Planter (1916) are ostensibly plays about Indians, but Austins feminism and Londons socialism are all too didactically apparent in the lines of their pre-Columbian characters. London was even more heavy-handed when he wrote three other plays set in his own time. Like Bret Harte and Mark Twain, Austin and London wrote essays, stories, and novels that were far better than their plays. After World War I, aspiring playwrights not only had The Great Divide and European plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, and Strindberg as models, but they could also see that one of their contemporaries, Eugene ONeill, was creating a modem American drama. Universities had started to offer courses in playwriting, and college theatres and new professional theatre groups were staging original dramas by young American playwrights. Another Californian, Sidney Howard, was a graduate of Professor George Pierce Bakers playwriting course at Harvard. When Howard wrote a play about an unconventional love affair, the Theatre Guild of New York209
dedicated to the production of fine plays which commercial managers were 7 afraid to present staged They Knew What They Wanted (1924), for which Howard was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Like Ruth and Ghent in The Great Divide, the leading characters in Howards play must act unconventionally in order to do what is best for all. They Knew What They Wanted is not, however, a play about ideas, but, as Joseph Wood Krutch wrote, a play 8 about men and women. . . . The men are Tony Patucci, a Napa Valley grape grower, and his hired man Joe; and the woman is Amy, Tonys mail-order bride. When Amy arrives at Tonys ranch to be married to him, she at first thinks that Joe is Tony, since Tony had sent her Joes photograph and said it was a picture of himself and since Tony had broken his leg shortly before her arrival and was therefore not present for it. In spite of that initial confusion, the wedding takes place; and afterwards, when Tony falls asleep, Amy and Joe succumb to a moment of strong sexual attraction. Three months later, when Amy and Joe learn that she is pregnant as a result of their one night together, the play appears to be headed in the direction of melodrama, for Amy and Joe decide to leave together, even though they are not in love and Joe does not want to be married. And when Amy breaks down and tells Tony everything, he first goes berserk, swearing all kinds of vengeance. But at this point Howard gives the play some realistic twists, and the earlier melodramatic elements become only a counterpoint for the plays basically realistic thrust. Tony, who is much older than Amy and Joe, cools down and begins to think about the situation. Then, by pointing out that he and Amy love each other, that he wants a child, and that Joe wants to roam with the Wobblies, Tony persuades Amy to stay and Joe to go. Barrett H. Clark called They Knew What They Wanted a comedy of second thoughts; in the first act Amy starts to do the conventional thing because her pride is wounded, but on second thought she knows she wants comfort and affection more than she does revenge; in the third act Tony starts to do the same thing, because somewhere within him is a conviction that a good husband must kill his wifes lover, but on second thought he 9 takes a wiser course. Howards characters arrive at their second thoughts not by discussing ideas (as in The Great Divide) but by a process of individual reconsideration that awakens them to their actual feelings, thereby helping them to change their minds. They Knew What They Wanted has been overshadowed by its musical adaptation, The Most Happy Fella (1956), which diminished the effect of realism by overplaying the sentimentality in the story. For its sensitive portrayal of typical westerners without gunplay and without other stage heroics, Howards original drama is a landmark in western American literature. Howard spent some time in Hollywood, where he wrote screenplays for 210
Sinclair Lewiss Arrowsmith and Dodsworth. In the 1920s, Hollywood entered its Golden Age and became the subject of a number of plays, most of them satirical comedies. What the playwrights satirized is the Hollywood myth of the West as a land where the good cowboy always wins. They showed that only fools believe a movies version of the West or of any other place; that Hollywood itself has become a new gold camp, luring naive fame-and-fortune hunters by the thousands. The best known satirizations of Hollywood are George Kaufman and Marc Connellys Merton of the Movies (1922; based on the novel by Harry Leon Wilson) and Moss Hart and George Kaufmans Once in a Lifetime (1930). Although satires such as these hilariously expose the phoniness of the movieland West, they give no sense of the real world on the other side of the false-front sets. For the people in that real world, life was not very hilarious. The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression made the West of the late 1920s and the 1930s a place of hardship and anxiety. Thanks to the support of many group theatre organizations, the Federal Theatre projects, and university theatre programs-not only at Harvard and Yale, but also at schools such as the University of North Dakota and the University of Washington-serious young playwrights received encouragement to write plays about the hard times. Also during those two decades, the upsurge of interest in regional literature helped to provide audiences for new regional dramas. A good example of such regional playwrights is E. P. Conkle, whose Crick Bottom Plays 1928) are humorous sketches of folksy Nebraskans. ( When Conkle tried to write serious plays about events and characters from western history and folklore, he failed to bring them to life. But he was successful when he wrote 200 Were Chosen (1937), a drama about the resettlement in Alaska of destitute midwestern farmers. The play is strikingly similar to parts of The Grapes of Wrath, and much of Conkles writing is as effective as Steinbecks. Another Nebraska playwright, Virgil Geddes, saw in the lives of midwestern farm families the same problems that had faced the ancient Greeks, and he wrote several dramas about incestuous relationships between fathers and daughters. W. David Sievers says that in The Earth Between (1930) and Native Ground (1932), Geddes . . . attempted to capture the Greek feeling for the majesty of a struggle with the hereditary curse of evil within a family, but he did not quite achieve ONeills mas10 tery of his material. ONeills plays are rivalled, however, by the works of the greatest of the western dramatists: Lynn Riggs. His Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) has been so popular in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical version that millions of people outside the region think the West is Oklahoma ! (1943) plus some Indians. Delightfully entertaining though it is, the musical has a saccharine optimism which probably deters most readers from bothering to look at the 211
original drama or at any of the rest of the more than two dozen plays by Riggs. What readers would find in Green Grow the Lilacs is a dark side more ominous than the treatment of evil in Oklahoma! The shivaree in Riggss play is a powerful and frightening display of mob lewdness and callousness, and the mob consists of those who are usually considerate neighbors. Also in Green Grow the Lilacs, Jeeter (Jud Fry) has been warped by the demeaning force of his work, whereas Curlys easygoing warm manner is the result of the freedom hes enjoyed as a cowboy. In Oklahoma ! Curly escapes a jail sentence, an ending which, as Thomas A. Erhard has suggested, is a little more clear-cut in its lightness than the almost bittersweet Lilacs . . . (Lynn Riggs, p. 21). Riggs had written a number of plays before Green Grow the Lilacs, and one of the firstBig Lake (1927), about the killing of two innocent teenagershad been praised by Burns Mantle and Barrett H. Clark; and after its production, Sidney Howard had encouraged Riggs to continue writing. Like Howard, Riggs moved to Hollywood for awhile to make a living by writing screenplays, and he also continued to write dramas. Yet in spite of his early reputation as one of Americas most promising playwrights, Riggs never wrote a Broadway hit and he never received the kind of acclaim granted to ONeill. Nevertheless, almost all of Riggss plays are good, and a number of them are first-rate. Roadside: Or Borned in Texas (1930) presents a ring-tail roarer who woos and wins the ex-wife of a down-to-earth farmer. While he woos, the swaggering frontier hero demolishes a courthouse and jail and then brags his way out of punishment. Like the tall tales of the mountain men, the boasts in Roadside create a special and comic world of hyperbole, as one can see in the following passage: Wild and reckless, Borned in Texas Suckled by a bear, Steel backbone, Tail screwed on, Twelve feet long, Dare any son-of-a-bitch to step on it! Erhard is clearly right when he says that Riggs captured the poetic flavor of frontier speech almost as well as John Millington Synge captured that of Irish dialects (p. 2). At first the Irish refused to recognize Synges achievement, feeling that his plays were none too flattering; perhaps a similar defensive reaction by Americans is part of the reason why Riggs has not yet been recognized as the great writer he is. Riggs was a master of tragedy as well as comedy. A Lantern to See By 212
(1928) is about a farmer who tyrannizes his family. Here a western playwright tried to emulate the Greeks and succeeded. John Harmons whole life is his sons, but his immense pride in them is overshadowed by his determination to domineer. His domination of his eldest son, Jodie, so stunts the boys spirit that when he thinks he can find no other escape, he is driven to kill his father. Another cause of the patricide is John Harmons forcing himself upon the girl Jodie loves. The sexual rivalry that pits father against son is apparent underneath their squabbles over work and money. Yet Riggs shows us that even that sexual conflict is caused by a deeper division, for John Harmon is the pioneer, the proud self-made man who wants to dominate everything Nature, his children, womenwhereas Jodie is of the second generation on the land and seeks sympathy and understanding. The sexual rivalry between a farmer and his son and the boasts of a frontier braggart were not subjects that excited commercial theatre owners on Broadway, so Riggs escaped obscurity only because he had written the play from which Oklahoma ! was created. When one considers that a widely used textbook such as The Norton Anthology of American Literature (1979) contains not a single reference to any American dramatistnot even ONeillthen it may be safe to assume that almost all literary critics and historians have never read a line written by Riggs. Amazingly productive in the face of such neglect, Riggs wrote his last (and far from his best) playa musical entitled Toward the Western Sky (1951)because he had received a commission for a historical pageant-drama. Pageant-dramas and other historical plays comprise a large category of western drama, but unlike western novelists, playwrights have not succeeded in bringing the Old West back to life, perhaps because, as Susanne Langer has pointed out, the novel is virtual memory pointing toward the present, whereas the drama is a virtual present pointing toward the future; and until recently the West was so young and changing so rapidly that no 11 future could be envisioned with certainty. One of the best of the historical plays is Maxwell Andersons Night Over Taos (1928), which recounts the story of the Taos rebellion of 1847, but which belongs among his lesser 12 credits. More effective at showing how the past is linked to the present, Talbot Jenningss No More Frontier (1931) dramatizes the changes in a pioneer Idaho family over several generations. But no western historical play has yet matched the artistry of A. B. Guthries The Big Sky or Wallace Stegners Angle of Repose. Ostensibly about a robbery in a western desert, Robert E. Sherwoods The Petrified Forest (1935) shows allegorically that the American sense of history had become petrified. Some twentieth-century robbers descend on a desert filling station, where they hole up with hostages until a posse shoots it out with the gang. But before the gangs leader leaves, he fulfills his prom213
ise to shoot a destitute young poet who had asked to be killed so that the granddaughter of the filling station owner could receive the benefits of a $5,000 life insurance policy. The young poet mentions T. S. Eliots The Hollow Men, an allusion which reinforces the impression that Sherwood chose the southwestern desert for his setting because he saw it as a good symbol of the wasteland and because the dreams of the old frontier are petrified there like the forest in the desert. In contrast to Sidney Howard and Lynn Riggs, neither Sherwood nor his characters look upon the West as home; for them it is just a way station until they can get somewhere else. The twentieth-century urban West is home for most of the characters in William Saroyans My Hearts in the Highlands (1939) and The Time of Your Life (1939), but their behavior and beliefs are little changed from what one finds in the pages of Bret Harte. My Hearts in the Highlands is a sentimental drama about a struggling poet and his nine-year-old son who are inspired by the bungling and philosophy of an old stranger. A Pulitzer Prize was awarded for The Time of Your Life, but Saroyan refused it. The plays setting is a San Francisco waterfront bar in and out of which characters drift while the bartender watches some of the regulars interact with the other customers. An eccentric rich man befriends a two-dollar whore and encourages her and his slow friend to fall in love. When a police detective picks on the whore, we expect the rich man or her new lover to retaliate, but instead the cop is killed by Kit Carson, a talkative old Indian fighter. The whore with a heart of gold is straight from Bret Harte; and once one notices that resemblance, it becomes clear that many of the other characters also have Hartesian prototypes. The regulars in the bar share a feeling of community and camaraderie that is similar to the spirit evinced by some of the groups and towns in Hartes stories. Although better known than Riggs, Saroyan was not nearly so good a playwright as his Oklahoma contemporary, and the critical consensus holds that Saroyans later dramas did not match the freshness and spontaneity of his two 1939 plays. For example, Loves Old Sweet Song (1940), Saroyans spoof of John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath, suffers from a plot that was 13 badly neglected. Ironically, Steinbeck wrote a play, Of Mice and Men (1937), that is much better than any of Saroyans dramas. Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men, The Moon Is Down (1942), and Burning Bright (1950) as playnovelettes, novel[s] which can be played, as he defined them. The only one of these works that has a western setting, Of Mice and Men is a major work of western American literature. Although George and Lennies dream of owning their own ranch is crushed, Steinbeck shows us how powerful and sustaining that dream can be. As Malcolm Goldstein has noted, Steinbeck is reluctant to point a moral by directly linking the defeat of the pair to the 214
national economic situation; rather than do so, he is content to create a situation in which the dual protagonists are victims of their own skewed psychological structures. Yet darting through their story are insights into 14 the workers life. . . . In contrast to Steinbeck and Riggs, western dramatists of the 1940s showed scenes of real life only to suggest that it can be escaped through fantasy. Robert Finchs Plays of the American West (1947) are short dramas in most of which a happy resolution is achieved when the protagonist begins to live in an imaginary world that is an escape from the harsh reality of the actual and inhospitable West. Mary Chases Harvey (1944), the best and most widely known of her works, is like Finchs plays in that it suggests that fantasy is often preferable to reality. Although Chase is a long-time resident of Denver and although Harvey is set in a city in the Far West, there is little that marks her play as western. A theatrical development of the 1940s that reached full bloom in the next decade was the production of hit musicals on western themes. Rodgers and Hammersteins Oklahoma ! (1943) is the best known of these, but many of the western musicals that followed were almost as popular: Irving Berlins Annie Get Your Gun (1946); Lerner and Loewes Paint Your Wagon (1952); the film musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954); Harold Romes Destry Rides Again (1959); Rodgers and Hammersteins Flower Drum Song (1959); and Meredith Willsons The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960). As drama, the musicals differ from earlier melodramas only in the addition of songs, a few more realistic details, and an unbounded optimism that is never disappointed by an unresolved conflict. In the world of the western musicals, the West becomes a kind of vast Disneyland and life there is a game with a predictable happy ending. Without any of the saccharine optimism of the musicals, the plays of William Inge are studies in midwestern despair and psychological turmoil. Yet four of Inges plays were Broadway hits during the 1950s, bringing him fame and fortune: Come Back, Little Sheba (1950)) about an alcoholic chiropractor who had wanted to be a doctor, and his childless wife whose life is empty; Picnic (1953; Pulitzer Prize), about a young drifter, Hal, whose love affair with a small-town girl leads to his expulsion from the town; Bus Stop (1955), about some passengers whose forced stay in a small-town cafe leads to a successful romance for a Montana cowboy and a nightclub singer but only to more loneliness for others; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), which is set in a small Oklahoma town of the 1920s and which shows the family struggles of a cowboy turned harness salesman. Although popular and often praised, Inges plays have also been strongly criticized. Gerald Weales, for example, finds the talk in an Inge play dull and whining: The naturalistic tradition seems to have spawned a host of 215
dull people who are bromidic and repetitive, inarticulate except at those moments of high whine when they grind out their tales of woe; Inges plays 15 have their quota of such characters. Weales seems to assume that what we know about a character is only what that character explicitly tells us, but some recent criticism contends that the dialogue in an Inge play implicitly reveals truths about the characters deeper than any in their explicit statements. Critics such as R. Baird Shuman have pointed out that many of Inges characters must humble themselves and must accept a more realistic view of life before they can find any sort of happiness. Inge shows that it is because of social pressures and psychological forces that they come to realize what they must do. In some of his plays, the pressures take the form of ancient social patterns. According to Philip M. Armato, Picnic can be viewed as an incisive study of modern scapegoat ritual. . . . Inge creates in Hal a victim for our times. Hal is polluted by the sins of the townspeople which are laid upon his head through the psychological device of projection. . . . Instead of punishing themselves for their own transgressions, the townspeople 16 punish Hal Inges plays show not only the universal problems of small-town life but also the special pressures that plague the West because the frontier is gone. In The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Rubin expresses well the theme of most of Inges plays: Sometimes I wonder if its not a lot easier to pioneer a country than it is to settle down in it. Most of Inges characters cannot settle down, because they are lonely, insecure, and bored. Nothing in their empty lives substitutes for the sense of purpose and the challenges that filled the lives of the pioneers. Like the characters in many post- World War II western novels, Inges characters struggle on a frontier within themselves. Before they can find happiness they must come to see that, as Hegel put it, Freedom is the recognition of necessity. Inge achieved what Lynn Riggs had never been lucky enough to enjoy: success on Broadway. But western American dramatists had to wait until the 1970s before they could receive national acclaim regardless of whether Broadway producers cared for their work. By the end of the 1950s, a number of outstanding western dramas had been written, but no one had published a volume of Great Plays of the American West, probably because the interest in regional culture that had peaked in the 1930s had waned by then and because in the West the short story and the novel had such strong, coherent traditions that few critics thought much of other genres. Perhaps, too, the inferior works of the formative periodthe pro- and anti-Mormon dramas and the melodramasdiscouraged readers from pursuing any further a study of western drama. Whatever the reasons for their neglect, the western plays of William Vaughn Moody, Sidney Howard, Lynn Riggs, William Saroyan, 216
John Steinbeck, and William Inge deserve our attention now. A tradition of western drama does exist; and its sustained study could be a positive cultural force, not only because the plays can entertain us, but also because they can give us a clearer view of ourselves.
JAMES H. MAGUIRE , Boise
State University
Notes
Lael J. Woodbury, Mormonism and the Commercial Theatre, Brigham Young University Studies 12 (1972): 23839. 2. Paul T. Nolan, John Wallace Crawford, Twaynes United States Authors Series, No. 378 (Boston: Twayne, 1981), p. 34. 3. Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years of American Drama, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982), p. 136. 4. Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama: From the Civil War to the Present (New York: Crofts, 1936), p. 192. Martin Halpern, William Vaughn Moody, Twaynes United States Authors Se5. ries, No. 64 (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 130. 6. Maurice F. Brown, Estranging Dawn: The Life and Works of William Vaughn Moody (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), p. 214. 7 Wilson, p. 242. 8 Joseph Wood Krutch, The American Drama Since 1918: An lnformal History (New York: Braziller, 1957), p. 53. 9 Barrett H. Clark, An Hour of American Drama (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1930), p. 81. 10. W. David Sievers, Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama (New York: Cooper Square, 1970), p. 95. 11. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribners, 1953), pp. 30607. 12. Alfred S. Shivers, Maxwell Anderson, Twaynes United States Authors Series, No. 279 (New York: Twayne, 1976), p. 30. 1.
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A Literary History of the American West 13. Howard R. Floan, William Saroyan, Twaynes United States Authors Series, No. 100 (New York: Twayne, 1966), pp. 10809. 14. Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage: American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 372. 15. Gerald Weales, American Drama Since World War II (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 44. 16. Philip M. Armato, The Bum as Scapegoat in William Inges Picnic , Western American Literature 10 (1976): 275.
Primary Sources Conkle, Ellsworth Prouty. 200 Were Chosen. New York: French, 1937. Delano, Alonzo. A Live Woman in the Mines: Or, Pike County Ahead! New York: French, 1857. Howard, Sidney. They Knew What They Wanted. New York: French, 1925. Inge, William. Four Plays. (Includes Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.) New York: Random House, 1958. Moody, William Vaughn. The Great Divide. New York: Macmillan, 1909. Riggs, Lynn. Big Lake. New York: French, 1927. . Green Grow the Lilacs. New York: French, 1931. . Roadside: Or, Borned in Texas. New York: French, 1930. . Two Oklahoma Plays. (Includes A Lantern to See By and Sumpn Like Wings. ) New York: French, 1928. Saroyan, William. Three Plays: My Hearts in the Highlands; The Time of Your Life; Loves Old Sweet Song. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939. Sherwood, Robert E. The Petrified Forest. New York: Scribners, 1935. Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: Covici, Friede, 1937. Secondary Sources Brown, Maurice F. Estranging Dawn: The Life and Works of William Vaughn Moody. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Detailed biography related to the works. Clark, Barrett H. An Hour of American Drama. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1930. Has brief sections on Sidney Howard, E. P. Conkle, Virgil Geddes, and Lynn Riggs. Dusenberry, Winifred L. The Theme of Loneliness in Modern American Drama. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1960. Discusses plays by Sherwood and Inge. Goldstein, Malcolm. The Political Stage: American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Thorough analysis of drama from 1920 to 1940 in terms of government activity and politics. Herron, Ima Honaker. The Small Town in American Drama. Dallas: Southern Metho-
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dist University Press, 1969. Biographical details about western dramatists, plot summaries, and evaluations of plays, from Gold Rush days to the 1960s. Indispensable for a study of western drama. Hughes, Glenn. A History of the American Theatre, 17001950. London: French, 1951. Theatrical history by a western playwright who was also a teacher of playwrights. Krutch, Joseph Wood. The American Drama Since 1918: An Informal History. New York: Braziller, 1957. Discusses, among others, Howard, Sherwood, Saroyan, and Steinbeck. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of the American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War. 2nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943. . A History of the American Drama: From the Civil War to the Present. New York: Crofts, 1936. Quinn is a gold mine of informationhe gives play summaries, bibliographies, and biographical informationbut his high praise of some nineteenth-century dramas now seems overdone. Contains information about many dramas that exist only in manuscript form, are out of print, or otherwise difficult to obtain. Sievers, W. David. Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama. New York: Cooper Square, 1970. Examines the influence of theories of psychology on twentieth-century drama, including comments on plays by Howard, Anderson, Sherwood, Totheroh, Riggs, Inge, Chase, and Foote. Sper, Felix. From Native Roots: A Panorama of Our Regional Drama. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1948. A survey by western sub-regions, providing plot summaries, bibliographies, and information about regional theatre programs. Weales, Gerald. American Drama Since World War II. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962. Sometimes harsh, but thought-provoking. Wilson, Garff B. Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982. An adequate introduction for beginning students. Standard Sources The Twaynes United States Authors Series includes works on the following authors of western plays: O. W. Frost, Joaquin Miller, No. 119 (1967); Paul T. Nolan, John Wallace Crawford, No. 378 (1981); Martin Halpern, William Vaughn Moody, No. 64 (1964); Earle Labor, Jack London, No. 230 (1974); T. M. Pearce, Mary Austin, No. 92 (1965); Sidney Howard White, Sidney Howard, No. 288 (1977); Warren French, John Steinbeck, No. 2, 2nd ed. (1977); R. Baird Shuman, Robert E. Sherwood, No. 58 (1964); Howard R. Floan, William Saroyan, No. 100 (1966); and R. Baird Shuman, William Inge, No. 95 (1965). The Steck-Vaughn Southwest Writers Series includes pamphlets on the following authors of western plays: Jo W. Lyday, Mary Austin, No. 16 (1968) and Thomas A. Erhard, Lynn Riggs, No. 29 (1970). See also the following pamphlet in the Boise State University Western Writers Series: Benjamin S. Lawson, Joaquin Miller, No. 43 (1980).
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A Literary History of the American West Advanced Study See James H. Maguire, A Bibliography of Western American Drama, Western American Literature 14 (August 1979): 14963, for a listing of published plays about the American West and for a checklist of some secondary materials. By no means exhaustive, this bibliography stands in need of corrections and additions; but it includes some otherwise relatively inaccessible information. Arthur Hobson Quinns A History of the American Drama (1936; 1943) contains information about the many western American dramas that exist only in manuscript form and the many others that have long been out of print and are difficult to obtain. Another source of information about unpublished western plays is the government document entitled Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States: 18701916. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918.
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The Nature Essay in the West

HE FUNCTION of the nature essayist, as Henry Beston pointed out 1 some forty years ago, is like that of the poet. Both attempt to reforge a fundamental continuity between inner and outer, so that for the reader the world is alive again, seen precisely for what it is, and the mind is alive to it. To have known the beauty of the world, seen with unclouded eyes the sheer wonder of a clear river or a mesa or a cottonwood tree, is to be in some sense and for that time, psychologically whole. The deepest attraction of the nature essay, probably, is this basic rightness of gestalt. Good nature writing is a recapturing of the childs world, the world before fragmentation, the world as poets and artists can see it. The best nature writing has this, and has also the reliability of science, for a true completeness must, logically, include the objective aspect of mind as well. In the West, the nature essay also reflects the European and eastern newcomers drive to be at home in a new land: first to explore it, to list its ingredients and learn its history, then to settle in it, finally to cherish and defend it. For several decades beginning with Lewis and Clark, western nature writing was done by travelers, and by necessity took the form of brief sketches within journal-like narratives. Perhaps its chief quality or charm, at this stage, is the wonder of newness as the writer, far from what he regarded as civilization, burst upon the vast freedom of the prairies or was awed by the abundance of animal life or the wild strangeness of distant, snow-draped mountains floating above the heat waves of summer. By definition, an explorer is not at home, and it is not surprising that the writing of most early observers lacks some of the closeness and thoroughness which distinguishes the best of the genre, and which seems to come from a true immersion in an environment. Nevertheless, even in the early years, there are occasional passages which show that the writer was deeply moved by the wildernessMeriwether Lewis looking down from a hilltop on the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri, or Prince Maximilian silently descending the Missouri at night, almost thirty years later, listening to the elk and the wolves on shore, and the buffalo thrashing their way across the river. These are some of the great moments of newness. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the first freshness was gone. At this point, with the work of a few important writers, chief among them John Muir and Mary Austin, the western nature essay took a turn onto a more profound level. Muir and Austin, and others, spent the requisite time
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to become dwellers, as opposed to travelers, and the deep perception of place they developed was significant not only for the nature essay, but perhaps also for the general maturation of western regional literature. With them, the post-frontier era begins. They came to believe that the frontier challenge was not of physical movement to a new place, but of the enlargement of understanding. The secret of learning the mesa life, Austin 2 wrote, is to sit still, and to sit still, and to keep on sitting still. In our own time, a central concern of nature essayists is the shrinking of the wild biosphere as the technosphere expands. It is now possible that Thoreaus question, What would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? could become more than a rhetorical one. Wilderness becomes increasingly rare. For western nature writers in the twentieth centuryAldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Edward Abbey, to cite just three examplesthe old American dialectic of the wild and the civilized has seemingly worked its way into the endgame, with the wild now disappearing so rapidly, so irrevocably, that the fear arises we might be undoing not just wilderness but ourselves as well. The pockets of wild land and the few remaining undammed rivers become powerful in the literature, as settings for introspection about our species and as examples of natural, planetary health.
I. FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The classics of nature writing, beginning with the first great work of the modem era, Gilbert Whites The Natural History of Selborne (1789), and including such later books as Henry David Thoreaus Walden (1854), John Muirs The Mountains of California (1894), Mary Austins The Land of Little Rain (1903), Henry Bestons The Outermost House (1928), Joseph Wood Krutchs The Voice of the Desert (1954), and Edward Abbeys Desert Solitaire (1968), are works of a settled, home-knowing and home-loving consciousness. Place, after all, is a logical center and starting point: from a home ground one may venture thoughts on the human conditionas all of the major nature writers doin terms of a solidly naturalistic perspective (the cycle of the four seasons being the most common reference and pattern for the writing), and from a practical involvement with the earth. The best nature writers are connected in this way; they have, as it were, a bit of the home place under their fingernails. In the early decades of nature writing about the West, we do not often find the familiarized expression of the placed. On the other hand, we would be remiss to ignore the genuine excitement of space and wildness the West offered, once upon a time. Among the details of travel and food-getting leaps up the occasional great moment:
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THE NATURE ESSAY IN THE WEST
Thursday April 25th, 1805 [Lewis] . . . our rout lay along the foot of the river hills. when we had proceeded about four miles, I ascended the hills from whence I had a most pleasing view of the country, particularly of the wide and fertile vallies formed by the missouri and the yellowstone rivers, which occasionally unmasked by the wood on their borders disclose their meanderings for many miles in their passage through these delightfull tracts of country. I could not discover the junction of the rivers immediately, they being concealed by the wood; however, sensible that it could not be distant I determined to encamp on the bank of the Yellow stone river which made its appearance about 2 miles South of me. the whol face of the country was covered with herds of Buffaloe, Elk & Antelopes; deer are also abundant, but keep themselves more concealed in the woodland. the buffaloe Elk and Antelope are so gentle that we pass near them while feeding, without appearing to excite any alarm among them; and when we attract their attention, they frequently 3 approach us more nearly to discover what we are. . . . This is a journal entry by a man traveling with a purpose, with several purposes in fact, and it was not meant as literature; but there is no mistaking the Adamic undercurrent, the consciousness of Meriwether Lewis that he was indeed in a singular, privileged vanguard. The records of the travels of Thomas Nuttall, who made three explorations into the West in 1811, 1819, and 1834, suggest a more deliberate approach to the essay form and to literature. In Nuttalls writings about the West, which appear in scattered paragraphs in his later ornithological and botanical works and most conspicuously in A Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory, During the Year 1819, there is a more informed documentation of natural history than was possible for Lewis, and in addition more reflection in the classic manner of the personal essay. Nuttall reveals his love of nature, and a scheme of values in which geology and wild flora and fauna seem of considerably greater interest than detail of travel and camp, and he also essays general comments on the relationship of civilization and wilderness, somewhat after the manner of Crvecoeur, so that what emerges from his journals and his more formal writings is something close to a literary persona. Nuttall, who was born in England in 1786 and died there in 1859, was one of the most thorough of the early generalists in American natural history. His Genera of North American Plants (1818) and A Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada (1832) were authoritative for their time, and were in heavy use throughout the nineteenth centurythe bird
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book (Nuttall, as it was familiarly known) into the twentieth. Despite Washington Irvings characterization of him as absent-minded (he went groping and stumbling along among the wilderness of sweets, forgetful of everything but his immediate pursuit, Irving said of Nuttalls accompani4 ment of the Astorians in 1811), it is clear that Nuttall was, in another sense, absolutely present. His success as a collector and taxonomist suggests the point, and his writings go far to prove it. Unfortunately, we have no record of his trip partway with the Astorians, and his 1834 journal has also been lost, but we do have an account of his middle, southwestern excursion. In 1819, Nuttall traveled up the Arkansas River into what is now Oklahoma, and after passing through seemingly endless climax forest along the lower portions of the river, came finally into higher and more open country. We see him here at the prime moment for the eastern traveler. He immediately fell to studying the prairie vegetation, in which he delighted wholeheartedly. The surface of these woodless expanses was gently undulated, and thickly covered with grass knee high, even to the summits of the hills. . . . The flowers, which beautify them at this season of natures vigour, communicated all the appearance of a magnificent garden, fantastically decked with innumerable flowers of the 5 most splendid hues. In common with nearly all travelers to the frontier, up to the present, the naturalist commented on the state of civilization of the few settlers in the area, as if the very dominance and beauty of the wild called forth cultural generalizations. It was a new world, fresh, and human activity stood freshly revealed. The settlers did not impress Nuttall favorably. It is to be regretted that the widely scattered state of the population in this territory, is but too favorable to the spread of ignorance and barbarism. . . . the rising generation are growing up in mental darkness, like the French hunters who have preceded them, and who have almost forgot that they appertain to the civi6 lized world. The European model was Nuttalls apparent standard, for he referred to wilderness as a dead solemnity, where the human voice is never heard to echo, where not even ruins of the humblest kind recal [sic] its history 7 to mind, or prove the past dominion of man. But the wilderness was where the new plants and birds were, and it was to wilderness that Nuttall returned again and again. In 1834 he resigned his position at Harvard to travel once more to the West, this time with Nathaniel Wyeth, the Cambridge merchant who designed to enter the fur 224
trade, and with a young Philadelphia ornithologist, John Kirk Townsend. The party went all the way to the Pacific, and Nuttall continued by ship to Hawaii, always and indefatigably in search of new plants. The West was Nuttalls Eden, where he could roam free and give names to almost everything before him; he left it and America with a deep sense of loss, recorded in his Preface to Michauxs North American Sylva in 1841: . . . and I must now bid a long adieu to the New World, its sylvan scenes, its mountains, wilds, and plains; and henceforth, in the evening of my career, I re8 turn, almost an exile, to the land of my nativity. In his supplements to the Sylva, a work first published in 18101813 and considerably enlarged by Nuttall for a new edition in 1841, the naturalist occasionally departs from botanical description to engage in short narratives about his own experiences with western trees. His aesthetic joy is evident and unabashed, leading his science writing into the realm of the literary essay: As we sailed along the smooth bosom of these extensive streams [the deep Wahlamet and the wide Oregon], for many miles we never lost sight of the long-leaved Willow, which seemed to dispute the domain of the sweeping flood, fringing the banks of the streams and concealing the marshes entirely from view; at every instant, when touched by the breeze, displaying the contrasted surface of their leaves, above of a deep and lucid green, beneath the bluish-white of silver: the whole scene, reflected by the water and in constant motion, presented a silent picture of 9 exquisite beauty. John Kirk Townsend, Nuttalls companion on the 1834 journey, left a record which has been called the most readable and exciting account ever written of the continental crossing. First published in 1839, the Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains, to the Columbia River, and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chili, &c. is certainly readablein part because Townsend, a member of a prominent Philadelphia family, wrote an urbane, faintly amused, often more than faintly scornful, prose which interests the reader as much in the writers character as in the scenes portrayed. Townsend is an early specimen of the tourist. His account contains short descriptions of camas bulbs and chokecherries, among the somewhat scanty natural history references, but this travelers attention seems to have been mainly on topography-in-general and on the details and stories of camp life. He is an example of the writer on the move. However, there was an occasion when Townsend took a leisurely look around himselfhe was ill, and was offended by the brawling of the trappers at a rendezvous, and so stayed apartand the result is a pleasant Rocky Mountain pastoral scene: 225
30th. Our camp here is the most lovely one in every respect, and as several days have elapsed since we came, and I am convalescent, I can roam about the country a little and enjoy it. The pasture is rich and very abundant, and it does our hearts good to witness the satisfaction and comfort of our poor jaded horses. Our tents are pitched in a pretty little valley or indentation in the plain, surrounded on all sides by low bluffs of yellow clay. Near us flows the clear deep water of the Sidkadee [Green River], and beyond, on every side, is a wide and level prairie, interrupted only by some gigantic peaks of mountains and conical butes [sic] in the 11 distance. One early naturalist whose writing seems to reflect a more spirited engagement with the wilderness was Alexander Philip Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied, a small principality on the Rhine. Maximilian not only wintered-over in the wilderness, a distinctive accomplishment according to the measurement of frontier veterans, but he also paid attention to the sounds and smells of the wild and to the complex life of Indian encampments, so that his account, Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832 1834, is one of the richest and most precise of early travel documents. During his young manhood in the Prussian army (he fought in the Napoleonic Wars, rose to the rank of major, and was decorated with the Iron Cross), Maximilian had become intensely interested in natural history, and had pursued his studies in the Amazon jungles for three years ( 18151817) after leaving the military. He collected and named flora and fauna, and made the first detailed studies of native tribes in the Amazon Basin. Later, after identifying and arranging his South American collections and after corresponding with Thomas Say, the American entomologist who had accompanied the Long expedition to the front range of the Rockies in 18191820, Prince Max determined to extend his nature studies to North America. In April, 1833, he set out by steamboat from St. Louis, bound for the upper Missouri, eager to see the primitive part of America. His narrative, in common with others of this early period, is largely concerned with travel, but Maximilian seemed to have a more relaxed approach than most-perhaps because he traveled with a manservantand there are numerous occasions when he simply sat still and watched. I often passed my time in the lofty and shady forest which extended beyond the willow thickets on the banks, at the border of the open prairie. Sitting on an old trunk, in the cool shade, I could observe at leisure the surrounding scene. I saw the turkey buzzards, that hovered above the hills, contending against the high wind, while a couple of falcons frequently made a stoop at 226
them, doubtless to defend their nest. A couple of ravens likewise flew about them. The red-eyed finch, the beautiful Sylvia aestiva, the Sylvia striata, and the wren, flew around me, the latter singing 12 very prettily. When, in the fall of 1833, he made the turn at Fort Union and started back down the Missouri, Maximilian was deeply impressed by the abundance of wildlife: Buffaloes and elks had crossed the river before us, and we heard the noise they made in the water at a considerable distance. The island was covered with lofty trees, and in many places, with tall plants, especially artemisia, but had many grassy and open spots, and we found on it five buffaloes, and several troops of elks and Virginian deer. A white wolf looked at us from the opposite bank, 13 and the great cranes flew slowly and heavily before us. Appended to his travel narrative, the German prince included some two hundred fifty pages of detailed observations on the Indian life he had seen and to some degree taken part in, covering food, clothing, games, rituals, language (including sign language), stories, and social relations; the contrast with Townsend, who at one point simply said of an Indian village, I scarcely know how to commence a description of the tout en semble of the camp, or to frame a sentence which will give an adequate idea of the ex14 treme filth, and most horrific nastiness of the whole vicinity, is instructive. Where Townsend was put off, Maximilian sat down comfortably in a Sioux tipi, hesitated not to accept the proffered dish of freshly cooked dog, and pronounced it excellent. Among the writings of mountain men, Osborne Russells Journal of a Trapper, which he readied for publication in 1848, is a remarkable document. Its descriptions of place are innocently heartfelt, and the appended essays on animals and Indian tribes of the Rocky Mountains are enlivened by a quaint, untutored, workmanlike approach. Though Russell was modest about his own writing, and felt that he was trespassing on poets territory when he attempted to describe the mountain wilderness, it is clear that he himself had the poetic spirit. In his second summer in the West (1835), he wandered into the Lamar River valley in what is now Yellowstone National Park, and formed an immediate attachment to that beautiful area, calling it Secluded Valley. I almost wished I could spend the remainder of my days 15 in a place like this, he wrote. He returned to the Lamar several times during his years as a trapper, often attempting to describe the peculiar hold the landscape had upon him. Not a tourist but a working trapper, and often in danger, Russell nevertheless was keenly sensitive to the fact that in wilderness lay a special power. 227
There is something in the wild romantic scenery of this valley which I cannot nor will I, attempt to describe but the impressions made upon my mind while gazing from a high eminence on the surrounding landscape one evening as the sun was gently gliding behind the western mountain and casting its gigantic shadows across the vale were such as time can never efface from my 16 memory. . . . This trapper went out of his way to engage the wilderness at its most potent. In the depth of winter, 1841, having stayed on in the mountains after the last rendezvous had been held and the beaver business had declined, Russell rode out from the Indian camp he had been staying in, just east of the Great Salt Lake. The 3d day of Feby. I took a trip up the mountain to hunt Sheep I ascended a spur with my horse sometimes riding and then walking until near the top where I found a level bench where the wind had blown the snow off. . . . . . . . the air was calm serene and cold and the stars shone with an uncommon brightness after sleeping till about Midnight I arose and renewed my fire My horse was continually walking backwards and forwards to keep from freezing I was upwards of 6,000 ft above the level of the lake, below me was a dark abyss silent as the night of Death I set and smoked my pipe for about an hour and then laid down and slept until near daylightMy Chief object in Sleeping at this place was to take a view of the lake when the Sun arose in 17 the morning. Shortly after the mountain mans day had faded began the era of the government surveyor. Well provisioned and equipped for the most part, working as officials on a mission, the surveyors of the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century corrected and completed the mapping of the West, made it known to all through their reports, and served thus to edge the country in the mind out of the unknown and mythic, toward the account books. However, the writing of some of these men-John Charles Frmont, Howard Stansbury, William Henry Brewer, Clarence King, and especially Clarence E. Duttonis nowhere near as dry as their assigned work might suggest. Their reports are informed with excellent geological understanding and often ecological insight. The immensity of the West, and the great views from high points necessary for mapping, and the sheer exhilaration of contact with wilderness, all worked to bring their documents alive. Some of the writing is very good indeed. 228
Frmont ( 18131890), who in 1842 mapped the Oregon Trail through South Pass in minute detail and whose later expeditions likewise took on historical and political importance, had an enjoyment of mountain wilderness, at least in its summer season, which considerably brightens his journal report. The Wind River range, which he first visited in August of 1842, seemed to speak to him in terms quite other than the march-tempo tunes of manifest destiny, future railroads, and future mines which he heard nearly everywhere else in the ten or fifteen thousand miles of western travel covered by his expeditions. Here in the mountains he came closest to writing simply of nature as nature. It is as if the Wind Rivers stunned him into a purely aesthetic response. It is not by the splendor of far-off views, which have lent such a glory to the Alps, that these impress the mind; but by a gigantic disorder of enormous masses, and a savage sublimity of naked rock, in wonderful contrast with innumerable green spots of rich 18 floral beauty, shut up in their stern recesses. Later, describing a climb to the summit of the range, he commented that a stillness the most profound and a terrible solitude forced themselves con19 stantly on the mind as the great features of the place. There was no conceivable use for these gigantic mountains, no obvious material reason for people to be there. Captain Frmont went on, of course, to California and a gold rush fortune, a senatorship, even the Republican nomination for President; yet his reports, and his unfinished Memoirs of My Life (1887) often reflect a kind of wistfulness in their descriptions of place, as if Frmont did in fact, at least half-consciously, surmise what he was leaving behind. Howard Stansbury (18061863), who as a Captain in the Topographical Engineers made a hardship-plagued survey of the Great Salt Lake and its surrounding desert in 1849, wrote a straightforward account of the area which presents its ruggedness clearly. But Stansbury too, perhaps to a greater degree than Frmont, was awake to wild beauty. In Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah (1852), describing a desert where he and his men had to carry water for their mules (rationing them to two pints per day), and where their own survival was very much in question, he calls 20 the area a landscape full of wild and peculiar beauty. In the course of setting up triangulation points, the party came upon the pelican colonies of Gunnison Island in the Great Salt Lake, and Stansburys description of the scene reveals a lively aesthetic awareness: The whole neck and the shores of both of the little bays were occupied by immense flocks of pelicans and gulls, disturbed now for the first time, probably, by the intrusion of man. They literally
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darkened the air as they rose upon the wing, and, hovering over our heads, caused the surrounding rocks to re-echo with their discordant screams. The ground was thickly strewn with their nests, of which there must have been some thousands. Numerous young, unfledged pelicans, were found in the nests on the ground, and hundreds half-grown, huddled together in groups near the water, while the old ones retired to a long line of sand-beach on the southern side of the bay, where they stood drawn up, like Prussian soldiers, in ranks three or four deep, for hours together, appar21 ently without motion. Stansburys appreciation for the deserttypically the least hospitable of environments, a kind of test for the nature lovercomes through his account despite his comments on its difficulty. What called forth his best writingeven extending him to metaphor at timeswas the experience of absolute space and starkness in the reaches of the Great Basin, where life forms were sharply outlined and precious. In 1860, the State Legislature of California sponsored what it hoped 22 would be an accurate and complete Geological Survey of the State. Taking part in this significant undertaking were two men whose writings have lasted into our time, William Henry Brewer (18281910) and Clarence King (18421901). Both were graduates of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, capable wilderness travelers in the West, and competent, not to say graceful, writers, with King decidedly the more literary of the two. Brewer, who had grown up on a farm in upstate New York, maintained a commonsensical outlook and a practical realism in the many letters he sent home from the California survey, letters gathered into a continuous account a century later; King, in his best-known and most consciously artistic work, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872), used some of the survey experiences as a starting point only, to create a classic series of sketches and adventures. In him, we see the first literary man in the history of the western nature essay. Brewers charm as a writer is that of the ordinary man given heavy responsibilities and difficulties, who meets these and has time and mind left over for appreciating beauty. He climbed mountains for the view as much as for survey work, and seemed to delight in recording what lay below. From a hill at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, he wrote, The valley looked like a map, and the head of the bay, with its swamps intersected and cut up with winding streams and bayous crossing and winding in every direction, 23 made by far the prettiest arabesque picture of the kind I have ever seen. On one memorably clear day, from the summit of Mount Diablo, Brewer was able to see, he said, forty thousand square miles, from the Pacific to the 230
Sierra Nevada. What a grand sight ! he exclaimed, in typically unembellished enthusiasm. As the Survey progressed, Brewer became fit and hardy, and relished the outdoor life. He wrote several times that he liked camp life best, and never, whatever the weather, caught a cold in the wilderness. But Brewer, although it has been said that his writings must . . . be considered the founding statement of California mountaineering,24 does not transmute wilderness fitness into philosophy. His contribution to the western nature essay is more in the line of topographical realism and precision. Clarence King was a writerat the very least we can say he was a would-be writera fact immediately apparent as one turns from other surveyors reports to the opening of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada The western margin of this continent is built of a succession of mountain chains folded in broad corrugations, like waves of stone upon whose seaward base 25 beat the mild small breakers of the Pacific. With an amazingly comprehensive grasp of geological history as expressed in present landforms, King laid out for his readers a view of the Westin Mountaineering and later in Systematic Geology (1878), his major contribution to the Fortieth Parallel Surveywhich would not be surpassed until the photographs from space in the 1960s. King was also an excellent storyteller, whose account in Mountaineering departed from the daily journal record to create incident and character in almost novelistic fashion. No one before King, in the western travel essay, had this sort of range. If he had brought his gifts to maturity, King might have been a major western writer. Even so, his contribution is important. The distinctive finish he added to survey notes may be seen by comparing an account of his with one of Brewers, of the same view in the Kings River Canyon district of the Sierra Nevada. Brewer says, in his serviceable way, The rocks are granite, very light-colored, the soil light-gray granite sand. Here and there are granite knobs or domes, their sides covered with loose angular bowlders, among which grow bushes, or here and there a tree. Sometimes there are great slopes of granite, almost destitute of soil, with only an occasional bush or tree that gets a rooting in some crevice. Behind all this rise the sharp peaks of the crest, bare and desolate, streaked with snow; and, since the storms, often great banks of clouds curl around 26 their summits. King attempts to express the scene as an involving, rhythmic pattern: I believe no one can study from an elevated lookout the length and depth of one of these great Sierra caons without ask-
231
ing himself some profound geological questions. Your eyes range along one or the other wall. The average descent is immensely steep. Here and there side ravines break down the rim in deep lateral gorges. Again, the wall advances in sharp, salient precipices, rising two or three thousand feet, sheer and naked, with all the air of a recent fracture. At times the two walls approach each other, standing in perpendicular gateways. Toward the summits the caon grows, perhaps, a little broader, and more and more prominent lateral ravines open into it, until at last it receives the snow drainage of the summit, which descends through broad, rounded amphitheatres, separated from each other by sharp, cas27 tellated snow-clad ridges. The difference is small, perhaps, in point of imagery or diction, but the sense of organization is telling. If King, writing with both geological insight and artistic care for leading the eye, helped to bring the West into sharper focus, he did not venture into a philosophy of nature or wilderness in any overt way, not even as far as the sober Brewer had. There are hints in Kingspeaking of the forest belt of the Sierra, he said, Lifted above the bustling industry of the plains and the melodramatic mining theatre of the foot-hills, it has a grand, silent life 28 of its own, refreshing to contemplate even from a hundred miles away but only hints. Kings career led him elsewhere. Perhaps the finest of the surveyors, as a writer, was Clarence Dutton (18411912), whose work has even been said to belong properly with that 29 of Thoreau, Burroughs, Muir. . . . As a captain in the U.S. Army, Dutton spent parts of the years 1875 through 1881 studying the geology of the Four Corners region of the Southwest, and described his findings in four major works: Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah (1880), The Physical Geology of the Grand Caon (1882), Tertiary History of the Grand Caon District (1882), a book which has recently been reprinted and which is perhaps the climax to surveyors prose, and finally, Mount Taylor and the Zuni Plateau (1885). Dutton had the large grasp of King, as regards landforms and the immensities of geologic time, and a remarkably lucid style, complemented in Tertiary History by the equally remarkable artwork of William H. Holmes. The plateau and canyon country stands forth, as it were, in the depth-revealing light of late afternoon in Duttons works, and although he did not become a dweller, and thus perhaps did not penetrate so deeply into the place-mind as Thoreau, say, or Muir, he is nevertheless a consummate tour guide. He is a master of the authoritative overview which yet has a poetic tone, for example in introducing a mountain range in south-central Utah: The Tushar is also a composite structure, its northern half being a
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wild bristling cordillera of grand dimensions and altitudes, crowned with 30 snowy peaks, while the southern half is conspicuously tabular. In Tertiary History, Dutton raises an epistemological and aesthetic point which, in the works of subsequent writers about western wilderness, has become an important theme: that which is totally wild cannot be easily assimilated into the prepared categories of civilized perception. In fact, it will be distorted by them. A new apprehension is called for, and this seems not to be a simple acquisition but something which must be slowly lived into. Speaking of the Grand Canyons inner gorge, Dutton wrote, Forms so new to the culture of civilized races and so strongly contrasted with those which have been the ideals of thirty generations of white men cannot indeed be appreciated after the study of 31 a single hour or day. In accordance with this thought, Duttons mode of presentation was an attempt at complete realismescaping, or trying to escape, those received conventions of thirty generations. There is no need, as we look upon them [the Vermilion Cliffs], of fancy to heighten the picture, nor of metaphor to present it. The simple truth is quite enough. I never before had a realizing sense of a cliff 1,800 to 2,000 feet high. I think I have a definite and 32 abiding one at present. Dutton did not always abide by these strictures, but the stated respect for terrain-as-it-is reveals a certain emotional dedication; only a perfect purity on the part of the observer, a non-embellishing expression, could do justice to the unique landscape. It is clear that Dutton felt such a mission, though he found it impossible to fulfill. He avoided any explicit comments in the area of the dialectic which has, from the beginnings of American literature, been suggested by the opposition of civilization and wildernessthere was, after all, perhaps little place for this in a government report. But his statements in favor of directness and accuracy show that he was aroused by the incomparable wilderness of the canyon country, and inspired to a kind of purgation of motive and expression. The main thing was to see clearly. Duttons degree of success can be suggested only by samples of a certain length. We need to be with this observer for several hours at least, to appreciate his patience and attentiveness. Perhaps an afternoon and evening watching the Vermilion Cliffs will serve as an example. In the bright light, depth and proportion are flattened. But as the sun declines there comes a revival. The half-tones at length appear, bringing into relief the component masses; 233
the amphitheaters recede into suggestive distances; the salients silently advance toward us; the distorted lines range themselves into true perspective; the deformed curves come back to their proper sweep; the angles grow clean and sharp; and the whole cliff arouses from lethargy and erects itself in grandeur and power as if conscious of its own majesty. Back also come the colors, and as the sun is about to sink they glow with an intense orange vermilion that seems to be an intrinsic luster emanating from the 33 rocks themselves.
II. A CLOSER LOOK
With Clarence Dutton, the western nature essay may be said to have reached the upper limit of the pictorial. The West was being described to visual near-perfection. While it is true that a certain tactile sensitivity must be among the powers of a landscape-describer, it seems clear that Dutton, King, Brewer, Stansbury, and Frmont, along with the other writers discussed to this point (with the partial exceptions of Osborne Russell and Prince Maximilian), limited their descriptions to the visual realm. This limitation suggests a certain distance, a lack of grit, sound, and smell; and this in turn may explain why the early writers make almost no profound psychological or philosophical comments about wildernessthat is, about their experience in it and what this experience might mean for a civilized inheritor of the European and Judaeo-Christian tradition. There are only intimations. It is as if the wild had not been deeply enough entered, or assimilated; the observer remained apart, bringing back ever more detailed and precise reports, until finally almost everything knowable had been accounted for in the picture, but still the complete engagement had not been made. In the writings of John Muir (18381914), the body comes alive to the wilderness, and with this important, almost baptismal step (to use one of Muirs metaphors), the western nature essay reaches toward maturity and significance. The intellectual response to nature is not neglected-in fact, Muirs first published nature essays were scientific in nature and grew out of a geological controversybut it is placed within a context of physical and emotional immersion into the wild. Muirs great contribution to western writing was to bring the holistic or participant experience alive, but at the same time not to relegate the intellect and science to vagueness. Muirs writing, at its best, vivifies science. John Muirs emergence as a mature thinkerbetter said, his emergence into a radical, perhaps historically important consciousnessbegan in the summer of 1869, his first summer in the Sierra. Thirty-one years old, a man without a career except, as he said, to walk Gods wilderness, 234
Muir had been offered a more or less supernumerary job as a sheepherdersupervisor. The band of two thousand sheep trailed from the hot foothills up into the forests and finally to the edge of the little-known alpine zone, and as the summer developed, Muir rapidly opened out into an ecstatic, wakeful relationship with the wild mountains, a feeling of deep continuity which would be the basis of his understanding of geological processes, his compassion for all life forms, and his subsequent explanation and defense of all that was wild. His eventual command of a first-rate prose style, which in its flexibility and emphasis upon the activity of nature could evoke some of the excitement of a wilderness experience, was also rooted in the awakening of 1869. That summer was the key, and Muir was aware that something dramatic was happening to him. On July 7, he wrote in his journal, Never while anything is left of me shall this first camp be forgotten. It has fairly grown into me, not merely as memory pictures, but as part and parcel of mind and body alike. The deep hopper-like hollow, with its majestic trees through which all the wonderful nights the stars poured their beauty. The flowery wildness of the high steep slope toward Browns Flat, and its bloomfragrance descending at the close of the still days. . . . The great sun-gold noons, the alabaster cloud-mountains, the landscape 34 beaming with consciousness like the face of a god. Two weeks later, the emergence continued. No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with Gods beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of the limbs is pleasure, while the whole body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels a campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all ones flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ec35 static pleasure-glow not explainable. The traditionally limited and separate point of consciousness of Western civilization is here being transcended. A larger, apparently limitless identity is emergingtwo years later, Muir wrote, the solid contents of a 36 human soul is the whole world which became the root of his life and thought. From this new viewpoint, Muir was able to see or intuit natural facts and relationships that other, perhaps better trained, observers had not noticed. For example, he proved that glaciers had played an important role in the formation of Yosemite Valley, a fact that both Clarence King and Josiah Whitney of the California Survey had missed. The important point 235
A Literary History of the American West for Muirs own development, however, was that his intellect was enabled and enlivened by his inner feeling for relationship and process, his sharing with the mountains, as it were, one body. He literally felt the mountains, lying on boulders in order to sense their grain and possible cleavage lines, sleeping out tentless where night happened to overtake him, climbing numerous peaks, wading streams, and going almost foodless, so that what he called his loving study could proceed with maximum, filterless perception. Muirs studies and experiences in the Sierra suggest a revolutionary transformation or eversion of consciousness, into a state of mind which accords with the physical interweavings and mutualisms of ecology. The writing which proceeded from this vision is characteristically vivid, imagistically. But it suggests a life within the pictures by paying attention, above all, to movement and to interconnection. There are few static scenes in Muirs books: always the wind is making the flower stalks nod or bending the trees in great arcs, and the streams are catching at the downhanging grass stems along the bank; when the sun rose over the Grand Canyon, Muir saw it stinging the uppermost cliffs. Even in his later, comparatively not so active works, such as The Yosemite (1912), the sense of movement is basic, as in his description of the giant sequoia: The immensely strong, stately shafts are free of limbs for one hundred and fifty feet or so. The large limbs reach out with equal boldness in every direction, showing no weather side, and no other tree has foliage so densely massed, so finely molded in outline and so perfectly subordinated to an ideal type. A particularly knotty, angular, ungovernable-looking branch, from five to seven feet in diameter and perhaps a thousand years old, may occasionally be seen pushing out from the trunk as if determined to break across the bounds of the regular curve, but like all the others it dissolves in bosses of branchlets and sprays as soon as the general 37 outline is approached. With prose that modelled activity and the interpenetration of subject and object, Muir was able to arouse a caring response on the part of his readers. In The Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), and in the posthumously published Travels in Alaska (1917) and Steep Trails (1918), the attempt was to express a physical-spiritual joyfulness, an engaged awareness which could inspire ecological sensitivity. Importantly, Muirs initial effect was contemporaneous with the closing of the frontier, and perhaps indicated the acceptability of a new style of thought. His fundamental recognition was that the world is a living system, not an endless flat plane consisting of resources which may be used up, serially, by an always-advancing people. Nor was the world, for 236
Muir, an object of any sort, not even the pretty sort. His is thus the first post-frontier mind in western literature. He had the science of the great surveyors, but he went the necessary step further to make himself completely at home in the mountains, and to become capable of ecological vision. We are governed more than we know, and most when we are wildest. Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of 38 one another. . . . Mary Austin (18681934) had a similar attitude toward nature, though perhaps more forthrightly mystical and less scientific than Muirs. She realized the importance of the territory he had opened up, and paid him tribute in her first book, The Land of Little Rain (1903); by the end of her career, she had made a significant extension of the Muir line, as it might be called, by prophesying that the consciousness of the unity of mind and nature would become not just a literary theme but the ground of an entirely new culture. This would happen, according to Austin, in the American West. She also paid a good deal of attention to Native Americans and their philosophies, an area in which Muir had small interest, and she absolutely relished the details of folk life on the land, finding in native and folk adaptations instances of ecological wisdom. Her essays on natural history, found in The Land of Little Rain, The Flock (1906), California, the Land of the Sun (1914), and The Land of Journeys' Ending (1924), are distinguished by a leisurely, spacious, and at the same time almost microscopic attention. There is no hurry in Mary Austins books. Time and the seasons will come around again; the flocks will be moved a few miles a day, toward the lowlands in fall, toward the mountains in spring; the dust devils way out on the alkali flats will whirl again when the winds are right. The chief thing is to be alert, unhurried, ready, because vision and the Deep-self, her term for the ultimate consciousness that ones self and the environment are not two, may awaken at any time. The primary experience had first come to Mary Austin at the age of six, near her family home in Illinois. Fifteen years later, while riding in the hills near her brothers homestead in California, she was reconfirmed in the fundamental, mystical center which was to inspire all of her writings. As her third-person autobiography, Earth Horizon ( 1932), has it, It was a dry April, but not entirely barren; mirages multiplied on every hand, white borage came out and blue nemophilia; where the run-off of the infrequent rains collected in hollows, blue lupine sprang up as though pieces of the sky had fallen. On a morning 237
Mary was walking down one of these, leading her horse, and suddenly she was aware of poppies coming up singly through the tawny, crystal-sanded soil, thin, piercing orange-colored flames. And then the warm pervasive sweetness of ultimate reality, the reality first encountered so long ago under the walnut tree. Never 39 to go away again; never to be completely out of call. . . . Her resolute holding to this center, and to a degree her promotion of it in her role as a literary figure later in life, served to isolate Austin somewhat and perhaps helped make her life more difficult. But her chosen path also allowed her to concentrate and to see. Her neighbors in Independence, California, after the publication of The Land of Little Rain, could not understand how she drew so much out of the apparent barrenness of an ordinary, vacant field next to her house. But Austin, who unlike most of her townsmen was not looking for gold or planning to move water, had time to look meditatively and to see the riches in My Neighbors Field. She sat out on the mesas in the same way, at the edge of the wilderness desert, until the dry and seemingly hostile landscape became for her a land of abundance. The ecological givens of place were not irritations to her but matter for the opening of vision. She spent hours of outdoor stillness to get the one right word for the dry foothills, and got it, to her satisfaction: puckery. Her great contribution to the western essay is just such a distillation and purity of image. To Austin, however, especially in later years, this vision was not solely imagistic but also had historical, analytic, and prophetic aspects. When invited to a conference of prominent southwesterners in 1927, on the subject of the proposed Boulder Dam, she alone was outspoken against it. Man should be learning and adapting to natural conditions, not rushing to change them. Austins case against dams would move no realists, probably, but she believed that time and the gradual influence of the land and its native people upon the incoming races, the water movers, would prove her right. The Southwest, she thought, the environment itself, operating subtly below all other types of adjustive experience, will work to produce a new, land-harmonious culture. It will be, she said, the next great and fructifying 40 world culture. This future, for Mary Austin, begins in any moment of true seeing. To an alert mind, any natural object will do; one could be walking casually through a stand of junipers, surely an ordinary environment, and quite suddenly touch the core of things. Not one of all the ways by which a tree strikes freshly on your observation,with a greener flush, with stiffened needles, or slight alterations of the axis of the growing shoots, accounts for 238
this flash of mutual awareness. You walk a stranger in a vegetating world; then with an inward click the shutter of some profounder level of consciousness uncloses and admits you to sentience of the 41 mounting sap. Aesthetic communion is also the heart of the work of John Charles Van Dyke (18561932), a New Jersey librarian and professor of art history at Rutgers College, whose experience in the West began in Minnesota in 1868 and encompassed long stays in Montana, Arizona, and California. Again, as with Muir and Austin, the opening of perception to a specific environment led eventually to an ecological vision and a critique of civilization. In Nature for Its Own Sake (1898), The Desert (1904), The Mountain (1916), The Grand Canyon of the Colorado (1920), and The Open Spaces (1922), which represent Van Dykes western writings, he covers nearly all of the subjects of the western nature essay, and in his firm, Muirian, antianthropocentric position, strikes the western essays major tone perfectly. Though he did not overtly promote or even assert a mystical consciousness, as did Mary Austin, there is evidence of Van Dykes having transcended the limited, egoistic view. Speaking of the Grand Canyon, he said, And we, if we would understand the Canyon, must largely eliminate the human ele42 ment of it. It is insignificant. The ideal point of view, apparently, is Mind, not ego. The utilitarians look at it [the Colorado River] and perhaps wonder how they can harness it, make it turn wheels, generate electricity, or irrigate the earth. It now serves no purpose and is quite uselessuseless to man, who still cherishes the idea that 43 the world was made exclusively for him. The origin of the larger vision is unmediated aesthetic experience simply being aware of light, rain clouds, color in fog banks, the lightness and drift of clouds, the roll of the divides and swalesto list a few of the topic headings in Nature for Its Own Sake. Van Dyke teaches awareness by narrative example, for instance in the opening chapter of The Mountain, an autobiographical account of riding across the high plains of Montana toward the Rockies, by noticing the air becoming thinner and the light brighter. More often, he gives minutely detailed lectures in which the usually-passed-over beauties of nature are set up for notice. The attention to detail is extraordinary, almost dissective, and yet the sense of the whole is kept alive, as a kind of diapason, by the fact that all of the scenes and details are, after all, being known by one careful, meditative consciousness. The feeling of interested participation is great, and is one of the positive beauties of Van Dykes writing. 239
Van Dyke also directly attacked what he considered to be false approaches to nature, for example fancy and the pathetic fallacy. Like Clarence Dutton, he thought a stripped, illusionless and traditionless perception, unfiltered by any predisposition to dualistic judgments, was the only means by which the wild could be apprehended. . . . Nature neither rejoices in the life nor sorrows in the death. She is neither good nor evil; she is only a great law of change that 44 passeth understanding. The fault is not in the subject [desert wildlife]. It is not vulgar or ugly. The trouble is that we perhaps have not the proper angle of 45 vision. If we understood all, we should admire all. If we could but rid ourselves of the false ideas, which, taken en masse, are called education, we should know that there is nothing ugly under the sun, save that which comes from human 46 distortion. The ideal of a direct and perfected awareness is a major theme in the western nature essay, still very much alive. It was clearly John Van Dykes guiding thought, and it led him more and more to wilderness, as an environment conducive to such perception. The great spaces of the wilderness have a quality of beauty about them that no panorama of civilized lands 47 can equal or even suggest, he wrote in The Mountain. This beauty was for Van Dyke not an object but a personal, mind-awakening renewal. He [the climber of a wilderness mountain] is back to a primitive faith from which he 48 never should have wandered. In his autobiography, The Open Spaces, he describes sleeping out in the arid, spacious West, and summarizes his thought: What a strange feeling, sleeping under the wide sky, that you belong only to the universe. You are back to your habitat, to your original 49 environment, to your native heritage. Anything less than this was, for Van Dyke, civilized and partial, and vision-obstructing. Muir, Austin, and Van Dyke represent the flowering of the post-frontier vision. But it should not be supposed that the closing of the frontier automatically or widely conferred such an outlook. Many writers simply exploited the West as a tourists curiositysome continue to do so. Some appeared to approach the level of sensitivity of the three authors cited, but then seemed to fall short. George Wharton James (18581923), for example, who praised the curative powers of the southwestern deserts in his best book, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (1906), and gave tours of the West in such works as California, Romantic and Beautiful (1914) and Utah, Land of Blossoming Valleys (1922), was apparently greatly attracted to the wildness of mountain and desert which Muir and Austin had found so 240
meaningful. Indeed, James found a personal regeneration in the desert after losing, in a scandal, his former career as a minister. But he wrote quickly and excitedly, as a promoter or converter rather than one who had rested deeply in the self-nature continuum. He described himself as having been on the jump for many years, indicating perhaps the nature of his rela50 tionship with any one particular place. Even so, there are passages in his works, for example the last several pages of The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, which intimate a great deal. The desert is nothing if it is not sincere. It is sincere to brutality. Open, bare, exposed it lies, and yet it is not dead. It is alive with a fiery aliveness that takes you into its heart and compels you 51 to be as it is, open, frank, sincere. The lure of the desert, according to James, is that it can deepen one who will cross the line into wildness and revoke all former claims. There is no 52 knowing of self in the whirl of the cities, he asserts. But the boosterism in James suggests a certain incompleteness. For him, the underground aquifers in the desert were, simply, inexhaustible, and should be tapped. Where John Van Dyke had argued that the deserts should never be reclaimed. They are the breathing-space of the West and should be preserved for53 ever, James rather trippingly stated, in summarizing vast water projects in 54 Utah, Thus the good work of irrigation goes on. Having it both ways the desert is good, and reclaiming the desert is goodJames shows a positive attitude. But it is legitimate to ask if he was thinking through the matter of aridity completely. Authors from California and the southwestern deserts dominate the western nature essay from the close of the frontier onward into our time. Among the few good writers dealing with the interior, mountain West was Enos Mills (18701922), a philosophical follower of John Muir and a Colorado mountaineer of very extensive experience in the wild. Millss debt to Muir is clearly greathe dedicated his first major book to Muir, quoted him at length when the scene under discussion apparently seemed to require an extra dimension in the writing (see Millss Your National Parks [1917], for example), and even used several Muirisms in something very like their original formbut he also had a great fund of personal experience, particularly with animals, which enabled him to make a unique contribution to western literature. In Wild Life on the Rockies ( 1909), The Spell of the Rockies (1911), and Wild Animal Homesteads ( 1923), the sense of being involved with myriad life forms-beaver, mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, skunks, grizzlies, and a host of birdsis particularly strong. From 1886 on, Mills spent a great deal of time in lone mountain rambles, having as a base camp a small cabin near Longs Peak, and he came to know the Rockies with a lovers intimacy. 241
He was a true dweller. Where Henry Thoreau had referred to himself humorously as an inspector of snowstorms, Mills actually had a government job in precisely that line, walking the continental divide to measure snow depth. I lived intensely through ten strong days and nights, and gave to my life new and rare experiences, he said of one inspection trip. I went be55 yond the trails and visited the silent places alone. The demands of winter travel in the wilderness helped to develop in Mills a remarkable hardiness and insouciance, which in his accounts often reaches toward the philosophical dimension. His writing also shows a profound understanding of territory, in the animal-behavior sense: the absolute interdependence of animal and habitat. Walking quietly, alone, and sitting still in concealment for long periods, he observed intensely, and upon occasion attempted to take part in, the often dramatic scenes unfolding around him. He also entered the animals home life, and in a sense did make it his own by writing with emotion for his home ground and his wild neighbors. This connection, like his hardiness, suggests much, philosophically. But Mills, a self-educated man, was reticent about deep interpretations, seeming to pass them off in almost formulaic sentences. (Silence sounds rhythmic to all, and attunes all minds to the strange message, the rhapsody of the universe, he said once, for example, speaking of the quiet of the high 56 country.) Chiefly, he seemed content to let his adventures speak for themselves. His narratives showed the wilderness as a friendly place, by and large, where night and winter held no genuine terrors. In comparison to his contemporaries Muir, Austin, and Van Dyke, Mills may seem less intellectual, perhaps, less in command of the cultural references of Western civilization; but his fearless absorption into the wild gives his writing original life and a vivid sense of place. He was at home in the mountains. Mills was also, like all twentieth-century nature writers, disturbed by the swift passing of large-scale wilderness. Like John Muir (indeed, perhaps partly because of a youthful meeting with Muir), he entered the political arena on the side of the shrinking wild, using his writing to awaken readers to the awesomeness of their moment in history. In an explosive change occupying only a few decades, man had become capable of transforming the planet, and of losing sight of the most fundamental connections. In Your National Parks, Mills wrote, Once, like a web of joy, trails overspread all the wild gardens of the earth. The long trail is gone, and most others are cut to 57 pieces and ruined. The few broken remnants are but little used.
III. THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY CRISIS
If we realize that the change Mills lamented had occurred in something less than a centurycounting from the expedition to the eastern edge of 242
the Rockies by Major Stephen Long in 1820, to the publication of Millss major Rocky Mountain books between 1909 and 1923we are then acquainted with the chief thematic element in the modern western nature essay. As in Millss own career, the wonder and the deep enjoyment of nature are encountered, and given a bittersweet flavor, by the rising feeling that something, in the broad historical sense, is going rapidly and vastly wrong. Loss, particularly the loss of wilderness, casts a sundown light over much of the nature literature of the modern time. Yet the wild continues to be upheld, at times apparently almost in desperation, as the archetype of harmony. The importance of wilderness may be seen clearly in the work of Aldo Leopold (18861948), Robert Marshall (19011939) and Olaus Murie (18891963). All three had government careers in the field of natural resources, in the courses of which they worked successfully for wilderness protection or for wild solutions to ecological problems, all had deep personal experience of wilderness in several locations, mostly in Alaska and the West, and each wrote influential essays on the wild. Leopold was perhaps the most explicitly philosophical of the three, in terms of speaking to the general human conditionhis formulation of the Land Ethic is one of the truly new and important philosophical statements of the twentieth centurybut Marshall too addressed the central conflict of our time, and was especially penetrating on the psychological necessity of wilderness. Olaus Murie seemed, by comparison, to avoid the general or portentous, but the practicality and simplicity of his writing seem to bespeak the wild itself, and a life in touch with it. Leopold, who had a Master of Forestry degree from Yale, came to the West in 1909 and spent the next fifteen years as a forest ranger in Arizona and New Mexico, with time off for trips into the wilder parts of northern Mexico. In the West, he came to know wildland as something more important than good hunting territory. A 1922 trip to the delta of the Colorado River, in particular, provided him with images of freshness, abundance, and order, images of seemingly universal import; this trip may be seen as part of the necessary foreground for the philosophy of ecological conscience he later developed. By 1924 he was campaigning within the Forest Service for a policy of wilderness protection; by 1933, with his textbook, Game Management, he was promoting the idea of the biota as a community or system, an enormously complex system which included man. He later termed the ecological concept of system the outstanding scientific discovery of the 58 twentieth century. System, which John Muir too had posited as early as 1875, is a revolutionary theory, and it may be seen, in part, as a contribution of thinkers whose primary experience of nature was in the American West. On the practical surface of things, consciousness of system can pre243
vent game-hogging and the over-harvest of timber, two frontier-era practices Leopold worked against in his official capacities; on a deeper level, the realization of system is capable of erasing or at least mitigating the epistemological and ethical split of man from the rest of nature, the separation which has dominated Western thought and kept it partial for at least two millennia. For Leopold, as he expressed it in his best-known work, A Sand County Almanac (1949), the extension of system into ethical behavior and indeed into the whole of the man-nature relationship was the next necessary stage in human evolution. We must recast our whole thinking and feeling about nature, and learn to think like a mountain. Thinking like a mountain, after decades of observation and a slow, practical enlargement of thought, Leopold gave to philosophy a classic statement: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic 59 community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. As Leopold saw it, wilderness is system, the original, the ground of being. It is also the base line of data which gives, or could give, reference to all human activity. But it is possible, Leopold thought, for man to so encapsulate himself within the industrial pattern that he can forget wildernesswhich is to say, forget where his industry came from, and in the end essentially forget himself, becoming a caricature of alienation. Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallowminded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate 60 of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. Robert Marshall, who along with Leopold and Murie and others founded the Wilderness Society in 1935, once wrote that he grew up regretting he had not been born in the time of the great explorationsof Lewis and Clark, for example. However, he went on to make four long expeditions into the Alaskan wilderness, where he lived to a degree the Lewis and Clark life, and out of this experience, coupled with his twentiethcentury consciousness, he gave modern expression to the psychological and spiritual value of wilderness for civilized man. Marshall made effective what might be termed the wilderness corollary to the Turner or frontier thesis of history: if the frontier had indeed been important in shaping American institutions and ideals, and most especially the self-reliant American psychology, then it behooves us in the contemporary age to preserve some land (large tracts, in fact) in a wild condition. Otherwise, in Marshalls view, we might degenerate into the nervous little man of the industrial dystopia, looking to vast social identities and national confrontations for a release from the tepidity of his existence. 244
In Arctic Wilderness (1956), Marshall described a world of pioneer testing and adventure. He forded rivers, climbed mountains, endured extremes of weather, and thrilled to the opening of consciousness as he beheld range upon range of wilderness mountains. He also kept careful records of tree distribution (he held a Ph.D. in plant physiology), made accurate maps, and studied the Eskimo culture with remarkable thoroughness, his entire Alaskan experience in essence suggesting a nineteenth-century journey by a man of science into the western wilderness. The important addition was that Marshall also had the twentieth-century perspective and was far from reveling in primitivism or nostalgia. In 1930, in an influential essay which appeared in The Scientific Monthly, Marshall summarized what he had learned and thought about in the wilderness. The essay is comprehensive and historical: America stands at an important moment, and must decide whether to keep its frontierits West alive in anything greater than token size. To make the decision by deliberate rationality, as Marshall recommends, the country must know what wilderness was and is, must know its effects, and must see how its own character has been molded by the existence of the wild. All of these topics are covered in the essay, in such a way that finally a choice between two fundamentally different kinds of life presents itself: on the one hand is the terrible neural tension of modern existence; on the other, a breakthrough to psychological fulfillment: Adventure, whether physical or mental, implies breaking into unpenetrated ground, venturing beyond the boundary of normal aptitude, extending oneself to the limit of capacity, courageously facing peril. Life without the chance for such exertions would be for many persons a dreary game, scarcely bearable in its horrible 61 banality. Olaus Murie, like Leopold and Marshall a trained scientist, also saw the upshot of the wilderness issue, and fought for wildland preservation for many years, first as a nonconformist within the Biological Survey and later as Director of The Wilderness Society, but his writings do not stress the grand vision so much as the particular, telling experience. In Wapiti Wilderness (1966), a book co-authored by his wife, Margaret E. Murie, and in Journeys to the Far North (1973), Murie writes narratively of the wilderness base. He depicts wildlife adventures and camp life in Wyoming, Alaska, Labrador, and the Hudson Bay country with obvious feeling for the wild but also, usually, with a kind of respectful reticence, as if the wilderness would always beshould always bebeyond words. He occasionally lets go: Now, by the alchemy of moonlight, all was transformed into a soft duotone of black and silver. The tiny meadow lay silver bright, 245
overlaid with a dark tracery of moon shadows from the pines. On the forest floor about our tent lay the same network of shadowy limbs and twigs, while in the deeper woods a few gleams penetrated in scattered flecks that silvered the underbrush. We scarcely broke 62 the silence with speech. Few people in our time have had anything like the field experience of Murie, and the writing in The Elk of North America (1951) and A Field Guide to Animal Trucks (1954) is solid, experiential, and radiant with the implications of wilderness experience. Over a rise I came upon a depression, a green meadow, in the middle of which was a pond. A band of elk was just then coming in to water. As they came near, some of the eager ones rushed on ahead, jumped into the water, and romped along in the shallows, splashing the water, shaking their heads, and hopping with the same joy that a group of children go splashing into the water at a 63 beach. Adolph Murie (18991973), the younger brother of Olaus and also a government biologist for many years, likewise enjoyed a great breadth of field experience, some of the best episodes of which are described in A Naturalist in Alaska (1961). Like his brother, Adolph Murie was keenly aware of the larger issues of civilization and wildernessA Naturalist, for example, opens with a description of Alaska as a land where the individual is not yet swamped by numbersbut also in the Murie manner he concentrated upon the animal life around him, so that the implications, for example in the adjustments of arctic animals to the boom and bust cycles of population typical of the north, are understated and are discovered by the reader, rather than preached at him. The same can be said of two wellknown government reports that Adolph Murie wrote, The Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone (1940) and The Wolves of Mount McKinley (1944), the latter a landmark study in terms of science and perhaps one of the few examples of a twentieth-century government documents approaching literary quality. That The Wolves transcends mere technical writing may be shown by Muries description of an evenings observations: On May 31 I left the lookout at 8:30 p. m. since the wolves seemed, after some indications of departure, to have settled down again. But as I looked back from the river bar on my way to camp I saw the two blacks and the two gray males assembled on the skyline, wagging their tails and frisking together. There they all howled, and while they howled the gray female galloped up from the den 100 yards and joined them. She was greeted with ener246
getic tail wagging and general good feeling. Then the vigorous actions came to an end, and five muzzles pointed skyward. Their 64 howling floated softly across the tundra. Again, as in many episodes in the writings of his brother Olaus, the implication is of a profound connection having been made, and the necessity for calm awareness and patience, so that one may be ready for such moments when by grace they occur. According to J. Frank Dobie (18881964), who along with Roy Bedichek (18781959) and John Graves (1920) might be said to constitute the Texas school of natural history writing, such awareness, schooled in the outdoors, is very often a mark of great literature. What endures as quality, in writing, comes from the land and keeps its reference to the land. But this is not a narrowness, for in knowing a place truly, with respect, a good writer escapes provincialism and begins to model nothing less than excellence of mind. The commercialized or mass-industrial type of mind, lost to the outdoors and the land, Dobie anathematized with the adjective juke-box. In Guide to the Life and Literature of the Southwest, first published in 1942, updated in 1952, and many times reprinted, Dobie set forth his naturalistic standards and revealed at the same time an uncommon range. He was not only a natural historian of letters, but a skilled folklorist and a student of animal life, and a commentator on humanity-in-general who believed above all in the conclusive importance of environment. One of the few western nature writers who was also a professor, Dobie affected to scorn 65 what he termed our institutions of so-called higher learning, but in fact (and almost single-handedly for a long time) he worked to make the study of western regional literature respectable in the university. His major ventures into natural history are The Longhorns (1941), The Voice of the Coyote (1949), The Mustangs (1952), and Rattlesnakes (1965). These books are marked by a direct and informal style and a native skepticism of things urban, new, highly publicized, or mechanical. The personality and belief of Dobiebelief in the land, and in life lived close to it make of the books typical structure, a montage of folklore, scientific observation, personal experience, and side-cutting commentary on modernisms of all kinds, an informed whole. His stated philosophy is that the coyotes 66 howl is more tonic than all theories about nature, but his art and thoroughness in presenting that howl assure that his reader will nevertheless absorb a complete theory of naturebetter said, a vision of nature. The books on the coyote and the rattlesnake are illustrative. These two are hardhunted animals, thus not the usual subjects of leisurely observation, and furthermore they are surrounded by myths of several kinds from outright
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legend to profound religious symbolism. Perhaps Dobie chose them as subjects because to come to terms with these species, to know them truly, one must discern and then see through a great deal of human conception and projection. Under Dobies guidance, to study the coyote and the rattler is to study humanity and its life with and against nature, and then suddenly, if Dobies persuasion has worked, to realize respect and compassion for the animals themselves, as they are, living their lives. In the end, one may share in the ecologists broad-gauge consciousness. Dobie saw things as Aldo Leopold did, or John Muir, but he expressed that vision in terms of a countrymans feisty allegiances. When I remember their [coyotes] derision of campfires, their salutes to the rising moon, their kinship cries to stars and silences, I am ten thousand times more grateful to them than I am to the makers of the blaring radios and ringing telephones that index the 67 high standard of American living. Dobies friend Roy Bedichek, to whom he paid his highest compli68 mentHe was an earth man was also, like Dobie, an autodidact of amazing range and depth. His great theme through three nature books Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (1947)) Karnkaway Country (1950), and The Sense of Smell (1960)was the same as Dobies, and indeed is one of the foundations of all modern nature writing: man and nature, contrary to the economics, politics, and technology of our recently flourishing scene, are one system; to know this unity as a personal realization and not merely as a set of facts is the basis of right living. Both Dobie and Bedichek argue that to earn such a knowledge is not to engage in primitivism but rather to extend an ancient and honorable human insight. Their scholarship is aimed at connection. There are some interesting differences. Bedichek is not so merry and mischievous as Dobie, his style not so down-home. His vision of our time seems more melancholy. He had been vouchsafed a profound experience of nature, an innocent ten-year-old boys epiphany, when riding his pony across a meadowlark-filled Texas grassland early one morning in 1888: My whole world was green and blue, except for the flowers and the bicolored breasts of those proud and joyous birds. And the chorus was also green and blue out of which shot skyward bursts of individual song, like the brilliant flowers springing up here and there in sudden rapture out of the communal happiness of the level, grassy meadow, bordered by trees of deeper green. My pony became quiet at last and I know not how long I sat and looked and listened, consciousness merged in the general ec69 stasy of that April morning. 248
This touchstone experience of transcendence marked Bedicheks life. He refers to it, obliquely, as a dedication. It was apparently thus the root of his fierce support of wildlife, and of his hope, later, that others of the modern time could somehow, as he did, feel the great connection. His writings seem to indicate that such a man must only wonder, perhaps, and become as the years go by more than a little saddened, at the general and seemingly accepted alienation which is everywhere created as the upshot of progress. Of the fragile and precious coast where the last whooping cranes winter, Bedichek wrote in 1950: But worst of all, and as a final debauchment of these virgin marshes, are the oil developers pushing in for the final squeeze, making their seismographic surveys, which involve earth jarring, subterranean peals of artificial thunder as well as terrific underwater explosions, occasionally blowing out a deadly oil slick to 70 mess up the waters of a bay-deadly, I mean to all avian life. Karnkaway Country, from which this passage comes, is marked by a subtly increasing anger, as the book enlarges from its original concern with the Gulf Coast between Corpus Christi and Galveston to include almost all of the watersheds of Texas. All is connected, ecologically: Bedichek cannot discuss the silt that is choking the mouths of the rivers, and ruining the shellfish grounds, without addressing the upstream problems; and here one must confront the builders of damsto find that the bigger the project, the more likely are its promoters to know nothing about the decisive subtleties of ecology, or its interlocking of all things. However, sacred rage is only one of Bedicheks voices. Just as often, he is meditative, curious, studiously reporting his own experience with wildlife or that of others he has learned about, venturing interpretations, appearing to seek always a more intimate view, a new or closer understanding of nature that may prefigure communion. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist is slowpaced, Thoreauvian. It is a series of carefully-thought-out meditations on diversity and stability, the keys to the wild. The main theme, and the standard for analysis, is the health that naturally obtains before the simplifications wrought by civilizationby some types of civilization. This health is indicated persuasively by Bedicheks own joy of perception: seeing a male vermilion flycatcher displaying for the female his fiery hue, or a small snake patiently swallowing a frog of twice its own diameter, or a fallen sweet gum tree, disintegrating amid a riot of new-grown flowers and nectar-seeking insects. His tone is vital and interested, carrying the feeling that whatever one may know or learn, there is always more. First with Goodbye to a River (1960), which has earned a place as a minor classic in western letters, then with an essay entitled You Aint Seen 249
Nothing Yet in the Sierra Clubs book, The Water Hustlers (1971), and more recently with Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land (1974), and Texas Heartland (1975), John Graves has moved toward the front rank of contemporary western nature writers. In the tradition of Dobie and Bedichek, his works are founded on research into the folklore and history of his chosen placenorth-central Texason a sound ecological sense, and in recent years on a landsmans working connection with his home ground. Graves is an amateur naturalist, a farmer after the style of Aldo Leopold (having purchased a run-down homestead and attempted to restore it to health, as Leopold did with his Sand County, Wisconsin, farm), a writer and professor, and a contemplative. His is a voice of the edgelands, rural country rather than the deep wilderness, and in this too he resembles his two great Texas forebears. Typically in his writings, Graves drifts in a canoe down a river, sits before a campfire, or lays stonework at his place, thinks of others who have done these things before him, thinks of his reasons for doing what he is doing, notes with sharp perception the life that is going on around him, and gradually is moved to deeper reflection, understated almost always, but provocative and widely applicable. It is the general manner of Gilbert White, or Thoreau, or Henry Beston. The subject matter is practical consciousness awakening to its revelatory but heretofore ordinary surroundings and daily life. Goodbye to a River, as the title implies, is an elegyfor a section of the Brazos River about to be dammed, for a Texas that once was and the youth that was lived there, for many good things that seem to be going under. However, the book does not read in that summary fashion, for Gravess sentences and thoughts are not predictable. His sympathies are plain, but the expression is not righteous or programmatic. He makes mistakes and admits them, surprises himself, and seems to be discovering what he is writing about as he goes along. As his canoe drops down the Brazos he resolves not to shoot any more ducks except in real need. Hard upon this promise, Three green-winged teal from a big flock of them turned and bulleted back past me 71 very high. I led the lowest one by perhaps twelve feet and fired. . . . This projection of a fallible persona, pretty much the mode throughout his writings, seems to indicate that Graves is realistically in touch with his own membership in the modern scene. He says in Hard Scrabble that he 72 does not seek to grind large axes or to give large answers. Thus there is a more complex, or perhaps more mixed, consciousness than that projected in the books of Dobie or Bedichek. But Gravess reticence is severely tested on occasion. In The Water Hustlers, for example, after giving a restrained but telling analysis of one of the more egregiously anti-ecological proposals in history (the Texas Water Plan of 1968), he struggles with the urge to fight fire with fire. One would just as soon not wax shrill and indignant and 250
earnest, there being so much shrillness all around us as it is, and so much 73 Christ-like earnestness. Sweet reason is best. But two pages later, as if finally giving in to the joy and freedom of polemic, he appears to relish the delivery of an acidly phrased series of rhetorical questions, the upshot of which is that modern, technology-dependent life may become, quite logically and unknowingly, monstrous. A persistent theme in the western nature essay has been the apparent need for civilized man, when confronting the wild, to develop clearer ways of seeing and a clearer consciousness in general. Several western writers have stated explicitly that wilderness on the scale of the West called for a new approach or a new mentality; a number of others, upon entering the West, doubted in print that their languagethat is, we may say by extension, the whole set of paradigms they brought with themcould adequately convey what they were seeing. There were new ranges of experience here. It is as if the strangeness of immense space, the frequent feeling of removal from traditional props, and the immersion into the moving, natural world of wildlife illuminated the European-derived mind somewhat, with the effect that its conventional, verbal, dualistic nature became apparent to itself. But what then? The great challenge, which perhaps is fudged by writers who fall back onto the picturesque or sublime modes, but is bravely attempted by some few of a more daring cast of personalityMuir, say, or Austin-is to break through the received frames of reference into something less rigidly dualistic and alienated, something wilder. Muir and Austin found a participative, that is, transcendental or mystical approach congenial. Not many have followed these two all the way, but they indicate forthrightly a general path upon which most have at least stepped. Precisely this theme of mind seemed to preoccupy John Steinbeck on his one venture into natural history, a biological expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940 with his mentor Edward Ricketts. As is shown in the literary record of that trip, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1941; 1951), when Ricketts and Steinbeck came to the extensive wilderness of Baja California, and plunged into the swarming life of its tide pools, their shipboard and campfire reflections increasingly turned on what was proper, accurate thinking, and what was not. It is as if the wilderness inspired them with a certain urgency to sort through accumulated patterns of consciousness, rejecting all that was wishful or false, looking for bedrock truths. The upshot of their reflections, given in a chapter entitled March 24, Easter Sunday, 74 which was apparently written originally by Ricketts, is that teleological thinking, the goal-oriented, emotionally attached and reductionist mentality which dominates Western civilization, is something to be outgrown. Non-teleological thinking, by contrast, which does not break down the totality of things into simplified, linear cause-and-effect but instead concen251
trates upon what is and attempts to live into it, is desirable, because it is open to the ecological, relational nature of nature. Teleological thinking is frontier-minded thinking, in which the self is an entity confronting a separate world of objects. Non-teleological thinking, ultimately, foregoes projections and undue attachment to self and becomes, the authors argue, deeper and participating, possibly encompassing the Oriental concept of 75 being. We see Steinbeck and Ricketts here edging into the perennial philosophy, to use the phrase of Leibniz and of Aldous Huxley, and in American western terms, into what might be called the wilderness mind. As they traveled deeper into the wild, and measured their own minds by its implicit standard, they came closer to a holistic, Muirian point of view. The movement is so widely shared among western writers that it almost seems inevitable: go into the wild; start to think wildly. Finally, in the Introduction to the Log, and as a fitting epigraph to a book written at the dawn of the world-war, world-technology era, Steinbeck recorded a powerful, wilderness-inspired insight: We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isnt terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isnt very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None 76 of it is important or all of it is. Joseph Wood Krutch (18931970), perhaps the best-known western nature writer and regarded by many as one of the most profound, philosophically, also was deeply interested in the epistemological questions which wilderness seems to arouse. In The Voice of the Desert (1954), he reflected upon the traditional, Lockean dualism of Western civilization, and questioned how well it fit the systematic, holistic world he was then learning, in his first years of desert study. Perhaps the mind is not merely a blank slate upon which anything may be written. Perhaps it reaches out spontaneously toward what can nourish either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of nature and, without being taught, shares natures 77 intentions. Krutch also questioned the ancient Western denial of mind and emotion to
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the so-called lower forms of life. In The Desert Year (1952), his first western book, he faced the pathetic fallacy squarely: Let us not say that this animal or even this plant has become adapted to desert conditions. Let us say rather that they have all shown courage and ingenuity in making the best of the world as they found it. And let us remember that if to use such terms in connection with them is a fallacy then it can only be somewhat less a fallacy to use the same terms in connection with 78 ourselves. In The Great Chain of Life ( 1956), Krutch repeatedly affirmed a view of animals that was more than merely sympathetic. Man and the other animals are a continuum of life and consciousness, and as such an aspect of a great, overall, interpenetrating system. There is no good reason, according to Krutch, to suppose that when a bird sings it is not motivated by happiness and confidence as much as by some mechanical announcement of territory. Furthermore, and this point is crucial to understanding Krutchs own philosophical development, man can share the joy of animals, and in so doing overcome some of the sophisticated alienation which darkens our time. These ideas are particularly interesting in light of their authors point of view some twenty-five years earlier, when in The Modern Temper (1929) he had stated conclusively that Humanism and Nature were fundamentally antithetical. He had ended that book with a classic formulation of Western dualism: Ours is a lost cause and there is no place for us in the natural universe, but we are not, for all that, sorry to be human. We should 79 rather die as men than live as animals. A few years later, in a series of articles for The Nation entitled Was Europe a Success? Krutch concluded that indeed it had been, and he mentioned in particular European philosophy as being one of mankinds most precious achievements. By the middle 1930s, then, Krutch seemed to have arrived at a paradox: his culture was the best that mankind could attain to, but it appeared nevertheless to be a kind of dead end. At the end of its great course lay only a knowing, urban pessimism. Krutchs intellectual life for the next forty years may be described as a recovery from that psychological impasse, a slowly accelerating turn toward a positively conceived holism in which, finally, wilderness played a great part. The writing of a biography of Henry David Thoreau, published in 1948, was important to his change, but a sabbatical year in the Arizona desert in 1950, during which he decided to move to the West, was decisive. The rest of Krutchs life was spent in a study of the desert in the Southwest and in Baja California. He made many trips to Baja, beginning in 1958, and
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A Literary History of the American West there came into his closest contact with the wild. The great contrast between the quiet, pristine quality of a then-little-visited land and the furious development of his own Arizona made the modern situation more clear to him than ever, but in a very different way from that portrayed in The Modern Temper. He came to recognize alienation, certainly, but not as a givenrather, as a cultural artifact. His sense of wilderness, as the pattern which connects and instructs, became confirmed. In one of his final essays, Krutch turned one hundred and eighty degrees away from The Modern Temper to state that wilderness, besides being the expression of ultimate systematic health, also represents a saving spiritual allegiance. Faith in wildness, or in nature as a creative force, has the deeper, possibly the deepest, significance for our future. It is a philosophy, a faith; it is even, if you like, a religion. It puts our ultimate trust, not in human intelligence, but in whatever it is that created human intelligence and is, in the long run, more 80 likely than we to solve our problems. The themes of solitude and self-sufficiency in wilderness, long present at the experiential core of the nature essay, have been brought to perhaps quintessential expression in the work of Welsh-born Colin Fletcher (1922). Author of the immensely popular The Complete Walker, Fletcher often deals specifically, even minutely, with technical aspects of backcountry travel. In his case, though, equipment seems to be merely the means to freeing up time in which a leisurely, reflective frame of mind may develop. Fletchers specifically western works, The Thousand-Mile Summer and The Man Who Walked Through Time, are marked by introspection and by the quickened, whole-body sense of ones environment that solitary backpacking may bring on. There is a strong sense of place in these books, and a parallel sense of perceptual clarification. At the close of The Thousand-Mile Summer, after six months of walking northward across the diversity of California, Fletcher found himself loath to quit the march. He had come all the way from Mexico and now stood at the Oregon border; six months of routefiguring, shelter-finding, food-preparing, and simply moving ahead under a heavy pack had not only straightened out the lines of his life and created a certain competence, but had also, perhaps inevitably, built an identity. Fear of the letdown and emptiness that can come at the end of something came to him. Simplicity, though, might in fact be transferable: I walked down through the trees toward the road that would take me back to San Francisco and everything the city now offered. Renewal through wilderness experience, specifically the enlivening of the mind to small, simple things, is an old theme in the nature essay; Fletchers witness is that it continues to exert a deep pull, even (or especially) in our urban, technical time. 254
Edward Abbey (1927) is also concerned with mind and wilderness, and in Desert Solitaire ( 1968), his major non-fiction work, he shows a strong desire for a clarified, illusionless consciousness with which to know the desert. The sense is that in the very seeing, in the meeting with raw nature in what might be its most portentous aspectdry wildernesssomething profoundly meaningful could be enacted. One must be extraordinarily careful not to let conventions distort the precious moment. A purely subjective or idealistic mode of consciousness would result in not a picture of the external reality but simply a mirror of the thinker. At the opposite, objective end, one would be separating too deeply the observer and the thing ob81 served . . . and again falsifying our view of the world. The ideal is a perception that transcends the dualism: Abbey says he dream[s] of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the non-human world 82 and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. With that, presumably, one would know and be, simultaneously. One would have entered the paradox of nature, of the wild universe, in which systematic unity and self-hood co-exist. The genuine realization or accomplishment of this state would seem to place one in the company of the enlightened; Abbey says he only dreams of it. With this philosophical and psychological quest Abbey demonstrates an inherent significance in nature writing. He is also making a contemporary statement of one of the western essays ancient and recurrent concerns. But the quest is not his only theme. He is probably best known, in fact, for his cinematic, rhythmic presentations of landscape, and for his spirited, noholds-barred defense of the wilderness. Describing the view from a side-door Pullman in 1944, when he first traveled into the West, Abbey says, Proud of my freedom and hobohood I stood in the doorway of the boxcar, rocking with the motion of the train, ears full of the rushing wind and the clattering wheels, and stared and stared and stared, like a starving man, at the burnt, barren, bold, bright landscape passing before my eyes. Telegraph poles flashed by close to the tracks, the shining wires dipped and rose, dipped and rose; but beyond the line and the road and the nearby ridges, the queer foreign shapes of mesa and butte seemed barely to move at all; they revolved slowly at an immense distance, strange right-angled promontories of rose-colored rock that remained in view, from my 83 slowly altering perspective, for an hour, for two hours, at a time. In the struggle to defend wilderness, Abbey uses a first-person narrative point of view, and cuts and rips the commercial spirit of the times, technological power out of control, institutionalized laziness symbolized by automobiles and power lines running everywhere across the land, the ar255
rogance of some politicians and bureaucrats, the ecological ignorance of these same and of economic boosters who see no limits in nature, and the timidity and insularity of all who somehow fail to hear the cry of the wilderness as it goes under. Clearly, in Abbeys view, we are in something like the last days, and strong measures are required. In Desert Solitaire, Slickrock (1971), Cactus Country (1973), and in The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West (1977), he has established a presence more militant than that of any other major western writer. In a time like this, Abbey seems to be saying, what must be guarded above all is the moment and the place wherein free, unmediated perception, and perhaps the dreamed-of ultimate connection, may occur. The ideal is leisure for the free play of the mind, together with its natural partner, the unspoiled clarity and rightness of wilderness. Upon this protected base, which Abbey refers to as something entirely different (different from capitalism or socialism, or indeed any ism), a sane society might conceivably evolve. Meanwhile, Abbeys persona as a writer revels in what free time and free place are yet available. In Desert Solitaire he speaks with great affection of his first two seasons as a ranger in Arches National Monument, when the tourist business was poor and the time passed extremely slowly, as time should pass, with the days lingering and long, spacious and free as 84 the summers of childhood. Independence of convention, love of wilderness, nostalgia for freedom, serious searching for psychological wholenesswith-nature, and righteous defense of the wildall of the major themes in the western nature essaycome to fresh expression in Abbeys popular and influential writing.
T HOMAS J. LY O N,
Utah State University
256
Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Henry Beston, Foreword, in Herbert Faulkner West, The Nature Writers (Brattleboro, Vermont: Stephen Daye Press, 1939), pp. 5-6. Mary Austin, The Lands of the Sun (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), p. 19. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 18041806 (New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959), pp. 334335. Washington Irving, Astoria, edited by Edgeley W. Todd (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), p. 170. Thomas Nuttall, A Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory, During the Year 1819 (Philadelphia: Thos. H. Palmer, 1821). Rpt. in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1905), vol. XIII, pp. 218219. Thwaites, ed., vol. XIII, pp. 161162. Thwaites, ed., vol. XIII, p. 101. F. Andrew Michaux, The North American Sylva. (Volumes 4 and 5 by Thomas Nuttall.) Philadelphia: Rice, Rutter & Co., 1865, vol. 4, p. 10. Michaux, vol. 4, pp. 7475. John I. Merritt III, Naturalists Across the Rockies, The American West 14 (March-April 1977): 8. John K.Townsend, Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River, and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chili, &c. (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1839). Rpt. in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1905), vol. XXI, p. 194. Alexander Philip Maximilian, Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832 1834, in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), vol. XXII, p. 299. Thwaites, ed., vol. XXIII, pp. 176177. Townsend, Narrative, p. 258. Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, n.d.), p. 27. Russell, p. 46. Russell, p. 118. J.C. Frmont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the Years 184344 (Washington: U.S. Senate, 1845), p. 66. Frmont, p. 69. Howard Stansbury, Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 1852), p. 172. Stansbury, p. 179. Francis P. Farquhar, ed., Up and Down California in 18601864 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. x. Farquhar, ed., pp. 174175.
6. 7 8. 9. 10. 11.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.
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A Literary History of the American West 24. Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 18501915 (New York: Oxford university Press, 1973), p. 179. 25. Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1963), p. 1. 26. Farquhar, ed., pp. 520521. 27. King, p. 32. 28. King, pp. 2324. 29. Wallace Stegner, The Scientist as Artist: Clarence E. Dutton and the Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, The American West 15 (May-June 1978): 19. 30. Clarence E. Dutton, Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880), p. 3. 31. Clarence E. Dutton, Tertiary History of the Grand Caon District (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882), p. 90. 32. Dutton, Tertiary History, p. 56. 33. Dutton, Tertiary History, pp. 5556. 34. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), pp. 8385. (First published in 1911.) 35. Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, p. 131. 36. John Muir, Letters to a Friend (Dunwoody, Georgia: Norman S. Berg, 1973), p. 161. (First published in 1915.) 37. John Muir, The Yosemite (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1962), p. 99. (First published in 1912.) 38. John Muir, Wild Wool, The Overland Monthly 5 (April 1875): 364. 39. Mary Austin, Earth Horizon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), p. 198. 40. Mary Austin, The Land of Journeys Ending (New York: Century, 1924), pp. 441442. 41. Austin, The Land of Journeys Ending, p. 40. 42. John C. Van Dyke, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1920), p. 17. 43. Van Dyke, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado, p. 130. 44. John C. Van Dyke, The Desert (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1904), p. 129. 45. Van Dyke, The Desert, p. 173. 46. Van Dyke, The Desert, p, 192. 47. John C. Van Dyke, The Mountain (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1916), pp. 6869. 48. Van Dyke, The Mountain, p. 198. 49. John C. Van Dyke, The Open Spaces (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1922), p. 20. 50. George Wharton James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (Boston: Little, Brown, 1906), p. 76. 51. James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, p. 531. 52. James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, p. 532. 53. Van Dyke, The Desert, p. 59.
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54. George Wharton James, Utah, Land of Blossoming Valleys (Boston: The Page Company, 1922), p. 205. 55. Enos A. Mills, Wild Life on the Rockies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), pp. 3, 5. 56. Mills, Wild Life on the Rockies, p. 254. 57. Enos A. Mills, Your National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), p. 393. 58. Aldo Leopold, Round River (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 146. 59. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 224225. 60. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, pp. 200201. 61. Robert Marshall, The Problem of the Wilderness, The Scientific Monthly 7 (February 1930): 143. 62. Margaret E. and Olaus Murie, Wapiti Wilderness (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1966), p.47. 63. Olaus Murie, A Field Guide to Animal Trucks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954, pp. 272275. 64. Adolph Murie, The Wolves of Mount McKinley (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1944), pp. 3132. 65. J. Frank Dobie, Pertinences and Patrons, in Dobie, Mody C. Boatright and Harry H. Ransom, eds., Coyote Wisdom (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1938), p. 6. 66. J. Frank Dobie, Guide to the Life and Literature of the Southwest (Dallas: Southem Methodist University Press, 1952), p. 149. 67. J. Frank Dobie, The Voice of the Coyote (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949), p. 29. 68. J. Frank Dobie, Foreword, in Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1960), p. 7. 69. Roy Bedichek, Karnkaway Country (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), p. xxii. (Originally published in 1950.) 70. Bedichek, p. 25. 71. John Graves, Goodbye to a River (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1960), p. 290. 72. John Graves, Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land (New York: A. A. Knopf, 19741, p. 5. 73. Robert H. Boyle, John Graves, and T. H. Watkins, The Water Hustlers (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1971), p. 111. 74. Richard Astro, Steinbeck and Ricketts: Escape or Commitment in The Sea of Cortez ? Western American Literature 6 (Summer 1971): 117. 75. John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), p. 151. 76. Steinbeck, pp. 34. 77. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1954), p. 218. 78. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1952), pp. 2829. 79. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 249.
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A Literary History of the American West 80. Joseph Wood Krutch, If You Dont Mind My Saying So, The American Scholar 39 (Spring 1970): 204. 81. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 240. 82. Abbey, Desert Solitaire, p. 6. 83. Edward Abbey, The Journey Home (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), pp. 1011. 84. Abbey, Desert Solitaire, p. xii.
There is not very much critical literature on western nature writingalmost nothing, in fact, in comparison to that on western fiction or poetry. The following list is meant to include the most important primary sources. I have also included three critical studies which emphasize the psychological and cultural importance of the experience of nature. Abbey, Edward. Abbeys Road. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979. The Introduction is a forthright statement on the writer in the West; the essays are crusty, various, sometimes surprising. . Cactus Country. New York: Time-Life Books, 1973. The Lower Sonoran desert, with iconoclastic commentary on mans impact and related subjects. . Desert Solitaire. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. If any twentieth-century work comes close to Walden . . . . The Journey Home. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977. Some Words in Defense of the American West (subtitle). The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone-and to no one (epigraph). . Slickrock. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1971. With photography by Philip Hyde. Experience in and defense of southern Utah; stunning photography; more than a coffee-table book. Austin, Mary. Earth Horizon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932. A fearless and searching autobiography, especially in the early chapters. . The Flock. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. The life and lore of the herders of the southern California deserts and mountains, with reflections on the effects of outdoor life. . The Land of Journeys Ending. New York: The Century Company, 1924. The New Mexico mystique. . The Land of Little Rain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903. You of the house habit can hardly understand the sense of the hills. . . . The business that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous, world-formative. . The Lands of the Sun. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. Originally published in 1914 as California, the Land of the Sun. J. Frank Dobie said, Mary Austin saw the meanings of things; she was a creator. Bedichek, Roy. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1947. The essay on fences is a small masterpiece of ecological understanding. . Karnkaway Country. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974. First published in 1950. The Gulf Coast of Texas, and the rivers that run to it.
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Boyle, Robert H., John Graves, and T. H. Watkins. The Water Hustlers. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1971. Three big water projects in Texas, California, and New York dissected; their promoters deservedly pilloried. Burdick, Arthur J. The Mystic Mid-Region. New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1904. Travelogue to the Mohave, with emphasis on the ways of burros and prospectors. Colby, William E., ed. John Muirs Studies in the Sierra. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1960. Muir at his most scientific, proving his glacier theory of the Sierras history. Craighead, Frank. Track of the Grizzly. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979. An account of a long-term study in the Yellowstone area, with suggestions for management. Deeply informed by ecological sensitivity. Dobie, J. Frank. Guide to the Life and Literature of the Southwest. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952 Well-ventilated with fresh, outdoor air. . The Longhorns. Boston: Little, Brown, 1941. Much more factual and realistic than Red River. . The Mustangs. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952. I see them vanishing, vanishing, vanished, The Seas of grass shriveled to pens of barb-wired property. . . . . Rattlesnakes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. A tribute to a noble animal, and a good look at some of the filters through which we perceive. . The Voice of the Coyote. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949. The adaptable and durable one, as seen by both admirers and detractors; Dobie is one of the former. Beautifully illustrated by Olaus Murie. Dutton, Clarence E. Mount Taylor and the Zuni Plateau. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1886. Landform description, written with the greatest care. . The Physical Geology of the Grand Caon. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882. The aura of wilderness is never mentioned, but everywhere present. . Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880. Nature has here made a geological map of the country and colored it so that we may read and copy it miles away. . Tertiary History of the Grand Caon District. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882. Wallace Stegner has written, Duttons works . . . are astonishingly fresh after nearly a hundred years. This is his best. Farquhar, Francis P., ed. Up and Down California in 18601864. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. The journals and letters of William H. Brewer, skillfully excerpted. Fletcher, Colin. The Complete Walker. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1970. Rev. ed., The New Complete Walker. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1974. Rev. ed., The Complete Walker III. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1984. Much, much more than an equipment guide. . The Man Who Walked Through Time. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1968. I saw that by going down into that huge fissure in the face of the earth [the Grand Canyon], deep into the space and the silence and the solitude, I might come as close as we can at present to moving back and down through the smooth and apparently impenetrable face of time.
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A Literary History of the American West . The Thousand-Mile Summer in Desert and High Sierra. Berkeley: HowellNorth Books, 1964. From Mexico to Oregon, on foot. Frmont, John Charles. Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the Years 184344. Washington: U.S. Senate, 1845. Fast-moving adventure. This man saw a lot of wilderness, and was impressed by it, though not detained. Graves, John. Goodbye to a River. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1960. A leisurely, meditative canoe trip, during which just about everything in Texas gets thought of in a quietly new way. . Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1974. Emersons Man Thinking, on the farm. . Texas Heartland. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1975. With photography by Jim Bones. Dobie country, now Graves country also. Hoagland, Edward. Notes from the Century Before. New York: Random House, 1969. A summer in deepest British Columbia, interviewing old-timers and learning about wilderness. James, George Wharton. California, Romantic and Beautiful. Boston: The Page Company, 1914. Just exactly what the title says. Not as philosophical as The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, Jamess best book. . Utah, Land of Blossoming Valleys. Boston: The Page Company, 1922. A travelogue. . The Wonders of the Colorado Desert. Boston: Little, Brown, 1906. Desert renewal and purification. King, Clarence. Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872. Superb descriptions of landforms; funny accounts of mountain settlers. . Systematic Geology. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1878. A vast but particular overview of landforms in a large section of the West. Krutch, Joseph Wood. The Desert Year. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1952. Getting to know a home place. . The Forgotten Peninsula. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1961. Prepavement Baja California, and its extremes of contrast with modem America. . The Grand Canyon. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1958. The canyon, and canyon-inspired meditations on man and nature; in Krutchs work, this book signals a turn toward wilderness. . The Great Chain of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Biological studies, underpinning a vision of ecological system. . If You Dont Mind My Saying So. The American Scholar 39 (Spring 1970): 202 208. A final word on wilderness. . The Modern Temper. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. Urban disillusionment, stated bravely and conclusively. . The Voice of the Desert. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1954. Deeper into the desert than The Desert Year; wider, epistemologically. LeConte, Joseph. A Journal of Ramblings Through the High Sierra of California. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1960. Originally published in 1875. A high-spirited summer pack trip, with lectures on geology. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.
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The outstanding characteristic of perception is that it entails no consumption and no dilution of any resource. . Round River. Ed. by Luna Leopold. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Early journal entries, mostly about hunting. Lopez, Barry Holstun. Desert Notes. Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews & McMeel, 1976. The desert as renewal, mostly. . Of Wolves and Men. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1978. A nonpareil study, combining science, feeling, and species-introspection. . River Notes. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1979. Reflections suggested by living next to a river in Oregon. McPhee, John. Coming into the Country. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977. Alaska: a trip on a wild river, a view of politics and economics in the current boom, and a study of settlers and their dreams. Marshall, Robert. Arctic Wilderness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956. Reprinted in 1970 as Alaska Wilderness. Adventures on the frontier, and thoughts on the meaning of frontier. . The Problem of the Wilderness. The Scientific Monthly 7 (February 1930): 141148. A key document in the development of a theory of wilderness-forrecreation. Maximilian, Alexander Philip. Travels in the Interior of North America, 18321834. In Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906. Volumes XXII, XXIII, XXIV. Bernard DeVoto said, He was a good man. Michaux, F. Andrew, and Thomas Nuttall. The North American Sylva. 5 vols. Philadelphia: Rice, Rutter, & Co., 1865. Volumes 4 and 5, dealing with trees of the West, are by Nuttall. Mills, Enos A. The Spell of the Rockies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. Adventures with animals and with strong weather. . Wild Animal Homesteads. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1923. Close views of wildlife in mountain wilderness. . Wild Life on the Rockies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909. A climb up the Rockies will develop a love for nature, strengthen ones appreciation of the beautiful world outdoors, and put one in tune with the Infinite. . Your National Parks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. A survey, written with urgency and a far-seeing sense of the importance of wilderness. Muir, John. Letters to a Friend. Dunwoody, Georgia: Norman S. Berg, 1973. Originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1915. Letters to Mrs. Jeanne Carr, confiding and passionately expressive. . The Mountains of California. New York: The Century Company, 1894. Rpt. New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1962. Careful depictions of trees, rocks, mountains, streams, and flowery meadows; all spiritually, intensely alive. . My First Summer in the Sierra. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. Rpt. 1979. Drawn up from the journals of 1869, Muirs baptismal season; as wild and as moving as anything he wrote. . Travels in Alaska. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. Rpt. 1979. Indians, glaciers, and youthful excitement (at age 40+) to be learning a new wildland.
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A Literary History of the American West . Wild Wool. The Overland Monthly 5 (April 1875): 361366. An early view of wilderness as pure order. . The Yosemite. New York: The Century Company, 1912. Rpt. New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1962. A guidebook, but to more than just Yosemite. Murie, Adolph. The Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone. U.S. National Park Service Fauna Series, No. 4. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1940. Resolutely thorough; perhaps not so suggestive, nor so poetic, as The Wolves of Mount McKinley. . A Naturalist in Alaska. New York: Devin-Adair, 1961. Rpt. New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1963. Interesting adventures, centered on high spot encounters with wildlife. . The Wolves of Mount McKinley. U.S. National Park Service Fauna Series No. 5. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1944. The first modern, scientifically objective study of the species. Murie, Olaus. The Elk of North America. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: The Stackpole Company, 1951. Years of close study, most of it in the field, give this book its authority. . A Field Guide to Animal Tracks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Practical and complete; a clue to the life of a wilderness man. . Journeys to the Far North. Palo Alto: The Wilderness Society and American West Publishing Company, 1973. . . . the snow stretching away until broken by the blue line of woods where we might camp for the night. , and Margaret E. Murie. Wapiti Wilderness. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1966. Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the surrounding wilderness, seen over four decades. Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Rev. ed. 1973. The most comprehensive of scholarly studies on the subject. Nuttall, Thomas. A Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory, During the Year 1819. Philadelphia: Thos. H. Palmer, 1821. Rpt. in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1905, Volume XIII. A curious, mostly solitary traveler, in love with plants. Roe, Frank Gilbert. The North American Buffalo. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951. J. Frank Dobie says: The one indispensable book on the subject. Russell, Osborne. Journal of a Trapper. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, n.d. Includes poetic encounters with wilderness. Seton, Ernest Thompson. Lives of Game Animals. 4 volumes. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1929. A compendium of facts and field accounts. Shepard, Paul. Man in the Landscape. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1967. An intellectual and aesthetic history of attitudes toward nature, with examples from the American West included. Stansbury, Howard. Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1852. A government workman, with an eye for the beauty of even the most barren and dangerous places.
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Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. New York: The Viking Press, 1951. Rpt. 1962. Originally published in 1941 as part of Sea of Cortez. A trip to Baja California, with reflections on thinking and ecology. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 18041806. New York: Antiquarian Press, 1959. A first look at the West. Townsend, John Kirk. Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains, to the Columbia River, and a Visit to the Sandwich Islands, Chili, &c. Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1839. Reprinted in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1905. Volume XXI. General accounts of landscape and certain edible plants. Van Dyke, John C. The Desert. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1904. What is it that draws us to the boundless and the fathomless? . The Grand Canyon of the Colorado. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1920. Minutely detailed views, and a grand undertone of aesthetic rapture. . The Mountain. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1916. Doctor Johnson thought that the mountains were so much hopeless sterility dismissed by nature from her care. The cockney limitation of that thought is amazing. . Nature for Its Own Sake. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1898. The human animal, caged in cities and taught the tricks of civilization, can never forget the nature that sent him forth. . The Open Spaces. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1922. Autobiographical reflections on the influences of space and wildness. Wild, Peter. Pioneer Conservationists of Western America. Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press, 1979. From Powell to Abbey, including Austin, DeVoto, and David Brower, among others. A most useful overview. Wolfe, Linnie Marsh, ed. John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. Rpt. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. The inner Muir. Wright, William H. The Grizzly Bear: The Narrative of a Hunter-Naturalist, Historical, Scientific, and Adventurous. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1909. When I first began actually to hunt the grizzly I found that much of what I had read about him and most of what I had heard was fiction.
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THE WESTERN MOVIE TO 1960
During that time generations of young people inhabited movie houses on Saturday mornings and afternoons, thrilling to the exploits of Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, Hoot Gibson, Tim McCoy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, William Boyd, and many another courageous cowboy star. The B Westerns were subject to much contemporary criticism, not the least of which was due to their generally low artistic quality. Though some recent critics have expressed fondness for the Bs, they were made with such haste and in such quantity that most of them could not possibly claim to be works of high art. Quite often, in point of fact, they shamelessly exaggerated, distorted, and romanticized to the degree that, in them, the reality of the Old West was virtually obscured from view. What could be more absurdly unrealistic, for example, than the series of singing cowboy moviesGene Autry and Roy Rogers were the best known but hardly the only singing cowboys of the timethat were so popular from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s? Another frequently voiced criticism of the Bs was that they undermined the morals of the young; such movies necessarily relied on violence as a standard plot device and tended to glamorize outlaws and outlawry. Such complaints, of course, are often directed at the various forms of popular culture. The B Westerns, in any event, were killed, not by critics and moralists, but by television and the breakup of the big-studio system. By the early 1950s the main function of the Bs, to provide weekend entertainment for restless youngsters, had been appropriated by television. The last Western to be designated as a B was filmed in 1954. Whatever their weaknesses, the Bs constitute a major component in the history of Western movies. They addressed audiences whose members were ordinarily at an impressionable age, and unquestionably they reinforced in the minds of those audiences the key elements of the western mythos. Moreover, they apparently supplied exactly what Americans in the 1930s and 1940s were looking for: fantasy, escape, and a consoling interpretation of their nations past. Growing up alongside the Bs was another strain of Western movie that critics have viewed more sympathetically: the full-scale, feature-length, fully, sometimes lavishly financed serious Western. One of the first of these was The Spoilers (1914), based on the Rex Beach novel. One of the best (of those that have survived the ravages of time, at any rate) was Hells Hinges (1916), starring William S. Hart, perhaps the greatest of the early Western actors. The movie has strong religious-allegorical overtones, in that it deals with the corruption of a weak-willed clergyman in an evil western town known as Hells Hinges; the hero, Blaze Tracey (Hart), who is in love with the clergymans sister, takes vengeance on the town by burning it to the ground. The photography of Hells Hinges, combined with an imag267
inative storyline, makes it the best of the extant Hart Westerns, and one of the best of the early serious Westerns. A landmark event in the history of Western movies was the release, in 1923, of James Cruzes The Covered Wagon, which dramatized the story of the nineteenth-century pioneers overland journey to California. Stunningly photographed in Nevada and Utah, The Covered Wagon introduced the epic element to Western film. Though the story itself often seems contrived by current standards, the picture was an enormous box-office success, and it was unquestionably responsible for the proliferation of Westerns during the next decade; studio production of Westerns in 1924, for instance, tripled that of the preceding year. Serious Westernsespecially those in the epic categoryabounded in the 1920s. Some of the more notable ones were Riders of the Purple Sage (1925), starring Tom Mix; George B. Seitzs The Vanishing American (1927); Raoul Walshs In Old Arizona (1929) ; Victor Flemings The Virginian (1929), a talkie starring Gary Cooper; and King Vidors Billy the Kid (1930). A much-ballyhooed epic, released in 1930, was Raoul Walshs The Big Trail, which featured a promising young actor who went by the name of John Wayne. The Big Trail, after its publicity build-up, was a commercial flop, a circumstance that resulted in two unfortunate side effects: Wayne did not receive another starring role in a serious Western for nearly a decade, being consigned instead to toil for years in the Bs; and the studios, by and large, shied away from big-budget Westerns in the 1930s. In fact it was not until 1939 that the Western recovered fully from The Big Trail disaster. In that year Cecil B. DeMilles Union Pacific appeared; so did Henry Kings Jesse James, George Marshalls Destry Rides Again, and Michael Curtizs Dodge City. And, most auspicious of all, John Fords Stagecoach, with an impressive performance by the rehabilitated John Wayne, was released in 1939. Stagecoach has been discounted by some for its romantic portrayal of the West, but its immense importance in restoring the Western to a position of preeminence in the movie industry in the late 1930s cannot be doubted. Nor can the contributions of its director, John Ford, be questioned. John Ford was, quite simply, the greatest director in the history of the Western movie genre. Ford first went to Hollywood in 1915, where he acted, under the name Jack Ford, in several D. W. Griffith films. In 1917 he began his directing career, churning out one- and two-reelers, many of them Westerns. His first Western feature was The Iron Horse (1924), a silent epic about the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Other Ford Westerns followed in the late 1920s, but during the 1930s he moved on to other topics and genres in his pictures. The success of Stagecoach changed all that. 268
Following the Second World War, Ford made a remarkable series of superior Westerns. He formed a kind of stock company of actors and technicians that periodically journeyed to Monument Valley, his favorite shooting location. (Ford, among others, was responsible for an oft-repeated jest in the 1940s that the typical Western movie was set in Texas, filmed in Arizona, and financed in California.) The first of the series, My Darling Clementine (1946), starring Henry Fonda and Victor Mature, is the best of all the Wyatt Earp-OK Corral movies. Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), all starring John Wayne, constitute Fords so-called U. S. Cavalry trilogy. Fort Apache, in particular, is a rich, provocative work that marks a turning point in Fords portrayal of the American Indian; in Fort Apache, for the first time in the American cinema, the Indian is treated fairly, sympathetically, and without condescension. Wagonmaster (1950), starring Ben Johnson, a somewhat scaled-down version of the 1920s Covered Wagon epic, was Fords personal favorite of all his films. The critical consensus, however, seems to favor The Searchers (1956) as Fords greatest picture. The Searchers is, arguably, the best Western movie of all time. Certainly the role of the Indian-hating Ethan Edwards in The Searchers brought forth John Waynes career-best performance as an actor (a judgment Wayne agreed with, incidentally). The films photography, featuring the Monument Valley backdrop, is excellent. The movies complex theme, however, is the primary factor in its greatness. John Waynes portrayal of Ethan Edwards, with psychosexual implications oozing from his racial hatred, is truly memorable. But what is most impressive about the film, viewed from the perspective of the 1980s, is its continuing relevance to a world in which individual and collective hearts of darkness lurk ubiquitously. The decade and a half after the Second World War, 1945 to 1960, was a period of considerable change for the Western. As one critic has put it, previously ignored subjects such as sex, neuroses, and racial conscience began to seep through the genres widening crevices. Howard Hughess The Outlaw ( 1943) and King Vidors Duel in the Sun (1947) brought sex into the Western with much fanfare and not a little controversy. Such bizarre versions of the genre as Nicholas Rays ]ohnny Guitar (1954) certainly qualified as neurotic. And as previously mentioned, even John Ford, who in Stagecoach had used Indians simply as background props to validate the principle of white supremacy, began to portray Native Americans with seriousness and sensitivity. An important trend in the Western genre following the Second World War was the emergence of the adult Western. Because of the popularity of the B Westerns among young people of the time, the industry felt com269
pelled to make clear that some Westerns anywaythose that focused on psychology rather than actionwould appeal to adults as well as to children. The best-known of the adult Westerns of the 1950s were Henry Kings The Gunfighter (1950), Fred Zinnemanns High Noon ( 1952), and George Stevenss Shane (1953). The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck, is a stark drama of an aging gunman who must face the fact that he is very nearly over the hill. Jimmy Ringo (Peck) returns to his hometown to visit his wife and son, whom he has not seen in a long time. In the end he is gunned down, unfairly, by a young man who wants the reputation of having killed the great Ringo. Ringo allows the boy to go free, secure in the knowledge that living the harried life of a gunfighter will be punishment enough for his action. High Noon, starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, is perhaps the most controversial Western ever made. It has been interpreted variously, usually in terms of political allegory. Critics either love it or despise it; there appears to be no middle ground. Certainly the scenes in High Noon in which Will Kane (Cooper) prepares to shoot it out with the Miller gang, to save a town that does not deserve to be saved, are among the most suspenseful the Western genre has to offer. Adapted from the classic novel by Jack Schaefer, Shane is generally acknowledged to be the finest celluloid portrayal of the Western hero. The title character appears mysteriously at the beginning of the film, defeats the evil cattle baron and his hired guns, and then rides off into the sunset at the close. With classical simplicity, the movie establishes a pattern of behavior for the Western hero and etches into the viewers consciousness the image of the hero as frontier savior. The postSecond World War period was a time of rich innovation and development at all levels of the genre. Not only did John Ford do his best work during this era and the adult Western come of age, but a number of talented lesser directors, whose works are only now beginning to be appreciated, were active during the period. I am thinking, specifically, of Anthony Mann, Delmer Daves, and Budd Boetticher. Mann directed a series of excellent Westerns-Winchester 73 (1950) and Bend of the River (1952), for examplestarring James Stewart. Davess contributions include Broken Arrow (1950) and 3:10 to Yuma (1956), and Boettichers half-dozen lowbudget Westerns with Randolph Scott during the 1950sthe last, Comanche Station (1960), is the bestare all finely crafted films. One of the great directors in the history of American motion pictures, Howard Hawks, also made two notable Westerns during the post-war era: Red River ( 1948) and Rio Bravo ( 1959). Red River, starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, is the best of the cattle-drive epics. Regal in length and pacing, the movie is one of the classics of Western film. It supplied John 270
Wayne withnext to his portrayal of Ethan Edwards in The Searchershis most memorable role. Rio Bravo, though it has been highly praised by influential critics, does not, in my estimation, measure up to the classic stature of Red River. As the decade of the 1950s drew to a close, the Western found itself, as it often had before, in an ambiguous position. A rapidly evolving world made the Westerns moral and geographic landscape seem, to many, anachronistic. Technology had changed the nature of the motion picture industry drastically, and of all movie genres, the Western was affected most adversely by those changes. The Western would undergo radical surgeries in the 1960s and 1970s, and predictions of the death of the Western would be rife in the 1980s. In the first six decades of its existence, however, the Western movie generated a grand, gaudy, and occasionally glorious history.
W ILLIAM T. PILKINGTON ,
Tarleton State University
Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1971. An indispensable work. Brings together the authors ideas, developed earlier in a series of journal articles, on the character and plot formulas most often associated with the Western myth. Fenin, George N., and William K. Everson. The Western: From Silents to the Seventies. New York: Grossman, 1973. An invaluable source of information on the historical development of the Western. French, Philip. Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Witty and reliable discussion of Westerns as a movie type. Kitses, Jim. Horizons West. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Offers, in its opening chapter, an excellent structural analysis of the Western genre. Manchel, Frank. Cameras West. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Apparently written for a high-school-age audience. Readable and informative. Especially good on the silent period. 271
Nachbar, Jack, ed. Focus on the Western. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Collects fifteen essays and excerpts that provide illuminating overviews of the Western. Helpful chronology and bibliography. Pilkington, William T., and Don Graham, eds. Western Movies. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979. Critical articles on a dozen important Westerns. Tuska, Jon. The Filming of the West. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. A breezy, chatty history of Western films. The books most valuable service is that it records biographical and production data relating to the makers and the making of about one hundred significant Western movies.
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SECTION IV
Beginnings of Literary Historiograhy
Introduction
ESTERN AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM had its beginnings in the eighteenth century, as Martin Bucco explains in the last chapter of A Literary History of the American West. After western criticism had developed for more than a century, the frontier closed in 1890, and explorers, adventurers, and pioneers could no longer encounter the Old West. Historians, political leaders, writers, and artists such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and Frederic Remington contributed to a new western literary historiography that argued the importance of the bygone Old West to the nation and to the new region that had emerged as a result of the westward movement. They were followed in the twentieth century by scholars such as Mabel Major, T. M. Pearce, and Henry Nash Smith, whose works helped to stimulate interest in the formal study of western American literature. Such study probably began in universities before World War I. Certainly, by the 1930s western universities offered courses like J. Frank Dobies Life and Literature of the Southwest, which he began teaching at the University of Texas in 1929. Such literary study was often approached in terms of the theory of a history professor: Frederick Jackson Turner. To the frontier, wrote Turner, the American intellect owes its striking characteristics; and from that theory he concluded that the closing of the frontier was a watershed event in American history. When Turner expounded those views in a paper that he read before the American Historical Association in 1893, his theory itself became a watershed event in the way that people thought and wrote about the West. No longer did Americans think of the trans-Mississippi region as simply a barren desert; thanks to Turner, it was viewed as the proving ground of the American spirit. Shortly before and during the years when Turner first expressed his theory, Theodore Roosevelts The Winning of the West added force to the Turnerian view; and Roosevelt and other strenuous life easterners such as Owen Wister and Frederic Remington depicted the Old West as a vanished world, as the foreword to The Virginian put it. In
273
his chapter in this section, Ben Vorpahl explains why Turner, Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington were so fascinated by the West. The Old West retained its fascination for succeeding generations of scholars, and the New West began to attract some attention, too. Fred Erismans chapter on Mabel Major, T. M. Pearce, and Henry Nash Smith discusses them as representative of literary historians and critics who began to assess the achievements of the Old West from the perspective of the New. In 1938, Mabel Major, Rebecca W. Smith, and T. M. Pearce published Southwest Heritage: A Literary History. This pioneering critical guide to books about the region was revised and enlarged in 1948 and again in 1970. Although few other literary histories of western sub-regions were updated as often as Southwest Heritage, a number of others appeared during the 1920s and 1930s, among them Ralph L. Rusks The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (1925), Alfred Powerss History of Oregon Literature (1935), and Franklin Walkers San Franciscos Literary Frontier (1939). Such regional critics had an effect not only on the local scene, but on American literature in general. In Southevest Heritage, Major and Pearce quote from an essay that Henry Nash Smith wrote in 1942 for The Saturday Review of Literature. Smith contended that regional critics helped to overthrow the genteel tradition by objecting to an ideal of a cultivation and refinement of the human being without reference to place and social setting and by maintaining the human need for a harmonious adjustment to naturenot an abstraction, but a specific, tangible terrain; and to societynot a featureless aggregate, but a concrete group of individual persons engaged in a joint enterprise, governed by shared references to a historical tradition, and bound together by the common conditions of their life (May 16, 1942, pp. 56). In 1950 appeared a book that changed the way people thought about the Old West, that made it possible to see once again a variety of genres and a richness of expression in western literature, and that viewed Turners frontier hypothesis as itself a product of the myth of the garden. Henry Nash Smiths Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth examined the western experience with the then-new American Studies approach and showed that dime novels and Wild West novels played an important part in American attitudes about the West, for men believed the myth even in the face of opposing facts. But in his chapter on The Agricultural West in Literature, Smith also traced the steps by which the conservative social bias evident in Coopers Leatherstocking Tales gave way to the equalitarian creed expressed in the stories of Hamlin Garland. It had at last become possible to deal with the Western farmer in literature as a human being instead of seeing him through a veil of literary convention, class prejudice, or social theory (p. 290).
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BEGINNINGS OF LITERARY HISTORIOGRAPHY
A decade after the publication of Virgin Land, studies of western American literature began to appear in increasing numbers. By 1982, Richard W. Etulain, choosing selectively, listed more than five thousand items in A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature (University of Nebraska Press). Etulain also surveyed scholarship from the time of Turner in The American Literary West and Its Interpreters: The Rise of a New Historiography (in The Western: A Collecton of Critical Essays [1979], edited by James K. Folsom). By turning to Martin BuccoS The Development of Western Literary Criticism, one can see how the new historiography fits into the overall development of western studies. These studies suggest that there is much to learn from our predecessors encounters with the West. Wallace Stegner has rightly warned, however, of the tendency to seek the Old West as an escape from the new. In a widely quoted passage from History, Myth, and the Western Writer (in The Sound of Mountain Water ), Stegner offers an analogy which shows that the western past must be explored for what it can reveal about the present: In the old days we used to tie a string of lariats from house to barn so as to make it from shelter to responsibility and back again. With personal, family, and cultural chores to do, I think we had better rig up such a line between past and present. (p. 201)
J AMES H. MA G U I R E ,
275
Roosevelt, Wister, Turner, and Remington

HE FIRST EUROPEAN accounts of the West were written by people for whom locating and defining their large subject presented no very serious difficulty. The West, which lay between Europe and Asia, was America. The Atlantic Ocean made a boundary too broad to be ignored, even had the wild American bays and inlets resembled their Old World counterpartswhich, of course, they did not. However, when European settlements were established in America, the problems of location and definition appeared at once, and became more urgent as time passed. Frontiers shifted constantly and, sometimes, rapidly. The West soon came to be associated with the vague region into which no frontier had yet intruded almost a synonym for uncertainty. In 1728, for instancesome 120 years after the founding of Jamestown in the huge colony that had been chartered as Virginia in 1584William Byrd gazed westward at the crests of the Appalachians enraptured with that Place, which the Hand of Nature had made so very remarkable. He was speaking of the vast continental interior that retreated ahead of him as he surveyed a boundary between the colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. His chief reason for finding this region remarkable was that he had no idea how far it extended. To have discovered the West and to be lost were much the same thing. About a hundred years later, when James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Prairie in 1827, the interior region had been penetrated by whites and was in the process of being subjected to the political control of the United States, which had devised a battery of irresistible techniques for its division 2 and settlement. This relatively new circumstance did not dispel the aura of mystery that hung about the West. Dying Natty Bumppo faces westward at the end of Coopers novel, much as Byrd had faced west in 1728, and can see no more than Byrd could. The reason is not merely that he has gone blind; it is that he is looking toward what Cooper calls an unknown 3 world. Presumably, the unknown would remain unknown until the line that divided it from the known dissolvedan event which seems to have occurred sixty-three years later, when the U.S. Census of 1890 officially de4 clared that a line of frontier settlements could no longer be identified. That is, emigration had erased the frontier. It was then, while the frontier faded and vanished, that four young Americans attempted to look back and discover what the West had beeneven what it might still signify. Theodore Roosevelt was the eldest of the four, born into a well-to-do
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ROOSEVELT, WISTER, TURNER, AND REMINGTON
New York business family in 1858. Next was Owen Wister, the son of a Philadelphia physician, born in 1860. Frederic Remington and Frederick Jackson Turner were born about a month apart in 1861, both sons of small town newspaper editors. The former grew up among the rivers and lakes of northern New York; the latter among the similar landscapes of central Wisconsin. Each of the four had different gifts, as Natty Bumppo might say. Roosevelt was a politician, Wister a publicist, Turner a humanist, Remington a romantic. Yet they all shared Byrds taste for the remarkable and Coopers interest in the unknown, and their individual investigations, considered together, had a large collective effect on the course of American cultural history. When Turner, a thirty-two-year-old professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, delivered a paper at the 1893 American Historical Association meeting in Chicago, outlining his frontier hypothesis, Roosevelt, at thirty-five, had already published eight books. In addition, he had served as a member of the New York State Assembly at Albany, had lived as a rancher and deputy sheriff in North Dakota, and had lost a New York City mayoral election. He was currently U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, a post he would soon resign to sit on the New York City Police Commission. Versatile, resourceful and energetic almost to a fault, Roosevelt possessed many of the traits Turner assigned the better sort of frontiersmanalthough he later described himself to Remington as a literary man with a large family of small children and a taste for practical politics and bear 5 hunting. Roosevelt writes with the same vigor of conception and clarity of demonstration that played such important parts in his public life. The literary habit was already well established in him when he graduated from Harvard in 1880 and began to pursue his varied interests. He entered Columbia University Law School in September, married Alice Hathaway Lee, of Cambridge, in October, and embarked with his bride the following spring for a five-month tour of Europe before returning to law school in October 1881. For most people, this schedule would have been quite full enough, but Roosevelt was also campaigning for the New York Assembly and beginning his career as a writer. An October 17, 1881 diary entry noted: am working fairly hard at my law, hard at politics, and hardest of all at my book which I 6 expect to publish this winter. Not only was Roosevelt elected an assemblyman in November, days after his twenty-third birthday; he almost kept up with his self-imposed publication schedule. On December 2, he sent his manuscript for The Naval War of 1812 off to G. P. Putnams, where it was published in the spring. The Naval War of 1812 did what Roosevelt wanted it to do, filling gaps left by other historians, providing detailed accounts of individual battles 277
andmost importantpresenting a balanced view of emotionally volatile events. Roosevelt managed all this by paying close attention to the various strategies used in the war, and by sensibly showing why some strategies succeeded better than others. He was no more unbiased than he would be in more frankly patriotic works such as The Rough Riders (1899) or America and the World War (1915), but he managed to explain his biases by dealing with facts in a reasonable manner. He based his judgments on the unstated premise that even wars operate in accordance with rules which may be discovered, and which will be found to make sensethe broadly defined but powerful norms of sanity, utility, and morality he had learned to value as a child and at Harvard. Roosevelts tacit assumption that life was sane, useful and good was seriously shaken on February 14, 1884, when his wife and his mother died only hours apart, two days after the birth of his first child. That summer, he dropped out of active political life and went to live on a ranch he owned in North Dakota, leaving his infant daughter in the care of his sister, Anna. He stayed on the ranch for about two years, writing more or less steadily, even while he also practiced the strenuous life that transformed him from a frail asthmatic into a robust outdoorsman. Three books came directly out of the North Dakota experienceHunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888), and The Wilderness Hunter (1893). Ranch Life shows best why Roosevelt struck out for North Dakota in the wake of his personal tragedy of 1884, and why he would continue to regard the West as having a special importance. To turn from The Naval War of 1812 to Ranch Life is not to encounter the expansiveness often associated with the West, but to notice a reduction in the scale of experience. The chief reason is that Roosevelt abandoned in the latter book the long historic memory that informed the former. The isolated environment of the ranch, with its minimal landscape, engaged the senses but did not confuse the mind with too much complexity. Roosevelt observed that life in the arid beltas he liked to call the northern plainswas difficult but invigorating, and that the surroundings were beautiful but treacherous. The wild animals, thinly scattered over broad areas, seemed unusually cunning and resourceful. Range cattle and domestic animals brought in from elsewhere either died quickly or acquired traits that allowed them to thrive. Men who proved themselves capable of enduring the rigorous climate, the hard work, and the isolation tended to develop appropriate and useful virtues. They were physically strong, mentally quick, and morally insightful but direct. Wherever he looked, Roosevelt seemed to find analogies with the larger, more complex world he had temporarily left behind him. The division of labor at a cattle roundup, the workings of parapolitical organizations like the Montana Stock Raisers Associationeven 278
the extra-legal justice administered by summarily hanging horse thieves, cattle rustlers and the likereassured him by demonstrating on a small and therefore comprehensible scale the fundamentally sound principles that supported Anglo-American civilization. In short, the arid belt served Roosevelt simultaneously as a retreat from painful personal experience and a lucid model of sometimes cloudy history. The region was plainly of the world, but not, somehow, in it. This made the education Roosevelt underwent there easy in one way and hard in another. A talented if not profound thinker, who, at twentysix, had already begun to make a name for himself in letters and politics when he went west to live in 1884, Roosevelt quickly grasped the rudimentary social order and the practical concerns related to raising livestock. In the first five chapters of Ranch Life, he concentrated on matters that not only showed how far apart North Dakota and New York were, but suggested that there was a continuity between them. Although he called the North Dakota prairies barbarous, picturesque, and curiously fascinating, he made sure to explain how they could be put to good use by erecting log houses and outbuildings in cottonwood groves along the watercourses, taking care not to overstock the ranges, letting wild grasses cure standing on the stalk for winter pasture, and employing other management practices which were not at all barbarous and which only those who did not understand them would be likely to regard as picturesque. On the other hand, what made these practices fascinating was that they were all adaptations of European technology and methods of organization. They represented high standards of efficiency and utility being applied on a large scale. Therefore, even when Roosevelt allowed himself to wax sentimental about grim pioneers enduring western prairies (rather than having a gay time in eastern towns, presumably), his self-indulgent rhetoric usually had a hardpan of historic truth not far underneath. For example, he insisted on ridiculously comparing himself and his fellow ranchmen with primitive peoples, but deftly gave the comparison resonance by calling western ranches a primitive industry and thus establishing the same linkage between ranchmen and industrialimperial power which he would himself affirm in 1898 by founding the Rough Riders. The first five chapters of Ranch Life present a coherent account of how well the systems that had allowed Europeans to found commercial and manufacturing empires along Americas eastern seaboard worked in the Dakota plains and badlands. Dealing with discontinuities between the East and the West was much more difficult for Roosevelt because it required him to examine personal differences among individuals rather than merely generalizing about the behavior of groups. This he tried to do in the next three chapters of Ranch Life, which he entitled Frontier Types, Red and White on the Border, and 279
Sheriffs Work on a Ranch. These chapters proceed quite differently than the first five chapters. They consist mostly of anecdotes about Roosevelts contact with outcasts for whom the industrial order had no place, and who therefore seemed bound for extinction. Roosevelt concentrated on the eccentricities that seemed to make each individual among the outcasts unique, but he also ascribed one characteristic to all of them in common. The outlaw he pursued down more than a hundred miles of the ice-bound Little Missouri River could later write to him from jail with what Roosevelt recognized as a delicious sense of equalityan assertive expression of manhood that seemed to transcend legal distinctions. Indians like those he told of outfacing on the prairie near his ranch were very apt to have a good deal of the wild beast in them. Cowboys were universally possessed of a free spirit. Trappers, he said, fear neither man, brute nor element. Hunters comprised the archetype of freedom. No particular sequence informs Roosevelts accounts of the outcasts. Indeed, his anecdotes may be arranged in almost any order without changing their collective meaning: just beyond the frontier Roosevelt called the border, a perilous freedom beckoned men to forsake utility, efficiency, and historyall the values, in short, that made ranching identifiable as an industry. The last four chapters of Ranch Life concern Roosevelts direct personal experience of the freedom he associated with extra-social behavior. These chapters are arranged in an order of ascent, ranging from the badlands near Roosevelts ranch on the Little Missouri River to the peaks of the Coeur dAlene Mountains far to the west. The Ranchmans Rifle on Crag and Prairie tells of hunting antelope and deer, which served as a source of fresh meat for the ranch. The Wapiti, or Round-Horned Elk recounts the pursuit of larger and scarcer game somewhat farther away. Although the elk taken were used as food, the chief reason for hunting them was to get the antlers, which were displayed as trophies. The Big Horn Sheep, which continues in the same vein, concerns animals Roosevelt linked with snowclad, desolate wastes, ice-coated crags, and the bitter cold of a northern winter. Roosevelt claimed of the particular hunt he recounted that I was out for meat rather than sport, but the account emphasizes the hardship and danger of the pursuit, the wild strength and beauty of the quarry, and the splendor of the snow-covered landscape. Roosevelt rode home afterward, he said, by moonlight as the thermometer hovered at twenty-six degrees below zero. Aching, exhausted and half-starved, he also froze [his] face, one foot, and both knees. However, he was able to confirm at last that the great rams head was a trophy that paid for all. The Game of the High Peaks: The White Goat, finally, tells of an even more dangerous adventure in search of a much more exotic beast. No mention is made of using the carcass for meat, although taking the horns and hide seems an act of 280
sacramental importance. As the altitude of the hunt increases, efficiency and utility are replaced by a sense of wonder akin to that felt by westwardgazing William Byrd in 1728. Together, the four hunting chapters chronicle a transcendenceif only a temporary oneof the practical concerns of ranching, politics, and industrial management. The crucial point for Roosevelt in 1886, when he made his goat hunt, was not that cattle ranching succeeded so well as an industry that frontier conditions were fading out; it was that the frontier might survive in the mind even after industry had removed it from the land. Having gone west to escape the painful complications with which history must often deal, he had discovered a principle by which he believed history was governed. Plainly, the hardest part of his North Dakota education was also the most potent. Just after returning from his 1886 hunting expedition into the Coeur dAlene Mountains, Roosevelt was offered the Republican nomination for Mayor of New York City. As though to confirm his recent discovery, he conducted a vigorous campaign, lost the November election, and departed without remorse for England, where he married Edith Carow, a long time friend, in December. He finished Ranch Life while in Rome, on his honeymoon. Returning with his bride to Sagamore Hill, the family home on Long Island, he then began work on a project that was probably more ambitious than anything else he would ever attemptincluding his ambitious strategies of presidential politics. Diffidence, which rarely troubled him, was surely no impediment when he decided to call his new project simply The Winning of the West. Roosevelt planned in 1887 to trace the course of European exploration, emigration and settlement across the entire North American continent. As it happened, politics, war, and other pressing concerns interrupted him, and he never executed the massive study he had conceived. Still, the four volumes he managed to complete suggest the sweep of his initial vision. The first volume centers on the period between French penetration of the Ohio Valley in 1763 and the organization of Kentucky in 1776. The second takes up the subject of international intrigue in the interior between 1777 and 1783, years dominated by the Revolutionary War. The third treats developments related to accelerated migration and settlement between 1784 and 1790Indian wars, western separatist movements, and the organization of the Northwest and Southwest Territories in 1787 and 1788. The fourth addresses increasingly complicated problems of frontier impatience and intractability, especially as they spawn elaborate land speculation schemes in the last decade of the eighteenth century and give new force to the Louisiana Purchase and subsequent westward exploration in the first decade of the nineteenth century. In all, The Winning of the West covers about a century-and-a-half of turbulent history in the great in281
terior valleys and along the western watersalso spanning, in Roosevelts own life, the period between his emergence from the relative obscurity of his North Dakota ranch in 1886 and his entry into national politics as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. The student of personal experience would never have a better chance to weigh in the large balance scales of history the great concerns he thought he had glimpsed, schematized and miniaturized, in the arid belt. When G. P. Putnams Sons brought out the first two volumes of The Winning of the West in 1889, Frederick Jackson Turner was taking courses toward his Ph.D. in history at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He also married Caroline Mae Sherwood of Chicago the same year, a few days before his twenty-ninth birthday, and went to work as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he earned a yearly salary of $1500. Like Roosevelt, Turner was intense, bookish, and inclined to stubbornness. Unlike Roosevelt, he distinguished sharply between the life of the mind and the life of action. The latter, he thought, had always been required by the conditions present along a frontier, which he later 7 defined as the meeting point between savagery and civilization. The former consisted chiefly of reflective contemplation about the manifold significance of various frontier situations. Looking back, he would later suppose that he had belonged to the party of the mind since his boyhood in Portage, Wisconsin, on the banks of the Wisconsin River, where he had observed the pioneer commerce between East and West from a very early age. This kind of observation was raised to another power when he entered the University of Wisconsin as a freshman in 1880 and quickly discovered the Draper collection of historic documents at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, where he spent countless hours, even as an undergraduate, poring over the accumulated records of exploration and settlement. An expansive energy kept Roosevelt constantly on the move looking for outlaws, big game, political contests and other challengesall of which he regarded as materials he could use in the conduct of his ubiquitous work. Turners method was less spectacular and probably more efficientalthough the work he produced by it is hard to measure in quantitative terms: he moved only when he had to, used well whatever was at hand, and said as little as possible. By practicing such subtle strategies he would not only get the admiration of students in the seminars he taught at Wisconsin and Harvard, he would significantly change the way in which American history was studied and written. The Wisconsin State Historical Society was a good but not great library when Turner worked there on his Masters degree between 1885 and 1888, meanwhile earning a meagre living as a tutor in rhetoric and oratory at the University. Had the library been more extensive, Turner might have 282
taken even longer to finish his thesis than he did, because he was almost compulsively exactingbut he completed the brief, scholarly study, or at least seemed to do so, in 1888, the same year Ranch Life (Roosevelts fifth book) was published, profusely illustrated with lively pictures by Frederic Remington. In 1889, the year he reviewed the first two volumes of The Winning of the Westnoting that Roosevelt might profitably have consulted the Draper collection-he recast the same thesis into a Ph.D. dissertation at Hopkins as The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin. The thesis- cum -dissertationwhich had already served him as the basis of several speecheswas soon printed as a monograph, and would before very long make identifiable contributions to the frontier hypothesis 8 of 1893, his most famous single work. This work, in its turn, would be published in several versions, each of which Turner would thoroughly mine for the principles he used in the related writings on the frontier, sectionalism, 9 and geo-cultural evolution that would occupy him until his death in 1932. Finding just where one of these works leaves off and the next begins is therefore well-nigh impossible, but so many fresh starts, each one of which depends so thoroughly on all the others, shows one thing very clearly: as is appropriate for a historian governed by such rigorously reflective tendencies of mind, Turner never finished anything. From first to last, his forte was beginnings. Turners amazing capacity for the study of historic genesis not only sustained the historian in the life of the mind; it generated a new history and l0 ordained a new generation of exciting historians. It also raises questions concerning ways in which the life of the mind as reflective contemplation may legitimately be conducted, and what worthwhile results it may be expected to produce. Specifically, did Turners curiously self-consuming study produce new formulations of human experience as affected by frontier conditions, or merely reformulations of Turners experience as a student of the material he repeatedly, even exhaustively, addressed in his own works? And what, really, was this material? Did it justify the grandiose distillations of which Turner seemed to speak when he announced that line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution, or was it rather less substantial and more vaporous to begin witha fragmentary record that looked coherent to Turner mainly because of his isolated background and his insular habits of mind? In his 1889 review of The Winning of the West, Turner showed himself as both a parochial introvert fascinated by his own isolation, and a bold thinker who would contribute importantly to new schools of historical thought. The insulated westerner made his appearance at the outset, when, in the first sentence, Turner somehow felt obliged to acknowledge that Americas historians have for the most part, like the wise men of old, 283
come from the East. The man of ideas appeared at the close, when Turner commended Roosevelt for seeking to understand the widest significance of the events which he describes. Yet both the naf who seemed surprised to discover that most American historians, like most other Americans, came from the East, and the sophisticate who sought for germs of general truth in records of everyday occurrences joined to make the humanistic scholar, who aimed to shape himself into an instrument for understanding the world around him. Even when he urged that the great central valley was nurturing a new composite nationality . . . a distinct American people speaking the English tongue, but not English, he was merely attempting to find a position from which it might be possible to recognize the West as a promising 12 . . . region for study. Throughout life, Turners characteristic metaphor for this study was readingan activity which, for him, meant building a continuity between the observer and the sequence observed. In his 1889 review, he linked the idea of right perspective in American history with the idea of a connected and unified account of the progress of civilization across the continent. The new historian had to read events and circumstances from a right perspective, in order to explain how change came about. Navet was necessary to see that change was happening, and sophistication was equally necessary to study relationships among changes observed. The scholar who possessed both qualities would gravitate toward the study of frontiers, because the most exciting changes could be read there. Roosevelt viewed the matter much differently. I believe, he would later argue in a speech to the American Historical Association, that forces working for good in our national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and that . . . we shall yet in the end prove our faith by our works, and show in our lives our belief that righteousness exalteth a nation. Or again, in the 13 same place, the greatest historian should also be a great moralist. His most characteristic metaphor for the historian was that of the moral teacher, whose stories illustrate episodes in the ongoing conflict between good and evil forces. Wars, such as the one he wrote about in his first book, inevitably attracted his attention as instances of the same exciting work he set out to trace in The Winning of the West. While the doer applied himself to sorting out facts about naval battles, North Dakota ranch life, and geo-political expansionismschooling himself, however unwittingly, for ever more active roles in governmentthe reader turned to the study of frontier trading posts, attempting to trace the logic of a transaction in which he felt sure that much more than pelts and glass beads had been exchanged. The two approaches were not necessarily antithetical. Neither did they necessarily
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disagree. They merely lacked a common ground, even though they ostensibly shared many of the same concerns and subjects. Turners most succinct statement of his frontier hypothesis is his essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, of which he delivered a shortened version at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago. He acknowledged in a note that this essay grew out of an 1892 article he had written on Problems in American History for 14 Aegis, a student publication at the University of Wisconsin. It also, of course, grew out of his earlier work on the Wisconsin fur trade, and shows signs of having been influenced by a number of the historians he admired, including William Allen and James Truslow Adams (his major professors at Wisconsin and Hopkins, respectively), and Woodrow Wilson (who spent a year at Hopkins on a visiting appointment while Turner was there working on his Ph.D.). Whle such grounding in personal experience meant much to Turner himself, it meant considerably less to his Chicago audience, who received the performance without enthusiasm. The Significance of the Frontier neither refuted nor advanced any arguments, and it was worth little as a truncated version of American history, although Turner claimed at the outset that American history has been in large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. Roosevelt, for all his enthusiasm, would never be so drastic. Furthermore, Turner made his alarming claim without offering to reinforce it from any of the usual authorities. He did, of course, refer to some more or less conventional sources, such as works by Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Adams, and others, as well as to sources rather more unconventionalcertain geologic, climatic, and economic theories, often untranslated from the German or Italianbut his hypothesis did 15 not depend on any of these. He seemed, rather, maddeningly to take for granted the self-evidence of his often outrageous observations, based, for the most part, on the study of census data, topographic charts and old records, which he selected as he pleased and juxtaposed when it suited his purpose. The result reflected his ingenuity, and he was obviously delighted with it. But The Dial, in 1893, l6 called him an amateur historian and a sensational theorist. Roosevelt read the essay in its published version the next year and wrote Turner a letter in which he noncommitally observed that you have struck some first class ideas, and put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has 17 been floating around rather loosely. Understandably, Turner regarded this as faint praise. When he reviewed the fourth volume of The Winning of the West in 1896, he faulted Roosevelt for using history as the text for a sermon, and wished that he would show more sobriety of judgement.l8
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However, Roosevelt had seen correctly in 1894 what Turners detractors and supporters alike have only rarely taken into account: Turner aimed to convince not by arguing, citing authorities or amassing and analyzing facts, but by the far more ambitious means of establishing and manipulating point of view. Accordingly, The Significance of the Frontier does not follow the frontier in time as it passes from one stage to anotheror even in space as it advances across the continent. Turner chose instead to address his subject as a cluster of shifting phenomena he called sequences of evolution, successive terminal moraines, or the outer edge of the wavemetaphors which, if they seem perversely calculated to exasperate his audience of historians, also express his insistence on the frontier as an event rather than a place. At the essays center is a consideration of The Frontier . . . [as] A Field for Comparative Study of Social Development, in which the traders frontier, the ranchers frontier and the farmers frontier are delineated as elements in the developmental process. Spreading outward from the center, the essay (antecedently) traces the stages of frontier advance from the tidewater regions to the Rockies and Great Plains, and (later) considers three chief factors in the advance: army posts, which protected settlers against the various perils of the wilderness; salt springs, which reduced their dependence on seaboard communities, and gave them the means to preserve their food without returning east for supplies; and the ubiquitous land that drew them ever westward. The whole is enclosed within a web of speculations about relationships between the idea of the frontier and the mind of the historian. Its opening section introduces the theme of motion by briefly suggesting the frontier as rebirth and fluidity, culminating in the image of the wave. The latter and more extensive portion, which closes the essay, unveils the grand topology which Turner claimed could be seen only in the mind. This is nothing less than the governing order, in Turners view, of American historya design produced by the kinetic frontiers shaping of the culture at large. Some of its chief features are a composite nationality consisting of numerous European peoples more powerfully united by shared experience than by the English tongue they have in common; an industrial independence from Europe, achieved as western trade with the great interior valleys frees American coastal cities from dependence on France and England; political institutions favoring growth and internal improvements; a land policyoften most powerfully operative when least fully formulated or controlled which fosters individualism, nationalism, and democracy; and a various but identifiable national intelligence characterized by skepticism, restlessness, confidence, and energy. Many of Turners auditors had no doubt whatever that these colorful 286
images were still floating around rather looselyif not quite wildly when Turner presented them at Chicago, but what holds them firmly in the orbital pattern Roosevelt called a definite shape is plain enough: they are not ideas at all, strictly speaking, but expressions of what Roosevelt called thought, or a thinking process, executed by an eccentric, vigorous, and brilliant intellect. Whatever Turner supposed he was trying to do at the 1893 Chicago meeting, his real aim was to offer some impressions of his own thoughts about a problem which seemed to him significant. Turner much later wrote to Merle Curti, a former student, that the main difference between himself and other historians was perhaps that he tried to keep relations among the many different aspects of his subjects 19 steadily in mind as he wrote. In another letter written at about the same time he said that he regarded his students not as real or potential vehicles for transmitting his own views but as companions . . . gathering source 20 materials for criticism and consideration. When he argued in his famous 1893 paper that what the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely, he was obviously both considering relations and practicing consideration, even though many of his listeners probably thought he was merely indulging a weakness for unrestrained hyperbole, and some of his followers have subsequently claimed that he was laying down a law. His freehanded rhetoric accurately reflects his eclectic technique and expresses his delight in the surprises that language and the mind could together effect by achieving new perspectives. His insistence on the continuing interest of the sets of intellectual goals he liked to call problems unmistakably states his deep mistrust of solutions. What Roosevelt described as the definite shape into which he forged The Significance of the Frontier, then, was quite simply and overwhelmingly the shape of Turners own mind. He was much too bright either to accept answers or give them, and far too honest to pretend that he knew any. He spoke only the truth his reading had enabled him to see when he confided to his Chicago audience what it was that interested him most about the frontier: movement has been its principal fact. Owen Wister, a thirty-two-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School when Turner delivered his Chicago paper, had already, by then, given up the idea of practicing law and decided to devote himself to writing. That he, too, was interested in movement he showed by spending the summer of 1893 at home in Philadelphia, working on a historical discourse of undetermined length, which he called The Course of Empire. He hoped to see this work published serially in Harpers Monthly magazine, where two of his 21 short stories about the West had already appeared. However, the editors 287
had informed him, before he set out for Chicago and the Worlds Fair in September, that his project would have to wait until he had produced a series of pure adventure in order to attract to himself and his subject the popular attention felt to be necessary for success in a large national magazine. So now, Wister wrote in his diary, my next duty is to hunt material 22 of adventure voraciously. The fact that neither Roosevelt nor Turner would have understood what he meant shows mostly that Wister was more a man of his times in the centurys last decade than either of them. By temperament and inclination the most aloof of the four young men who set out to locate and define the frontier, Wister was also the most anxious to please the large, anonymous public of readers that sustained great publishing houses by subscribing to journals and buying books. Roosevelt, whom Wister had known slightly at Harvard, took the approval or disapproval of readers much more nonchalantly. When Turner and others criticized him for slipshod scholarship in The Winning of the West, he acknowledged that they were right, and explained that he had been busy with other work. In his view, the rightness of his aims, and of his industry in pursuing them, rendered apology and accommodation unnecessary. Turner, who soon became sensitive to the judgments of fellow historians as they began to question his methods and conclusions, was wounded in a very personal way by public criticismbut not because he had failed to please. Rather, he supposed that when others expressed skepticism about his views, he had not been wholly successful in bringing them around to a right perspective and his usual resort in such cases was to a more meticulous reading of his own compelling text. Wister, on the other hand, relied for approval on his publishers and his friendsboth of which he chose with careand on his readers, whom he regarded with mixed awe and apprehension. He wore the patrician mantle somewhat stiffly, instead of with Roosevelts easy carelessness, and he was much too unsure of himself to entertain the creative introspection Turner conferred upon his students like a sacred fire. When he met Frederic Remington, he quickly discovered his own ignorance about both art and the Westtwo subjects about which he had considered himself well schooled. Yet he had an ear for the complicated tonalities of folklore and mass communications which enabled him to detect a popular yearning for something he called the Past. Insofar as he recognized and exploited the nostalgic possibilities of the frontier in American culture, he was far and away the most modem of his fellow students. Wister was a myth-maker of considerable skill and determination who set out, in a calculated way, to fashion the cowpuncher into a hero on the model of a Gawain, a Tristan orto use one of his favorite analogiesa prodigal son. How well he succeeded may be judged partly on the basis of the hundreds of horse operas in print, film, and television that have sprung 288
more or less directly from his vision of what happened when people were transplanted from eastern cities, where they could not help being all varnished over with Europe, to the wide open spaces of the western plains, 23 where they became real Americans. Whether or not the so-called cowboy Western would have bloomed with such prolific vigor, and across such a broad front, without Wister remains a question. However, the initial appearance of the genre clearly involved the young mans eccentric response to the conjunction of three circumstances. The first was a passionate attachment to the full-blown mythic romance of Wagners operas, which he had mastered as a student of music at Harvard before making a pilgrimage to Bayreuth in 1882, where he saw Parsifal and played a piano composition of his own for Franz Liszt. The second was his painful neuralgia, accompanied by severe mental depression, which came to a crisis in 1885, when, having been called back from Europe by his father, he was working as a clerk at a Boston banking house. The third was his treatment by the Philadelphia neurologist and friend of his family, S. Weir Mitchellalso a prolific writer of Revolutionary War romanceswho sent him west for the summer of 1885 to undergo a rest cure on a Wyoming ranch. All three circumstances guided Wisters thinking about The Course of Empire in 1893, and each of them left a mark on the essay that eventually resulted, which was called The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher when it appeared in the September 1895 issue of Harpers Monthly. A Wagnerian aura emanated from several set scenes designed to show off the cowboys heroic virtues, and appeared throughout as Wisters insistence on the cowboy as a racial (Saxon rather than Teuton) type whose potency depended on a pure blood line and a clean environment free from the hordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities into Babels and our citizenship 24 into a hybrid farce. The mental depression that afflicted Wister when he first went west comes out as a pessimistic view of world affairs in general and American culture in particular, culminating in the observation that present signs disincline us to make much noise on the Fourth of July. Wisters experiences of Wyoming played a larger part in his essay than did either his characteristic gloominess or his fondness for operatic spectacle. The summer he spent at Major Frank Wolcotts Deer Creek ranch, where he found air . . . better than all other air in 1885, had miraculously relieved him of 25 frustrations that had only weeks before seemed insurmountable. Why shouldnt the West promise a cure for Americas cultural malaise as well, asked Wisterand promptly declared the nation cured of even that unparalleled compound of new hotels, electric lights, and invincible ignorance which has given us the Populistso that no cause for lament any longer clouded its history in the long term. Nonetheless, tourism and electricity throve, and even ignorance and Populism did not seem likely to go 289
away very soon. Either Wister was a fake, or his prescription was more complicated than it looked. Both were true, as it happens. At first glance, The Evolution does not offer much support for Wisters hope. What Wister seemed to count on was a triumphal awakening of the slumbering untamed Saxonstripped of the sissified manners and genteel inhibitions with which the Old World had burdened himin the vast reaches of Americas prairies and mountains. Wister thought that the awakening had happened, but also acknowledged that it had run its course in a mere thirty years, and that the collective Saxon had been driven underground again before he could exert any appreciable influence on the ailing American body politic. Even worse, the Saxon Wister described was far from reassuring. Driven away from England because of failing fortunes, he had emigrated to America, where he came to a badbut none too earlyend: From 1865 to 1878 in Texas he fought his way with knife and gun, and any hour of the twenty-four might see him flattened behind the rocks among the whiz of bullets and the flight of arrows, or 26 dragged bloody and folded together from some adobe hovel. So much flattening and folding, presumably, welded the Saxon into a unit which had subsequently been dispersed by the relentless amenities Wister called Progressbut not to contemplate the powerful Jeffersonian ideas of revolution that caught Turners eye, or even to carry on the good work admired by Roosevelt. He went to town for a job; he got a position on the railroad; he set up a saloon; he married, and fenced in a little farm; and he turned rustler, and stole the cattle from the men for whom he had once 27 worked. Whether or not the Saxons progress from boyish killer to aging sneak thief in the space of a single generation was truly degenerative, for Wister to call him a good soldier was ludicrous. The studious young Philadelphian with a flair for colorful if sometimes turgid rhetoric appeared to be right about one thing only: the fortunately imaginary criminal whose dubious development he chronicled in The Evolution had never made a good citizen. In fairness, it must be noted that Wister did not intend his essay as a celebration of stupidity, slaughter, and debasementand that the essay was almost certainly not what he had in mind when he began working on it as The Course of Empire, a project he probably modeled after Roosevelts The Winning of the West, the first two volumes of which he read when they came out in 1889, the same year he decided to give up law for a writing career. The Evolution is best understood as a document that reflects the
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authors double culture shock when he was told on one hand that he had to write a series of pure adventure in order to satisfy the rather lurid tastes of magazine readers and told on the other hand by Frederic Remington that these same readers were despicable almost beyond expression because their ideas of adventure were so tame. Most of the information in The Evolution came directly from Remington, whom Wister met by chance at Yellowstone Park just after the House of Harper had sent him away to search for adventure like a knight errant instead of encouraging him to stay at home and study ideas like a historian. Remington, at thirty-one, may have had several ideas, and he had certainly had some adventures, but he had a great many more opinions, and even more impressions, all of which were vivid, fragmentary, and excited. Consequently, Wister encountered at Yellowstone in 1893 the very antithesis of the rest cure he had gone west in 1885 to accomplish. Remington had spent much of his majority wandering in inhospitable regions, and had acquired some first-hand experience of both the work Roosevelt associated with the frontier and the interchange between savagery and civilization that Turner thought must occur whenever the two came into contact with each other. Born at Canton, New York on the eve of the Civil War, he early became a voracious but selective reader of materials about the West. The journals of Lewis and Clark, James Fenimore Coopers Leatherstocking Tales, the western writings of Washington Irving, and the pictures of George Catlin and other artists began forming his expectations of the frontier before he ever went there. In 1878 he entered Yale University art school, where he proved an indifferent student, but dropped out the following year when his father suddenly became ill and died. When he came into his inheritance in 1883, he bought a quarter section of prairie land near the town of Peabody, Kansas, and tried, unsuccessfully, to start a small sheep ranch. 1884 found him at Kansas City, where he promptly lost the money he had gotten from the sale of his Peabody property. In the fall of the same year he married Eva Caten, a young woman from Gloversville, New York whom he had begun courting about four years earlier. By summer the marriage seemed likely to fail, because Remingtons scheme to earn money by selling pictures to New York periodicals for illustrations was not working out. Eva returned to her parents, and Remington made his way to Arizona, where he sketched Indians and soldiers sweltering in the heat and dust, in the fall taking the sketches to New York City, where he tried, without success, to sell them. However, U.S. and Mexican military forces decided, in 1885, to escalate their pursuit of the hostile Apache chief, Geronimo, who had been conducting sporadic raids on isolated Arizona settlements since about 1880. Remingtons desert pictures thus became
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suddenly newsworthy, although none of them depicted anything resembling a war, and his career as an illustrator was successfullyif ironically launched. Popularity came almost overnight. By 1888, when Remington illustrated Roosevelts Ranch Life, he was making hundreds of pictures per year for large periodicals such as Harpers Weekly, Harpers Monthly and the Century, as well as turning out canvases of his own at an astonishing rate. He also began that year to publish essays in the Century, beginning with a fine series on Indian reservation life designed to follow up the serial publication of Roosevelts book in the same magazine. In 1890, he covered the Sioux uprising in South Dakota for Harpers Weekly, where he barely missed being present at the encampment on Wounded Knee Creek when units of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Indians, most of them women and children. When Wister met him at Yellowstone in 1893, he had ricocheted back from north Africa and Russia, where he had gone with a college friend to find new types. His most recent projects had been an article on the Manhattan slums, done with Julian Ralph, a bear hunt in the mountains of New Mexico with General Nelson Miles, and an excursion to Sonora, where he elatedly believed that at a rancho named San Jose de Bavicora, he had, in the year of 1893, . . . rediscovered a Fort 28 Laramie after Mr. Parkmans well known description. Remington possessed Roosevelts energy, but not his deft judgment Turners navet, but not his passion for sophisticated scholarship. Because his experience of the West was at first hand, he knew its details minutely; because he was temperamentally unsuited for either the life of action as Roosevelt practiced it in politics or the life of the mind as Turner pursued it in humanistic letters, he could piece the details together only as they related directly to himself. He was an artist rather than a man of judgment or of intellect, and his language, like his pictures, appealed more to the senses than it did to reason. Therefore, when he told Wister at Yellowstone about the punchers he had found in Sonora and New Mexico, or later wrote to him, urging, make me an article on the evolution of the puncherthe passing as it wereI want to make some pictures of the ponies going over the hell-roaring malpais after a steer on the jump, he was speaking his own mind in his own waywhich was also a way that Wister would never be 29 able to comprehend properly. Wister, in turn, wrote The Evolution in his own way, which was nothing like what Remington wanted. The result is a curiosity that shows how Wisters relatively conventional mind, making a calculated appeal to the conventional tastes of a genteel reading public, attempted to deal with an iconoclasm which challenged conventions of all sorts. Wisters technique was disarmingly simple. He merely plastered over 292
ROOSEVELT, WISTER, TURNER, AND REMlNGTON
Remingtons turbulence with a coating of continuityof unity, even stated in stiffly formal sentences. Although Remington had written in an essay called Horses of the Plains that there were many kinds of western horses, the cowboys mount was designated in The Evolution as the horse. Remingtons pictures showed that cow punchers came in all shapes and colors, but Wister placidly insisted that the cowpuncher was the American descendent of Saxon ancestors, conceding that he had borrowed some equipment and habits from the Spanish, and even the Mexicans. Most important, Wister treated with schoolmasterly sternness the novelty and multiplicity of the frontier: Destiny tried her latest experiment upon the Saxon, and plucking him from the library, the haystack, and the gutter, set him upon his horse; then it was that, face to face with the eternal simplicity of death, his modern guise fell away and showed once again the mediaeval man. It was no new type, no product of the frontier, 30 but just the original kernel of the nut with the shell broken. Thus lectured, an unruly pupil might be tempted to ask what had become of Roosevelts exhilarating arid belt, Turners protean kinesis, Remingtons hell-roaring ponies and desperado punchers? The answer is reasonably obvious and extremely instructive: they had been assimilated into the constellation of genteel symbols out of which The Virginian, Shane, High Noon, and hundreds of other Westerns would spin like so many brave (if also somewhat shopworn) new worlds. The mystery that had fascinated William Byrd at the base of the Appalachians and compelled Natty Bumppos sightless attention in the trans-Missouri prairies was about to be explained on the pages of slick magazines produced in astronomical quantities. Roosevelts moral energy, Turners keen eye for problems, Wisters talent for catching public sentiments and tossing them back again, and Remingtons sandpaper skepticism had all, by 1895, contributed importantly to the vocabulary that made the explanation possible. Indeed, the four men had definitely worked togethereven though they worked apart to produce a complex consciousness of the West in American thought. Not surprisingly, each of them was dissatisfied with the result. Wister soon discovered that neither Dr. S. Weir Mitchells rest cure nor the more abrasive treatments advocated by Remington would bring the chivalry he dreamed of to life in a world where the skills of the P.R. man were ascendant. He revered the Past until his death in 1938, but one that was nearer, albeit still inaccessiblethat of his own youth. Although he insisted on calling The Virginian a colonial romance, most of his works were actually domestic comedies. Remington continued to play the boisterous rebel outwardly while he struggled inwardly with his deeply sensitive 293
nature. He became a sculptor, a writer, and a painter of often startling genius, but only at cost of rejecting the cheerful topicality that had made him popular and pursuing the darker shapes of his imagination. The intensity of his pursuit brought him to an early death in 1909. Turner left Wisconsin for Harvard in 1910, and, after his 1924 retirement, became a research associate at the Huntington Library in California, a larger, as well as sunnier, version of the State Historical Society at Madison where he had begun his quest five decades before. When he died in 1932, he was writing The Significance of Sections in American History, still another of the glittering and interminable beginnings that kept him always at the outer edge of the wave, where explanations paled in the brilliance of thought. Roosevelt became President with the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. He ran twice more, and was defeated the second time by Woodrow Wilson, a friend of Turners since 1888. Undaunted, as always, he left for the Brazilian rain forests, where he explored a wilderness river and gave it his name. When he diedor, perhaps, found deathin 1919, he had completed some fourteen books and countless articles since breaking off The Winning of the West with volume four in 1896. Explanations meant nothing to him; he was too busy with the work of exploring, and his experience in the arid belt had shown him that the West could not be explained, anyway. Explanations aside, Roosevelt, Wister, Turner, and Remington did succeed in locating and defining the West, even though none of them agreed with the conclusions they formulated together: the West was a condition of displacement, and its region was the mind. The four searchers found this out by getting lost, much as William Byrd had in 1728but their awareness of being lost was greater than Byrds because their quest was more purposeful and ambitious. They not only experienced the displacement that lies at the heart of American culture; they examined it, and left an honest record of their findings.
B EN M ERCHANT V ORPAHL ,
University of Georgia
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Notes
1. William Byrd, William Byrds History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (New York: Dover, 1967), p. 175. 2. The most powerful of these techniques are codified in the Ordinance of 1787, which provides for the division of unorganized lands into territories, and sets up orderly procedures for states to be formed from the territories thus established. 3. James Fenimore Cooper, Works, vol. II (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), p. 441. 4. See especially United States Census Office, Eleventh Census, 1890, Extra Census Bulletin No. 2. Distribution of Population According to Density, 1890 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1891). This pamphlet is a source for important census information used by Turner in his frontier hypothesis of 1893. 5. Quoted in Harold McCracken, Frederic Remington: Artist of The Old West (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1947), p. 89. 6. Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1979), p. 149. 7. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, in Everett E. Edwards, compiler, The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1938), p. 187. 8. Among the speeches were The Character and Influence of the Fur Trade in Wisconsin, delivered at a Madison meeting of the Wisconsin State Historical Society on Jan. 3, 1889, and The Conquest and Organization of the Northwest Territory, delivered at the Washington High School, Washington, D.C. on March 28, 1889. The monograph, appearing in Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 9th series, nos. 1112, is entitled The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin: A Study of the Trading Post as an Institution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1891). 9. The Signifi cance of the Frontier in American History was delivered at the American Historical Association in Chicago on the evening of July 12, 1893. It was printed in 1894 in the American Historical Association Annual Report and the Wisconsin State Historical Society Proceedings. Slightly modified, it forms the opening chapter of The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1920). 10. A few of the many distinguished historians upon whom Turner left his mark at first hand are Merle Curti, Carl Becker, Charles Beard, Ulrich Phillips, and Ray Allen Billington. 11. Frederick Jackson Turner, review of The Winning of the West, The Dial 10 (August 1889): 7173. 12. Turner review, pp. 72, 71. 13. Theodore Roosevelt, History as Literature, delivered at Boston, Dec. 27, 1912, as the annual address of the president of the American Historical Associ-
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A Literary History of the American West ation; reprinted in History as Literature and Other Essays (New York: Scribners, 1913), pp. 336. 14. The foundation of this paper is my article entitled Problems in American History, which appeared in the Aegis, a publication of the students of the University of Wisconsin, November 4, 1892 (partial quote from Turners note). 15. For instance, Turner almost certainly used Achille Lorias Analisa della Proprieta Capitalista, which treated the American frontier in its economic dimension. He probably had the work read to him by a Wisconsin colleague, since he did not read Italian, and there was no English translation. 16. The Auxiliary Congresses, The Dial 15 (August 1, 1893):60. 17. Theodore Roosevelt to Turner, February 10, 1894. Frederick Jackson Turner Papers, The Houghton Library, Harvard University. Quoted in Ray Allen Billington, The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1971), p. 82. 18. Frederick Jackson Turner, review of The Winning of the West, The Nation 63 (Oct. 8, 1896):277. 19. Turner to Merle Curti, August 15, 1928, Henry E. Huntington Library. Quoted in Ray Allen Billington, p. 271. 20. Turner to Luther L. Bernard, November 24, 1928, Henry E. Huntington Library. Quoted in Ray Allen Billington, p. 294. 21. Hanks Woman, the first story, was published in August 1892. The second story How Lin McLean Went East, was published in December of the same year. 22. An 1893 notebook entry by Wister, quoted in Fanny Kemble Wister, ed., Owen Wister Out West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 168. 23. A July 1885 entry in one of Wisters western notebooks, Coe Library, University of Wyoming. Quoted in Ben Merchant Vorpahl, My Dear Wister: The Frederic Remington-Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto: American West, 1972), pp. 1920. 24. Owen Wister, The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher, Harpers Monthly 91 (Sept. 1895):603604. 25. Postcard from Wister to Sarah B. Wister, his mother, July 3, 1885, Owen Wister Papers, Library of Congress. Quoted in Ben Merchant Vorpahl, My Dear Wister: The Frederic Remington-Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto: American West, 1972), p. 18. 26. Owen Wister, The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher, p. 688. 27. The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher, p. 617. 28. Frederic Remington, An Outpost of Civilization, Harpers Monthly (Dec. 1893), p. 73. Quoted by Ben Merchant Vorpahl, Frederic Remington and the West: With the Eye of the Mind (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 146. 29. Remington to Wister, Sept. or Oct. 1894, Owen Wister Papers, Library of Congress. Quoted in Ben Merchant Vorpahl, My Dear Wister: The Frederic Remington-Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto: American West, 1972), p. 47. 30. Owen Wister, The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher, p. 610.
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Works by Frederic Remington Crooked Trails. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1898. Done in the Open. New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1902. John Ermine of the Yellowstone. New York: Macmillan, 1902. Men with the Bark On. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900. Pony Tracks. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895. A Rogers Ranger in the French and Indian War. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897. Stories of Peace and War. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899. Sun Down Leflare. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899. The Way of an Indian. New York: Fox Duffield, 1906. Samuels, Peggy and Harold, eds. The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Secondary Sources for Remington Allen, Douglas. Frederic Remington and the Spanish American War. New York: Crown Publishers, 1971. Explores Remingtons brief involvement with the war in Cuba, and the events that led to it. . ed. Frederic Remingtons Own Outdoors. New York: Dial Press, 1964. A treatment, mostly in pictures, of Remingtons interest in hunting, woodcraft, sports, military maneuvers, and other outdoor subjects. Baigell, Matthew. The Western Art of Frederic Remington. New York: Ballantine, 1976. A collection of western paintings and illustrations. Erisman, Fred. Frederic Remington. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1975. A pamphlet in the Boise Western Writers Series. Concentrates on Remington as a writer. Hassrick, Peter. Frederic Remington. Fort Worth: Harry N. Abrams, 1972. Prints color reproductions of eighty-six Remington paintings and statues in the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth. Highlighted by Hassricks fine introduction and excellent commentary. Jackson, Marta, ed. The Illustrations of Frederic Remington. New York: Bounty Books, 1970. A sampling of Remingtons magazine illustrations, accompanied by brief texts quoted from Owen Wister and elsewhere. McKown, Robin. Frederic Remington: Painter of the Wild West. New York: Julian Messner, 1959. A brief, chatty biography, dealing mostly in amiable (and questionable) anecdotes about Remingtons western excursions. McCracken, Harold. Frederic Remington: Artist of the Old West. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1947. The first book of serious scholarship on Remington. Contains biographical information, numerous pictures, and a very useful list of Remingtons illustrations. . The Frederic Remington Book: A Pictorial History of the West. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966. An attempt to establish Remingtons historical
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A Literary History of the American West value as an artist. Concentrates on the ways in which Remingtons pictures and statues capture authentic details of western life. . Frederic Remingtons Own West. New York: Dial Press, 1960. Deals with Remingtons experience of the West as expressed in his art. Contributes (perhaps unintentionally) to the popular misconception of Remington as a westerner. Manley, Atwood. Frederic Remington in the Land of His Youth. Canton, N.Y.: Privately printed, 1961. A surprisingly valuable brief study of Remingtons North Country boyhood and youth, written by a long-time friend and associate of the Remington family. Samuels, Peggy and Harold. Frederic Remington: A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982. The only full-scale biography of Remington that has been written. Unfortunately marred by numerous inaccuracies, and by a failure to take Remington seriously enough as a writer and artist, but generally useful for chronology and background information. Vorpahl, Ben Merchant. Frederic Remington and the West: With the Eye of the Mind. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978. A study of Remingtons complicated involvement with the idea of westering. Concentrates on the growth of the West as a symbol in Remingtons pictures and writing. Works by Theodore Roosevelt An Autobiography. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1926. Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1885. Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. New York: Century, 1888. The Wilderness Hunter. New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1893. The Winning of the West. 4 vols. New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 18941898. Hagedorn, Hermann, ed. The Works of Theodore Roosevelt. 24 vols. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 19231926. Morrison, Elting E., ed. The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt. 8 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 195154. Secondary Sources for Roosevelt Beale, Howard K. Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956. A careful study of Roosevelts foreign policy, and of his role in establishing the influence of the United States on a global scale. Bishop, Joseph B. Theodore Roosevelt and His Times. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1920. The official biography, begun while the subject was alive, and conducted with his cooperation. Blum, John M. The Republican Roosevelt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954. A study of Roosevelts political ambitions, and of his particular brand of Republicanism. Burton, David H. Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968. Discusses Roosevelts empire-building ambitions. Includes some discussion of his attitudes toward the West.
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. Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Twayne, 1972. A concise, useful treatment of Roosevelts life and work. Chessman, G. Wallace. Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. An acute study of Roosevelts foreign and domestic policies, including his uses of the West. Makes good use of current historical scholarship. Gardner, Joseph L. Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as Ex-President. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1973. An illuminating study of Roosevelts postpresidential thoughts and adventures. Hagedorn, Hermann. Roosevelt in the Badlands. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921. A chronicle of Roosevelts North Dakota experience, 18841886. Harbaugh, William H. The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Straus and Cudahy, 1961. Probably the best extant biography. Even-handed, acute, and massively documented. Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1979. A well-documented study of Roosevelts youth and young manhood, and of his rapid rise to political power. Mowry, George E. The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 19001912. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Largely a study of Roosevelts conflicts with sources of entrenched political and economic power. Pringle, Henry F. Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931. A highly critical study, and one that won a Pulitzer Prize. Wister, Owen. Theodore Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship. New York: Macmillan, 1930. Wisters account of his personal and professional relations with Roosevelt. Includes considerable correspondence from Roosevelt. Works by Frederick Jackson Turner (This bibliography of Turners writings is arranged chronologically, rather than alphabetically, in order to show the relationship among the various works. ) The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin: A Study of the Trading Post as an Institution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1891. The Significance of the Frontier in American History [later Chapter 1 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. American Historical Association, Annual Report. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1894. Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era [later Chapter 4 of The Significance of Sections in American History (1932)]. American Historical Review 1 (Oct. 1895, Jan. 1896):7087, 215269. The Problem of the West [later Chapter 7 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. Atlantic Monthly 78 (Sept. 1896):289297. The West as a Field for Historical Study. American Historical Association, Annual Report. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1897. Dominant Forces in Western Life [later Chapter 8 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. Atlantic Monthly 79 (April 1897):433443. Documents on the Relations of France to Louisiana, 17921795. American Historical Review 3 (April 1898):490516.
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A Literary History of the American West The Origin of Genets Projected Attack on Louisiana and the Floridas [later Chapter 3 of The Significance of Sections in American History ( 1932)]. American Historical Review 3 (July 1898): 650671. The Middle West [later Chapter 4 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. International Monthly 4 (Dec. 1901):794820. Contributions of the West to American Democracy [later Chapter 9 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. Atlantic Monthly 91 (Jan. 1903):8396. The Policy of France Toward the Mississippi Valley in the Period of Washington and Adams [later Chapter 5 of The Significance of Sections in American History (1932)]. American Historical Review 10 (Jan. 1905):249279. The Rise of the New West, 18191829. Vol 14 of The American Nation: A History, A. B. Hart, ed. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1906. Is Sectionalism in America Dying Away? [later Chapter 11 of The Significance of Sections in American History ( 1932)]. American Journal of Sociology 13 (March 1908):661675. The Old West [later Chapter 3 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. Wisconsin State Historical Society Proceedings 56 (1908):184233. The Place of the Ohio Valley in American History [later Chapter 5 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 20 (Jan. 1911):3247. The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History [later Chapter 6 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. Mississippi Valley Historical Association Proceedings 3 (19091910):159184. Social Forces in American History [later Chapter 12 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. American Historical Review 16 (Jan. 1911):217233. The First Official Frontier of the Massachusetts Bay [later Chapter 2 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, 19131914, pp. 250271. Geographical Influences in American Political History [later Chapter 6 of The Significance of Sections in American History (1932)]. Abstract in American Geogmphical Society Bulletin 46 (August 1914):591595. The West and American Ideals [later Chapter 11 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. Washington Historical Quarterly 5 (Oct. 1914):243257. Middle Western Pioneer Democracy [later Chapter 13 of The Frontier in American History (1920)]. Minnesota History Bulletin 3 (August 1920):393414. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1920. Sections and Nation [later Chapter 12 of The Significance of Sections in American History (1932)]. Yale Review 12 (Oct. 1922):121. Since the Foundation [later Chapter 8 of The Significance of Sections in American History (1932)]. Clark Univerrsity Library Publications 7 (Feb. 1924):929. Geographic Sectionalism in American History [later Chapter 7 of The Significance of Sections in American History (1932)]. Association of American Geographers Annals 16 (June 1926):8593. The Significance of the Section in American History [later Chapter 2 of The Significance of Sections in American History (1932)]. Wisconsin Magazine of History 8 (March 1925):255-280.
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The Children of the Pioneers [later Chapter 9 of The Significance of Sections in American History (1932)]. Yale Review 15 (July 1926):645670. New England, 18301850 [later Chapter 3 of The United States, 18301850 (1935)]. Huntington Library Bulletin 1 (May 1931):153198. The Significance of Sections in American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1932. The United States, 18301850: The Nation and Its Sections. New York: Henry Holt, 1935. Secondary Sources for Turner Billington, Ray Allen. Americas Frontier Heritage. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. Analyzes the historical debate that has been in progress over Turners thesis since 1893. . Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. An affectionate and intelligent biography by one of the subjects distinguished former students. Concentrates on Turners personal side, and on his considerable contributions to the cause of academic freedom. . The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity. San Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library, 1971. A study of the long process of research and thought that brought the frontier thesis into being. Includes letters in which Turner tried to explain his work. Burnette, Lawrence, Jr., ed. Wisconsin Witness to Frederick Jackson Turner: A Collection of Essays on the Historian and the Thesis. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961. A collection of mostly sympathetic essays by historians about Turner and his work. Hofstadter, Richard, and Seymour M. Lipset. Turner and the Sociology of the Frontier. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Discusses the importance of Turners work for sociology. Emphasizes the interdisciplinary aspects of the historians career. Taylor, George R., ed. The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1949. Collects some of the main articles attacking or defending Turners frontier thesis. Works by Owen Wister The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900. A Journey in Search of Christmas. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900. Lin McLean. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897. Members of the Family. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Red Men and White. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896. Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship. New York: Macmillan, 1930. When West Was West. New York: Macmillan, 1928. The Writings of Owen Wister. New York: Macmillan, 1928. Secondary Sources for Wister Baltzell, E. Digby. Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958. Considers Wisters Philadelphia background, grouping him with such writers as Francis Hopkinson and S. Weir Mitchell.
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A Literary History of the American West Contrasts the tender and expressive style of his fiction with the biting and bitter tone of his polemical essays. Branch, Douglas E. The Cowboy and His Interpreters. New York: Cooper Square, 1926. Claims Wister did not accurately represent the cowboy in The Virginian. Burt, Nathaniel. The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. Calls Wister a one-book man, referring to The Virginian. Explores the writers painful sensitivity to published or spoken criticism of his work. Burt, Struthers. Introduction to The Virginian, by Owen Wister. New York: Heritage, 1951. Argues that The Virginian summed up Wisters attitudes about the West and America. Etulain, Richard W. Owen Wister: The Western Writings. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1973. A pamphlet in the Boise State Western Writers Series. Contains a brief biographical sketch of Wister, and a selected bibliography of his western writings. Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel. New Haven: College and University Press, 1966. Concentrates on The Virginian, comparing it to The Ox-Bow Incident, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Also compares Wisters method of writing to Nathaniel Hawthornes in The House of the Seven Gables. Frantz, Joe B., and Julian Ernest Choate, Jr. The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. Concentrates on The Virginian and Lin McLean. Traces Wisters literary debts to Bret Harte and Mark Twain. Marovitz, Sanford E. Owen Wister: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Material. American Literary Naturalism 7 (Winter 1974):1110. An extremely thorough and extensive bibliography that encompasses the full range of published interest in Wister, from gossip columns and newspaper reviews to scholarly books. Vorpahl, Ben Merchant. My Dear Wister: The Frederic Remington-Owen Wister Letters. Palo Alto, Cal.: American West, 1972. Traces the friendship and collaboration of Wister and Remington from 1893, when the two men met, until Remingtons death in 1909. Attempts to explain the differences in background, talent, and habits of mind that kept the two men apart, as well as the historical forces that brought them together. White, G. Edward. The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. Argues that Remington, Roosevelt, and Wister all left their eastern homes and went west as young men because they were looking for ways to more fully express their complicated masculinity. Explores the cultural and historical bases for their sense of need, and for the quest through which they sought to satisfy the need. Wister, Fanny Kemble, ed. Owen Wister Out West: His Journals and Letters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Selections from Wisters western travel journals ranging from July 1885 through August 1895, chosen and introduced by his daughter.
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Early Western Literary Scholars
liest moments of exploration to the most recent stages of urbanization the region has been the topic of studies detailing its essential nature, the events involved in its settlement, and its relation to American history and culture. These studies, however, ranging from Theodore Roosevelts The Winning of the West (18891896), Herbert Boltons The Spanish Borderlands (1921), and Walter Prescott Webbs The Great Plains (1931) to Ray Allen Billingtons The Far Western Frontier (1956) and Rodman Pauls The Frontier and the American West (1971), have focused primarily upon the traditional stuff of historical inquiry, paying little or no heed to the literary development of the West. Only in the middle years of the twentieth century did the literary materials of the region become the objects of study in their own right, a development stimulated by the works of George R. Stewart, T. M. Pearce, Mabel Major, Henry Nash Smith, and others. By their pioneering studies, these investigators established the inherent continuity of the Wests literary growth, linking the regions literature to that of the nation and drawing upon two developments that affected American literary historiography in general. The first of these developments was the growth of a theory of national culture. Prompted in part by the Centennial observances in 1876 and reinforced by the presentation of Frederick Jackson Turners frontier hypothesis in 1893, the suggestion that a cohesive cultural pattern permeated American literary development was stated most persuasively in 1927, when the first volume of Vernon Louis Parringtons Main Currents in American Thought appeared. Taking his cue from Turner, Parrington directed his attention, as he says in the introduction to the second volume (1930) of his work, to the incoming into America of certain old-world ideals and institutions, and the subjection of those ideals and institutions to the pressures of a new environment. The result was an interpretation of American literature national in its scope, Jeffersonian in its assumptions, and dedicated to the belief that American life, land, and literature are inseparably united. Complementing Parringtons interpretation, and in some respects going beyond it, was the second development: the appearance of literary regionalism as a distinct genre. American literary regionalism originated in the local color fiction flourishing after the Civil War. Intended in part to help heal the wounds of the war by emphasizing the diversity of American life, 303
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WEST has never lacked for interpreters. From the ear-
local color writing focused upon the distinctive, even peculiar, qualities of the American scene. Bret Harte, in a series of stories beginning with The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868), wrote of the colorful mining camps of Gold Rush California; George Washington Cable, in Old Creole Days (1879), recreated the ambiance of Old New Orleans; and Joel Chandler Harris, with Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881), combined slave tales and animal fables into a memorable recreation of the Old South. Whatever their setting, these works shared certain traits: an emphasis upon colorful, eccentric persons; a careful reconstruction of the dialects spoken by these folk; and a detailed portrayal of the localized settings in which the action occurs. Beyond this they made no effort to go. More ambitious than local color writing was regional writing, which emerged in the last years of the nineteenth century, burgeoned in the 1930s, and matured in the 1960s. This literature, building upon the place of local regions in national life and an increasing awareness of the interdependence of regions, the nation, and the world, looks beyond the particulars of specific locales to link the place and characters to human life in general. The stories, making use of climate and geography as do the local color tales, grow out of the essential nature of the specific place but go on to consider the larger effects of these local qualities upon all human life. Thus, Sarah Orne Jewetts The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) tells of far-reaching social changes in the fishing villages of Maine; Edgar Lee Masterss Spoon River Anthology (1915) evokes the human cost of midwestern life; O. E. Rlvaags Giants in the Earth (1927) records the pressures of the Great Plains environment upon Norwegian immigrants; and Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) links the Depression and Hitlers rise to power with life in an Alabama small town. The materials are the same as those found in the local color stories, but are used to create works significantly more sophisticated than those of the earlier period. The growth of regional awareness is obvious in the development of western studies. Focusing at the outset upon the odd, the distinctive, and the indigenous, the studies grew steadily in subtlety. As they developed, they shed increasing light upon the national implications of western literature. If their concern initially was with western materials in a purely local context, they came at last to establish the influential role that western writing has played in the development of distinctive American attitudes and ideas. Despite the tendency of early western studies to emphasize the peculiar traits of their subjects rather than their far-reaching literary merits, they nonetheless suggested the broad historical context within which the materials developed. Parrington called attention to the degree to which American literature in general could be considered the result of an intellectual 304
EARLY WESTERN LITERARY SCHOLARS
synthesis; though the early students of western writing did not go so far as Parrington, they still made plain the importance of diverse times and places to the special circumstances of the particular locale. A landmark work in establishing this view of literature was George R. Stewarts Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (1935). Stewart, by his own admission, made no effort to judge Hartes works qualitatively. Instead, he emphasized what may be called the biographical aspect of Hartes writings i.e., the ways in which they grew out of his own experiences and in which they themselves reacted in turn to influence his life. Hartes life, therefore, appears in its historical setting; Stewart opens his study, for example, by remarking that Harte was born in the same year as Jay Gould, was a year younger than Marshall Field and Samuel Clemens, and a year older than Andrew Carnegie, William Dean Howells, and Mark Hanna. Though Stewart goes on to expand upon Hartes ties to the later nineteenth century, his simple evoking of a half-dozen names effectively orients his subject in time, clearly dramatizing Hartes situation in the midst of the Gilded Age. Other episodes add to the historical fleshing-out. Stewart makes valuable use of the eastern reception of the early mining-camp sketches, savoring the irony of their appeal to the readers of the Atlantic Monthly, and goes on to trace the course of Hartes rise and fall in popularity among eastern readers. If the juxtapositions of his birth supply a frame for his early years, Hartes visit to New England and his conversations with Emerson and Longfellow typify the later years. For Stewart, the inability of the western writer to communicate with the eastern sages speaks volumes, implying an intellectual and literary tension that endures into the present. Hartes works, as works, get little attention; Hartes works, as documents, are put to good use to illustrate the nature of the western literary experience. In much the same style, although dealing with a figure of far less stature than Harte, was T. M. Pearces Lane of the Llano (1936), the memoirs of the cowboy and frontier scout Jim (Lane) Cook. Pearce, like Stewart, pointed less to the literary merits of his subject than to its localism. Cooks life extended from the first days of the Chisholm Trail (he traveled it at the age of eight, with his father, in 1866) through the last days of the open range and the coming of the syndicate-owned ranch. Pearce relates Cooks story as oral history, letting Cook speak in his own words but interpolating editorial asides to bridge gaps or expand motifs. The result is a work more evocative than specific, one that early on establishes an elegiac tone. Cook, to Pearce, is a living memorial to a time gone by. As his story unfolds, Cook becomes in Pearces eyes not only a person who has grown with the country, but also one who symbolizes western life in general. Commenting in the opening pages on the speed and cost of progress, Pearce goes on to remark: The story of the Old West and the story of the New West 305
have much in common. Both are bound up in the story of Jim (Lane) Cook. Then, after summarizing his introduction to Cook and the early stages of their association, he concludes: In his tale, drawn from the vistas of his memory, you will see Jim, honest, stalwart, courageous, carrying his life perilously close to the end with the spirit of beginning new things. . . . There is unity in his story: the unity of searching for the thing he and the Western country have lost. Contrasting old and new as he proceeds, using the memoir format to create a nostalgic sense of what has gone before, Pearce presents in his work a genuine piece of western local color. Three books edited by Mabel Major and Rebecca W. Smith, John C. Duvals The Adventures of Big Foot Wallace and Early Times in Texas (both published in 1936) and W. S. Bartletts My Foots in the Stirrup (1937) also presented western materials as local color. The Duval books, published originally in 1870 and 1892, respectively, deal with the battle for Texas independence. Duval survived the Goliad Massacre of 1836; Wallace, a scout and Indian fighter, survived the Mier Expedition of 184244. The two were friends, and their adventures form the nucleus of Duvals works. Conversely, Bartletts first-person memoir takes him from the last days of the Civil War to the 1870s and his work as a scout in New Mexico Territory. None of the books is claimed to have particular literary significance. All, however, are said to cast light upon a time and place, sharing with the reader a glimpse of the past. They continue, moreover, the Turnerian view of the West as a place of growth and freedom. Young Duval, the editors remark, came to Texas with a vision of a freer life and a wider range of action than was possible elsewhere, while Bartletts reminiscences tell rather what everybody has been in the habit of believing instead of the sifted exactness of history. But these tales have their own way of arriving at truth. Like foot-paths winding through the woods-lot, they lead in the right direction and get you to your destination sooner even than does the big road. As artifacts in the development of western studies, these five books are significant. They lack in critical discrimination, to be sure, but they worked to establish the potential of western materials and helped to emphasize the essential historical coherence of the materials. The early days of the West were not conducive to literary growth, yet the nucleus for a developing literature was present. Harte created from California materials tales that speak to eastern readers, while Major and Pearce rescued a gallery of near-forgotten names and faces from the ranks of local history. The studies, like the local color works from which they derive, often relied too much upon the unusual nature of their subject and too little upon its literary nature, but they provided the foundation for more sophisticated works to come. Those works were not long in appearing. Even as they were engrossed in the identifying and circulating of local materials, scholars were con306
cerned with the presenting of more contemplative, critical accounts of the region and its materials. Among the earliest of these was America in the Southwest: A Regional Anthology (1933), edited by T. M. Pearce and Telfair Hendon. A volume of essays and fiction dealing with the Southwest, the book drew upon novels (e.g., Willa Cathers Death Comes for the Archbishop, Andy Adamss The Log of a Cowboy ) and the little magazines developing throughout the WestNew Mexico Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and Southwest Review, among others. If the book was hindered by the lack of a fully developed conceptual foundation, it nonetheless moved toward the building of that foundation. The degree to which local materials can transcend mere quaintness becomes clear in the books introduction. Pearce is concerned, he says, with the qualities that define the Southwest; with the ways in which the region is becoming more and more involved with the nation at large; and with the question of whether the Southwest can retain the qualities that give it its distinctiveness. To this end, he presents the book in three sections. The first, What is the Southwest, embraces critical essays speaking to socioeconomic matters. The second, Where is the Southwest, evokes environmental determinism, striving to describe the aspects of a place that are born in it and give it character. The last, Who is the Southwest, identifies the several character types found in the regions fiction, emphasizing that these are the persons who have built civilization here and are the root material for all the story-life which has grown up. The three sections complement each other, forming a cohesive, thought-provoking volume that draws attention to concerns specifically southwestern, but applicable to regional studies everywhere. If Stewarts Bret Harte was a landmark in western literary biography, Southwest Heritage (1938), by Mabel Major, Rebecca W. Smith, and T. M. Pearce, was a landmark in western literary history. Combining narrative history, bibliographies, and a teaching syllabus, the book comprised accounts of the literature of the Southwest from the earliest Indian and Spanish materials to current publications in fiction, biography, and folklore. Organized chronologically, it opened with Literature Before the Anglo-American, to 1800. This was followed by Literature of Anglo-American Adventurers and Settlers, 1800c. 1918; and by sections bringing the listings up to the date nearest publication. Thus, the third edition, published in 1972, ends with Literature from c. 19181948 and Literature from 19481970. Within these categories, the authors worked toward three goals. They strove, first, to recognize the informative records and chronicles and descriptions, literary or not. Second, they attempted to identify racy and indigenous revelations of character and custom, however crudely put down. And, third, they sought to call attention to beautiful expressions of the 307
human spirit, whether in the chant of the Indian, the folktale of the backwoodsman, the limpid style of a modern novel, or the clean-cut prose of a scholar. These goals, as stated, are suggestive. No longer is the mere recording of local oddity a sufficient reason for attention; the authors now recognize that local materials have more than provincial significance in the ways in which they can serve as historical evidence, characterize the quirks of the human character, and speak to the more general matter of the human spirit. The number of authors and titles included in Southwest Heritage at times causes the authors to fall short of their goals, for critical comments are often limited to a perfunctory sentence or less. The book remains, however, a central and wide-ranging compendium of southwestern regional literature, and marks a major step forward in the progress of western literary studies. The literary use of local materials pioneered by Pearce and Major reached its adolescence in San Franciscos Literary Frontier (1939), by Franklin Walker. On the surface a traditional literary history, Walkers book becomes on closer examination the next step in the progression established by Major and Pearce. Walker was, to be sure, concerned with literary figures and literary history; he sought, he says, to analyze and evaluate the early writings of the authors upon whom he concentrates, and to reconstruct the background of their work. He did so, however, within the context of a particular time and placeSan Francisco, from 1848 to 1875with a particular concern for how the time and place influenced each writer during the years under discussion. From his efforts came a work that plausibly links authors, time, place, and experience, so that the western literary experience emerges as a telling part of the sweep of the American literary experience. Walker concentrates upon eight authors: Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, Prentice Mulford, and Henry George. These selected, he proceeds to establish the distinctive milieu in which the eight workedSan Francisco in the middle nineteenth century, a city already burgeoning in an area rich in potential. Limited by the ocean to the west and the desert to the east, California turned in upon itself in a way that few other western states did. Given the circumstances of its founding and its growth, San Francisco became heterogeneous in cultures, social classes, and racial stocks, producing a society unique in its sex and age. The writers Walker studies, all young, all ambitious, found the area appealing, and were colored by their experiencing of it. The significance of Walkers book is two-fold. Walker is, for the first time, dealing with authors of literary importance. If the lasting stature of Ina Coolbrith and Joaquin Miller is debatable, there is no question of the 308
national significance of Harte, Twain, and George. Thus, dealing at last with writers of merit, Walker is able to consider the literary aspects of their work without becoming overly defensive. He can, as he says, proceed to evaluate the works as well as describe them. Second, and more important, he is also able to deal with these persons as regional writers. They are writers; they are not adventurers who chanced to keep a diary or explorers whose only concern was the recording of day-to-day discoveries. They are persons striving consciously to perfect their literary expression, and they do so within a distinctive and invigorating regional atmosphere. Thus, while Walker certainly builds upon the works that precede his own, he is able to go beyond them, speaking of the contribution of the western region to the creation of a sophisticated literature. The next stimulus to western literary study came from outside the region, and even the nation. The Second World War, examined as an event contributing to a sophistication of regional studies, has received almost no attention. Yet the war played an essential role, for the accommodations that it forced upon the country stimulated the changes in attitude and the broadening of vision that lifted local studies from the provincial and made them truly regional. By its duration, complexity, and intensity, the war forced Americans of all regions to look beyond the concerns of their particular locale and to see themselves within a greater, national context. By its transport of masses of personnel from one region to another, it gave these persons, willy-nilly, a sense of the variousness of the landscape and the diversity of the population. The archetypal platoon including a Texas ranch hand, a New York Jew, a Minnesota Swede, and a California Nisei is a clich of the war film, yet, in principle, dramatizes one of the secondary effects of the war. Americans, as Americans, became increasingly aware of the parts played by the several regions (and their populations) in constituting the United States as a whole. A similar awareness derived from the wars enforced exposure of Americans to diverse foreign cultures. World War I was a European war, acquainting American soldiers with France, England, and Germany; the Second War took the military to not only Europe, but also Asia and the Pacific. The ensuing exposure to many cultures and the sense of international interdependence stimulated by the development of nuclear weaponry and the coming of the United Nations created a citizenry necessarily conscious of the world outside the continental limits of the United States. Just as the several regions of the nation had to become concerned about the welfare of the country at large, so, too, had the nation to recognize that its well-being was linked to that of the other countries of the world. Thus, out of the war, in the years between 1945 and 1955, one finds developing in historical writings an effort to place the United States within a world political and cul309
tural context. On a smaller scale, the same pattern appeared in western literary studies. Setting the stage was George R. Stewarts Names on the Land (1945), a book that Stewart later acknowledged was written at a particular time in history, and many reflections of World War II may be found in its pages. In this study, an account of how the places and things of the American continent were named, Stewart dealt with two themes. He was, certainly, concerned with national diversity, as he points out the sources of namesfrom the Spanish (Florida, El Paso), the French (Illinois, Louisiana), and the English (elk, robin, Trenton) as well as from quirks of geography (Saddle Mountain, Chimney Rock), the Bible (Goshen, Canaan), and public figures (Jackson, Washington). As he observes, from the names on the land the patient scholar may piece together some record of what we were. Yet, if the names on the land record American historical diversity, they create as well a consciousness of American unity. And of this unity Stewart was much aware. The names, he says, have grown out of the life, and the life-blood, of all those who had gone before. From the names might be known how here one man hoped and struggled, how there another dreamed, or died, or sought fortune, and another joked, twisting an old name to make a new one. The result, he says, is a historical record closely bound with the land itself and the adventures of the people. By becoming aware of the names, local, regional, and national, the individual becomes aware of the country, in its diversity and its unity. Local detail expands to become a national concern. The expanding vision that Stewart sought to encourage appears in Southwesterners Write (1946), an anthology of regional prose edited by T. M. Pearce and A. P. Thomason. Limited to the American Southwest (Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico), the book contains four sections: Interpretation, concerned with folkways and attitudes; Fiction, giving excerpts from novels and short stories deriving from the regions materials; Narrative, relating tall tales and local history; and perhaps the most significant section, Opinion, assembling nine critical essays examining the region in its historical, cultural, and national context. The authors included, like the works that represent them, suggest the growing breadth of regional consciousness. Although one finds such familiar western names as J. Frank Dobie, Harvey Fergusson, and C. L. Sonnichsen listed, alongside them are names of another sort: D. H. Lawrence, Paul Horgan, Walter Prescott Webb, and others. Plainly, the region was becoming less provincial. That diminishing provincialism becomes clear in the editors preface. They see the book, they say, as a successor to and an extension of the earlier America in the Southwest. They are, they say, aware of their literary predecessorsFrank Cushing, who wrote of Zuni myths and folktales; Josiah 310
Gregg, recording the coming of trade to the West; John C. Duval, whose works combine adventure, history, and humor; and others. And they are, they say, dealing with much the same kind of materials. Their intention, however, is different. The earlier anthology attempted to give the historic panorama, the character types, the landscape line. The newer book, in contrast, attempts to identify the intermingled patterns of living and the contrasting currents of thought in the modem civilization of the region, taking its materials from the most professional period of literature the region has attained. Thus, the editors, while working with and emphasizing the writings of a particular region, are concerned more with illuminating that regions growing cohesiveness than with proclaiming its specific uniqueness. Pearces contribution to the growth of regional consciousness continued with Signature of the Sun (1950), a collection of southwestern poetry that he edited in collaboration with Mabel Major. This work strove to do for poetry what Southwesterners Write did for expository prosecall attention to the simultaneously local and universal themes present in regional literature, thereby dramatizing the ties that link the expressions and concerns of a limited region with those of the nation itself. In some respects, the book was more successful in its task than was Southwesterners Write, for poetry, by its basic nature, is better suited to the expression of emotional consciousness (a sense at the heart of any regional awareness) than is prose. The books are, however, complementary, and, taken together, do much to advance the synthetic approach to regional study. The theme of Signature of the Sun, like that of Names on the Land and Southwesterners Write, is unity. Diverse though the peoples of the region are and varied though the experiences they have undergone, their lives are bound together by certain distinctive elements of the time and the place. Thus, the editors note, Nature conditioning man and man shaping nature are the basic statements of much of the poetry from this area of illimitable contrasts and extremes, unified by proximity and wind-crossed, earth-crossed trails. The peoples of the region, moreover, share the rhythm of daily life, the images in the eye, the labors of the hand, [and] the vocabulary on the tongue, so that the anthology, the editors conclude, bears a regional stamp, but we also believe that it bears the stamp of good poetry written in America. The implications of this last comment are profound, for it marks a conscious statement of the change taking place in post-war regional studies. Regional writing builds upon local materials, but it can, and must, speak to the nation as a whole. The potential of western regional literature, already suggested by the books of Stewart, Pearce, and Major, was crystallized by a work published in the same year as Signature of the SunFranklin Walkers A Literary History of Southern California (1950). Walker, who had already made good use of 311
Californian materials in a biography of Frank Norris (1932) and his study of the San Francisco writers, here turned to the more general region of southern California, evoking the names of George Wharton James, Mary Austin, and Helen Hunt Jackson as well as those of Zane Grey, Charlotte Perkins, and Robinson Jeffers. His book, however, was more significant for its method than for its materials; if Walker dealt with authors of disparate significance and familiarity, he did so in a way that lifts regional study to a new level. Walkers method is simple, yet profound. Identifying the several authors most associated with the region, he goes on to consider them in a way that is as much cultural history as it is literary history. He speaks of the authors roles in creating the California mystique, of their parts in an idealization of the past, and of the ways in which their own views and works are shaped by the social, mercantile, and technological developments taking place about them. He identifies distinctively local themes (the contrast of Spaniard and Yankee; the impact of the missions upon the Indian; the pervasive lack of water and how this need was met), but, like Pearce and Major, goes on to link these themes with the life of the nation. These local themes were all well established before World War I and were amplified rather than displaced during the resurgence of American letters in the twenties, he writes. Such isolation, in fact and in spirit, as the region had known during its youth rapidly disappeared with the increase in speed and ease of communication and the growing nationalization of our culture; yet the older, basic themes lingered on. Here is the real contribution of the Literary History of Southern California. By embodying the interlocking development of local and national literary culture, it established the national importance of local materials and prepared the way for an even greater exposition of these materials, Henry Nash Smiths Virgin Land. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) is, as befits one of the most influential single works in the literary study of the American West, soundly rooted in the region. Its author, Henry Nash Smith, was born in Dallas, served for ten years (19301940) on the faculty of Southern Methodist University, and worked in various capacities for the Southwest Review during its early years. The Review, itself one of the most distinguished and staunchly regional of the literary quarterlies appearing in the United States during the first third of the century, nonetheless espoused an enlightened regionalism. Though dedicated to advancing fictional and nonfictional accounts of the Southwest as region, it strove to keep these accounts from lapsing into the provincial. Thus, in its columns, one finds local folktales and Texas fiction interspersed with essays on national literary figures and analyses of current political matters. The region, it tacitly suggests, may have its distinctive and indigenous qualities, but is still a part of the greater nation. 312
The conceptual breadth implicit in the editorial policies of the Southwest Review appears explicitly in Virgin Land. Beginning with the observation that one of the most persistent generalizations concerning American life and character is the notion that our society has been shaped by the pull of a vacant continent drawing population westward, Smith traces the impact of the West, the vacant continent beyond the frontier, on the consciousness of Americans and follows the principal consequences of this impact in literature and social thought down to Turners formulation of it. In its way, therefore, the book becomes the fruition of the intellectual and literary movements begun by Turner and Parrington. Assuming, with Parrington, the existence of a generalized American character, it sets out to examine, with Turner, the effects on that character of the frontier, its experiences, and its expressions. Smith develops his argument through the examination of three central motifs. The first is that of Passage to Indiai.e., the role of the West in the carrying out of the dream of Americas steady growth toward the Pacific. Within this section Smith concerns himself with the philosopher-politician Thomas Jefferson, the politician Thomas Hart Benton, the merchant Asa Whitney, and the poet Walt Whitman. Each, he notes, possessed a vision of the United States as reaching to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, a vision embodied variously in Jeffersons dispatching of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Whitneys efforts to finance a transcontinental railroad, and Whitmans articulations of the dreams of manifest destiny in such poems as Passage to India and Pioneers! O Pioneers! Though their motives and goals differed, all of these individuals contributed to the American vision of the West as the direction of empire. Smiths second motif is The Sons of Leatherstocking, which leads him to an inquiry into the nature of the hunter and trapper who so quickly came to dominate American mythology. Here Smith widens his scope to include the fictional (Natty Bumppo, Deadwood Dick, and a host of lesser characters) as well as the historical (Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, William F. Cody), exploring the mystique that grew around the hunter-trapper figure whether real or created. If the resulting images quickly became standardized and formulaic, they nevertheless retained their power of influencing American thought, for they prepared the way for the most lasting of American mythic figures, the cowboy hero so memorably crystallized by Owen Wister in The Virginian ( I 902). The final motif, discussed in the third and longest section of the book, is The Garden of the World. In this section Smith deals with the westerner not as imperialist or hunter, but as farmer, tracing the vision of the West as a land of fertility and plenty, so that western imagery serves to complement a view of the United States as an agricultural nation. The materials 313
are diverse, coming from literature (the works of Hamlin Garland, Caroline Kirkland, and E. W. Howe, among others), from politics (the Homestead Act), and from the figures of the past (Thomas Jefferson, Hector St. John de Crvecoeur). From them, however, Smith demonstrates a widespread unity of belief as he examines the part played by each in establishing the generalized myth of the yeoman farmer. The farmer as symbol, already a part of American lore, became in the last years of the nineteenth century the final expression of the American view of the West. In discussing these motifs and their implications, Smith brought to full maturity the first stages of western literary study. The lasting importance of Virgin Land was as much in what it made possible as in what it accomplished, for it became the starting point of the second great wave of western studies. Its accomplishments are far from negligible. It establishes the lineal relationship of American attitudes toward the West; it points to how those attitudes, by coloring the American character, have contributed to the difficulties of Americans in adapting to life in an interdependent world community; and it argues persuasively the belief that history cannot happen that is, men cannot engage in purposive group behaviorwithout images which simultaneously express collective desires and impose coherence on the infinitely numerous and infinitely varied data of experience. Yet, important as these achievements are, their implications are even greater. The achievement of Virgin Land was to bring the life, history, and literature of the American West into the fold of the United States. Smith was certainly concerned with western materials, but he was concerned with them as the stuff of the American West. He was, therefore, accepting diverse regional materials as integral parts of the national experience. In so doing, he established the importance of the West in influencing Americans views of themselves. A myth, he says, is an intellectual construction that fuses concept and emotion into an image. The West, with its evocations of fact and feeling, is an image intelligible to all Americans, and therefore one that gains in impact. Smith established, moreover, the principle that the West, a region, is also the West, a part of America. Its concerns are those of its populace and are affected by the specific, individual circumstances of geography and society. Yet it is tightly linked to the greater nation and through that to the human condition. What happens in the West is important there, but significant everywhere. With the publication of Virgin Land, western literary study reached intellectual maturity. Its development had been lengthy. Beginning with a simple recognition and largely uncritical exposition of local materials, it moved to the stage of exploration, cataloging and appreciating the diversity and scope of these materials. Its final stage, expansion and synthesis, incorporated detached evaluation of the materials, investigation of their signifi314
cance, and application of that significance to matters of extra-local concern. Just as the frontier hypothesis of Frederick Jackson Turner was an intellectual product of all that had preceded it, so, too, is the study of western literary materials the culmination of a long sequence of growth. The study builds upon the sense that American literary culture has many parts. Assuming that the culture is the product of these parts, the study goes on to conclude that American culture is linked to the culture of the world at large. Accepting at last the place of local culture within the national, and the national within that of the world, the study presents a careful, coherent examination of western literature as national, even world literature. The bonds of provincialism are broken at last, and if much remains to be done, the work that has gone before will endure.
F RED E RISMAN , Texas
Christian University
Primary Sources Bartlett, W. S. My Foots in the Stirrup. Edited by Mabel Major and Rebecca W. Smith. Dallas: Dealey and Lowe, 1937. Cook, Jim (Lane). Lane of the Llano. As told to T. M. Pearce. Boston: Little, Brown, 1936. Duval, J. C. The Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace. Edited by Mabel Major and Rebecca W. Smith. Dallas: Tardy Publishing Co., 1936. . Early Times in Texas. Edited by Mabel Major and Rebecca W. Smith. Dallas: Tardy Publishing Co., 1936. Major, Mabel, Rebecca W. Smith, and T. M. Pearce, eds. Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with Bibliography. 3rd edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972. Major, Mabel, and T. M. Pearce, eds. Signature of the Sun: Southwest Verse, 1900 1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1950. Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. Single volume edi-
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A Literary History of the American West tion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1958. Contains all three volumes. Pearce, T. M., and Telfair Hendon, eds. America in the Southwest: A Regional Anthology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1933. Pearce, T. M., and A. P. Thomason, eds. Southwesterners Write. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1946. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West us Symbol and Myth. 20th Anniversary reissue. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Stewart, George R. Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1959. Reprint of the 1935 first edition. . Names on the Land. 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Walker, Franklin. San Franciscos Literary Frontier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939. . A Literary History of Southern California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Secondary Sources Caldwell, John. George R. Stewart. Western Writers Series. Boise: Boise State University, 1981. The only extended critical study of Stewart and his works. Erisman, Fred. Western Writers and the Literary Historian. North Dakota Quarterly 47 (Autumn 1979): 6469. Consideration of western regional works as historical documents. . Western Regional Writers and the Uses of Place. Journal of the West 19 (January 1980): 3644. An Emersonian approach to western regional writings. Etulain, Richard W. The American Literary West and Its Interpreters: The Rise of a New Historiography. Pacific Historical Review 45 (August 1976): 311348. Discussion of Smith, Walker, and others. Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. Includes a detailed critique of Parringtons thesis, with bibliography. Marovitz, Sanford E. Myth and Realism in Recent Criticism of the American Literary West. Journal of American Studies 15 (April 1981): 96114. Useful commentary on patterns in western literary history after 1950. Stewart, George R. The Regional Approach to Literature. College English 9 (April 1948): 370375. Somewhat old-fashioned but helpful introduction to literary regionalism as a genre. Tate, Cecil F. The Search for a Method in American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973. Includes a lengthy critique of Smiths Virgin Land. Welty, Eudora. Place in Fiction. New York: House of Books, 1957. Impressionistic but stimulating consideration of place as a deterministic element in fiction, by a noted regional author.
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Part Two
SETTLED IN: MANY WESTS
INTRODUCTION
after the closing of the frontier in 1890, San Francisco novelist Frank Norris observed: The Frontier has become conscious of itself, acts the part for the Eastern visitor; and this self-consciousness is a sign, surer than all others, of the decadence of a type, the passing of an epoch. Like the post-revolutionary writers of the new American republic who viewed Americas colonial past with a determination to build from it a new national literature, post-1890 western writers realized that upon the stories and legends of the Old West, they had to create a new literature for a region with a newly acquired self-consciousness. By 1960, the West had its new literature. But as late as 1962 in his preface to A Country in the Mind, Ray B. West wrote: The West is still, of necessity, pioneering. He added that When a Westerner uses the word pioneer, he is not merely creating an image; he is likely remembering his grandfather. With that self-consciousness about the regions newness and its frontier days, western writers from 1890 to 1960 resemble in important ways the writers who created an American national literature in the years from 1790 to 1860. Both groups of authors expressed their strong desire to create distinctive literary works to match the distinctive new character of their culture. Both occasionally indulged in a kind of literary boosterism, boasting their successes and sometimes overrating their more modest achievements. Criticized for such displays or (worse) ignored, both groups resorted to a defensiveness that some outsiders mistook for xenophobia or narrow parochialism. But because they knew they were pioneering, the writers of both groups created works that explore questions of national and regional identity, works of philosophical probing. One group inspired by nationalism, the other by regionalism, they both sought to make local subjects and scenes the matter of their literature. In pre-Civil War America, industrialization, the Westward Movement, the debate over slavery, and the wars of 1812 and 1846, all had an effect on the writers of the period. In the years from 1890 to 1960, western writers saw the creation of the National Forest and National Park systems and watched as the plains turned into a dustbowl and farmers headed west again for a new start. With massive dams springing up everywhere in the West, conservationistsmany of them writerstried to slow the rush toward progress.
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But most westerners agreed that a change such as rural electrification was progress, although power lines and growing smog made the price evident. Economically, however, the West remained a colony of the East. As such vassalage was mitigated by the discovery in the West of vast oil fields and by the development of the new aerospace industry, westerners put aside the populist sentiments of the 1890s, becoming by the 1960s the most conservative of Americans. As in regions and nations in other parts of the globe, however, many of the Wests writers did not follow the prevailing political drift of their neighbors. Indeed, in debates over unionization, conservation, land use planning, and environmental protection, the two sides often seemed to be (1) those who recognized more than just a romanticized part of the western past and (2) everyone else. Almost like people suffering from a retrograde amnesia, many westerners often seemed blind to the lessons of the past, as if they could not see the miles of gravel mounds left by dredge mining, the acres of hillsides eroded by overgrazing, the mountain slopes denuded by clearcut-and-run lumbering. Tantalized by visions of the American dream, such people seemed to believe not in the actual past but in the formula-bound Old West of Zane Grey and Hollywood. The tinsel West of such believers seemed to permit an escape from time: out of the present into the romanticized world of Riders of the Purple Sage and into a glorious future untouched by past mistakes and blessed with the infinite bounty of the western cornucopia. In contrast to westerners oblivious to the real past, insensitive to the present, and unprepared to face a future littered with old mistakes, the regions best writers realized a truth expressed by T. S. Eliot in Little Gidding: A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. Attempting to recreate the authentic Old West and to describe the actual New West, western writers also tried to understand what the western landscape meant and should mean to the people living in it. The writers of the early republic and the American Renaissance had similar concerns. In The Scarlet Letter, for example, Hawthorne recreated timeless moments of the past and placed them in the pattern that bound the American to the Puritan, showing that Americans could not escape history. Yet in seeing western writers of the years from 1890 to 1960 as undergoing on a regional level much of what American writers from 1790 to 1860 had experienced on a national level, one should avoid the reductionist mistake (sometimes made in discussing American romantics, realists, and naturalists) of approaching writers and their works solely in terms of the dominant ideology
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or philosophy of a literary movement or period. As Edwin H. Cady has explained in The Light of Common Day, to characterize the literature of a period by looking only at its ideas is to miss much, perhaps most, of what makes literature distinctive. Cady says that by considering the mode of sensibility of the romancer, we come closer to the actual cultural phenomena of the author, the book, and the reader. . .; and Cady also gives a succinct definition of sensibility: Deeper in the psyche than ideas, perhaps a source for them, certainly a major determinant of our choice of one possible idea in favor of another, sensibility is more than feelings, emotion. It connotes tact, a feeling for life, a way of taking events and making experience, a ground for life-style and at last for morality. Just as a distinctivethough not uniqueAmerican sensibility grew and manifested itself in the works of pre-Civil War American writers, so a western sensibilitydistinctive, not uniquedeveloped, becoming more pronounced in the period from 1890 to 1960. It was present in the westerners in the generation of American writers which Cady says was held together by one thing: all felt and responded to, were perhaps tempted by, though none consistently or definitively committed himself to, the sensibility of a naturalista generation that included the western writers Frank Norris, Willa Cather, Jack London, and Ole Rlvaag. Younger by a decade than those writers, Robinson Jeffers came closest to a thoroughgoing naturalists point of view. By the 1920s, however, Jeffers and other western writers had also adopted a distinctive mode of apprehension that Max Westbrook calls Western realism (Conservative, Liberal, and Western: Three Modes of American Realism, in The Literature of the American West, ed. J. Golden Taylor). Two other modes of apprehensionwhich Westbrook calls Liberal realism and Conservative realismpreceded the Western. The fundamental distinction between the two earlier modes and the newer regional one, as Westbrook explains, is that in profane realisms the conscious mind is primary; in Western realism the unconscious mind is primary. Western realism is usually a large part of the western sensibility, of which there are varying degrees as is also true of the sensibility of romancers, realists, and naturalists. Its vastness and its mountains prompting the writer to see life in the scale of geological time, the western landscape is the greatest source of the western sensibility. The record of millions of years written on the canyon walls of the West and implied by the ocean-like expanses of its plains and deserts suggests the relative puniness of the conscious human mind and the greater power of an unconscious mind moving in accord with the ele-
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mental rhythms of the earth. Not all western writers have been sufficiently moved by that suggestion to accept the primacy of the unconscious, but even those who are exceptions reveal a western sensibility in their approach to human history. With its origins in medieval Latin poetry, the ubi sunt motif is obviously not unique to western American literature, but when western writers deplore the eclipse of a golden age by a crass modernity, their laments have distinct reference to the special conditions of frontier life in the western landscape. However much it was characterized by Western realism and by an expression of the ubi sunt motif, the western sensibility from 1890 to 1960 was generally that of the square, the term that Wallace Stegner used in his essay Born a Square (1964) to refer to a certain western innocence, even dewy innocence, in the teeth of the modern world (Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature, p. 123). Almost twenty years after the publication of that essay, still convinced that squareness marked the western sensibility, Stegner said: The kind of western writer who writes modern literature immediately abdicates as a Westerner, and the kind who sticks to the western attitude is likely to be considered a little backward by the modernists. That dichotomy does persist. There are certain western writers who share common characteristics. . . . You could tell it partly by subject matter, of course, but also by manner and attitude. (Conversations, pp. 12324) Beginning in the 1950s but especially after 1960, western writers younger than Stegner began to exhibit what Stegner maintains is impossiblea western sensibility tinged with modernismbut there are few, if any, exceptions to Stegners dictum among western writers of his own generation. In manner and attitude, that generation did not adopt the bohemian and avant-garde style of many modernists, nor did they run in packs. We think of writers such as Robinson Jeffers, Vardis Fisher, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark as loners or mavericks, stubbornly refusing to shift with the winds of fashion. And because they did not parade in the latest literary fashions, they were often, as Stegner points out, either misunderstood or ignored. But even long residence in the East could not etiolate that fundamental westernness in a Willa Cather or a Bernard DeVoto or a Mari Sandoz. A shared sensibility apparent in western writers does not, however, mean that those of the period from 1890 to 1960 are a homogeneous group. Most of the great West, as Gerald W. Haslam has explained, was so var-
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ied that variety itself seems to have been its major characteristic. We are faced with a semantic dilemma: we say West, and consequently search for common characteristics, when in fact we must deal with Wests (Western Writing, p. 4). To cope with that dilemma, this part of A Literary History of the American West is divided into four sections, each focusing on one of the Wests sub-regions. Each sub-region has its own distinctive landscape and history, and a glance at titles of representative western literary studies shows that each sub-region has developed its own body of literature: California Classics by Lawrence Clark Powell; Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest by J. Frank Dobie; The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier by Ralph L. Rusk; and Rocky Mountain Life in Literature by Levette J. Davidson. So distinct are the Wests sub-regions, in fact, that a few observers have contended that the larger region does not exist, there being no cohesion between the sub-regions. A brief consideration of the lives of a few western writers dispels that notion. Although most authors seem primarily concerned with only one western sub-region, a surprising number of writers in the years from 1890 to 1960 lived in two or more of the sub-regions, and most western writers were familiar with the works of contemporaries from other sub-regions. Counting Clarence King and Helen Hunt Jackson among her acquaintances, Mary Hallock Foote lived in and wrote about Colorado, California, and Idaho. The next significant Idaho author, Vardis Fisher, was a professor for a few years at the University of Utah. A student in one of Fishers classes, Wallace Stegner had traveled with his family from Iowa to homesteads in North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, and Wyoming; and since 1945 he has lived in California, where as director of Stanford Universitys Creative Writing Program he has taught students who are now themselves noted western writers, among them Larry McMurtry of Texas and Ken Kesey of Oregon. A Nebraskan, Willa Cather wrote some of her novels about the Southwest; and Frederick Manfreds Siouxland extends from his home in Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains. We find a Montanan, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., writing an introduction to Lewis H. Garrards Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail, and a Texan, J. Frank Dobie, writing introductions to Helen Hunt Jacksons Ramona and Archer B. Gilfillans Sheep, Life on the South Dakota Range. Clearly, there is a West in addition to the sub-regional Wests. Moreover, from 1890 to 1960 writers from all of the Wests sub-regions shared a common burden as well as a common sensibility. Because formula novels about the West received the tag Westerns, the regions other writers had to write under the shadow of Zane Grey and his legions. Wallace Stegner explains that A principal problem of living in the West is that you get labeled as a limited regionalist; and he adds:
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I dont like to be called a western writer, simply because its a limiting term, a pejorative term like local colorist. But I certainly am not objecting to being thought of as a person who comes from the West, as a writer who comes from the West, and who writes from the West. Western writer is likely to make you sound like Louis LAmour. (Conversations, p. 132) To understand how Westerns have influenced the development of western literature, keep in mind Stegners statement and then imagine what might have happened to American literature if at the beginning of the nineteenth century a flood of formula novels about America had been labeled Americans and the formula writers themselves had come to be spoken of as American writers. Suppose The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick had been dismissed as simply two more Americans (Moby-Dick did sink into half a century of obscurity in this country because it was at first regarded as simply an adventure story). Even with no such onus attached to the literature of the American Renaissance, professors of American literature had to argue for years in order to gain a place for their courses in the English curriculum along with the study of British literature. Western American literature not only had to proceed under the penumbra of the pejorative label Western, but it also had to cultivate the same territory that Hollywood and television rode roughshod over. Such negative connotation applied to an entire region has created a strange milieu in which the Wests literature is written, read, and studied, for the regions best writers simultaneously try to create a distinctive regional literature but to avoid the regional label, whereas the formula writers perpetuate the old romanticized version of the West and do all they can to have the regional label applied to them and their works. As a result, the West has two major cultural currents: the tradition of the formula Westerns and the anti-tradition, works by those western writers who want to create a western literature but who also want to avoid classification as western writers. The tensions between these two major currents and the influence they have had upon each other have yet to be adequately understood. What we do understand is that a substantial body of first-rate western American literature was written during the seventy years after the frontier ceased to be a continuous line. At the same time, immigration into the region continued, shifting the population balance from the East to the West, and the region became more industrialized and increasingly dependent on technology. Many writers warned that the consequences of such rapid growth and change could be dire, but few westerners took them seriously, and so most were unprepared for the cultural, moral, intellectual, and environmental crises of the 1960s and 1970s. Those years of crisis were to the
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West what the Civil War had been to the North and the South: a profound shock to their sense of cultural identity. Settled in since the 1890s, westerners found themselves unsettled in many ways by the events of the 1960s. The western sensibility survived the shocks of the sixties and seventies, but not without being altered. Westerners felt a new sense of losslike the ubi sunt laments but more urgentfor now it seemed that we were losing our memory of the past as well as its glories. Lyman Ward, the narrator of Stegners Angle of Repose, spoke for many westerners when he said: This present of 1970 is no more an extension of my grandparents world, this West is no more a development of the West they helped build, than the sea over Santorin is an extension of that once-island of rock and olives. . . . I am on my grandparents side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings (p. 18). The fear that westerners had abandoned their past was caused mainly by the upheavals of the Vietnam era. But the escapist nature of the popular Westerns and the reluctance of the non- Western western writers to be identified with the traditions of the region also played a role in making people like Lyman Ward feel that the West had turned its back on its own past. As the essays in this part of A Literary History of the American West demonstrate, western history and literature are still being studied, the anarchy that Lyman Ward feared has not come to pass, and the Westwith most of its old problems and some new onesis still here. If the West is still here at the turn of the century, if we are fortunate enough to escape nuclear annihilation and ecocide, then we will be able to look back on the second major stage in the development of western American literature as a seventy-year period when western writers, having settled in to the sub-regions, explored the new regional identity. To understand adequately the achievement of those authors who wrote during the years from 1890 to 1960, we will each have to conduct our own search, leading, if successful, to the individual enlightenment that comes as the fulfillment of the cultural process. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
J AMES H. MAGUIRE , Boise
State University
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SECTION I
The Far West
Introduction
Far West has its roots in that much larger realm called the American West. During the past fifty years, however, a body of literature has taken shape that deals more directly with the life, the landscape, and the mystique of the farthest reach of the continent-never entirely separate from the West, yet clearly a world of literature that has mapped its own geography. The literary West began with the oral literature of indigenous native cultures; its first writer of note was James Fenimore Cooper. Western stories and legends can occur anywhere between Appalachia and Puget Sound, between Alaska and Mexico, an area peopled by pioneer mothers, cowhands, miners, whores, soldiers, warriors, sheriffs and sharpshooters. The West Coast as a literary region begins with Mark Twain, then heads rather quickly toward modern times. Its literature tends to deal with contemporary events rather than to reach back into history. Its heroes fight city traffic as well as blizzards. The physical territory includes, with a little flexibility at the borders, the Pacific states of California, Oregon, and Washington, together with British Columbia and Alaskathat side of America which faces the Far East. Among the characters are found some of those familiar cowhands and miners and pioneers, but also tough okies, zany Armenians, scab lumberjacks, Zen poets, talking trout streams, existentialist private eyes, secondrate film stars and undocumented aliens recently smuggled in from Jalisco on their way to work in Californias Central Valley. From the earliest days of settlement, this has been a region of abundance, of excess, of high energy. It has also been a region of tremendous variety in ethnic origins and religious beliefs, as well as in terrain and resources, that kind of uncontainable variety that resists all patterns. Like the life out west, literature now is moving in all directions at once. This is due partly to the so-called open society for which the Far West is notorious and partly to the multitude of writers. It happens that more writers live along the West Coast than in any other part of the United States, outside the Boston-New York-Washington megalopolis. Thus much literature is pro-
S A LITERARY REGION the
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THE FAR WEST
duced here. Not all of it deals with the region. Many writers choose to live near the Pacific Coast, drawn by the climate or the movies or a campus job or the available space, but write about other climes, other cultures, sometimes other planets and other galaxies. In the midst of this literary abundance, a sizable body of work has emerged from the experience of the West Coast, from the terrain, from the legends, from the dreams dreamed and the lives lived, some of it from writers who are native to the coastal states, some from writers who have lived there a while and have also in some way incorporated this experience into their writing. Alice Adams, for example, is a southerner by birth, from North Carolina by way of Virginia. Since the early 1950s she has lived in San Francisco, and some of her strongest work, such as the stories in Beautiful Girl (1979), deals with southerners, or easterners, who for one reason or another find themselves out west and whose destinies are fulfilled or concluded here. In southern fiction a frequent theme is the play between present time and some resonant moment in history, such as the Civil War. In the Far West the more frequent situation is a characters present played against a past from another region, like the American South or East, or Mexico, or the China Maxine Hong Kingston reaches back to in Woman Warrior (1976). It is a feature of the Pacific Coast that people arrive continually from somewhere else, with high hopes, or no hopes, to start over, or to play the final card. Because the coastline is both a physical and a psycho/spiritual boundary, this interplay between the Far West and the realms left behind is among the recurring themes. West Coast writers have not practiced any one form as consistently as writers from the South, for instance, have practiced and excelled at the short story. Though many fine stories have emerged from the region, this cannot be dwelled on for long, the way one can dwell on the notion of the southern short story. In the South, with its own rich oral tradition and much closer ties to England and Europe, the short story seems an authentic mode, built into that regions history. Out west a more characteristic impulse has been toward expansiveness and large works stirred to life by the astonishing scale and richness of the landscape: The Octopus (1901) by Frank Norris, Honey in the Horn (1935) by H. L. Davis, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) by Ken Kesey, and Angle of Repose (1971) by Wallace Stegner. The impulse to expand sometimes shows up as a renegade western refusal to be penned in by anyones expectation of what a narrative should or should not look like, a response William Everson has called the repudiation of received forms. We see examples in Keseys layer cake of voices and time-zones, in the chronic digressions of William Saroyan, in Richard
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Brautigans short, surreal, unclassifiable takes on trout fishing, and in the runaway prose of Jack Kerouac, who found a landscape to suit his tastes when he finally reached the same coastal ranges that had inspired Robinson Jeffers to extend his poetic line far past what most publishers had come to accept as the tolerable width of a printed page. Repudiation of received forms, of course, has long been an American pastime. This may be typical of life and literature in the Far West, but not exclusively so. If anything gives definition to this writing, it is not the forms so much as it is the available material writers have had access to, such elements as the unique history and geography, with its resulting role in the imagery and mythology of the western world, and thus that endless fund of dreams and aspirations funnelled toward the Far West from every direction, some of them fulfilled, some of them demolished, some of them twisted beyond recognition. The Far West was dreamed about before anyone really knew it was there. It was foreshadowed in a Spanish novel of the sixteenth century called The Adventures of Esplandian, a romancethat eras equivalent of science fictionby Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo. In that novel, published in Madrid in 1510, thirty-two years before the Cabrillo expedition first sighted and identified the West Coast, twenty-five years before Hernando Cortez named what is now the tip of lower California, Montalvo sent his hero and his readers on a fantastic journey: Know then, that on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, and it was peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they lived in the fashion of the Amazons. They were of strong and hardy bodies, of ardent courage and great force. Their island was the strongest in all the world, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores. Their arms were all of gold, and so was the harness of the wild beasts which they tamed and rode. For, in the whole island, there was no metal but gold. (From the 1872 translation by Edward Everett Hale, for The Atlantic Monthly .) This island of Montalvos was an invention, a fantasy which actually influenced the expeditions of the earliest Spanish adventurers. And this sequence, the dream running well in advance of reality, has affected the life and the literature of the region from the outset. But for two-and-a-half centuries that is where the Far West remained, as a beguiling and fabulous place in the mind. Apart from a few scattered sightings and landings by sea-roving explorers, the Pacific Coast was uncharted and unaltered by Europeans until the small band led by Gaspar de Portola made the first overland expedition, following the coastline north 328
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from San Diego five hundred miles to what is now San Francisco Bay. The year was 1769, getting late in the days of conquest, settlement, and the advances of the written word. Elsewhere on the continent Benjamin Franklin had already p ublished numerous editions of Poor Richards Almanac. Mr. William Byrd, Virginia surveyor and prominent man of letters, had accumulated a personal library of 3600 volumes. Settlers in New Mexico had been performing Spanish miracle plays annually for almost two hundred years. But on the Pacific Coast, as of 1769, there were only the diaries of a few men like Portola and his chaplain, Juan Crespi, a Franciscan friar from the island of Mallorca. From these have come the earliest writings about the life and look of the region. Making daily entries as they crept up the coast, Crespi was the first to report at length on the fauna and the flora, the climate, the habits of the local tribes and the habits of the land. For the next hundred years, the writings came from other travellers missionaries, adventurers, soldiers and trappers, fortune hunters and homesteaders, trekking overland, or shipping around the Horn. Like Crespi, Lewis and Clark kept remarkable diaries describing their progress westward toward the mouth of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean, which they reached in November 1805. Richard Henry Dana sailed the sparsely settled coast of California in the 1830s and recorded his impressions in Two Years Before the Mast ( 1840). 1849 saw the first novel from the Pacific Northwest, an undistinguished effort by Sidney Albert Moss entitled The Prairie Flower; or, Adventures in the West. More impressive were such early sojourners accounts of the region as James G. Swans The Northwest Coast (1857) and Theodore Winthrops Canoe and Saddle (1863). In 1861 Mark Twain left St. Louis, Missouri, on a trip to the Mother Lode, the Sacramento Valley and eventually out to San Francisco, all of which he recounted ten years later in Roughing It (1872). It is in Twains early writings that we can observe the point where Far West travel narrative began to take the shape of memorable fiction. Roughing It is rich with tall tales and outrageous gold country escapades. One such tale became The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, written while he was working as a journalist in San Francisco. It was published in The New York Saturday Press in November 1865, and brought him national attention. At the same time Bret Harte was also working in San Francisco, editing The Overland Monthly and beginning to write short stories. In 1868 he published The Luck of Roaring Camp, another mining country tale, and in 1869, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, a haunting and poignant story which does what numerous West Coast fictions have done since, that is, it plays against the prevailing myth of boundless opportunity, by recounting the fate of several people forced out of a mining camp, who meet their death in a Sierra snowstorm they arent prepared for. Reputed to be a realm 329
of mineral wealth and rich promise, the terrain, for these hapless exiles, is deceptively hostile. These stories established Harte and Twain together as the new voices from the far and fabled West. And this is the starting point for West Coast literature, the small gang of journalists and poets centered in San Francisco in the 1860s, which included Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, among others, the San Francisco Circle. Twain and Harte soon left for the East, never to return, but San Francisco was to remain a literary center from then on, for many years the only literary town of any consequence west of the Mississippi. In the 1880s Robert Louis Stevenson was living there, eventually marrying there, and recounting his honeymoon travels around northern California in The Silverado Squatters. The first notable fiction writers native to the West CoastGertrude Atherton and Jack Londonwere both born there in the second half of the nineteenth century. All, along with Joaquin Miller, whose poetry erupted at about the same time, were published in the Bay Area in the 1890s in the company of other poets such as Stoddard, Coolbrith, Edwin Markham, and George Sterling, and the novelist Frank Norris, who had come to California from Chicago with his family at the age of fourteen. Norris studied at Berkeley, and for a while at Harvard, returning to San Francisco as a newspaperman and then, after the success of his fiction took him to New York, as a novelist researching material for his most famous book, The Octopus (1901). The central issue of this novelthe struggle for control of the land and for shares of its bountiful producehad figured earlier in the original southern California novel, Helen Hunt Jacksons Ramona (1884), which depicts the plight of Mission Indians caught in the crossfire between Mexican landowners and Yankee entrepreneurs. Similar concerns would continue to turn up after Norris in such varied works as Factories in the Field I iams, John Steinbecks In Dubious Battle (1936) (1939) by Carey McWll and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the early Actos (1966) of Luis Valdez, and Rabbit Boss (1973) by Thomas Sanchez. To the north, this tradition was echoed in the proletarian novels of Robert Cantwell, Laugh and Lie Down (1931) and Land of Plenty (1934). Based on actual events, Norriss main story deals with a group of independent wheat ranchers defending their interests against a land-greedy, tariff-wielding railroad combine, the octopus of the title. Some features of the novel are typically western: the time is 1880, the land is recently settled, the railroad is the villain, and the law is hard to find. Other features give it a distinctly far-western flavor: the San Joaquin Valley setting, a sidetrip into San Franciscos already thriving Bohemian subculture, the presence of a long-haired wandering mystic who hears voices and believes in 330
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reincarnation, and the aspiring poet, Presley, who observes the unfolding drama. Norriss sprawling novel signaled many things to come. Economically, ecologically, the history of the Far West has continued to be a saga of exploitation, land abuse, wars for water, bloody struggles and enormous thefts. It has been the same, of course, in other parts of the world during the past two hundred years. What makes the difference, especially in California, are the deathless legends of what the Far West holds in storefirst the legend of gold and riches, later the legend of golden opportunities and the Golden Gate, the legend of open space and oranges, a land of promise, some final haven for the grandaddy of all such legends, the Great American Dream. Such expectations can move people to try things they might not otherwise try, and sometimes achieve things they might not otherwise achieve. They can also lead to particularly sharp, often crippling disappointment. Experiences that might be viewed elsewhere as simple reality are viewed out west as a failure of the dream. This dream, it should be pointed out, has seldom been promoted by the serious literature. Other media have kept it alive: word of mouth, popular songs, chambers of commerce, real estate campaigns. What twentieth-century writing has provided, time and time again, is counterpoint, playing under or around or against the legend, as Harte did, prophetically, in The Outcasts of Poker Flats, as Norris did in The Octopus. Presleys yearning for the frontier of romance is always there, somehow, in the foreground, or lurking in the background, yet it is usually surrounded, sometimes choked silent, by the various struggles for power. Very often the source for both the dream and the viciousness of the struggle is the samethe extraordinary abundance and dizzying worth, the formidable expanse of the western landscape and the fertility of the land, together with the expectations brought to it by the throngs it has magnetized. During the 1930s far western literature broadened in range and became rather suddenly more visible. While a modern generation of native writers found new ways to tap the power of the natural resources, some transplanted writers began to examine the area in ways it had not been looked at before. In Oregon and Washington, the frontier lasted longer than almost anywhere else in the U.S. excepting Alaska, which had itself inspired some of Londons finest stories as well as humorous verse by Robert Service. Further, in the absence of the sort of rare cultural transplanting that had led to San Franciscos prominence, Stewart Holbrooks generalization. . . the arts do not commonly follow close on the heels of the pioneer, no matter how literate the peoplewas indeed valid for the Pacific Northwest, which, while not the most recent section of the continental United States to re331
ceive what Mark Twain sardonically called the Blessings of Civilization, has probably been the last to develop a written literature worthy of the name. With a few exceptions, such as the autobiographical works of Theodore Winthrop and Joaquin Miller, Frances Fuller Victors biography of mountain man Joe Meek, some of Idaho-exiled Mary Hallock Footes fiction, and a scattering of poems from various hands, practically no pre-1920 literature from the Northwest remains readable today. In 1927 literary life up north stirred considerably when two young writers, James Stevens and H. L. Davis, collaborated on a manifesto upon the present condition of Northwestern literature, Status Rerum, a major contribution even though they could find no publisher for it and had to print it at their own expense. No wonder, for the authors essentially declared war on the academic arbiters of taste whom they accused of keeping the quality of their regions writing imitative and low. Both Stevens and Davis set out to correct such faults with vigorous compositions that actually reflected the land and its people. Over two decades would pass before Stevenss most mature novel, Big Jim Turner (1948), set in Idaho, would appear. Meanwhile, writing in the region moved toward maturity. In 1935, a young woman from the Pacific Northwest, Audrey Wurdemann, became at twenty-four the youngest winner of a Pulitzer Prize for poetry when her Bright Ambush was honored. One year later Davis, who had won the 1919 Levinson Prize from Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and had begun publishing fiction in H. L. Menckens American Mercury in the late 1920s, became the first northwestern novelist to bring wide literary recognition to his region when Honey in the Horn was awarded the Pulitzer. For his material Davis had dipped into Oregons recent past, the homesteading period in the decade after 1900, much as Norris had reached back into a similar period in the tumultuous past of Californias central valley. Further definition of the Northwest experience was contributed in the 1930s through 1950s by such novelists as British Columbian Ethel Wilson, Archie Binns, Allis McKay and, in historical novels late in his career (such as The Earthbreakers, 1952), by Ernest Haycox. In the mid-1930s, from the town of Fresno in the rich central valley of California, came the voice of William Saroyan, cocky, flamboyant, and instantly famous upon the publication of his first book, a collection of freewheeling tales and monologues called The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934). For Saroyan the farm country of his birth was not a battle zone. It was a warm, generally benevolent place where his Armenian family struggled to set down roots in a new land. My Name Is Aram (1940) is still one of his best-known books. In its approach to immigrant culture it is also a landmark book. Only in the past twenty yearssince the Civil Rights movement began to unlock minority literatureshas the unique mix of 332
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ethnic groups in the Far West begun to find full expression in poetry and fiction. Saroyans stories give us one of the earliest examples from the West Coast of writing about an ethnic minority from the inside. This is the source of that love of family and the deeply felt compassion for human effort and human error that mingle with his innate charm and whimsy and perfect timing. John Steinbecks first book, Cup of Gold, appeared in 1929, and was soon followed by The Pastures of Heaven (1932), To a God Unknown (1933), Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937)an outpouring of novels and stories and plays that continued for nearly forty years and brought him the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was, among other things, one of Americas most territorial writers. Like Faulkner and Mississippi, Steinbeck and his region have become inseparable. He laid such a powerful claim to a specific piece of central California that nowadays all the land between the Gabilan Range and the ocean, between San Jose and the southern end of the long Salinas Valley is referred to fondly as Steinbeck country. The Long Valley, a collection of his best short fiction, was published in 1938. The following year saw the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, as well as Nathanael Wests The Day of the Locust, Aldous Huxleys satirical look at a Hearst-like family in southern California, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and Raymond Chandlers first novel, The Big Sleep. In 1939 F. Scott Fitzgerald was living in Los Angeles doing much of the work on his Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon, and eastern magazines were publishing the Saroyan stories that would appear a year later in My Name Is Aram This confluence of now-famous West Coast classics, at the end of the decade, suggests the improbable variety of fictions the region would continue to deliverraw challenges from the back country, struggles for shares of produce in the lowlands, immigrant and minority experience, tales about Hollywood, and a new kind of detective story. The new detective story, as it was reshaped by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, originated in San Francisco. If we take things chronologically, Hammett actually provided the first popular hero of modern West Coast fiction. Five years before The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, ten years before The Grapes of Wrath and the Joad familys epic journey west from Oklahoma, there was The Maltese Falcon (1929) and its Satan-faced private eye, Sam Spade, whose prototype, The Continental Op, had been rubbersoling around the citys streets for years. Soon after World War I, Hammett had left his native Maryland and traveled to San Francisco, where he worked for Pinkertons Detective Agency. He lived there for eight years, writing stories that developed from his own experience as a private investigator. To this he brought a postWorld War view that changed the history of detective writing. 333
The hardboiled private eye, epitomized by the Op and Sam Spade in San Francisco, and by Chandlers Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles, inhabits a world much different from the world that produced Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. In the traditional detective tale, crime is an aberration, murder will out, justice will be done, and order will probably be restored in a more or less reasonable society. In the stories of Hammett and Chandler, crime is the norm, justice is not expected, and any order is temporary because their jaded heroes live, as Chandler wrote in the introduction to his collected stories, in a world gone wrong, where the law was something to manipulate for profit and power. Among the numerous detectives who have continued down these far western streets the most prominent is Ross MacDonalds Lew Archer, hero of some nineteen novels. Like Spade and Marlowe, Archer is a man in midlife, a loner who expects little from the people he deals with, and whose domain is the California coastline. He too is boiled, but not as hard. In the first scene of The Underground Man (1971), he is feeding the birds outside his window and making friends with a five-year-old boy. With a kind of guarded decency Archer moves through a world that is gradually going to pieces around him. What Chandler caught was the tawdry, tarnished glow of 30s and 40s L.A. Bringing southern California into the 70s, MacDonald shows a man living on the edge of imminent social disintegration, somehow continuing with business as usual and, in a strangely archaic way, morality as usual. The West Coast detective story intersects with the fictions from in and around Hollywood which began to proliferate during the 1930s. Both incline toward urban or suburban settings, city worlds almost always characterized by deceit, artificiality, shallow values, and corrupt habits. Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Budd Schulberg, Christopher Isherwood, Harry Leon Wilson, and Horace McCoy were in the first wave of literary writers lured to the coast by the prices being paid for film scripts. They were then lured, by the very nature of the bizarre and contradictory world they found themselves in, to write about it. In these books the movies merge with a titillating but doomed southern California concoction of fantasy, eccentricity, self-delusion and excess. The Day of the Locust, which is still the standard measure in this genre, makes Hollywood a place where the worst possibilities of the Far West find their most grotesque expression, where movie sets mirror hollow lives, where people driven wild by disappointment turn to violence, and the dream becomes a nightmare. Similarly the L. A./Hollywood depicted in Joan Didions Play It as It Lays (1970) is brittle, shallow, faithless, destructive. One difference is that Wests novel, like several later books, is a satire, weighted with derision. Didions account of Maria Langs downward spiralin taut, surgical prose, and chopped into 334
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cuts and takes like the film Maria usually thinks shes living throughis in its way a more harrowing view of the sundrenched danger zone. In both these novels, however, and in the numerous others that have now made L.A./Hollywood a literary realm unto itself, a good part of the power and the appeal derives from the fact that the dream is always there, if only to be betrayed, the ongoing western promise of the Big Romance, the Second Chance, which is a given in the environment, as potent and as insistent as the coastline. In these fictional cities survivors have to be toughly plated, like Spade or Marlowe, or L.A. Police Lt. Tom Spellacy in John Gregory Dunnes True Confessions (1977), who outlives his priest brother not because he is better or has tried harder, but because he is meaner and trusts no one. In The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), Ishmael Reeds kaleidoscope morality play and detective novel parody, the city is Berkeley, and the city is afflicted with a malady called Louisiana Red. The symptoms are malice, bitterness, hypocrisy. At the end the one who comes out smiling is private eye La Bas, the worldly veteran and voodoo investigator. Meanwhile, the soft, the sensitive, the vulnerable, if they dont escape, are liable to get consumed or seriously damaged. At the end of The Day of the Locust Tod Hackett is driven away in a police car, screaming, unable to face the mob violence outside a film premiere. At the end of Play It as It Lays Maria Lang is in a sanitarium where nothing applies. During the 1950s San Francisco once again became the gathering place for an important group of writers. The poets and novelists of the Beat Generationsuch as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Bob Kaufmansaw themselves as a resistance movement, taking a stand against forces in America that were dehumanizing the cities, stifling the imagination and spreading a gloss of false complacency across the land. The San Francisco Bay area was their headquarters because the spacious Far West seemed well suited to experiment, expansiveness, release and renewal. At the center of this movement was Jack Kerouac, a writer born and bred in Massachusetts whose life and prose were ignited by what he discovered in the Berkeley Hills, the San Jose railyards, the mountain ranges between Big Sur and Washingtons North Cascades where he worked one season as a fire lookout. Kerouacs books pointed the way for a generation of American writers as well as for a generation or two of American seekers, and it was among these mountains that he reached a climax point in his long, erratic spiritual journey. He describes this in Dharma Bums (1958), which like all his fictions is thinly veiled autobiography. Ray Smith, the easterner, neophyte Buddhist and student of mountain lore, is Kerouac. Japhy Ryder, his West 335
Coast mentor, is San Francisco-born poet and Zen scholar Gary Snyder. In this novel Kerouac announces what we might call the second discovery. The first discovery had been often described, as Steinbeck did in East of Eden, taking his characters into the Salinas Valley in the 1860s, to settle and then to work the virgin soil. For Kerouac in 1955, a valley was not something you worked for crops; a mountain was not to be mined for minerals. He came to the high country more like a poet than a dramatizer, and what he found was spiritual sustenance and renewal. A revitalizing force in fiction and poetry, the Beat writers explored the boundaries of language and rhythm and styles of life. In the history of the West Coast it might be said that, in ways both actual and symbolic, they reopened the territory; to an enormous audience they reaffirmed the coast as a literary location. During the twenty years since their heyday, far westem writing has seen an unprecedented flourishing. The Beat Legend itself has played a role in this, drawing writers toward the coast. So has the constant pull of Hollywood, as well as general population growth and population shift westward, and a new and now sizable generation of writers native to the region, born during the 30s and 40s, began to publish extensively in the 60s and 70s. The result is an ever-widening spectrum of lives and voices, from Tillie Olsens classic Tell Me a Riddle (1956), set in the California beach town of Venice, to explorations of San Joaquin Valley subculture in Leonard Gardners Fat City (1969) and Gerald Haslams collection Okies (1973), to the prize-winning stories of Oregon-born William Kittredge, The Van Gogh Fields (1978). The range of contemporary writing can be seen in the ways authors have continued to make use of the lands riches, both economic and spiritual, and the powers inherent in the western terrain. These elements are boldly present in such novels as Don Berrys Trask (1960), which explores the meeting of Indian culture and the earliest white settlers on the Oregon coast during the 1840s, Ken Keseys Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), Wallace Stegners prize-winning Angle of Repose (1971), Thomas Sanchezs Rabbit Boss (1973), and in James D. Houstons Continental Drift ( 1978). Sanchez writes of the Washo tribe that inhabited the Tahoe basin at the time of the first white penetration of the Sierras. The story begins in 1846, as a lone Washo hunter comes upon the Donner Party. From there we follow this tribes fate through four generations, experiencing profoundly what has been lost, not simply land but an identity, culture, and an entire belief system tied to the land. Sanchez evokes that complex consciousness that once pervaded the continent, wherein individual and tribe and every feature of the natural environment were physically and spiritually integrated. For the Stamper family in Sometimes a Great Notion, life in the northwestern woods is an equally intense bonding of kinship, work and soil. Self336
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reliant loggers, they are fighting a union that wants to intrude upon their right to grapple with the land. For Hank Stamper, the larger-than-life hero, it is the final struggle of the individual to preserve what he considers a rightful relationship to timber country that is both a source of sustenance and an awesome adversary. The great forests that dominate this terrain are lush and fertile and inspiring, and demonic. The ferocious Wakonda River can define a mans worth, can uplift his body and his spirit, can bear his ancestors and his memories along with its currents, and it can also swallow whatever he loves the most. For Washington-born Richard Brautigan, author of Trout Fishing in America (1967), a feature of the western landscape becomes the central character, has a voice, and suffers a terrible fate. It is a burlesque lament for the ways civilization has punished the great outdoors. We see trout streams that become stairways, water faucets, a row of telephone booths, and at last just a collection of scrap for sale in a San Francisco wrecking yard. Another Roadside Attraction (1971) by Tom Robbins is set farther north near Puget Sound and the Canadian border. Here the peaks, the mushroom glades and waterways dwarf the towns; yet this spectacular landscape is not being used for produce or for the spiritual renewal of the characters in the story, so much as it serves to launch the authors stoned and vaulting inventiveness as a means to explore another zone of reality. The novel offers its own metaphor, in the huge and marvelous hotdog which rises above the roadside restaurant and which contains within its surreal borders rivers, fields, valleys, a baseball stadium, a view of Kilimanjaro, and the gas rings of the planet Saturnthe perfect emblem, the narrator tells us, for the people and the land. Among writers native to the region who have emerged since the 1950s there are a number of non-whites whose stories, plays and poems have begun to illuminate lives crucial to the West Coasts past and present. AsianAmerican experience, for example, has been principally a West Coast and Hawaiian phenomenon, located there since the 1840s when men like the great-grandfather in Shawn Wongs 1979 novel Home Base crossed the Pacific to seek their fortune in a land the Chinese called Gold Mountain. Japanese-Americans like John Okada, a Seattle native whose uncompromising World War II novel No-No Boy (1957) dramatizes the turmoil of a Nisei caught between two cultures, began arriving in numbers in the 1890s. The Chicano presence goes back even further, to the earliest days of exploration, and beyond to the native cultures explorers found in the West. Mexican-Americans, in fact, became an ethnic minority not by immigration but by conquest, since all the states along the border were once northern provinces of Mexico; an area like Los Angeles has had a continuous Spanishspeaking population since it was founded in 1781. Here the cultural con337
tinuum extends not toward Washington, D.C., and London, but south toward Guadalajara. The growing body of stories and novels by such writers invites another look at some of the prevailing imagery. Because the Anglo voice dominates the literature, one looming presence has been the Pacific coastline as terminus, as some final limit of that great surge outward from Europe that began in the fifteenth century. Yet for Asian-American writers history has also been pushing toward this coastline from the other direction, eastward, across the Pacific. In the works of Chicano writers such as Luis Valdez, Ronald Arias, and Jos Antonio Villarreal, the coastline is not felt much at all. For them history is pushing northward from the south, across a border that oftentimes seems artificial, into a land their ancestors once held title to. And for Native Americans, the ancestry pushes not from West or East or South, but straight up from the soil beneath their feet. Thus, in these past twenty-five years literature has finally begun to reflect what this region is in fact-not only a terminal zone for the westering thrust, but a crossroads where an extraordinary mix of cultures has met, clashed, intermingled: Yokuts, Miwok, Skagit, Spanish, Mexican, Filipino, Portuguese, Chinese, Basque, African, Scats-Irish, Armenian, Japanese, German, Italian. Writes Lawson Inada: It doesnt matter to me that the exact geographical center of California is located in the back of the Gomez family yard. Or so they say. . . . The Gomez family, the Inadas, are exactly where they are, where California starts from and goes out, and out, and out. From here the going is easy. Look at our faces, and smile. This is one of our sources of hope, because in diversityif it can be preservedthere is always a richness. Moreover, it is yet another indication that, in a part of the world so recently settled, where the literature is still unfolding, there remain many regionsof the land, and of the heart for writers to explore.
J AMES D. HO U S T O N ,
Santa Cruz, California
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Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and the San Francisco Circle

1866. The Civil War concluded, America (save the South) had settled into an era of prosperity, and San Francisco proved to be at the vanguard of this national trend. In almost all phases of economic expansion, San Francisco by 1866 had been booming for more than a decade. No longer a supply station and recreation center for the motley gold miners, but an emerging major urban center, San Francisco enjoyed a population explosion and building boom that had been going strong for years. Brick and stone business establishments several stories high, opera and theater houses, picturesque dwellings perched on steep slopes, government and financial centers (including a branch of the U.S. Mint), and even paved streets were features of the new San Francisco. People of every description poured into the Bay Area, but what made this relocation and settling unusual was the extraordinary number of artists, artistes, and writers who arrived during this era. Far from the wounds of war, the humiliating poverty of Reconstruction, and the riots of eastern industrialization, San Francisco, with its early lead on post-war prosperity, enjoyed flush times with a unique emphasis on culture. Poetic in its spectacular vistas and misty weather, in the late 1860s The City became the birthplace for what would come to be called the local color movement in American literature. Practically every writer associated with early western local color at least made an appearance in San Francisco; many of these writers, who by the early 1870s would be scattered 1 all over the East Coast, England, and Europe, called the place home. While in San Francisco, most of these writers knew each other, and came to regard themselves as the circle or group that formed the cutting edge of a new kind of American writing. Surely the dominant figure of this emerging literary movement was young Francis Bret Harte. In the local color decade of 1865 to 1875, he would rise from local fame (and sometimes infamy) as a satirist, poet, editor, and short story writer to become the most celebrated figure of current American literature, before slipping away into a sad obscurity. Mark Twain, now recognized as unquestionably the groups greatest writer, was on the way to fulfilling his potential, and should be regarded as the second key figure in the San Francisco circle. These, men were the leading lights of local color, but what an amazing parade of writers as characters passed through The City. The most familiar names include Ambrose Bierce,
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Ina Coolbrith, Joaquin Miller, and Prentice Mulford. All of these emerging authors penned some form of what could at least loosely be called local color. Just what, then, is local color? Hamlin Garland wrote the standard definition of local color in the 1890s, explaining that this type of writing has such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by 2 anyone else than a native. This definition sounds so simple, reasonable, and convincing that somehow it ought to be truebut it is not. Harte, for example, left his native New York as a teenager; he later left California for the East Coast, after proving that there was more gold to be found in writing about the locals than in panning streams with them. It is now generally accepted that Harte spent less time in the Mother Lode country than many enthusiastic tourists of recent years. Although he wrote about Californias gold rush period for almost forty years, Harte lived only eighteen of his sixty-six-year life-span in California, and he spent most of those eighteen years not in mining camps, but residing in the San Francisco Bay area. In fact, most of the local color writers migrated to Nevada, Oregon, and California, the scenes of their most famous local color works. Garlands definition holds true, however, as a commentary on the spirit of this literary innovation called local color. His emphasis on texturepresumably meaning dialect speech, folkways, and local lore and his emphasis on backgroundpresumably meaning distinctive landscapes and picturesque character typesdoes suggest that in this definition, Garland had Harte much more in mind than, say, the politically active and social-issue-oriented Kate Chopin. But critics have always placed some strange ideological bed-fellows together in the local color movement. Harte, Chopin, and writers as diverse as Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Mary Ellen Wilkins Freeman, and John Muir are commonly regarded as local color writers. Considered historically instead of stylistically or ideologically, the local colorists can be viewed with some consistency; they form that diverse and diffuse group of American authors from several distinctly different areas who became prominent in the last half of the nineteenth century for their stories about particular geographical regions and characters. In order to understand historically the beginning of local color as a movement of San Franciscobased writers, we need to examine the origins and sources of these authors. The origins of California local color writing were mainly oral, journalistic, and southern. A maverick from the beginning, local color came from no established genre or body of traditional literature. Antecedents for local color were typically humorous, anecdotal collections, such as A. B. Longstreets Georgia Scenes (1835), J. J. Hoopers Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845), and the later Sut Lovingood (1867) by George W. Harris. Harte liked to credit Judge Thomas Haliburton, author of the Sam 340
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Slick stories, with founding local color shortly before James Russell Lowell in The Biglow Papers (1848) legitimatized the concept by giving it Brahmin sanction. But Lowell, and to an extent Haliburton, wrote sanitized and stylized versions of local color. The frontier yarn spinners, proud of their subliterary raciness and satiric bite, were the true originators of local color. These dealers in horse-swapping yarns, confidence games, peculiar local creatures and customstall tales in generalwere in tune with the newspaper realities of Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Company, journalists all, and without a college degree to their names. Even the dapper, frequently pompous Bret Harte began his local color career as a humorist. A survey of Hartes writings for northern California newspapers during the mid- and late 1860s reveals that much of his writing 4 about the Golden State was in the vein of humorous local color. In 1860, for a San Francisco newspaper called the Golden Era, Harte wrote an uproarious sketch about the drunken doings of a group of miners on Saturday night entitled A Night at Wingdam. For The Californian, a literary newspaper of the mid-1860s, Harte wrote a number of pieces about San Francisco that were pointed satire, often mixed with humor. Several of these examples were actually folklore, a reporting of local customs and beliefs, such as The Legend of Devils Point (1864), or A Legend of the Cliff House ( 1865), or Early California Superstitions (1865). Harte also realized the power of California to customize, to modify material from other eras, locations, and cultures and imprint this material with a Golden State stamp. Harte took particular delight in adapting nursery rhymes, lim5 ericks, and fables from Aesop for California children. In his late twenties, he did write an occasional serious, sentimental, and picturesque local color sketch or story, The Work on Red Mountain (1863) probably being his most famous example. This novella tells the story of spunky and bucolic Mliss, who fashions a life for herself in the rough mining world of the Sierra Nevada mountains. But until the late 1860s) local color was generally intended to be humorous. Interestingly enough, in early California local color writing, sometimes the serious could not be distinguished from the humorous. In 1865, Bret Harte, backed by a successful if speculation-prone publisher named Anton Roman, agreed to edit a collection of local poetry to be called Outcroppings. For all the advertising and promotion of this anthology, editor Harte nonetheless found the vast number of submissions far from ideal. After eliminating obvious plagiarisms and rhymed acrostics for patent medicines, Harte had to sort through an avalanche of essentially two types of poetry: talentless imitations of late Augustan picturesque verse in a California setting, or high-sounding Victorian verse of general truths, general sentiments, and predictable rhymes. As editor, Harte was too close to the 341
situation and his deadline to realize that these poems were not material for an anthology, but rather convincing evidence that traditional, literary statements of high purpose and seriousness would mutate into comedy when confronted with California as subject matter. Reluctantly, Harte decided to publish the Victorian group. By the mid-1860s, local color was by no means yet the fashionable vogue for aspiring California writers it would become by the end of the decade. Popular lyric poetry, and ballads of an heroic, sentimental, and conventionally rhymed nature could be found in virtually every issue of every West Coast newspaper. Poetry readings were frequent, and such figures as Blue Bird, and The California Canary had surprisingly large, loyal followings. The more serious poets were literary establishment adherents to a well-known scribe, writers who relied on their self-proclaimed potential and on an ability to imitate such recent great and popular poets as Longfellow and Tennyson. San Francisco attorney Edward Pollock was the most famous of the establishment imitators, a poet with considerable ambition who unfortunately died young before fulfilling his much-heralded promise. In Outcroppings, Harte reprinted Pollocks then-celebrated The Chandos Picture, an embarrassing and febrile rewriting of Poes The Raven, which substituted a talking bust of Shakespeare for the bird. Blatantly sentimental verse also had its followers, as the popularity of Mrs. A. M. Schulz, Clara Dolliver (her No Baby in the House was a melodramatic local sensation), 6 and May Wentworth could attest. Read today, all of this jejune and overblown verse sounds quite comical, of course. Harte may indeed have suspected that something was radically amiss with Outcroppings. Finding almost no California poems that might be either admired or respected, he found himself in an editorial box canyon, as his limp and apologetic Preface to Outcroppings revealed he understood. Reader sympathy for Hartes questionable anthology was not forthcoming; trouble, however, wasimmediately and in large doses. Judging from the violent disapproval of the volume by virtually every northern California and Nevada newspaper, what the public wanted was an all-inclusive anthology that would print every local versifiers work regardless of merit, making the volume a showcase for every California towns cultural products. As a collection of California poetry it [Outcroppings ] is 7 beneath contempt, noted the American Flag. Other regional papers were more explicit, calling the volume hogwash and purp stuff ladled out from the slop bucket, or a flap-doodle mixture, or a quantity of slumgullion, or tailings . . . which would average about 33 1/3 cents per ton, or referring to editor Harte as a serene ass or an editorial jackass. Too late Harte realized that he had played the fool by attempting to instruct and
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portray California with the best local poetry he could find that tried to demonstrate traditional, serious, eastern, and Victorian values. Attempting to save at least his reputation if not his pride, Harte joined the fray with indignant enthusiasm by writing a series of anonymous pleading reviews and counterblasts. His A Sheaf of Criticism (The Californian, Dec. 23, 1865) attempted to survey and understand this situation from the editors viewpoint, and the article is filled with humility mixed with a genuine puzzlement and appeal for understanding. But venom had continued to spew from rival newspapers, so in the same issue of The Californian, Harte turned from an accommodating prose to ripping apart the opposition with satire, thereby ignoring his own culpability in this fiasco. The fault rested with California and the idiotic bards he had published, not with Bret Harte! His critical parody in verse, Sunrise on Mt. Davidson, written with all the righteous indignation of an outraged sophomore, unmistakably showed the comic absurdity of writing on trivial local subjects in the language of great art. The mock-heroic metaphors and conventions, plus a dreadfully inappropriate imagery of seduction, birth, and parentage, made this a devastatingly effective satire on the literary pretensions of inferior California and Nevada would-be writers. His description of the brazen mining camp of Virginia City (at the foot of Mt. Davidson) in glowing, golden terms mocked the blind pride of such low-grade and presumptuous versifiers. Here is the poems first stanza: Lo! where the orient hills are tipped with snow, The pregnant morn slow waddles oer the plain, Big with the coming day; the shameless child Of Erebus and Nox, wrought in the slow And sure gestation of the rolling hours. How great is the fecundity of Time! Methinks I see the swaddling clothes of mist Roll down the bosky glens, and standing here Notebook in hand, I really seem to be Accoucher of the Universe! To his antagonists, Harte wrote some further ripe lines in demeaning, falsely picturesque couplets that described the flatulent morning in a typical miners camp. And through the valleys rose between The pleasant hiss of the esculent bean. And the jay birds thrilling song was stopped When the luscious flap-jack softly flopped.
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Harte was the leader, but not the only California writer who at first believed that local color was primarily humor. An entire group of phunny men arrived in San Francisco and began western local color as comedy, often a mockery of the very area that tolerated and sustained them. In the 1850s, an outrageous prankster and irrepressible perpetrator of hoaxes arrived on the California scene. George Horatio Derby, better known as Squibob or John Phoenix, entertained many, including the influential Jessie Benton Frmont, with his barbs and parodies, eventually collected in Phoenixiana (1855). A few years later, Prentice Mulford (Dogberry) appeared and quickly went to work on the Golden Era, writing humorous if crude sketches about gold miners destructive appetites and moral habits. During the 1860s he also wrote a series of very funny burlesques on mining life, Compressed Novels. Also joining the Golden Era staff during these years was Robert Henry Newell (Orpheus C. Kerr). He became the master of dialectal misspelling and preposterous exaggeration in his political satires, which scornfully attacked self-serving office seekers. Newell, third husband of Adah Isaacs Menken, first came to San Francisco when his wife arrived to play the equestrian lead in Byrons melodramatic tragedy, Mazeppa. Tied prone to a stallions back, her Goyaesque curves contained by a virtually invisible body stocking, Menken was the cultural sensation of the Opera House for almost a year (18634). During her year in The City, Menken wrote poetry for the Golden Era good enough to be praised by Whitman and Dante Gabriel 10 Rossetti. Other writers of some import who arrived in San Francisco during this time included Fitz Hugh Ludlow (author of the remarkable The Hasheesh Eater ), known as the American de Quincey, and the black poet James Madison Bell. Another one of the boys who appeared in San Francisco during this era was Samuel L. Clemens, who would emerge from the West as Mark Twain, and go on to become an international celebrity and indisputably major American writer. During the 1850s and 60s) Clemens never lighted in any one place for long. These were apprentice years for this future master of comedy and invective. In 1862, Clemens began writing local interest columns for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, columns which quickly turned into some of the most picturesquely humorous and incisive prose in the entire West. Clemens was challenged by a number of young journalistic rowdies, including the cynical Joe Daggett; fantasist William Wright (Dan de Quille), author of such humorous comic horrors as Petrified, or the Stewed Chicken Monster; and Steve Gillis, the small but lively renegade fighter from Mississippi. It is only poetic justice that Sam Clemens garnered his famous nom de plume not in the service of captaining a river boat, but in the world of 344
western local color. Scholar Paul Fatout learned from old timer George W. Cassidy and other sources that Mark Twain (allow two free drinks) was a reference to the on credit drinking contests Clemens held with a number 11 of opponents in Virginia Citys Old Corner saloon. After a time Mark Twain hurled one pointed barb, one dare too many, and he left Virginia City under a certain amount of pressure from his journalistic peers and other victims of his waggish prose and drinking prowess. Clemens moved to San Francisco in May of 1864, having recognized The Citys literary potential on a visit the previous year. The Call employed his services as a reporter for a time, but, as in most literary work Clemens would attempt, his own brand of satire, humor, and invective would soon triumph, and triumph especially quickly over so dull an assignment as the daily reporting of routine events. Clemens found more of a home with The Californian. For this imaginative literary newspaper, he developed his eye for local color by writing ten articles every week throughout the fall of 1864. With these pieces for The Californian, Clemens came directly under Bret Hartes tutelage, and much later paid tribute to the mentor of local color. He [Harte] trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of 12 paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor. Beginning to develop as a writer and gaining some local reputation and a following, Mark Twain had no intention of settling down just yet. He traveled back to the wild and wide-open Virginia City, happily discovering that his reputation as a trouble-maker had largely been forgotten. But Clemens found the literary life of this isolated place dull and limited compared to the cosmopolitan San Francisco. So he wandered back to California, stopping in the Mother Lode to spend three months with prankster Steve Gillis at Jackass Hill and Angels Camp. It was during this period that Clemens heard the jumping frog story and a number of other tales from Jim Gillis, Steves brother, a celebrated yarn spinner. Clemenss Jumping Frog story, of course, is a parody of the tall tale and its conventions. For example, the story has a double narrative perspectiveonce removed. Deadpan Clemens calls the whole proceedings monotonous, and Simon Wheeleramazingly digressive and long-winded even for a cracker-barrel folksy philosopherdoes not disappoint us with this elongated yarn about poetic justice. Bit by bit, we perceive that the story is putting us on, as a nameless confidence man (the first of Mark Twains many Mysterious Stranger figures) out-cons con man Jim Smiley. A mere anecdote, the Jumping Frog story is as garishly decked out and ornately tacky as a Virginia City saloon. What gives the story more depth than simply that of a comic tour de force is Clemenss unerring depiction of the picturesque as the grotesque. The story has its basis in Jim Smileys ob345
session with gambling, typically involving some kind of animal contest. What begins as a funny character quirk ripens into the truly disturbing account of Andrew Jackson, the dog who meets his mutilated match, a digression which sets up the reader to fall for Daniel Webster, who literally and figuratively gets shot down. Typical of Mark Twain at his best, this short early tale reveals a comedy increasingly dark and disturbing as one ponders its meaning. Publishing Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog in 1865 did give Clemens a taste of national recognition. He received even more plaudits with his collection of the same year, somewhat edited from the originals for an eastern audience, The Celebrated jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. During the next several years, Clemens would continue this pattern of travel, arrive, write, depart, and publish. His two most famous literary projects of the late 1860s were his letters about local customs in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) for the Sacramento Union, and his letters about traveling in the Middle East for the Alta California. Called The Quaker City Letters, a much edited version of this collection eventually became Mark Twains uproarious bestseller about traveling in the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad (1869). From Harte and others, Clemens had learned a great deal about how to transform satiric journalism into local color, as well as how to use local color materials to develop his own genius. Yet to reach his vast potential, or even write a lengthy local color work about the West, 13 by 1869 Mark Twain nonetheless had passed beyond his apprentice days. Until the late 1860s, local color writing in the Bay Area was a young mans sport. As renegade writers, these journalists naturally turned to debunking and criticizing the terrain at handwestern customs, myths, and values. All were new to San Francisco; all published much under the protection of anonymity; all developed essentially adolescent literary personas, thus their reliance to a man on pseudonyms. They shed this assumed identity when it became too silly or limited. There were serious local color works before the late 1860s, such as Hartes The Work on Red Mountain, but they were rare. As Californias early local color authors matured, they sought broader horizons, frequently leaving San Francisco in the process. With flush times, the transcontinental railroad soon to be a reality, and area writers growing older and more serious, publisher Anton Roman believed that the California literary scene was ready to make a bid for national recognition, and, with luck, even profitable fame. A major publication based in San Francisco was the logical vehicle, and Bret Harte the logical pilot. Recognizing his achievements as writer and critic, in 1868 Roman named Harte editor of the Overland Monthly. This would be Californias most ambitious literary adventure, a new magazine to rival Bostons Atlantic. Roman and Harte agreed at once that the Overland should be produced primarily 344
for an audience that would be literate, civilized, and eastern. However, this agreement posed a serious problem for both experienced publisher and maturing writer. In the spring of 1868, Roman took Harte and his family for a retreat in the charming valleys and picturesque hills of Santa Clara, near the crisp surf of Santa Cruz. Publisher Roman had a mission to perform. Of course he wanted the Overland to publish great writing, but at least equally he wanted his magazine to sing the praises of Californias idyllic life loudly, thereby luring to the Golden State numerous East Coast and Midwest families and their money. To accomplish this goal, Roman knew that he must convince Harte of Californias worth as a serious literary setting, a goal tantamount to reversing the direction of the debunking and humorous local color movement. Harte, after all, was the areas leading satirist; Roman could hardly have forgotten the triumph of invective over beauty and serious purpose in the Outcroppings debacle. The majority of Hartes previous references to miners, the Gold Rush, California in general, and even the sainted San Francisco in particular, had been satirically abusive. He had frequently lambasted the area for its earthquakes and foggy climate, the people for their barbaric cultural depravity, and local authors for not even approaching the lofty literary standards of Tennyson and Browning, or Longfellow, Lowell, and the other Boston Brahmins. Yet Romans appeal to Harte worked; not because of the publishers self-confessed capitalistic boosterism, but because of the successful appeal to Hartes conscience. With this conversion, local color took a giant step forward. Influenced by Charles Dickens, Harte became convinced that his prejudice against Californias colorful inhabitants was in direct contradiction to his broadly optimistic philosophy that however cursed by their follies, all men were ultimately good. Viewed in this light, Hartes romantic and liberal notions about mankind were quite compatible with Romans happy credo that free enterprise means a free society. Harte simply shifted his view of California local color from a satirical perspective to the more fashionably respectable sentimental perspective. Consider this passage of Harte invective from the Outcroppings literary war: The [Sacramento] Union believes that the grand gold hunting crusade would make a fine theme for an epic. We are inclined to think it would. Something in the style of the episode of the Argonautae, with Sam Brannan for Jason, Michael Reese for Theseus,and the editor of the Union as the Orpheus who 14 sings the romantic chronicle. The absurdity in this 1866 situation was more apparent than real. In his Overland stories, Harte would replace the above-named real colorful local 347
figures with Jack Hamlin, Brown of Calaveras, John Oakhurst, or Colonel Culpepper Starbottle, and begin to create the volumes of nostalgic California Gold Rush tales which he called episodes of The Argonauts of 49. Not only would Harte follow this mocking advice, but he would become famous and, for a time, rich doing it. Almost all of Hartes well-known local color stories were written during his three-year tenure as editor of the Overland Monthly. One may argue that these stories of the California Gold Rush, permeated with nostalgia for a simpler time past, were never meant to be complex pieces of realistic fiction. They can probably be read most accurately as topical parables which reinforced the values of the Overlands market, the idealistic eastern au15 dience. For example, seeing The Luck of Roaring Camp as a topical parable instead of a short story explains the lack of realism (except for those local color surfaces of setting and character types), psychological motivation, and organization around a central conflict. Parables are designed to illustrate truths, i.e., support an audiences values and expectations; they typically are not well-wrought individualistic statements from a gifted, articulate consciousness. The Luck, then, is a Mysterious Stranger story, a parable where Christ-like Tommy Luck converts several picturesque miners to a facsimile of Victorian civilizationbefore a raw, savage, anarchistic wilderness wipes them all out. Numerous other Bret Harte stories for the Overland follow this parable 16 formula. Tennessees Partner is a parable about the power of brotherly love. The Outcasts of Poker Flat shows that ultimately there is good in even the worst of people. (This story introduced Mother Shipton, a character who would become famous as the whore with a heart of gold.) Brown of Calaveras is a parable that demonstrates the nobility of duty over desire. How Santa Claus Came to Simpsons Bar is a parable with the message of never give up. As he gained more experience in writing this type of story, Harte learned how to use the parable formula for making serious social criticism. Stories such as The Right Eye of the Commander and The Crusade of the Excelsior demonstrate this development. But sometimes nothing fails like success. In establishing the triumph of local color, Hartes parables moved this subject from thematic issue to a background concern. For Harte, local color became not thematic substance in itself as much as the picturesque setting for parables about a lost or threatened order restored. But Harte and the Overland Monthly did lead the San Francisco-based western local color movement to a position of legitimacy in American literature. The most obvious feature of any Overland issue was that it looked very much like an issue of the well-established Atlantic Monthly, but here the resemblance largely ceased. Unlike the Atlantic, Hartes contents revealed a 348
strong emphasis on local color. For this purpose he selected a wide variety of travel articles, feature stories, and imaginative tales. Some were devoted to California and its inhabitants, but the journal also carried travel articles and fiction about Europe, Asia, Mexico, South America, and numerous parts of the United States besides California. This material was chosen to suggest an ultimate linking of local characteristics and issues with universal human concerns. Harte clearly wished to pull local color into the mainstream of serious literature. His journalistic emphasis on pointed brevity greatly enhanced the quality of Overland writing. And, despite protests from publisher Roman, Harte did include articles critical of California and the West. Under Hartes editorial leadership, the Overland quickly became nationally respected as an impartial and highly creative magazine. In moving local color from satire to seriousness, Harte relied on the help of two protgs, Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coolbrith. The three became known as the Golden Gate Trinity, and while quite interested in writing and publishing social criticism, all came to believe refined feeling far superior to parody, protest, and invective. Stoddard was persuaded to drop his ridiculous pen name of Pip Pepperpod, and received encouragement to concentrate on writing substantial travel literature and philosophi17 cal poetry. As Stoddards early mentor, Harte directed his effusive charge away from momentary enthusiasms to matters of more enduring substance. Stoddard, always intrigued with travel and foreign cultures, eventually authored South Sea Idyls (1873), becoming, after Melville, the most famous nineteenth-century American writer about the Pacific. A mentor himself to younger writers as the century wore on, Stoddard was for years a leading figure on the San Francisco literary scene. In the 1880s, Stoddard informed and directed the visiting Robert Louis Stevenson towards his paradise in Samoa, and in the 1890s, Stoddard coached and inspired the promising Japanese-American poet and essayist, Yone Noguchi. Ina Coolbrith was often Hartes inspiration and always his trusted and reliable editorial supervisor on the Overland. Harte thought of her as shy, sheltered, young, and talented, almost certainly having no knowledge of the mysterious and violent events that brought her to the Bay Area. The niece of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, Coolbrith (who disguised her given name in a number of ways) rode over the Sierra Nevada mountains as a tenyear-old, perched on the saddle of famed Indian scout James Beckwourth. Settling with her family in the small pueblo of Los Angeles, young Coolbrith wrote poems that were published in several California newspapers. Her verse was widely read and widely admired. But by 1861, at twenty years of age, she had been married, had given birth to a daughter (who very quickly died), and was divorced from her insanely jealous husband (who was later killed in a duel), in addition to achieving a growing literary reputation. 349
Coolbrith and her remaining family relocated in San Francisco. As a poet, she wrote carefully crafted, inspirational Victorian verse, chiefly, as would be expected, about love and the picturesque. Probably her best-known volume is Songs from the Golden Gate (1895), and in honor of this and numerous other volumes of her poetry, in 1915 she was named the first state poet laureate in America. Even more than with Stoddard, Coolbriths real accomplishment was in her generous support of other writers. Certainly during the Overland heydays, editor Bret Harte relied heavily on Coolbriths judgment and assistance. For many years she was a librarian at the Oakland Free Library, where she supervised the reading development of numerous patrons who sought her advice. She received considerable praise for the inspiration and literary guidance she gave to Isadora Duncan and young Jack London. In the case of Ina Coolbrith, one cannot help but wonder what such a talented person would have accomplished if fate and her era had been more responsive and kind to her. Among her other tragedies, Coolbrith lost all her pos18 sessions in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. With the help of Stoddard and Coolbrith, Harte produced in the Overland an important literary journal of very high quality. Hartes own fiction for the Overland, plus his verse satire Plain Language from Truthful James (better known as The Heathen Chinee, and often mistakenly read as blatant racism, rather than as a serious ironic indictment), took the eastern reading public by storm. But the Overland as a journal was first rate for several reasons. The Overland book reviews, mostly written by Harte with occasional assistance from journalists Noah Brooks and W. C. Bartlett, were the most complete and reliable estimations and standards for literary taste in the entire country. Nonfiction articles in the Overland frequently pointed to problems being experienced in these flush times. Young Henry George wrote of economic hardships the transcontinental railroad would bring to many people; T. H. Reardon stated that those with professional skills (especially lawyers and educators) were too plentiful on the Western Slope; A. W. Loomis wrote about anti-Chinese sentiment in California; and several authors touched on the seriousness of the earthquake issue. The Overland accomplished a good deal more than making Bret Harte famous for lol9 cal color writing. While Harte led local color fiction in the direction of literary respectability, Mark Twain in 1872 published the greatest work of satiric local color, Roughing It. By this time Mark Twain had gained even more respectability, although not yet fame, than Bret Harte. Safely seated behind a massive desk at his hilltop farm near Elmira, New York, and married to a very wealthy industrial heiress with his bachelor days only a lingering memory, Clemens decided to write his comic memoirs of the West. Roughing It is 350
more than autobiography and less than a conventional novel; it is gullible young Sam Clemens, the wondering, wandering tenderfoot, in the role of narrator unable to tell fact from hoax. The book is an extended tall tale of Clemenss never-completed expedition from St. Joseph, Missouri to the South Seas. With deadpan understatement and grotesque exaggeration, Clemens reveals through many episodes that in the West, assumed knowledge is likely to be wrong, perhaps dangerous; fiction may be fact; the absurd and the unexpected hold much more validity than serious and reasonable moral purpose. As the journey in Roughing It continues into Virginia City, more a loosely organized melee of violence and practical jokes than a town, the 20 narrative increasingly reads like a contemporary black humor novel. Indeed, of all the San Francisco circle writers, Clemens clearly has had the most impact on contemporary novelists. Characters vanish in the Nevada silver fields, while representative western types, such as the vagrant Mormon, suddenly appear then disappear. At one point, the narrator and his party find themselves stranded at Lake Mono (in eastern California), which looks like nothing so much as the surface of the moon. Earlier, Jim Blaine recounts the hilarious tale of his grandfathers bargaining ram, which includes a digression about old Miss Wagner. She [Miss Jefferson] was a good soulhad a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadnt any, to receive company in; it warnt big enough and when Miss Wagner warnt noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while tother one was looking as straight ahead as a spy-glass. Grown people didnt mind it, 21 but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary. This episode, indebted to southwestern local color and certainly not Bret Harte, is black humor by the following definition: black humor is tragedy masquerading as humor, a comedy grim (and often satiric) in its message, but also black in the sense of obscure or opaque. With what emotion should we react to Miss Wagnerdisgust, laughter, pity? This is complex comedy spilling into grotesque tragedy, quite appropriate to the western experience as later writers would see it, and quite beyond the other western local color writers of this era. In Roughing It, the tall tale is reality. Mark Twain seeks not merely to amuse, but to create a serious, often irreverent world, paradoxically out of comedy. His tale of Bemiss affair with the buffalo bull is a masterpiece of the comedy of despair, as is the story of Dick Hydes movable ranch, or Buck Fanshawes self-destructive anger. The books notorious and lengthy attack on Mormonism considers with tongue-in-cheek sympathy the debilitating 351
administrative problems of Brigham Youngs married life. With all its wild tales, bizarre contradictions, and fragmented, incomplete form, Roughing It also gives great insights into the crass values of those who go out West to strike it rich. Here, as in his greatest fiction, Mark Twain showed his inimitable style, and his penetration beyond masks to a shrewd analysis of the real self-serving motivation behind his characters actions. Through local color Clemens learned a fundamental and paradoxical truth he would carry to his grave: ironic comedy can be the most effective tragedy. By the end of 1871, most of the newly famous San Francisco writers had scattered. Harte left California, never to return, although he continued to write local color stories about the 49ers for another thirty years. Growing more remote in time and space as the years went by, Hartes fiction also declined in popularity and critical respect. Mark Twain used the techniques he learned in writing western local color fiction to help create his great masterpieces, Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), as well as his other celebrated novels and stories. Two other younger San Francisco writersboth very colorful and at opposite ends of the literary spectrumused their experiences in The City to gain fame in England. These two colorful figures were Joaquin Miller and Ambrose Bierce. Cincinnatus Hiner Miller received his name Joaquin, in addition to some very valuable help on performing public readings, from Ina Coolbrith. While she admired the bearded, unwashed bard, and even rather liked his poetry, editor Harte took a dim view of Millers theatrical enthusiasm rendered in a rhymed, bombastic verse. Understanding Millers considerable potential for establishing himself as a public personage, Harte nevertheless refused to accept for the Overland any poems submitted by Joaquin. Coolbrith urged what had become her creation to seek fame in England, where American literary primitives were much in favor as performers. Having led a tangled and peripatetic personal existence in the United States, Miller was easily convinced to try life as an export. Miller proved to be a sensation in London. Tom Hood got Millers lush Pacific Poems and prolix Songs of the Sierras into print, but it was on the stage that Miller really achieved popularity. Dressed in the outlandish garb Coolbrith had suggesteda ten gallon hat, riding boots, spurs, and a sealskin coat with real gold nuggets for buttonsJoaquin fascinated the English with marvelous, magniloquent tales of his adventures. Although he gained a certain measure of fame as a popular poet, his poetry never received much but scorn from serious literary critics. As an older man, Joaquin moved to the hills of Oakland, and became something of a professional character, and indeed, there was always an aura of the innocent flower child about him. In his final years, Joaquin abandoned writing poetry in favor of entertaining lady admirers at his cottage 352
(The Hights), and planting eucalyptus trees around San Francisco Bay. Ambrose Bierce cut quite a different figure. Ever sneering at Victorian poetry and all lofty sentiments, Bierce was a journalist who could wield a bitter, abusive prose that maintained the rhetorical stance of vituperative, frontal attack. In 1868, he took over the Town Crier column of the News Letter, a San Francisco newspaper which welcomed his relentless attacks and satiric jests. Odd as it may seem, Bierce got along famously with Bret Harte. Harte accepted for the Overland portions of what would become Bierces Grizzly Papers, and it was Bierce, for better or for worse, who persuaded Harte to retrieve The Heathen Chinee from the wastebasket and print this satirical poem in the Overland. Bierce was part of the literary contingent that left San Francisco in the early 1870s. His satires, increasing in their skill and bite, were very well received in England, where three books of his satiric sketches on California were published. Like Miller, but unlike Harte and Clemens, a now famous Bierce returned to San Francisco, the area which he so often claimed treated him with alienation and estrangement. As a satiric journalist in the corrupt Gilded Age of the 1880s and 90s, Bierce was not wanting for material. During these years, he attacked virtually everything, from Denis Kearneys Workingmens Party to the local Humane Society. Having offended with his Thersites-like wit practically everyone by the turn of the century, Bierce, despite his brilliance, came to be regarded by many as a crank. He disappeared in 1914, trying, at age seventy-one, to join up with Pancho Villa. Fortunately, he departed for Mexico after completing his classic collection of bitter definitions, The Devils Dictionary. Bierce had come a long way from his salad days of writing satiric columns for the News 2 3 Letter . As the century progressed, the San Francisco-based brand of local color not only moved from theme to background, but it was indeed more popular as a novelty, more popular the farther away from Californias shores it was read, studied, and performed. By the early 1880s, Hartes uplifting stories seemed sentimental and dated. As other parts of the West became more settled, a new generation of local color writers emerged, a generation that pushed local color in a decidedly realistic direction. This group included Mary Hallock Foote (Colorado and Idaho), Bill Nye (Wyoming), Alfred Henry Lewis (the Southwest), and, of course, Hamlin Garland (the northern Plains). But the shaping influences of Bret Harte and Mark Twain can be perceived in all of them. Although the San Francisco circle broke apart in the early 1870s, the circle quickly regrouped and then expanded. In the early 1870s, the Bohemian Club, dedicated to good fellowship, support of the arts, and literary pursuits, was founded in downtown San Francisco. The Clubs spectacular 353
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Bohemian Grove festivals and happenings continue to this day. The Bohemian Club, the revived Overland of the 1880s, and the establishment of The Wave in the early 1890s were literary events that marked the continuation and expansion of the circle. Perhaps the most significant and far-reaching examples in the 1870s and 80s of this expanding circle were the works of nature writers Clarence King and John Muir. A rather bizarre non-stop talker and mountain climber, King in 1872 published Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, a collection of short pieces in several genres. What makes this uneven volume important is its subject matter; King wrote not of people dealing with a frontier culture, but about the relationship between wilderness and humanity. John Muir, who in the early 1890s founded the Sierra Club and became known as the Father of our National Parks, was the first widely read western writer with a mystical, ecological vision. Far more than even King, Muir explored Sierra Nevada wilderness areas, coming to the deep belief that wild country must be preserved for its intrinsic value. Muirs statements about this new philosophy first appeared in 1873 Overland issues, and his influence on modem serious western writers and thinkers has been considerable and important. For generations, the San Francisco area has maintained its position as one of the two or three leading literary centers in the country. A list of twentieth-century writers associated with the San Francisco area reads almost like a Whos Who of modern American literature, including Gertrude Atherton, Kay Boyle, Dashiell Hammett, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Irving Stone, among others. In the 1950s and 60s San Francisco was the center for the Beat Movement, a group of writers (chiefly poets) who were loosely aligned as radical, anti-establishment anarchists. This group included poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and sometimes Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth, plus novelists Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. Inheritors of this tradition continue into the 1980s, expanding in terms of ethnic base and feminist orientation. The most promising of these San Francisco-based writers include Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, and Ntozake Shange. In our age of jet travel and creative writing teaching positions and scholarships, numerous writers, such as South African Dan Jacobson, Nicaraguan Catholic priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal, Filipino Nestor Gonzales, and British-born Thorn Gunn, to name only a few, have spent at least some time as members of the lively 24 San Francisco area literary scene. Also in this century, strong satellite literary communities have formed near the mother city of San Francisco. One thinks immediately of the Monterey-Carmel area with Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, Mary Hunter Austin, Robinson Jeffers, and Richard Farina; the Berkeley connection with 354
George Stewart, Josephine Miles, and Thomas Parkinson; or Big Sur and Henry Miller; or Lincoln Steffens in Sacramento, Gerald Haslam in Sonoma, and William Saroyan in Fresno; and recently, William Saroyans son, Aram, based in Bolinas, Wallace Stegner in Palo Alto, and the numerous artists who have moved to Mill Valley. Whether acerbic in social protest, radically chic, daringly innovative, or fashionably parodic, a local color flavor can still be found in San Francisco area writing. Bret Harte would be horrified but not surprised at the directions his northern California bohemian successors would choose to take in their writing. Mark Twain, however, would be downright gleeful about the way literary developments in The City and environs have evolved as we move towards another appearance of Halleys Comet, and the final decade of our twentieth century.
P ATRICK D. M O R R O W,
Auburn University
Notes
1. The best book-length account of the local color era in California continues to be Franklin Walkers San Franciscos Literary Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1939). More recently, Kevin Starr in Americans and the California Dream, 18501915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) has written perceptively of this era. 2. Crumbling Idols (Chicago and Cambridge: Stone and Kimball, 1894), p. 64. 3. For a broad sampling of local color stories and an excellent introduction to this topic, see Claude M. Simpson, ed., The Local Colorists (New York: Harper, 1960). 4. See George R. Stewart, Jr., ed., A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines and Newspapers of California, 18571871 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933), pp. 133156. 5. See John B. Howell, ed., Sketches of the Sixties by Bret Harte and Mark Twain (San Francisco, 1927), second edition. 6. See Nancy J. Peters and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Literary San Francisco (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), pp. 4648.
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A Literary History of the American West 7. George R. Stewart, Jr. gives an excellent account of the Outcroppings fiasco in his definitive biography, Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), pp. 129154. 8. A very mellow account of this incident, a version rendered from the healing perspective of time, appears in Hartes contribution to My First Book, ed. Jerome K. Jerome (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894), pp. 476486. Apparently Harte kept a clippings file of these local journalistic outbursts, and then improved them to heighten their scorn. Several accounts Harte mentions appeared in publications whose copies have disappeared; thus every student is to a large extent at the mercy of Hartes scholarship here. 9. Harte placed the disclaimer By the Editor of the Enterprise (Joe Goodman) in brackets above the poem. 10. See Paul Lewis, Queen of the Plaza: A Biography of Ada Isaacs Menken (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1964). 11. See Paul Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), pp. 3439. 12. Albert B. Paine, ed., Mark Twains Letters, vol. I (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), p. 182. 13. See Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), which gives the fullest account of the complex relationship between these two writers. 14. The Californian, Dec. 23, 1865, p. 2. Brannan and Reese were powerful, flamboyant businessmen regarded as pirates by many. 15. See Patrick D. Morrow, Bret Harte, Popular Fiction, and the Local Color Movement, Western American Literature 8 (Fall 1973): 123131. 16. For further amplification of the formula issue in western fiction, see John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1971); Caweltis Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Patrick D. Morrow, Bret Harte, Literary Critic (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1979); and William T. Pilkington, ed., Critical Essays on the Western American Novel (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980). 17. See Stoddards autobiography, Exits and Entrances (Boston: Lothrop, 1903). 18. A recent biography of this remarkable individual is Ina Coolbrith: Librarian and Laureate of California by Josephine D. Rhodehamel and Raymund F. Wood (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1973). For a reliable on-the-scene account of Harte as editor of the Overland, see J. C. 19. McCrackin, A Letter from a Friend, Overland 40 (1902): 221223. 20. See Max F. Shulz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973). Schulz writes a series of intense, perceptive essays on such figures as Barth, Pynchon, and Vonnegut, and includes a fine chapter on Thomas Berger, author of Little Big Man. This novel, very influenced by Mark Twain, is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of western fiction published since World War II. 21. Mark Twain, Roughing It (rpt. New York: Rinehart, 1953), p. 286.
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22. See Benjamin F. Lawson, Joaquin Miller, Western Writers Series, No. 43 (Boise: Boise State University, I 980). 23. See Joseph Gaer, ed., Ambrose Gwinett Bierce: A Bibliography and Biographical Data (rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978). 24. See Part Two of Literary San Francisco, pp. 121233.
Beasley, Thomas Dykes. A Tramp Through Bret Harte Country. San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1914. Beasleys nostalgic guidebook through the Sierra Nevada gold mine country remains insightful and accurate even today. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Caweltis thorough, insightful, and intense study is the place where contemporary explications of American popular fiction begin. Cummins (Mighels), Ella Sterling. The Story of the Files. San Francisco: Cooperative Printing, 1893. This is an almost complete account of primary source information about journal, magazine, and newspaper publishing in early San Francisco. De Voto, Bernard, ed. Mark Twain in Eruption. New York: Harper, 1940. De Voto presents a selection of nasty and insightful Mark Twain writings that had previously been suppressed. Duckett, Margaret. Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. This remains the definitive account of the stormy literary and personal relationship between these two men. Hart, James D. A Companion to California. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Hart, author of the well-respected The Popular Book in America, has also written this useful source book about numerous aspects of California culture. May, Ernest R. Bret Harte and the Overland Monthly . American Literature 22 (Nov. 1950): 260271. In this article, historian May provides a detailed and accurate account of Hartes career on the Overland. Morrow, Patrick D. Bret Harte, Literary Critic. Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1979. This is a study of the evolution and development of Harte as an important literary critic. Paine, Albert B., ed. Mark Twains Letters. New York: Harper and Bros., 1935. Paine in this volume has assembled a judicious and revealing selection of Mark Twains candid letters. Peters, Nancy J., and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Literary San Francisco. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980. This is the best general survey of how the San Francisco literary scene has developed over the last 150 years. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. New York: Vintage, 1957. A venerable study, this classic and provocative interdisciplinary work has inspired many other critical volumes in the last few decades.
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A Literary History of the American West Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 18501915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. A recent study, well-documented and quite convincing, of the promise that California has held for so many, including its writers. Stewart, George R., Jr. Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931; rpt. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1968. A definitive work, this biography is one of the finest ever written about an American writer. Walker, Franklin. San Franciscos Literary Frontier. New York: Knopf, 1939; rpt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969. This is a beautifully written and well-researched account of Harte, Clemens, and company.
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Mary Hunter Austin

to identify Mary Austin (18681934) and you will likely get the answer I did: Isnt she the lady who wrote the book about the desert? This label says a great deal about Mary Hunter Austin as a regional writerher most successful books such as The Land of Little Rain and The Land of Journeys Ending are ones which grew out of her personal knowledge of the land she lived in. Her home desert country is that triangular portion of California lying between the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the Nevada state line and extending south to the Mojave. This is the Land of Little Rain where Mary Austin lived for seventeen years. The second region associated with her is the high plateau country lying between the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, the traditional homeland of many of the Indian peoples she studiedthe Pueblo, the Zuni, the Hopi, the Navajo. When she wrote about this country she called it Land of Journeys Ending because she believed that this part of the Southwest would be the center for a new regional cultureone which would combine the Indian, Spanish and Anglo influences and one which would grow out of a peoples successful adaptation to the environment. In her early works such as The Land of Little Rain (1903), The Flock (1906) and Lost Borders (1909) Austin recreated two specific areas in southern California the lower San Joaquin Valley and the eastern slopes of the Sierra below Bishop. Each of these books is made up of a series of sketches, tales and nature studies which reveal some particular aspect of this country. Austin describes the desert, the mesas, the canyons and mountain ranges, the alpine lakes and streams, and the course of High Sierra storms in precise detail. She also includes her observations of animal and plant life: the way animals make trails to the few springs, the methods hawks and coyotes use to hunt, the migratory patterns of deer in the spring and fall. She explains how the desert plants adapt to small amounts of rainfall and shows the reader how the land shapes the plants and treesthe sage, the juniper, the scattered pines. These things are worth knowing for their own sake, but in addition, Austin believed that they help us see mans place in his physical environment. In The Land of Little Rain she says: To understand the fashion of any life one must know the land it is lived in and the procession of the year.
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This belief in the dominant influence of the land on a man or on a people is the heart of Mary Austins regional philosophy. In the concluding chapter of The Land of Journeys Ending, Austin provides her clearest expressions of this view: Man . . . is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources, half noted, or noted not at all except by some sense that lies too deep for naming. He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys, his is the rhythm of its seasonal processions, the involution and variation of its vegetal patterns. If there is in the country of his abiding no more than a single refluent color, such as the veiled green of sage-brush or the splendid wine of sunset spilled across the Sangre de Cristo, he takes it in and gives it forth again in directions and occasions least suspected by himself, as a manner, as music, as a prevailing tone of thought, as the line of his roof tree, the pattern of his personal adornments. This passage reveals the basic elements in Austins regional philosophy. First, there is the individuals emotional response to environment, sometimes so subtle that he doesnt recognize its effect. Second, there is his mystical unity with nature, so intense that the individual becomes the land. Third, there is the individuals use of his environment; he will make it part of his religion, his culture and his daily life. How did Mary Austin arrive at this romantic, non-intellectual view of mans relationship to his environment? As a little girl, growing up in Carlinville, Illinois in the 1870s she spent a great deal of time playing by herself in the fields and orchards near her home. In her autobiography, Earth Horizon, she recounts her first mystical union with nature: I had walked down through the orchard alone and come out on the brow of a sloping hill where there was grass and a wind blowing and one tall tree reaching into infinite immensities of blueness. Quite suddenly, after a moment of quietness there, earth and sky and tree and wind-blown grass and the child in the midst of them came alive together with a pulsing light of consciousness . . . I in them they in me. This childhood experience was strengthened by the books she read in adolescenceHugh Millers Old Red Sandstone, and Emersons essays. Miller was Austins introduction to the processes of the earth, its cycles and patterns. Emerson provided the young woman with a philosophy of nature based on the unity between the natural world and man and on the concept of ethical values that man could learn from nature.
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Her personal identification with the natural world was also reinforced by her lonely adolescence. The two members of her family with whom she most identified, her father and her little sister Jenny, died when she was a young girl. Feeling separated from the rest of her family, and alienated from her mothers midwestern values, Mary became more introspective, more self-centered. At sixteen she entered Blackburn College in Carlinville, but she could not make the psychological adjustment and became ill. When she returned a year later she focused all her attention on the sciences, believing that she could learn about literature and writing on her own. Looking back on her college education, Austin judged it to have had little effect on her intellectual growth. Her critics agree. Arthur E. Dubois, for example, claims that Having no science, no literature, nothing European, Austin had to rely on folk-habit, folk wisdom, folk idealism, folkmethodthe American rhythm, as it seemed. And Dudley Wynn explains the basis for her intuitive, emotional approach to ideas: unlearned, she was scornful of learning. Undisciplined, she was scornful of the meticulous search for truth. After her graduation, she and her family moved to Californias southern San Joaquin Valley. This was a crucial event in Austins life. The family began their homesteading experiment in 1888, the first year of a three-year drought in the valley. Not only was the desert aridity a psychic shock after the green of Illinois, but the pressures of physical survival made the young woman see nature in a new way. For the first time, she began to understand the realities of mans physical environment; and she began to think about the way man could adjust to his environment. In her autobiography, she recalls how she spent the days riding and walking across the land, learning about the plants, the animals, meeting the cattlemen and sheepherders who lived on Rancho El Tejon, the immense landholding of Edward Beale. When Mary Austin left the southern San Joaquin four years later, she had written only one published essay, a chronicle of her familys eight-day journey from Pasadena to Beales property (One Hundred Miles on Horseback). But however small in actual literary output, these four years prepared her to be a writershe now knew a region and its people well enough to recreate it for others. In 1892, following her marriage to Wallace Stafford Austin, Mary moved to Lone Pine in Inyo County. This was another region which exerted a major influence on her work. She claimed that living in this country and learning its rhythmsthe running of quail, the creaking of the twenty mule team, the beating of the medicine drumtaught her how to be a writer. Certainly, she did not learn from any other writers, for with the ex-
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ception of one trip to San Francisco in 1892 to arrange the publication of her first short story, she remained isolated from any literary contacts for the next seven years. This isolation ended in 1899 when she moved to Los Angeles, where she became part of the literary group led by Charles Fletcher Lummis, editor of The Land of Sunshine. Using his influence and that of other established writers, Mary Austin began to publish in journals such as Atlantic Monthly and Munseys. Los Angeles also provided the creative stimulus she needed to put her nature experiences into writing: she began The Land of Little Rain. One of the places Mary Austin recreated in this book was the home she built in Independence, the brown house under the willow tree by the creek that came down from Kearsarge. For five years, until she and her husband left Inyo for good, she lived here and in Carmel. The Carmel Writers Colony, which she helped establish, served as a major influence in her writing career. Other members like Jack London, George Sterling, Charles Warren Stoddard and Ambrose Bierce were writers and intellectuals with whom she could exchange ideas, and critical comment, and from whom she could gain a sense of identity as a writer. Although Mary Austin would not have admitted it herself, the Carmel experience was essential to her growth as a writer. During the twelve years she lived there she produced three of her most important books: The Land of Little Rain (1903), her first and best nature study; The Flock (1906), her memories of sheepherding on El Tejon; and Lost Borders (1909), her collection of tales which show how the land affects and controls man. These books represent the first stage of Austins work, where the writer explored mans role in nature using her own experiences for imagery and ideas. After 1912, when Mary Austin was living in New York or traveling in Europe, she turned to the novel as her literary form. The books from this period (19121920) reflect a growing feminist awareness stemming from Austins participation in the Womans Suffrage movement and in Alice Pauls Womens Political Union. They also reflect Austins new interest in social issuesmans adjustment to society, rather than his adjustment to nature. This change in theme marks the second stage in Mary Austins literary development. In A Woman of Genius (1912) Mary Austin created a character, Olivia Lattimore, whose struggle to have an acting career parallels Austins struggle to be a writer and a wife and mother. Olivia, like Mary, is only partially successful. In The Ford (1917) Austin combined a major social issuewater and land usewith portraits of four women, each of whom was a type Austin admired. Finally, in her most obvious social protest novel, No. 26 Jayne Street (1920), Austin examined Americas reaction to World War I through two main charactersa professional labor organizer and a socialite who 362
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tried relief work in Europe in order to discover America. All of these novels reveal Austins concern with how men and women work out their individual and mutual roles in society. Unfortunately, they do not involve the reader, and thus remain abstract polemics. Although the novels from this period were critical failures, their writing allowed Mary Austin to explore the crucial issues of her day and analyze the social systems men create. This exploration was carried further in the third and final stage of Austins career when she added society to the equation she had created between man and nature. If we look closely at two works-one from her first years and one from this third period-we can see how Mary Austin developed a regional philosophy which reflected this new balance. Mary Austins first book, The Land of Little Rain, established the pattern for all her nature studies. She used the natural world as a model for man to learn from and emulate. She believed that there are three lessons man can take from nature: first, by studying his environment he can recognize the power it exerts over his life; second, by observing how plants and animals survive in a harsh environment, he can learn to adapt to his own environment; third, by studying the example of people who lived close to the land (Indians, miners, sheepherders), he can find ways to live harmoniouslywith nature and with other men. In a land of little rain, man must learn peaceful co-existence with his environment; he must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions. This means, according to Austin, that man must accept the physical realities of a semi-arid land, drought, sudden violent storms and land with limited uses. In the chapter titled My Neighbors Field, the writer describes a piece of land near her home which was One of those places God must have meant for a field from all time. She explains how successive groups of peopleIndians, cattlemen, sheepherders, and farmersused the field and how, after each usage, the land reverted to its natural state. Mans impermanence is also emphasized in her chapter on the storms in the High Sierra. They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and warnings, and they leave you in no doubt about their performances. One who builds his house on a water scar or the rubble of a steep slope must take chances. One way for man to improve his chances is to follow the example of the desert plants which survive by adjusting to the cyclical rainfall. The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit and they do it hardly or with tropical luxuriance as the rain admits. One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring. 363
Even in her charming description of her countrys animals and birds, Austin stressed adaptation to the environment by noting how their feeding, hunting and migrating patterns change to fit changing conditions. Mary Austins best example in The Land of Little Rain of an individual who successfully adapted to her environment was Seyavi, the Basketmaker. Seyavi had survived the white mans attacks by hiding herself and her small son in an isolated canyon. When Mary Austin knew her, Seyavi was a middle-aged woman known for her basketmaking. Her daily life was perfectly attuned to the natural world because she used natural materials creatively and constructively. Also, the gathering of the willows fit a pattern laid down by nature: Twice a year in the time of white butterflies and again when young quail ran neck and neck in the chaparral, Seyavi cut willows by the creek. [This] was always a golden time and the soul of the weather went into the wood. For design in her baskets, Seyavi used the crested plume of the mountain quail, thus creating art from nature. This interaction between a woman and her environment seemed to Mary Austin the perfect symbol of mans adjustment to the land. By contrasting The Land of Journeys Ending published in 1924 with The Land of Little Rain, we can see the growth of Austins ideas and her new emphasis on a social theory. Her travels and research in the Southwest during the 1920s were as inspirational to her as her years in southern California had been. The lesson of adaptation she had learned from the plants and animals of the eastern slopes of the Sierra seemed doubly true on the arid plateaus between the Colorado and the Rio Grande. Also she found excellent examples of adjustment to environment among the Indians of this region such as the Pueblo and the Papago. Many critics, such as Vernon Young, have reserved their harshest criticism for Austins belief that a new regional culture would arise in the American Southwest. Austin felt that the region had great potential not only because of the Indian legacy and the Spanish contribution, but primarily because here the land had dramatic and immeasurable impact on man. If Mary Austin had supported this thesis with a detailed blueprint showing how man and communities could adjust to and harmonize with the environment, she might have satisfied the critics. Instead, in The Land of Journeys Ending she relied on the pattern established in her other nature studiesshe offered suggestions, examples, symbols. The reader must work out their meaning for himself. In addition, she never addressed the question of whether the American would or could live like the Pueblo or the Papago.
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Nor did she admit that often the Indians had only been partially successful in their adaptation to the land. Rather she concentrated on the way the Indianespecially the Pueblo established a spiritual union with the land. Believing that Wokonda, the life force, was present in man, bird and beast and blowing wind, the Pueblo based his existence on a quest to become one with this life force. If he were successful in attaining this power, he could influence nature and thus enjoy better hunting and heavier crops. Moreover, by unifying himself with Wokonda, the individual unified himself with every other Pueblo, and the goal of the group and the goal of the individual were one. In social terms this meant the individual was secondary to the community, but to Austin this was of minor concern. To her, the Pueblo represented the only society in the world in which culture exists as an expression of the whole, unaffected by schisms of class and caste, incapable of being rated in terms of power or property. An admirable social organization, however, was just the tangible model the Pueblo could provide for the Anglo. More significant, according to Mrs. Austin, was his spiritual example. She believed that modern man would benefit if he could think about nature as the Indian did: All up the Sangre de Cristo, the pine and aspen patterns make a hieroglyph still undeciphered, except as you find the key to it in the script of pagan thinking, at the back of the mind of man. The Indian saw nature as something he could influence directly by his prayers and songs. As Austin pointed out in her study of Amerind poetry, The American Rhythm, the Indian attempted to recreate his environment through music, dance, drama and song. This creative response to nature is what made the Indians life both bearable and beautiful. Austin believed, therefore, that if modern man could become more attuned to his environment, become aware of its creative force, he could live his life as Seyavi hadturning the routine of daily living into Art. The center of this artistic and cultural rebirth would be the American Southwest where the physical environment, the mountains and river systems, seemed to exert such great influence over man. In this land, man would see nature differently and thus become, like the Indian, sensitive to the spirit of existence. Almost fifty years have passed since Mary Austins death in 1934. She was not a popular writer during her lifetime and few people read her books today. Yet for someone who lives in the West, Mary Austins message is particularly relevant. Our physical landscape does influence our livesoften dramatically. The water shortage in California during 19771978 and the
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eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington are just two reminders that man cannot dominate his physical environment; his survival depends upon a successful adaptation to the land. Although modern man cannot live on the land as harmoniously as the Pueblo did, he can learn to accept its physical realities: resources are not always renewable, weather patterns are cyclical, and some natural forces are stronger than man. If we read Mary Austins nature studies, and apply their message to our own regions, understanding this fact will be easier.
JACQUELINE D. HALL , California
State University, Chico
Primary Sources The American Rhythm. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1923. The Arrow Maker. A play produced by the New Theatre, New York, 1911. New York: Duffield, 1911. Children Sing in the Far West. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932. Earth Horizon: An Autobiography. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932. The Flock. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. The Ford. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. Isidro. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905. The Land of Journeys Ending. New York: Century, 1924. The Land of Little Rain. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903. The Lands of the Sun. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. Lost Borders. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1909. Mother of Felipe and Other Early Stories. Collected and edited by Franklin Walker. Los Angeles: The Book Club of California, 1950. No. 26 Jayne Street. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920. One Hundred Miles on Horseback. Introduction by Donald P. Ringler. Los Angeles: Dawson Press, 1963. Outland. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919.
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Starry Adventure. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931. Trail Book. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918. A Woman of Genius. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1912. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. The Huntington Library (San Marino, California) holds the Mary Austin Collection purchased from the Austin estate. This contains approximately 11 ,000 items letters, manuscripts and research materials such as her extensive research on the Indians of the Southwest and Spanish American folklore. The Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico has a large collection of Austiniana provided by Jack Schaefer. It contains some letters and an almost complete primary bibliography. Secondary Sources 1. Bibliographies and Bibliographical Studies Barry, J. Wilkes. Mary Hunter Austin. American Literary Realism 18701910 2 (Summer 1969): 125131. Gaer, Joseph. Mary Austin, Bibliography and Bibliographical Data. Berkeley: Library Research Digest, Monograph No. 2, 1934. Thoroughgood, Inez. Mary Hunter Austin, Interpreter of the American Scene, 1888 1906. Unpublished Masters Thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1950. 2. Books Ballard, Rae Galbraith. Mary Austins Earth Horizon : The Imperfect Circle. Doctoral Dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1977. This dissertation is both a critical and textual analysis of Austins autobiography, Earth Horizon. Ballard shows how Austin developed the Earth Horizon symbol and, in her autobiography, shaped her life to its pattern. Valuable appendices reveal the stages of Earth Horizon through several drafts, provide deleted passages, and explain key revisions. Brooks, Paul. Speaking for Nature. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. This work is an overview of the impact and influence of selected literary naturalists from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson. Mary Austin is discussed as one of the two naturalists whose work explored and expressed the southwest desert country. Brooks bases most of his analysis on The Land of Little Rain. Fink, Augusta. I-Mary: A Biography of Mary Austin. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1983. This biography gives excellent insight on Austin as a writer, but does not sufficiently interpret Austins emotional life: her difficulties as wife, woman, mother, which are central in much of her writing. Lyday, Jo W. Mary Austin: The Southwest Works. Southwest Writers Series No. 16. Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn, 1968. This pamphlet includes summaries and analysis of Mary Austins southwest works, both the well-known such as The Land of Little Rain and the less-known such as Santa Lucia.
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A Literary History of the American West Pearce, T. M. The Beloved House. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1940. In this work, Pearce analyzes the roles Austin adopted as a woman and as a writer, such as Medicine Woman, Prophetess, and Feminist. He also examines the two separate ways she saw herselfas I-Mary and Mary-by-Herself. He shows how this self-perception coupled with her family, nature and community experiences influenced her work. One of the few sources which contrasts Austins work to other writers. . Literary America 19031934: The Mary Austin Letters. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. This is a collection of 115 letters drawn from the Austin papers at the Huntington Library. The title is misleading, since only eight of the letters were written by Mary Austin and the remainder are letters she received from fellow writers, critics, editors, and literary agents such as Charles Lummis, Jack London, and George Sterling. The strength of the collection lies in Pearces preface to each letter, which provides data on the author, his personal and professional relationship with Austin, and the context in which the letter was written. . Mary Hunter Austin. New York: Twayne, 1965. This book combines biography and critical analysis in four major sectionsThe Woman, The Novelist, The Poet, and The Naturist. The second section is particularly valuable because of the analysis of all Austins novels, even the little known ones of social protest such as 26 Jayne Street. This is an excellent basic source on Austin. 3. Articles and Pamphlets Dubois, Arthur E. Mary Hunter Austin, 18681934." Southwest Review 20 (April 1935): 231264. This essay examines how Mary Austins personalityher mysticism and feminisminfluenced her style and method. Ford, Thomas W. The American Rhythm: Mary Austins Poetic Principle. Western American Literature 5 (Spring 1970): 314. This study analyzes the validity of Mary Austins theory that there is a common rhythm in Amerind and American poetry. Hougland, Willard, ed. Mary Austin: A Memorial. Santa Fe: Laboratory of Anthropology, 1944. This collection ranges in tone from unfriendly reminiscence (Mabel Dodge Luhan) to scholarly comment (Pearce and Wynn). Ringler, Donald P. Mary Austin: Kern County Days, 18881892. Southern California Quarterly 45 (March 1963): 2563. This article shows how Austins experiences living on El Tejon and at Mt. View near Bakersfield were crucial to her literary development. Smith, Henry. The Feel of the Purposeful Earth. New Mexico Quarterly 1 (February 1931): 1733. Smiths essay discusses how Mary Austins novels allowed her to experiment with social criticism. Wynn, Dudley. A Critical Study of the Writings of Mary Hunter Austin, 1868 1934." An abridgement of a doctoral thesis, New York University, 1941. This monograph is Chapter nine of Wynns doctoral dissertation; it shows the
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sources for some of Austins nature writing and includes a summary of the eight preceding chapters. . Mary Austin, Woman Alone. Virginia Quarterly Review 13 (April 1937): 24356. This article explains the development of Austins regional philosophies and evaluates her social criticism. Young, Vernon. Mary Austin and the Earth Performance. Southwest Review 35 (Summer 1959): 15363. A good article to balance Smiths views of Austins novels and Wynns evaluation of Austins social philosophy.
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Frank Norris
FTER BRET HARTE and Mark Twain, Frank Norris was the next seminal writer to explore the literary possibilities of the American West. Unlike Harte and Twain, Norris was a westerner through and through. Although born in Chicago, in 1870, he considered San Francisco his true home. His family moved there when he was fourteen, and Norris later liked to say in typical western fashion that he had been born n raised 1 in California. Norris was a city youth, his father a man of wealth and entrenched bourgeois values, his mother a former actress devoted to conventional Victorian culture. Like the city itself, Norris was played upon by contrary forces. On the one hand there was college, Europe, the EastNorris spent considerable time in all threeand on the other, there was the primitive life of the wild West, of Zolas Europe, of the blood-and-adventure tales of Stevenson and Kipling, both of whom were strong early influences upon Norriss literary tastes. The San Francisco that Norris knew as a young man was a city as colorful as any in America. It had a Chinatown mysterious and evil-seeming to the Anglo-Saxon mind; it had a romantic shipping trade; it had a proletariat of lower-class shopkeepers and immigrants; it had a red-light district famous since the days of the forty-niners. It also had coteries of artists, painters, illustrators, architects, and writers who thought they were going to produce a Renaissance on the West Coast. San Francisco stood with one foot in the Old West, the other in Nineties aestheticism. Norris signed letters as the boy Zola, and left his mark beneath, a drawing of a six-shooter. He dressed like a Parisian dandy and defended football games as the purest expression of Anglo-Saxon virility. In a sense there were two Wests in Norriss life. One was personal, the other literary. His personal West was a place Emersonian in its salutary powers. When Norris came back from Cuba, where along with Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis he had covered the Spanish-American War for eastern magazines, he was scarred by the experience. California could heal him, he wrote to a friend:
I want to get these things out of my mind [in particular the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old girl that he had witnessed] and the fever out of my blood and so if my luck holds, I am going back to the old place for three weeks and for the biggest part of the 370
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time I hope to wallow and grovel in the longest grass I can find in the Presidio Reservation on the cliffs overlooking the Ocean and absorb ozone and smell smells that dont [sic] come from rotting 2 and scorched vegetation, dead horses, and bad water. After recovering from the Cuba experience, Norris was summoned East to pursue his career as a novelist. Three novels Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), McTeague (1899), A Mans Woman (1900)appeared in rapid succession, and Norris, now married and a father, seemed to be comfortable in his role as a professional writer living in New York City, literary capital of the U.S. But by the time he returned to San Francisco in 1900, to gather background for The Octopus, he knew that the West was where he wanted to live. He explained in an earlier letter (1899): There is not much color here [the East] and very little of the picturesque. I have almost forgotten how a mountain looks and I can never quite persuade myself that the Atlantic is an Oceanin the same sense as the Pacific. I miss the out of doorness of the West more and more, and the sea fogs and the Trade Wind, and I dont suppose I shall ever feel at home away from there. Indeed I have come to look forward to the time when I shall come back to 3 San Francisco to live for good and all. At the time of his premature death in 1902, Norris had recently purchased land near Gilroy, south of San Francisco. Apparently he intended to estab4 lish residence there. Norriss literary West involved a good deal more than the familiar dialectic of East versus West apparent in his life. Early in his brief but prolific career he wrote highly original fiction about the West; at the height of his powers he wrote The Octopus, a seminal western novel if there ever was one; and towards the end of his career he wrote conventional red-shirt western stories, the kind he had lambasted in newspaper articles on American fiction. By realizing that urban experience was an important part of the American West, Norris achieved a great advance over previous western writers. After Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), his first published novel, Norris wrote in a letter of his conception of western themes: I have great faith in the possibilities of San Francisco and the Pacific Coast as offering a field for fiction. Not the fiction of Bret Harte, however, for the country has long since outgrown the red shirt period. The novel of California must be now a novel of city 5 life, and it is that novel I hope some day to write successfully. 371
In fact, Norris had already completed two novels of city life, though neither had been published. Vandover and the Brute (published posthumously in 1914) is subtitled A Story of Life and Manners in an American City at the End of the Nineteenth Century. The San Francisco of Vandover and the Brute is at one level a city of genteel society debs and parlor-polite manners and marriageminded courtships and at another level a city of bars and prostitutes and relentless commercial competition. Vandover falls from the top to the bottom; he falls as low as one can and still remain alive. Educated at Harvard to be a painter, Vandover fails to achieve a career in art for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is his weak-willed innocence. He is unable to survive as a painter or as a human being. Suffering from a syphilis-like disease that in its worst phases makes him crawl and howl like a wolf, Vandover winds up at the novels end cleaning out filthy rental houses for a former college friend. Vandover and the Brute, a study of failure in a modern city, is hardly a story unique to the conditions of life in the Golden West. The West of Vandover and the Brute is a landscape dominated by the hard facts of city life, and its portrayal of young men in society and the fast girls they pursue is one reason it found such an ardent admirer in the young F. Scott Fitzgerald. McTeague is a novel also dominated by the city-scape until, in its famous and often criticized last three chapters, it explodes into the desolate wastes of Death Valley and becomes a kind of prototypical Western movie replete with posse, an exciting man-for-man pursuit, and a powerful and ironic capture. Before this slam-bang ending, however, Norris depicts in memorable and effective detail the quality of lower-middle-class life in a large city. The essence of Norriss sociological terrain in McTeague is one of those cross streets peculiar to Western cities, situated in the heart of the residence quarter, but occupied by small tradespeople who lived in the rooms above their shops. 6 Here McTeague lives among the ebb and flow of diverse throngs, practices his crude dental work, and enjoys life lived at a low frequency of expectation and accomplishment. Then something interrupts the smooth routine of his existence, and the chain of circumstances that will lead to his flight back to the mining country of his childhood begins. The woman Trina enters his life, and McTeague, inexorably drawn to her by the power of sexual attraction, woos her and marries her. Under Trinas management McTeague leads a totally conventional lower-middle-class urban existence. He works hard, lets her decorate the apartment, dreams of owning a little house, and bathes more often than he used to. For five years their marriage goes well, but beneath the placid surface dangers lurk. Trinas fondness for money turns into an allconsuming greed, McTeague loses his right to practice dentistry, and a sea372
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son of brutality and decline is launched, ending when McTeague murders Trina. Before this final deterioration of their marriage, there have been suggestions of McTeagues need for an expansive landscape. The seashore, for example, becomes a place of solitude and freshness far more pleasing than the cramped, sordid quarters where he and Trina have been forced to live. So the ending, the opening into vast spaces, is not unprepared for or illogical. Norris understood that McTeague was in some respects a victim of the closed frontier. The best symbol of McTeague as a man dispossessed of his proper landscape is the Indian that he encounters at a train station. An immense Indian buck presents McTeague a letter to the effect that the buck Big Jim was a good Indian and deserving of charity. As the train continues on its way, the Indian becomes a solitary point of red, lost in the 7 immensity of the surrounding white blur of the desert. McTeague at the end, chained to the dead body of his pursuer, is also a mute figure lost in the immensity of the desert. Norriss image of the West in this novelcity and frontieris a grim one indeed. It is a land of pulsing but unfocused energies, a place where civilization has failed to provide an adequate environment for the dispossessed frontiersman and urban peasant. The Octopus (1901), Norriss most important novel about the West, combines city and frontier and reconciles the tough-minded pessimism of the city novels with a new-found cosmic optimism. One of Norriss late essays, published in 1902, gives a good picture of his broad conception of the West: But as yet the West is midway of the two extremes. It is true that the West is a place of banks, of schools, of policemen and law courts, but it is equally true that as yet the Desert is a tremendous immovable fact, that the Apache and the Sioux are just where they were when we found them seventy years ago, and that the expression of personal physical courage is more often and to a greater degree called upon in Arizona, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico and Nevada than anywhere else in the United States. Other ideas in the late essays are pertinent to Norriss thinking about the huge conglomerate West and to the novel that tries to capture this ulti9 mate West. One is that the single most expressive figure in the modern West, just as in the days of the forty-niner, is the adventurer. The portrait of Magnus Derrick, owner of Los Muertos Ranch and the head of the Ranchers League, is Norriss fictional version of the adventurer. Another symbolic figure is the lawman, the legendary cowboy whom Norris imagined as the hero of the neglected epic. The epic of the West had not been written, Norris felt, because dime novels, which he called traduc373
ing and falsifying, had preferred to glamorize lawless heroes, men such as Deadwood Dick and Buffalo Bill. The true epic would dramatize the subjugation of a wild land by Anglo-Saxons fighting for law and justice and 10 liberty. Norris never put this cardboard figure into a novel, and his description of the lawman in an essay suggests that he was wise not to. Norriss lawman is familiar to us all; he is the hero of a thousand Western B-movies: He did not lounge in barrooms; he did not cheat at cards; he did not drink himself to maudlin fury; he did not shoot at the drop of the hat. . . . He died in defense of an ideal, an epic hero, a legendary figure, formidable, sad. He died facing down injustice, dis11 honesty and crime; died in his boots. Norriss idea of the good man willing to die for a cause is captured in The Octopus in a brilliantly realistic manner, however. This is the portrait of Annixter, a selfish, eccentric, willful man who, through the love of a good woman, Hilma Tree, changes into a brave, selfless, loving, and thoroughly convincing hero. Annixter is just one among several who die in the encounter with the railroad posse, but it is Annixters death that the reader cares most about. At the center of The Octopus, often considered the very type of the deterministic novel of naturalism, is a brave man with the intel12 ligence to slough off a bad self. Despite Norriss dislike of dime-novel heroes, he seems to have incorporated some of the elements of the dime novel into the plot of The Octopus. There are, for example, the gunfight between Annixter and the cowpoke Delaney at the barn dance; the train robbery by Dyke, the little man forced to turn outlaw, and the posses pursuit and capture of him; and above all, the portrayal of S. Behrman as a supreme villain, a fat, oily capitalist who finally, in an unforgettable scene, receives his comeuppance for all his crimes against the ranchers. The violent, melodramatic West of the dime novel is but one of several layers of western experience present in The Octopus. In fact, one way of looking at the novel is to define the extent to which Norris was able to delineate his huge conglomerate West. In doing that, it is first necessary to distinguish between the poet Presley and the novelist Frank Norris. Though sometimes a viewpoint character for the narrative, Presley is not an authorial mouthpiece and is often explicitly condemned by the narrative voice. Presley is an aesthete struggling to break away from effete eastern culture and the corrupted tastes of phony artists in San Francisco, whom Norris savagely satirizes in Chapter I of Book II. By coming to the San Joaquin Valley, Presley has already made an essential first step. He has repudiated his early work, such sonnets as The Better Part, and is searching for new material for a more vital art. He has the right idea and is deter374
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mined to write a poem about the worlds frontier of Romance, where a new race, a new peoplehardy, brave, and passionatewere building an 13 empire. But three factors keep him from realizing his aim. One is that he is overeducated, a poet by training, not by nature. Another is that he is lured, for a while at least, by the attractiveness of the more romantic aspects of western experience. Thus he is drawn by Californias Spanish past with its legendary stories of De La Cuesta, the first owner of Los Muertos. He is also drawn by the strange gothic tale of his mystic friend Vanamees lost love and by Vanamees account of the solitary, poetic spaces of the Southwest. But the chief obstacle to Presleys realizing his artistic goal is that he cannot accept certain unpleasant realities of ranch life. Uncouth farmers annoy him. Like many liberals, he prefers capital-P People over thorny individuals such as Hooven, the slovenly little Dutchman. The hardest fact of all to reconcile with his desire for pastoral beatitude and romantic beauty is the railroad, that stubborn iron barrier against which his romance shattered. The clash between the railroad and the ranchers, however, is precisely what constitutes the true epic subject. Although Presleys sympathies are enlarged as he is pulled into the conflict between ranchers and railroad, the most he is able to accomplish artistically is a socialistic poem called The Toilers. Even this is derivative, and inferior to the painting that inspired it. Despite his growth, Presley remains at best a would-be epic poet. The life that he comes to appreciate, such as the Homeric simplicity and directness of the feast following the rabbit hunt, is not his subject, but Norriss. It is Norris who achieves the broader perspective that Presley struggles toward. This perspective entails a complex synthesis of the two spheres that typify Norriss Westthe city and the frontier. The San Francisco of The Octopus is a city of pleasure, wealth, apathy, and cultural sham. It is, Norris writes, a place where the luxuries of life were had without effort; . . . a city that offered to consideration the restlessness of a New York without its earnestness; the serenity of a Naples without its languor; the romance of a l4 Seville without its picturesqueness. In the opinion of the eloquent capitalist visionary, Mr. Cedarquist, San Francisco is a Midway Plaisance, a term he borrowed from the Chicago Worlds Fair to describe crowds of vulgar pleasure seekers. This is the world of his pretentious wife and of the phony artist Hartrath, whose ambition is to construct a model of California, heroic-sized, out of dried apricots. But San Francisco is also a city of potential, a great seaport from which ships laden with wheat for starving Asians depart on their manifest destiny to extend American power and benevolence. The frontier is also complexly analyzed. The railroad, which connects 375
city and frontier, serves the city best, but this imbalance is no cause for lasting pessimism. The economic misalignment leads the railroad to gouge the ranchers through unfair practices and exorbitant rates, but it also leads the ranchers to exploit their land ruthlessly and to engage in corrupt politics. Both sides, however, are in the service of a higher natural force, the Wheat, and it is this symbol that allows Norris to be optimistic about such personal tragedies as the death of Annixter. Norris dramatizes three regenerative moments that transform the lives of the three central characters. Annixter realizes his unselfish love for Hilma Tree as he observes a field of wheat, seeing in it an expression of a benevolent life force. On the same night Vanamee connects the felt presence of Angl, mother or daughter it makes no difference to himwith the cycle of life out of death symbolized by the burgeoning wheat. And Presley, who has to struggle the most to reach an optimistic view, does so by realizing that the wheat in the hold of the ship on which he is sailing to India is a benevolent force that outlasts 15 evil. The Octopus simultaneously criticizes economic injustices and celebrates the good earth. It also presents characters who are free to make ethi16 cal decisions and therefore capable of moral growth. After The Octopus Norriss use of western materials shows a distinct falling-off. During 1901, the year The Octopus appeared, Norris published several western short stories. They were mostly hack work intended to make quick money. Probably written earlier and possibly revised in 1901, such 17 stories reveal Norriss awareness of a pulp West to be mined and exploited. The Passing of Cock-Eye Blacklock is a prime example of Norris ransacking western pulp fiction instead of imagining a West in original terms. This story uses a frame device to introduce the vernacular narrator, Bunt McBride, a western cowboy and roustabout. One problem is that the plot of the narrative within the frame is the hackneyed one of a retrieving dog that persists in returning a lighted stick of dynamite to the man who was using it to blast fish from a river. Of course man and dog are blown to scraps. The other problem is that Bunt McBride speaks an eccentric, unconvincing western dialect directly traceable to the Old Cattleman of Alfred Henry Lewiss Wolfville books. If Norriss contribution to western fiction depended upon stories like this one or A Bargain with Peg-Leg, another Bunt McBride tale, Norris would deserve to be forgotten as merely another imitator of a decadent local-color tradition. Dying Fires is the only interesting western story in this minor phase of Norriss career. It deals with a familiar Norrisean preoccupation, the fear of losing ones western vitality in the enervated, genteel circles of dilettantish coteries. A young writer from the West named Overbeck produces a strong first book called The Vision of Bunt McBride (an inside reference to the rough-hewn character who appears in the red-shirt stories), but is un376
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able to repeat the performance. Instead he abandons primeval western life and falls under the influence of eastern artists and pseudo-intellectuals. His new work is a pale, bloodless novel called Renunciations. With the exception of this little artistic parable, none of the other western stories have any lasting merit. The Pit (1902), Norriss next and last novel, continued the Epic of the Wheat trilogy but was a different kind of novel from The Octopus. Excellent in its own right, The Pit focused on Howellsian motifs, depicting the moral struggle of a bourgeois financier and his lovely, spoiled wife to save their souls in the midst of rampant materialism. Set in Chicago, The Pit ends with the couple defeated by economic forces beyond the heros power to control. But hope remains as the pair depart for the West where they intend to achieve a new beginning. Their West is mythic, a spiritualized place where simplicity and fresh starts are still possible. Death foreclosed Norriss career in 1902, leaving behind a reputation as one of Americas foremost naturalistic writers. This view of Norris has persisted until fairly recently, when other facets of his writing have begun to be appreciated. Among these is his singular contribution to western American literature. Norriss exploration of land-centered values versus economicpolitical considerations was a prescient discovery for western fiction. Later writers like John Steinbeck and Edward Abbey owe much to his groundbreaking analysis of ecological and social themes. This is especially the case with Steinbeck. It is hard to imagine The Grapes of Wrath without The Octopus in the background. Both novels aspire to epic scope; both use melodrama to highlight a titanic struggle between the People and the System; both abound with panegyrics to the earth, visionary preachers, earth mothers, and a lyrical tenderness on behalf of spontaneous, primal responses. More than any figure of his era, Norris was a true literary trailblazer of the Far West.
D ON G RAHAM , University of Texas
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Notes
1. Letter to Isaac F. Marcosson, Dec. 1898, in The Letters of Frank Norris, ed. Franklin Walker (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1956), p. 22. 2. Letter to Ernest Peixotto, August 1898, The Letters of Frank Norris, p. 19. 3. Letter to Mrs. Elizabeth H. Davenport, March 22, 1899, The Letters of Frank Norris, p. 31. 4. For evidence pointing in this direction, see Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Frank Norris: A Biographical Essay in Critical Essays on Frank Norris, ed. Don Graham (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. xlvixlvii. 5. Letter to Isaac F. Marcosson, December 1898, The Letters of Frank Norris, p. 23. 6. Frank Norris, The Complete Edition of Frank Norris (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928), vol. VIII, p. 4. 7. The Complete Edition of Frank Norris, vol. VIII, pp. 333, 334. 8. The Literature of the West: A Reply to W. R. Lighton, The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), p. 104. 9. The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, p. 107. 10. A Neglected Epic, The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, p. 121. 11. The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, p. 122. 12. See Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Frank Norriss The Octopus: The Christian Ethic as Pragmatic Response in Critical Essays on Frank Norris, pp. 138152. 13. The Complete Edition of Frank Norris, vol. I, p. 7. 14. The Complete Edition of Frank Norris, vol. II, p. 3. 15. The most thorough examination of Norriss positive adaptation of nineteenthcentury ideas about nature and force appears in Donald Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 131133. 16. For a detailed exposition of this theme, see Richard Allan Davison, Frank Norriss The Octopus: Some Observations on Vanamee, Shelgrim and St. Paul in Critical Essays on Frank Norris, pp. 99115. 17. For a keen appreciation of Norriss professional sense of specific audiences to whom he addressed his writings, see Robert A. Morace, The Writer and His Middle Class Audience: Frank Norris, A Case in Point in Critical Essays on Frank Norris, pp. 5362.
Primary Sources 1. Books by Frank Norris (in chronological order) Yvernelle: A Legend of Feudal France. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892 (1891). Moran of the Lady Letty: A Story of Adventure off the California Coast. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1898.
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McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899. Blix. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899. A Mans Woman. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1900. The Octopus. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901. The Pit. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903. A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories of the New and Old West. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903. The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903. The Joyous Miracle. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906. The Third Circle. New York: John Lane, 1909. Vandover and the Brute. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1914. 2. Additional writings Frank Norris of The Wave: Stories and Sketches from the San Francisco Weekly, 189397. Edited by Oscar Lewis. San Francisco: The Westgate Press, 1931. The Letters of Frank Norris. Edited by Franklin Walker. San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1956. The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris. Edited by Donald Pizer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. A Novelist in the Making. Edited by James D. Hart. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970. Secondary Sources Crisler, Jesse S., and Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. Frank Norris: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1974. Invaluable annotated bibliography of criticism on Norris, plus a useful essay reevaluating Norriss standing during his lifetime. Dillingham, William B. Frank Norris: Instinct and Art. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969. Useful biographical research into Norriss study of visual arts in Paris and their influence upon his writing. French, Warren. Frank Norris. New York: Twayne, 1962. Stresses Norriss ties with the transcendentalist themes of Emerson et al. Especially good on The Pit. Graham, Don, ed. Critical Essays on Frank Norris. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. A gathering of reviews and critical essays intended to portray Norris as an artist rather than merely a crude naturalistic author. Includes a bibliographical essay evaluating Norris criticism, with special attention to work done in the seventies. . The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Explores connections between Norris and the aesthetic environs of San Francisco in the nineties. Traces the effect of aesthetic reference in the novels, revealing Norris as more of a continuator of the Howells tradition than of naturalism. McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., and Katherine Knight, eds. Frank Norris: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1981. A comprehensive picture of how Norriss contemporaries viewed his works, plus an introductory essay evaluating Norriss standing in his own time.
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A Literary History of the American West Marchand, Ernest. Frank Norris: A Study. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1942. First full-length study of Norris the writer. Still useful for placing Norris in the critical context of his era. Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Frank Norris. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Widely regarded as the most influential critical study of Norris. Places the writer within an intellectual context of evolutionary theism, seeing Norris as a synthesizer of popular science and traditional moral perspectives. Walker, Franklin. Frank Norris, A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932. The only life of Norris to date. Solid, well researched, but with perhaps too much emphasis on Norris as an exuberant adolescent who never quite achieved maturity.
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Jack London
AM A WESTERNER, despite my English name, Jack London (18761916) once declared. I realize that much of Californias romance is passing away, and I intend to see to it that I, at least, shall preserve as much of that romance as is possible for me. Now, more than two generations since his death, there is little question about Londons literary success: that romance to which he refers has been preserved in his legend as well as in his works. The legend is universally familiar: Jack London the adventurer and literary pioneer, Jack London the hard-hitting, hard-drinking, hard-living individualist. All the favorite cliches that have been used to describe the spirit of the American West were incarnated in the London persona, and his public image was as spectacular as that of any of his fictional heroes. Born only fourteen years before the 1890 census marked the closing of the frontier, coming of age during that decade called the watershed of American history, and dying less than a year before the United States entered the first World War, Jack London symbolized the passing of an era perhaps, in a spiritual and intellectual sense, the most crucial era in American history. His generation was the last fully possessed of that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, that buoyancy and exuberance which, according to Frederick Jackson Turner, have defined the American character as shaped by the frontier experience. Aggressively optimistic, courageous, bluntly honest, extroverted, and utterly unpretentious, London was himself a product of that experience. No other writer has more dramatically incorporated into his own career the richly varied elements of the American dream. Born out of wedlock to spiritualist Flora Wellman and itinerant astrologer William Henry Chaney, who deserted her when she revealed her pregnancy, Jack (christened John Griffith) London achieved a success more fabulous than that of any Horatio Alger hero. Prince of the Oyster Pirates on San Francisco Bay at the age of fifteen, vagabond Sailor Kid at the age of sixteen, ablebodied seaman aboard the sealing schooner Sophia Sutherland at seventeen, member of the Western division of Coxeys Army of the Unemployed and profesh hobo at eighteen, notorious Boy Socialist of Oakland at nineteen, Klondike argonaut at twenty-one, Kipling of the American short story at twenty-four, ace war correspondent and world-famous novelist be-
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fore he was thirty, first author ever to earn a million dollars from his writingsthese are but a few of the highlights of the London legend. But there was another, a darker, facet of Londons persona. He melodramatically (and sometimes fictively) recollected his early years as clouded by poverty, solitude, insecurity, and deprivationemotional as well as financial. My body and soul were starved when I was a child, he complained in an early letter to his first great love, Mabel Applegarth (the model for his heros fragile Victorian sweetheart in Martin Eden ), recalling an incident in which hunger compelled him to steal a piece of meat from a schoolmates lunch pail. His kindly stepfather, John London, whom Flora had married nine months after Jacks birth, was a chronic failure in small business and farming enterprises, a failure due in considerable measure to Floras restless ambitiousness. As a result, the family was continually on the move, and Jack was forced to go to work before he finished his schooling. He sold newspapers on the Oakland waterfront, set pins in a bowling alley, scrubbed saloon floors; and as soon as he finished grade school, he started to work full time in a pickle canneryoften spending twelve to fourteen hours a day on the job. In a letter to his first publisher, Houghton Mifflin Company, he testified, from my ninth year, with the exception of the hours spent at school (and I earned them by hard labor), my life has been one of toil. Such childhood memories, though sometimes exaggerated (we know, in fact, that while the London family sometimes had difficulty in making ends meet, they were never close to starvation), nonetheless furnished a rich background for the writer and left psychological scars on the man. At the same time it is clear that London deliberately fostered the myth of himself as the self-made American Adam, winning to respectability and success against seemingly impossible odds: it was a myth to which he committed himself absolutely. In the winter of 1898his family and friends pressing him to get a steady job, magazine editors rejecting his manuscripts as fast as he could pawn his only decent suit, his bike, and his typewriter for postage stampshe wrote to Mabel Applegarth, I dont care if the whole present, all I possess, were swept away from meI will build a new present; if I am left naked and hungry tomorrowbefore I give in I will go naked and hungry; if I were a woman I would prostitute myself to all men that I would succeedin short, I will. And, in short, he did. His resolution was prophetic. Within a month after composing that letter Londons short story To the Man on Trail had been accepted for publication by the Overland Monthly; in little more than a year his work had appeared in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, and Houghton Mifflin Company had contracted to publish his first book; in less than five years he would be one of Americas most popular young writers, with a half-dozen books to his credit, including his best-selling masterpiece The Call of the Wild. 382
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In the fascinating contrarieties of his person and persona, as well as in his extraordinary popularity, London was in many ways like another western writer whose meteor overlapped his own: Mark Twain. Both were genuine folk writersthe kind of literary kosmos that Walt Whitman had proclaimed himself to be without ever really becoming. Moreover, both were paradoxical and paradigmatic figures shaped as much by the disruptive transitions of post-Darwinian and post-Civil War America as by the frontier influence and by memories of their childhood experiences. While both were children of the nineteenth century, they became men of the twentieth century; and their boisterous frontier spirit was prone to subversion by the malaise of the latter era, manifesting itself through such typical symptoms as disenchantment, spiritual alienation, and neurasthenic depression. The pessimistic despair of Twains The Mysterious Stranger is no bleaker than the White Logic of Londons John Barleycorn: Life is apparitional, and passes. You are an apparition. Through all the apparitions that preceded you and that compose the parts of you, you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire, and gibbering you will pass on, interfusing, permeating the procession of apparitions that will succeed you. Unlike Twains, however, Londons nihilistic moods were more transitory than chronic; and his predominant attitude was vigorously life-assertive. This characteristic optimism is nowhere more evident than in his writings about the American West, a region he envisioned progressively in symbolic and, ultimately, mythic terms. But it was not the romance of California and the American West that inspired Londons first successful literary efforts; rather, it was the call of a farther music. On July 14, 1897, the steamship Excelsior docked at San Francisco, disembarking forty miners who lugged a ton of gold down the gangplank. At Seattle three days later a second group carrying over two tons of gold dust and nuggets debarked from the Portland. Both groups had floated down the Yukon River from the Klondike to the ocean port at St. Michaels, and the wealth they brought out seemed to confirm the rumors of a fantastic bonanza in the Far North. The nation immediately went mad to be in contact with that remote country, and the Great Klondike Gold Rush was in full swing in less than a fortnight. To a people disillusioned by the Civil War, the political corruptions of The Great Barbecue, the spreading blight of industrial exploitation and poverty, the moral hypocrisies and social affectations of the genteel modeby all the decadence and dishonesty of what Twain had branded as The Gilded Agethe Klondike seemed to offer a truly golden opportunity not only to discover material riches but, perhaps even more compelling, to recapture the innocence and integrity of a past agein short, to return to paradise. I believed that I was about to see and take part in a most picturesque and impressive movement across the wilderness, Hamlin Garland later reminisced in The Trail of the 383
Goldseekers; I believed it to be the last march of the kind which could ever come to America, so rapidly were the wild places being settled up. . . . I wished to return to the wilderness also, to forget books and theories of art and social problems, and come again face to face with the great free spaces of woods, skies, and streams. Jack London was among the first of the stampeders. It had been over two years since he had returned from his cross-country hoboing odyssey; those years had been crammed with intensive study and frustrated efforts to break into the literary marketplace, with nothing to show for his efforts but writers cramps and a drawerful of rejection slips. On July 25, 1897, Jack with the help of his brother-in-law, Captain J. H. Shepard, who had mortgaged his home for their stakeboarded the Umatilla en route to the Yukon via the Dyea Beach in southern Alaska, the four-hundred-mile trek over the rugged Chilkoot Pass, through the treacherous White Horse Rapids, and downriver to the mouth of the Stewart River, where he spent most of the long Arctic winter listening to the tales that passed between the veteran sourdoughs and newly arrived chechaquosabsorbing and assimilating those wonderful materials which he would subsequently transmute into his great Northland Saga. Any illusions London may have entertained about the Northland-asEden were thoroughly dissipated during that rigorous winter. In sharp contrast to the salubrious wilderness depicted by the Romantic poets and by the academic primitivists, this vast, still wildernessportrayed in archetypal images of the White Silence throughout Londons Northland Sagawas cold, impassive, awesome, inimical to puny and insignificant man. While Natures wellsprings might be pure in this region, they were also frozen, providing neither warmth nor security. What the Northland did provide was a fitting backdrop for fiction written in the naturalistic mode, and Londons early stories are filled with terror and dread of this deadly landscape. Describing the psychological disintegration of one of the main characters in the story In a Far Country, he writes: Everything in the Northland had that crushing effectthe absence of life and motion; the darkness; the infinite peace of the brooding land; the ghastly silence, which made the echo of each heartbeat a sacrilege; the solemn forest which seemed to guard an awful, inexpressible something, which neither word nor thought could compass. The only serenity available to man in this frozen-hearted Eden was the serenity of death. This wilderness, London concluded, was a hostile place to be escaped from, not to. He himself escaped, suffering badly from scurvy, during the late spring of 1898, ready to resume his writing career in earnest that fall. It would be several years later, only after the harsh reality of that experience had been sublimated through the nostalgic alembic of timeonly 384
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after he had discovered through his traumatic six weeks in the slums of Londons East End that the city might be a more terrible wilderness than the Northlandonly when he was safe back home with family and friends in his snug bungalow in the Piedmont hillsonly then that he could afford to rhapsodize over The Call of the Wild. And it would be another two years, after his separation from his wife Bessie and after his new love Charmian Kittredge had rescued him from the Long Sickness described in John Barleycorn, before he would be ready to move permanently from the city to the countryand, even then, not to the real wilderness, but to the pastoral landscape surrounding the hamlet of Glen Ellen, in the Sonoma Valley, sixty miles north of San Francisco. This landscape would become the setting not only for his California romances but also for the agrarian vision to which he devoted most of his creative energies during the last decade of his life. Londons move from Oakland into the Valley of the Moon, as he lovingly called the region, was initially motivated by a sentimental pastoralismthat is, by the romantic yearning to escape the complexities of urban living, to return to the paradisal simplicities of an idealized rural landscape. The main thing is the country itself, and the fact that you are out of the high pressure of city life, London wrote to his socialist friend and Oakland librarian, Frederick Irons Bamford, on May 28, 1905: The thing is, to cease being intellectual altogether. To take delight in little things, in bugs and crawling things, the birds, the leaves, etc., etc. The thing is to get so keenly interested in decently cooking a pot of rice, that you will forget that there ever was a Socialist Revolution, or a library, or high school children getting books for collateral reading, or anything else under the sun except the one enda decently cooked pot of rice. . . . I didnt come to Glen Ellen to see people, but to get away from people. . . . This same temper is reflected in a story London was writing at this timehis first fiction dealing with the pastoral scene, All Gold Canyonobviously inspired by his own enthusiasm for the lovely setting of the 128-acre Hill Ranch, which he purchased on June 7, the day before mailing his completed manuscript to Century Magazine. All Gold Canyon is one of Londons most significant stories. Not only does it embody some of his best lyrical description and dramatic narrative: it also demonstrates his newly awakened ecological conscience. There had been little evidence of such concern in his Alaskan stories; all his sympathies are with the brave souls who pit their heroic will against the awesome intractability of the wilderness. The gold itself is incidental, the moral fiber of the man himself being the important thing, but it is nonetheless a positive reward for those select few upon whom fate has endowed the rare combination of grit, determination, adaptability, good comradeship, 385
andmost importantgood luck. Londons bonanza kings are almost invariably men of exceptional character who have also been blessed by Special Providence. Like their Puritan forebears they see in wildness not the preservation of the world, but profit for the individual who has the strength of will to match force with force. The main character of All Gold Canyon, a pocket-miner simply named Bill, is such a frontier type, possessing the best qualities of the Northland heroes: courage, decency, industriousness, a sense of fair play, and humor. But his materialistic spirit is out of harmony with the spirit of the beneficent Southland wilderness, which London introduces in the characteristic imagery of the pastoral tradition: It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from the rigid plan and relieved their harshness of line by making a little sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness and softness. Here all things rested. . . . There was no dust in the canyon. The leaves and flowers were clean and virginal. . . . Sunshine and butterflies drifted in and out among the trees. The hum of the bees and the whisper of the stream were a drifting sound. And the drifting sound and drifting color seemed to weave together in the making of a delicate and intangible fabric which was the spirit of the place. The quietness of this western Sleepy Hollow is a far cry from the terrifying silence of the Northland Wilderness, and its spirit is unmistakably Edenic (at one point the place is called the canyon-garden): It was a spirit of peace that was not of death, but of smoothpulsing life, of quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action, of repose that was quick with existence without being violent with struggle and travail. The spirit of the place was the spirit of the peace of the living, somnolent with the easement and content of prosperity, and undisturbed by rumors of far wars. This spirit is abruptly broken, however, by the pocket-miner, who bursts noisily upon the scene in a cloud of dust, the metal of his hobnailed boots clanging harshly against the rocks as he monotonously chants a hymn about them sweet hills of grace. The man is immediately struck by the loveliness of the place, but his motives are basically materialistic, not aesthetic, and he can only respond with cheap commercial cliches: A pockethunters delight an a cayuses paradise! Cool green for tired eyes! Pink pills for pale people aint in it. In Londons pastoral wilderness the roles between Man and Nature are reversed from what they were in the Northland: it is Man who now becomes the savage destructive force, Nature the helpless victim. Bill pro386
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ceeds methodically to desecrate the virginal canyon, digging a series of scientifically calculated holes into the gently sloping hill until he has located the secret gold-pocket. But, while discovering his treasure, the man has also brought death into the garden: the deep hole he has dug almost becomes his own graveand does, indeed, become the grave for the dark stranger who attempts to ambush him after he has mined his gold. Even so, All Gold Canyon ends on a hopeful note. After the miner has departed, . . . through the silence crept back the spirit of the place. . . . Only remained the hoof-marks in the meadow and the torn hillside to mark the boisterous trail of the life that had broken the peace of the place and passed on. Yet the lyrical pastoralism of All Gold Canyon represents only the first stage in Londons dynamic attitude toward the western landscape. His restless intelligence would not allow him to dwell long in this idyllic region without imposing his will upon the land. Shortly after purchasing the Hill Ranch, he contracted to build a magnificent barn from rock, reinforced concrete, and heavy redwood beams; and he began planting the orchard which would reach full maturity by the time he and his wife Charmian returned from their projected seven years cruise around the world. His own all-gold canyon was truly beautiful; he would preserve its beauty while also making it fruitful. Science, lovingly applied, could not merely preserve but enhance the best in Nature. Londons articulation of these two seemingly opposing forcesScience and Natureis first effected in White Fang, which he started writing on June 26, 1905. London explained the theme of this book in a conversation with George Wharton James: Every atom of organic life is plastic. The finest specimens now in existence were once all pulpy infants capable of being moulded this way or that. Let the pressure be one way and we have atavismthe reversion to the wild; the other the domestication, civilization. I have always been impressed with the awful plasticity of life and I feel that I can never lay enough stress upon the marvellous power and influence of environment. Because White Fang has been reared in a savage environment, and made even more vicious by a sadistic owner named Beauty Smith, he becomes a ruthless killer; but removed to the gentle world of the Santa Clara Valley and treated with love, the murderous wolf becomes happily domesticated: Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished like a flower planted in good soil. The thematic crux of Londons narrative is the encounter between the domesticated wolf and the escaped convict, Jim Hall, who, because he has been treated with neither kindness nor scientific understanding, has become a mad-dog killer. In saving the life of his masters 387
father, Judge Scott, from Hall, White Fang is himself critically wounded: a broken leg, several broken ribs, one of which has pierced his lungs, three bullet holes, and multiple internal injuries. He hasnt a chance in ten thousand, remarks the surgeon who operates on him. Of course the surgeon has failed to reckon with the toughness acquired in a wilderness environment. On the other hand, even with his magnificent constitution, White Fang would have perished of such wounds without the application of modern medical techniques. Thanks to science, enhanced by human love, the hero survives as the Blessed Wolf. While London was at work on White Fang, his pastoral dream was interrupted by another grand vision: It was all due to Captain Joshua Slocum and his Spray, plus our own wayward tendencies, Charmian recollected in The Book of Jack London. We read him aloud to the 1905 camp children at Wake Robin Lodge, in the Valley of the Moon, as we sat in the hot sun resting between water fights. and games of tag in the deep swimming pool. Sailing Alone Around the World was the name of the book, and when Jack closed the cover on the last chapter, there was a new idea looking out of his eyes. That idea was to build his own boat which he and Charmian could sail around the globe on a seven years cruise. But this vision of nautical glory seemed ill-fated from the outset. Because of the San Francisco earthquake, Londons fabulous dream boat, the Snark, was delayed more than a year in the building and sailing; and because of dishonest and incompetent contractors, who compounded the inflationary effects of the earthquake, it was shoddily built yet still cost over five times the $7,000 originally calculated. Sail it did, however, for Honolulu on April 23, 1907; and the voyage progressed reasonably well for a yearuntil the Londons and their tiny crew reached Melanesia. Before the summer of 1908 ended, all of them were plagued by malaria, dysentery, and yaws; and by that fall Londons health had been undermined by a half-dozen ailments, including a double fistula and a skin disease so severe that he was scarcely able to use his hands. On December 22, after spending a month in the hospital, he sadly notified his publisher, George Brett of Macmillan, and his friends that he was cancelling the voyage. If I were a king, he later wrote in The Cruise of the Snark, the worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons. On second thought, king or no king, I dont think Id have the heart to do it. But despite its ruinous impact on his health, the Snark yoyage did have one major salutary effect: it convinced London that the paradisal country he sought was not halfway around the world but in his own back yard. I also have a panacea, he affirmed in recounting his various tropical ailments. It is California. I defy any man to get a Solomon Island sore in California.
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His California ranch seemed, indeed, to be the panacea London needed after the Snark cruise; and for awhile after returning home he thrived as he devoted himself to fulfilling his agrarian dream. I believe the soil is our one indestructible asset, he said. I am rebuilding worn-out hillside lands that were worked out and destroyed by our wasteful California farmers. . . . Everything I build is for the years to come. Between 1909 and 1916 he increased the size of Beauty Ranch to fourteen hundred acres, one of the largest in the Sonoma Valley; and during those seven years he came to be regarded by the agricultural experts as one of Californias leading farmers whose ranch was one of the best in the country. By combining modern agronomy with the wisdom of Oriental agriculture (terracing, drainage, tillage, etc.), he succeeded in growing bumper crops of prunes, grapes, and alfalfa on land that had been abandoned by previous owners. He built the first concrete-block silo in California and constructed a pig palace which was a model of sanitation and efficiency. His livestock regularly took high honors in the county and state fairs and brought top breeding prices. One of the finest tributes he ever received was that by the famous horticulturalist Luther Burbank in his autobiographical reminiscence The Harvest of Years: . . . Jack London was a big healthy boy with a taste for serious things, but never cynical, never bitter, always good-humored and humorous, as I saw him, and with fingers and heart equally sensitive when he was in my gardens. Londons renewed pastoral enthusiasm manifested itself in his literary as well as in his agricultural achievements; in fact, the two fields of interest were reciprocal, each enhancing the other. Four major worksthree novels and one playreflect his agrarian vision. The first of these, Burning Daylight begun in Quito, Ecuador, on June 5, 1909, during the Londons return home from the Snark trip, and finished on the Ranch that fallis the story of a Klondike bonanza king, Elam Harnish, who, having made his fortune in the Northland, seeks new worlds to conquer in the civilized Southland, only to discover that the jungle of big business is more savage than the Arctic wilderness. After being mulcted of eleven million dollars by Wall Street robber barons, he decides to fight their ruthlessness with his own. He recoups his money and consequently accumulates an even greater fortune but in the process he loses his soul, becoming even more ruthless than those who swindled him. At the end, however, he is redeemed by the love of a woman, his secretary Dede Mason (admittedly modeled after Charmian London), who persuades him to renounce his wealth and move onto a small ranch in the Sonoma Mountains. By this time in his career Londons socialist enthusiasm had clearly begun to wane, and he envisioned a less violent solution to modern mans
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woes than social revolution: Oh, try to see! he exclaimed to Charmian: In the solution of the great economic problems of the present age, I see a return to the soil. I go into farming, because my philosophy and research have taught me to recognize the fact that a return to the soil is the basis of economics . . . I see my farm in terms of the world, and the world in terms of my farm. This vision is the central theme of The Valley of the Moon, generally considered the best of Londons agrarian novels. I am planning a serial, the motif is back to the land, he wrote to Cosmopolitan editor Roland Phillips on May 30, 1911: I take a man and a woman, young, who belong to the working class in a large city. Both are wage-workers, the man is unskilleda driver of a brewery wagon, or something of that sort. The first third of the book will be devoted to their city environment, their meeting, their love-affair, and the trials and tribulations of such a marriage in the working class. Comes hard times. The woman gets the vision. She is the guiding force. They start wandering over the country of California. Of course, they have all sorts of adventures, and their wandering becomes a magnificent, heroic detailed pilgrimage. After many hints and snatches of vision, always looking for the spot, they do find the real, one and only spot, and settle down to successful, small-scale farming. The central characters of this novel, Saxon and Billy Roberts, lose their first child through stillbirth in the ugly, strike-ridden city of Oakland; but, like Dede and Elam Harnish, they find Eden in the Valley of the Moon. The novel concludes with a promise of new life in Saxons announcement of her pregnancy as she and Billy, standing beside a quiet pool in the heart of their pastoral sanctuary, gaze blissfully upon a doe and a newborn fawn at the edge of the forest. Londons third agrarian novel, The Little Lady of the Big House, begun April 3, 1914, does not end so happily. Unlike Elam Harnish and Billy Roberts, who have purified themselves of all exploitive motives before entering the pastoral wilderness, Dick Forrest, the hero of The Little Lady, is possessed with a mania for efficiency and profit. The wealthy owner of a large California ranch, Forrest is a success as a commercial farmer and as a scientific breeder of prize stockbut he is a failure as a husband and father: his marriage is barren. He is Londons version of the twentieth-century clockwork man whose every working hour, sleeping hour, and playing hour is governed by his watch. His wife Paula (the title character), neglected and starved for genuine affection, falls in love with Dicks best friend, the artistwriter Evan Graham, and dissolves the love-triangle by committing suicide at the end of the novel. 390
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Contemporary reviewers condemned The Little Lady as a bad book that immorally portrayed the erotomania of three persons who fiddle harmonies on the strings of sensualism. Many of Londons critics have subsequently agreed that this is his worst novelcynical, confused, and gratuitously if unconsciously titillating. And several of his biographers have suggested that the book was a mirror of Londons own psychological state following the multiple disasters of 1913: an attack of appendicitis and the discovery that his kidneys were badly diseased; the loss of his fruit crop by a false spring and late frost; the accidental killing of one of his prize mares by a hunter; the threatened loss of his motion picture copyrights by the lawsuit of the Balboa Amusement Company; and, on August 22, the burning of his great new mansion, the Wolf House. Although there may be some truth in these allegations, they nevertheless tend to obscure the important thematic implications underlying the tragedy of the Forrests marriage: While a return to the soil is vital, mere scientific efficiency in our treatment of the land is not the ultimate answer to the problems of the present ageefficiency must be tempered with love; head must be balanced by heart. This humanistic theme is explicitly dramatized in The Acorn-Planter, the Bohemian Grove play which London began writing on Christmas Day, 1914, two weeks after completing the manuscript for The Little Lady. It is this, if any single book may be so designated, which might be fairly called Jack Londons last will and testament to California possibilities. The play is a mythopoeic fantasy beginning in the morning of the world and concluding in the Epilogue, or Apotheosis with the celebration of the death of war and the triumph of the acorn-planters, incarnated in Red Cloud, the philosopher/agrarian. California is seen throughout as the place of Edenic promise, A sunny land, a rich and fruitful land, / The warm and golden . . . land. Red Cloud, though killed by the Sun Men, is resurrected; and In place of wars alarums, peaceful days; / Above the warriors grave the golden grain / Turns deserts grim and and stark to laughing lands. The play ends on a strong note of affirmation as The New Day dawns, / The day of brotherhood, / The day of man! And in the protagonists final paean to life may be discerned the authors own optimistic hopes: The planters ways are the one way Ever they plant for life, For life more abundant, For beauty of head and hand, For the voices of children playing, And the laughter of maids in the twilight And the lovers song in the gloom. His agrarian optimism notwithstanding, Londons personal health was 391
already beginning to fail by the time he finished The Acorn-Planter. During the next two years, though he tried manfully to keep up a vigorous front to the public, his body betrayed him: the symptoms of uremia-edema, swollen ankles, bloated body, kidney stones, gouty rheumatismwere increasingly evident. And, while little was known about the disease at the time, there is considerable evidence that he was a victim of hypertension. Yet he refused to heed the advice of his physician that he must restrict his diet and get more rest; instead he kept up his dailyand deadlyregimen of underdone duck, heavy cigarette-smoking, five hours of sleep, with little time for real relaxation and even less for exercise. He spent several months in Hawaii in 1915 and 1916, hoping to recapture his lost health in that benevolent climate; but his body continued to deteriorate. He returned home from Hawaii in August of 1916 in time to attend the Bohemian Club High Jinks and the State Fair in Sacramento, and in early September he was hospitalized with what was diagnosed as an acute attack of rheumatism. After a week in bed he was up again, and when duck season opened the next month he began indulging himself in his favorite recipe of specially prepared nine-minute duck, working harder than ever on his plans to expand and improve his ranch. His symptoms worsened in November, and on the morning of the 22nd, he was found in bed unconscious, cyanotic, and evidently paralyzed. Despite the efforts of four attending physicians, he died that evening without ever regaining consciousness. His death certificate indicated Uraemia following renal colic as the immediate cause of death; more likely, the real cause was a stroke and heart attack as his symptoms suggest. The nation mourned Londons death as the passing of a true herothe newspapers allotting more space to Jack than to Francis Joseph I, the Emperor of Austria, who had passed away on the day before. More significantly, despite the efforts of two generations of academic critics to ignore him, Londons works have been kept aliveand in printby the common reader, not only at home but also abroad. He remains this countrys most widely translated, most widely read author. Jack London is an important western author, to be sure; but more than this, he is a great world author.
E ARLE L ABOR , Centenary
College of Louisiana
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Primary Sources 1. Fiction (in chronological order) The Son of the Wolf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. Klondike stories. The God of His Fathers. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1901. Klondike stories. Children of the Frost. New York: Macmillan, 1902. Northland Indian stories. The Cruise of the Dazzler. New York: Century, 1902. Juvenile stories featuring the Frisco Kid, based on Londons adventures as an oyster pirate in 1891. A Daughter of the Snows. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1902. Klondike novel. The Call of the Wild. New York: Macmillan, 1903. Klondike novella. The Faith of Men. New York: Macmillan, 1904. Klondike stories. The Sea Wolf. New York: Macmillan, 1904. Novel based on Londons experiences aboard the sealing schooner Sophia Sutherland in 1893. The Game. New York: Macmillan, 1905. Prize-fighting novella. Tales of the Fish Patrol. New York: Macmillan, 1905. Stories based on Londons adventures as a member of the California Fish Patrol in 1892. Moon-Face and Other Stories. New York: Macmillan, 1906. White Fang. New York: Macmillan, 1906. Companion novel to The Call of the Wild. Before Adam. New York: Macmillan, 1907. Prehistorical adventure novel. Love of Life and Other Stories. New York: Macmillan, 1907. Klondike stories. The Iron Heel. New York: Macmillan, 1908. Novel about socialist apocalypse. Martin Eden. New York: Macmillan, 1909. Autobiographical novel based on Londons early writing career. Lost Face. New York: Macmillan, 1910. Klondike stories, including To Build a Fire. Burning Daylight. New York: Macmillan, 1910. The first of Londons Sonoma novels. When God Laughs and Other Stories. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Adventure. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Melanesian novel. South Sea Tales. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Meianesian stories. The House of Pride and Other Stories of Hawaii. New York: Macmillan, 1912. A Son of the Sun. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1912. South Sea stories featuring David Grief. Smoke Bellew. New York: Century, 1912. Klondike stories. The Night-Born. New York: Century, 1913. Miscellaneous stories, including war and The Mexican. The Abysmal Brute. New York: Century, 1913. Fictional expos of professional boxing, based on one of several plot-outlines sold to London by Sinclair Lewis. The Valley of the Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1913. The second of Londons Sonoma novels. The Strength of the Strong. New York: Macmillan, 1914. Stories. The Mutiny of the Elsinore. New York: Macmillan, 1914. Novel based in part on Londons voyage around Cape Horn on the Dirigo in 1912.
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A Literary History of the American West The Scarlet Plague. New York: Macmillan, 1915. Novella. The Star Rover. New York: Macmillan, 1915. Fantasy novel based, in part, on prison experiences of Ed Morrell. The Little Lady of the Big House. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Farming novel. The Turtles of Tasman. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Stories. Jerry of the Islands. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Novel. Michael Brother of Jerry. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Novel with Foreword indicting trained-animal shows. The Red One. New York: Macmillan, 1918. Stories. On the Makaloa Mat. New York: Macmillan, 1919. Hawaiian stories, including several based on Jungs theory of racial memory. Hearts of Three. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Serialized cliff-hanger written in tandem with scenarist Charles Goddard. Dutch Courage and Other Stories. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Early juvenile stories, including Londons first prize-winning sketch, Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. Mystery thriller based on plot-outline sold to London by Sinclair Lewis and completed by Robert L. Fish. 2. Drama (in chronological order) Scorn of Women. New York: Macmillan, 1906. Three-act play based on The Scorn of Women, in The God of His Fathers. Theft: A Play in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan, 1910. Written for Olga Nethersole but never produced in the United States. The Acorn-Planter: A California Forest Play. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Written as a Grove Play for the Bohemian Clubs Jinks but never staged because of difficulties in setting it to music. The First Poet. In The Turtles of Tasman. New York: Macmillan, 1916. One-act play written by George Sterling, who asked London to publish it under his own name; first published in Century Magazine, June, 1911; produced at the Forest Theatre, Carmel, California, July 20, 1915. A Wicked Woman. In The Human Drift. New York: Macmillan, 1917. One-act play based on story by the same title, in When God Laughs; produced on the Orpheum Theater Circuit in 1910. The Birth Murk. In The Human Drift. One-act vaudeville skit written for exheavyweight boxing champion Robert Fitzsimmons and his wife Julia; first produced as Her Brothers Clothes in San Francisco in 1910. Daughters of the Rich. James E. Sisson, ed. Oakland: Holmes Book Co., 1971. Curtain raiser, evidently written by Hilda Gilbert, who persuaded London to put his name to it as a favor. Gold. James E. Sisson, ed. Oakland: Holmes Book Co., 1972. Three-act play written by Herbert Heron, based on two of Londons stories: A Days Lodging, in Love of Life, and The Man on the Other Bank, in Smoke Bellew.
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3. Non-fiction (in chronological order) The Kempton-Wace Letters. New York: Macmillan, 1903. Epistolary dialogue on love, written in collaboration with Anna Strunsky. The People of the Abyss. New York: Macmillan, 1903. Sociological study of living conditions in the East End of London. War of the Classes. New York: Macmillan, 1905. Essays. The Road. New York: Macmillan, 1907. Tramping reminiscences. Revolution and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1910. The Cruise of the Snark. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Travel sketches. John Barleycorn. New York: Century, 1913. Autobiographical treatise on alcohol. The Human Drift. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Miscellany. Letters from Jack London. Edited by King Hendricks and Irving Shepard. New York: Odyssey, 1965. Jack London Reports: War Correspondence, Sports Articles, and Miscellaneous Writings. Edited by King Hendricks and Irving Shepard. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. No Mentor but Myself: A Collection of Articles, Essays, Reviews and Letters, by Jack London, on Writing and Writers. Edited by Dale L. Walker. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1979. Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings. Edited by Richard W. Etulain. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1979. 4. Unpublished Sources The major repository for Londons papers is the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where some sixty thousand items (notes, manuscripts, letters, scrapbooks, along with many books from Londons personal library) are housed. The next largest collection is at the Merrill Library, Utah State University, Logan; in addition to Londons own notes and letters, this collection comprises much of Charmian Londons correspondence. Other smaller but significant collections are housed at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the Jack London Museum and the Jack London State Park, both in Glen Ellen, California; the Oakland Public Library; the Stanford University Library; the University of Southern California (the Cresmer Collection); the University of California at Los Angeles (the Irving Stone Collection); the Stuart Library of Western Americana at the University of the Pacific (presentation copies of Londons first editions to his first wife Bessie and to his two daughters Joan and Becky); and the University of Virginia (the Clifton Waller Barrett Collection, comprising more than one hundred London letters). Critical and Biographical Studies Foner, Philip S., ed. Jack London, American Rebel: A Collection of his Social Writings together with an Extensive Study of the Man and His Times. New York: Citadel, 1947. Socialistic.
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A Literary History of the American West Geismar, Maxwell. Jack London: The Short Cut. In Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel, 18901915. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. Psychoanalytic. Hendricks, King, ed. Creator and Critic: A Controversy between Jack London and Philo M. Buck, Jr. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1961. An exchange of letters between Buck and London concerning an article published by Buck which criticized Londons Martin Eden and Burning Daylight. , ed. Jack London: Master Craftsman of the Short Story. Logan: The Faculty Association, Utah State University, 1966. Indicates three major characteristics of Londons artistry: ability to weave a narrative, to create atmosphere, and to use irony effectively; discusses To Build a Fire, Love of Life, The Law of Life, and The Chinago. Kingman, Russ. A Pictorial Life of Jack London. New York: Crown, 1979. A sympathetic but well-researched, reliable biography. Labor, Earle. Jack London. New York: Twayne, 1974. First book-length critical study of Londons work. London, Charmian K. The Book of Jack London. 2 vols. New York: Century, 1921. Biased and poorly organized, but nonetheless valuable as a source of information about Londons life and personality. London, Joan. Jack London and His Times: An Unconventional Biography. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939; rpt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968, with a new introduction by the author. Remarkably objective study by Londons daughter; complements the biography by his widow Charmian. Lynn, Kenneth S. Jack London: The Brain Merchant. In The Dream of Success: A Study of the Modern American Imagination. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955. Traces the effect of the success myth on Londons consciousness. McClintock, James I. White Logic: Jack Londons Short Stories. Grand Rapids: Wolf House Books, 1975. First full-length treatment of the short fiction. Ownbey, Ray Wilson, ed. Jack London: Essays in Criticism. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1978. Contains some of the best essays written on London in the past twenty-five years. Rather, Lois. Jack London, 1905. Oakland: The Rather Press, 1974. Detailed study of this crucial year of Londons life. Sinclair, Andrew. Jack: A Biography of Jack London. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Though distorted by overemphasis of Londons physical ailments, useful in dispelling the myths of his supermanhood. Starr, Kevin. The Sonoma Finale of Jack London, Rancher. In Americans and the California Dream, 18501915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Strained effort to interpret Londons career as a nightmarish dramatization of a modality of California madness. Stone, Irving. Sailor on Horseback: The Biography of Jack London. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. Rpt. as Jack London, Sailor on Horseback: A Biographical Novel, New York: Doubleday, 1947; and as Jack London: His Life, Sailor on Horseback (A Biography ) and Twenty-Eight Selected Jack London Stories, Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1977. Unreliable popular biography containing many passages plagiarized from Londons own fictional and semi-autobiographical works.
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Walcutt, Charles Child. Jack London. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966. Evaluates London as a possessor of powerful talent who can evoke sharp images, explain complex procedures and describe intricate mechanisms and processes with economy and clarity. Walker, Dale L. The Alien Worlds of Jack London. Grand Rapids: Wolf House Books, 1973. Pioneering treatment of Londons fantasy fiction. Walker, Franklin. Jack London and the Klondike. San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1966. Articulate, scholarly treatment of Londons Northland experiences and their influence on his literary career. . The Seacoast of Bohemia: An Account of Early Carmel. San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1966; enlarged ed., Santa Barbara, California: Peregrine Smith, 1973. Informative study of Londons relationship with poet George Sterling and other members of the Carmel group such as Mary Austin and Jimmy Hopper. Watson, Charles N., Jr. The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. The first extensive critical treatment of Londons longer fiction; complements McClintocks White Logic. Bibliographies Bubka, Tony. A Jack London Bibliography: A Selection of Reports Printed in the San Francisco Bay Area Newspapers: 18961967. M.A. Thesis, San Jose State College, 1968. Sherman, Joan R. Jack London: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Annotated guide to secondary writings about London and his works. Sisson, James E., III, and Robert W. Martens, comps. Jack London First Editions IllustratedA Chronological Reference Guide. Oakland: Star Rover House, 1979. Walker, Dale L., and James E. Sisson, III, eds. The Fiction of Jack London: A Chronological Bibliography. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1972. Annotated with photographs. Woodbridge, Hensley C., John London, and George H. Tweney, comps. Jack London: A Bibliography. Georgetown, California: Talisman, 1966; enlarged ed., Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus, 1973. Comprehensive listing of both primary and secondary items.
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had a life-long affair with the beauty of things, a life-long standoff with the human race. His vision of both was heightened by the archetypal presences of his Big Sur coast.
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It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, storm, and mountain; it is their soul and their meaning. Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we have to harden our hearts to bear it . . . (The Worlds Wonders)
John Robinson Jeffers was not born into an ordinary family. His father, Hamilton Jeffers, was a teacher and scholar, Professor of Old Testament Literature and Exegesis and of Biblical and Ecclesiastical History at Western Theological Seminary (Presbyterian) near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His mother, a beautiful and talented young woman, as church organist fell in love with the visiting curate, Jeffers, over twenty years her senior. Instead of taking her on a honeymoon, he moved her into a seminary dormitory. John Robinson, born 1887, their first of two sons (the first name was dropped after publication of his first book) may have been caught in the dynamics between the distant, older, stern father and the young, vivacious, and emotional mother. One critic, William Everson, suggests that the mother-son relationship and its inner strategies for resolution constitute a major influence in Jefferss verse. Though not wealthy, the family was characteristically able to move about rather freely. In 1891, when the boy was four, his parents took him on the first of what was to be a succession of European sojourns, placing him in a Zurich school. In 1893 there was a second tour, the school this time in Lucerne. After six years at home in Twin Hollows, Sewickley, Pennsylvania, he was returned to Europe for a longer stay, with schooling at Leipzig, Geneva, Lausanne, Geneva again, and Zurich. During these years, eleven to fourteen, Jeffers gained a reputation among his peers for solitariness and stoicismthe result of stern teachers, the grandeur and awesomeness of the landscape, some perversion among classmates, separation from the family, and repeated relocation (his father, for reasons unexplained, seems to have visited from the United States only to put him in successive schools). Then westering entered into the family pattern. In 1903, for health 398
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reasons and perhaps to move away from the political tensions of the seminary faculty, the patriarch Jeffers moved his family to California, first to Long Beach, then to Highland Park (Los Angeles), where young Robinson matriculated as a junior, age sixteen, at Occidental College, then a small Presbyterian school. With his native intelligence and wide background in language and culture no doubt impressing his peers and professors alike, he took courses in biblical literature, economics, geology, history, Greek, rhetoric and astronomy, a discipline which featured frequent field trips to Mount Wilson and Echo Mountain observatories. He made fast friends perhaps for the first time in his life and took part in athletics and class hiking. Here he began writing and publishing verse for the school literary magazine, The Aurora, which became The Occidental under his editorship in his senior year. He graduated in a class of eleven in 1905. Jeffers immediately entered graduate school at the University of Southern California in mid Los Angeles as a student of literature. There in a class on Faust he met his future wife Una, who was then married to a young barrister, Edward Kuster. In April 1906 came another abrupt family interlude in Switzerland, where Jeffers took courses in philosophy, Old English, French literary history, Dante, Spanish romantic poetry, and the history of the Roman Empire. The following semester found him back at USC, translating German articles for one of the medical school faculty. In September 1907 he was accepted into the medical school and, although evidently not intending to become a practicing physician, he rose to the top of his class, becoming special assistant to Dr. Lyman Stookey and teaching physiology at the USC dental college. Una meanwhile was finishing a masters thesis on Mysticism at USC and meeting Jeffers clandestinely at Hermosa Beach, where he moved to be near her during the summer. The events of these years could easily sound like a soap opera script: a code name for phone calls, a painful final separation as Jeffers accompanied his family to Seattle and enrolled in forestry school there, a summer return when they met by chance at a downtown intersection and began their affair again, an outraged husband discovering they had spent a night together on Mount Lowe, a five-month cooling off period at Kusters request during which Una agreed to go on a European tour, Kuster then falling in love with a young girl and seeking a divorce himself, the divorce which, though uncontested, received banner headlines in the Los Angeles papers. The year 1913 found Jeffers and Una in a holding pattern, she at the University of California at Berkeley, ostensibly seeking a Ph.D. in philosophy, he back at the University of Washington, again following forestry. They were married August 2 at Tacoma after living together a few months on Lake Washington impatiently waiting for the divorce to be final. The first months of married life were spent in the beautiful beach com399
munity of La Jolla just north of San Diego. There followed an eventful year. Their first child Maeve died after one days life; the Great War began and they had to give up plans for living in Europe; they moved to Carmel at the suggestion of a friend, Mortimer Clapp; and Jefferss father died. The war years were evidently terrible for young Robinson, torn between the idealism which drove him toward enlistment and the beginning of the disillusionment which would make him a pacifist. The war was matrix to many themes of his later poetry. Much has been made of Jefferss first impression of Carmel as the inevitable place; but the cliche is nonetheless true. The magnificent natural surroundings must have been all but overwhelming. Life in Carmel was simple, almost primitive: a rented log cabin, many walks in the woods and along the beach, much reading, few friends. In 1919 the young couple managed to buy land on a hill overlooking Carmel Bay facing Point Lobos. There on August 15th, apprenticed to a stonemason, Jeffers began work on the structure which was to be so formative in his thinking and expressive of his aestheticsTor House. This stone cottage was followed by a five-year opus, the forty-foot, multileveled Hawk Tower, from which he could view the Pacific and the brilliant night sky. During his early adult years Jeffers had been writing poetryinitially romantic, imitative, melodramatic, and melancholy verse which filled his first two books, Flagons and Apples (1912) and Californians (1916); then, after a dramatic but undocumented conversion experience in many ways reminiscent of Whitmans, his writings turned turbulent, richly ritualistic and mythical, and philosophically integrated. There were from time to time attempts at publication but, when James Rorty found the poet in 1925 after the failure of Tamar at its New York publisher, he sensed one who was resigned to writing without an immediate audience but who found himself compelled to chronicle the human landscape of the Western Shore. Rortys enthusiasm was the catalyst for discovery. A man of contacts, he sent Jefferss Tamar to Mark Van Doren and Babette Deutsch. They each reviewed it favorably for major New York papers and journals, and Jeffers, for several years at least, became the sensation of the cocktail parties and literary circles of the East. From this point on, Jefferss biography can easily become a list of yearly publications (Melba Bennetts book takes this expedient). There were few dramatic turns, no world tours, no great milestones, little domestic drama. Jeffers became a master stonemason, expanding Tor House year by year with extensions, walls, and a courtyard. There were three trips to Europe, instigated by Una, a change in publishers (Liveright to Random House in 1933), yearly summer trips to Taos, New Mexico, beginning in 1930, also instigated by Una and protested but endured by Jeffers. Their twin sons, 400
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Donnan and Garth, born in 1916, grew up and went away to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1936. Recognition, after the first Jeffers hysteria of the late 1920s, came intermittently: a Book of the Month award, a Doctor of Literature from his alma mater Occidental in 1937, an honorary Phi Beta Kappa from USC in 1940, and election to the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 1945. Jefferss one public appearance, a reading tour in 1941, had ironic beginnings. Significantly, his house and tower had been turned toward the sea and away from the hamlet of Carmel; Jeffers methodically hedged his property on the three land sides with a dense wall of eucalyptus and Monterey cypress; he was almost comically intent on shutting out the hordes of humanity whom he imagined pouring over the hill to the north, shattering his privacy. Developers were high on his list of villains. Yet we owe his one reading lecture tour to the department of sanitations assessment of $ 1600 to extend sewer lines to take care of real estate development on Carmel point. If there was one central thread of life concern for Jeffers in the 1930s it was the new great war abuilding. If World War I was an after-the-fact disillusion and fundamental reorientation for him, the second war in Europe was a decade-long anticipation, a giant wave building toward a disastrous fall. Jeffers philosophically believed in the inevitability of the grand processes of history; they had a fatalism like the seasons. Yet he was human enough to care and to protest the stupidity of wars inevitable cruelty and fruitlessness. He began to write anti-war poems as early as 1933; he was still writing them at the end of his life. His post-war volume, The Double Axe (1948)) was the occasion for a dramatic downturn in his critical reputation and fortunes. The book was accompanied by an unprecedented publishers disclaimer. It was received hostilely from all quarters. Jeffers was singing no new song; it was just that his bitterness had increased and the age was bent on big-brother patriotism. It was another fifteen years before critical attitudes moved beyond the Double Axe. Meanwhile Jeffers received his sons back from the jaws of one war and looked ahead to the apocalyptic conflict that might more finally and fatally claim his grandchildren. Amidst all this, his life was filled with daily events, a few mini-crises, and a gradual growing old. His daily routine, since the early 1920s, was unswerving: writing in the mornings, stone work or tree planting in the afternoons, with an occasional pause to watch the sardine fleet slipping past the Point through the fog or the great zeppelin droning out into the Pacific. In the evenings there were awesome sunsets, walks under the constellations, reading by kerosene lamps (electricity came only in 1946), evening trips to the tower parapet to attune his microcosm to the universe of stars and galaxies (see his poems Night and Margrave). Jefferss Selected Letters (1968) and Unas letters document 401
this simple life, this centered, satisfying, day to day life-celebration. The family had a succession of Fords but travel was the exception. Aside from the summer trips to Taos and the cross-country stint in 1941, there were only necessary trips over the hill to town, biweekly pilgrimages to canyons and picnic points down the coast, a supper party at Noel Sullivans up Carmel Valley, a rare one-day excursion to San Francisco or to Berkeley to retrieve their sons. Often when a trip was called for, Una went without her husband, who preferred to keep his consciousness uncluttered and his solitude unperturbed. Social life was almost exclusively orchestrated by Una, who was naturally gregarious and from all evidence a very fine hostess and an informed, fluent conversationalist. There was no great stream of guests to Jefferss door but, since he would not come to them, many celebrities did eventually come to him, or at least visited him while they were in the Carmel area, coming on the arm of George Sterling or Noel Sullivan or some other friend. Visitors included Edgar Lee Masters, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lincoln Steffens, Irvin Cobb, Krishnamurti, James Cagney, Ralph Bellamy, Charlie Chaplin, Jo Davidson, Liam OFlaherty, George Gershwin, Bennett Cerf, Van Wyck Brooks, Louis Adamic, Thornton Wilder, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, William Rose Bent, William Saroyan, Aldous Huxley, Vincent Sheean, Toscanini, Salvador Dali, and others. Many celebrities were periodically neighbors in a Carmel community which drew artists and the wealthy because of its extraordinary beauty, its seasonal climate, its vacation facilities, and its perennial artists and writers colony. Much of the family time was spent in simple livingwhich included an intense intellectual life filled with books and discussions which ranged through philosophy and history, culture and art. Visitors found a charming but rather austere household: a low-ceilinged, dark living room with a faithful bulldog by the hearth, a stone-floored dining room with rough-hewn table and benches beside another hearth, a tiny kitchen made over from a garage, a colorful garden with an extensive herb annex, and of course the legendary tower. After the war, Garth Jeffers returned with a German bride, Lotte, then went to forestry studies in Oregon, later settling in Susanville. Donnan, after a few short years in Ohio during his first marriage, rejoined the household at Tor House, marrying Lee Waggener in 1947 and raising four children there. Life remained simple and subdued. After the triumph of Jefferss Medea on Broadway, starring Judith Anderson, there was a trip to Ireland in 1948, during which Jeffers almost died of pleurisy. Then tragedy struck. In 1949 Una Jeffers contracted what she insisted on calling sciatica, but which was a very painful cancer. Jeffers took her to San Francisco in January for a month of intensive and experimental treatments at the University of California Hospital. There was some relief but no cure and Unas remaining months were filled with bedrest, general weakness, and pain-relieving 402
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drugs. This very harrowing time was the subject for Jefferss most autobiographical poem, Hungerfield (1952). The remainder of Jefferss life, after her death in September 1950, involved living out the pact he had made early in his career, not to take his own life but to drink it to the dregs. As his health and eyesight failed, he could read only sparingly. He watched his grandchildren grow and thought grim thoughts of world-annihilation as the testing of atom and hydrogen bombs filled the news. In these final twelve years he wrote a few poems. Some of them, significant as his culminating thought on various subjects, were published posthumously in The Beginning and the End (1963). He agreed to help adapt The Tower Beyond Tragedy for Judith Anderson and for Broadway production ( 1951) and began an adaptation of Schillers Mary Stuart but left it after completing one act. There were infrequent visitors still, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Richard Eberhart among them. Jeffers died January 20, 1962; Carmel was covered with an all but unprecedented snow. Jefferss themes are identical with his overview of life and consistent from the beginning of his mature period (Tamar, 1924) till the end of his life (The Beginning and the End, 1963). He was a pantheist who believed that God is the evolving universe, a self-torturing god who discovers himself in the violent change which is at the center of lifes dynamism. One need not go far in Jeffers to find that all his images are cyclic: cycle is the truth of the stars, the life of the planet, the fate of man, insect, and flower. Cycle moves through birth, growth, fullness, decay, and death. In ritual terms cycle translates into sacrifice (fragmentation of each entity at the cycles end) and sacrament (reintegration and rebirth). For him, being involves change which is brought about only by violence and pain because each form resists its own dissolution. These realities, though customarily repugnant to man, are essential to beauty and divinity. For Jeffers there is only matter and energy; there is no spirit, or soul, or immortality (these being merely mens attempts to escape the cycle). God endures forever; man is a temporary phenomenon, something of an anomaly in the universe because of his megalomanic self-regard. But man is also unique, able to reflect on God. In fact man is, for the cosmic moment he endures, one of Gods sense organs (The Beginning and the End). Consciousness is a universal quality of the cosmos, but mans participation in it will pass (Credo); beauty survives mans faculty to perceive it. Death is at the end of each cycle, ending the individual existence; the material from each mans body is reassimilated into soil and air (Hungerfield). Mans energy sometimes endures for a moment after death, like a St. Elmos fire, in psychic phenomena. The world in its various rhythms is determined. The universe expands and collapses, oceans condense and evapo403
rate, mountains and civilizations rise and fall; nations emerge and grow old. The mass of men is fated in its course, but the individual can choose to remove himself from the breaking wave, can stand apart and contemplate instead of being blindly caught. God himself (the pronoun of course is an anomaly) is in no way like man; he is savage, indifferent, and wild (Hurt Hawks), encompassing both good and evil. If seen wholly, all things are sacred and in harmony. Evil itself is only part of the mosaic of beauty, indicating the close of the cycle (The Answer). To Jeffers the task of living a good life lies principally in detachment from insane desires for power, wealth, and permanence, in a measured indifference to pain, joy, or success, and in a turning outward to God who is all things. Wisdom, a word little used in his poetry except in irony (Wise Men in Their Bad Hours) means cosmic perspective (Signpost) and unfocusing from mankind (Jefferss inhumanism). Peace, as cessation from strife, is an illusion in life. True peace is found in death; in life it can be anticipated in a stoic balance which discounts mans innate anxieties for immortality, invulnerability, stability, and immunity from pain and sickness. The great and most subtle temptation for the good person lies in the implicitly self-aggrandizing notion that one can change the world (saviorism). Jeffers himself must have desperately fought this demon, he writes about it so often. He saw love as an abnormality of an incestuous race, leading to many other insanities. One love is pure: the love of God who is indifferent to man. Piety lies in an undistracted regard for beauty, earthly and cosmic. Terrible beauty is the god who commands worship. The poet is one who creates as God creates (Apology for Bad Dreams), who reconciles existence for man, putting mans preoccupations with sin, guilt, corruption, pain, and all other confounding fears and desires into saving context. The good person is not the leader, rebel, or savior; he is the self-contained mystic, contemplating God and living out the necessary conspiracies of life with a certain aloofness (Tamar achieves this amidst her melodrama of family destruction). Jefferss art grew out of his life and vice versa; it was a consequence of his philosophy and of his sense of vocation. Once one grasps the dimensions of his beliefs, it becomes clear that Jefferss poetry is incredibly centered and predictable. The theme of every poem, one way or another, is the divine beauty of the cosmos and the mutability of man. Jeffers has a deep sense of ritual, not only in natures rites of death and renewal but in every rhythm of being. His ritual intent is strikingly evidenced in a letter to his editor in 1926, in which he explained that the movement of his narratives was more like the ceremonial dances of primitive people; the dancer becomes a raincloud, or a leopard, or a God . . . the episodes . . . are a sort of essential ritual, from which the real action develops on another plane ( Selected 404
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Letters, p. 28). He embraces tragedy in its pre-Sophoclean sense of the inevitable, blameless fall which yields new beginnings. All life is tragic translates into all life is cyclic. Though civilized man flees the metaphysical implications of cycle, primitive man seems to have accepted and celebrated them. Characteristically in Mediterranean fertility cults, each year the cycle god, Attis, Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysus, had to suffer the consequences of reentry into being; each was born in order to die (and be reborn ten thousand times). Decline and death were not blameworthy or cataclysmic but inevitable and natural. Death is perhaps Jefferss most frequent theme; it is a truth to understand, accept, and move within. Of course subordinate themes abound in Jefferss poetry, but they all bear on the truth of the cyclehuman mutability, reconciliation with evil, confrontation of pain, indifference born of cosmic perspective, acceptance of God on his own terms, desirability of death and annihilation, inevitability of processes, delusion of human effectiveness, presumptuousness of mans self-importance, the nature of the poets art, the omnipresence and beauty of tragedy. The poetics of Jeffers are fairly simple and direct. His is a poetry of the external landscape, not the landscape of the mind (Credo). After the lyrics and semi-narratives of his first two books, he consciously avoided meter and rhyme. He replaced the first with the larger, more supple rhythms of Hebrew and Old English verse and the second with symmetries of parallelism and alliteration. Ten-beat lines are common in the narratives although there are many variations; four-beat lines are more likely in the lyrics. Much of Jefferss poetic effect comes through word-choice or diction. He chose words for etymology and for their successive layers of meaning. He kept a huge unabridged dictionary by his side and pondered word possibilities, sometimes for days. His imagery makes a fascinating study. Most of it is taken from his immediate coastal experience: hawks, herons, wild swans, pelicans, mountain lion, deer, and cattle; redwood, cypress, grass, wildflowers, rock, ocean, headland, clouds, sky, stars, and planets. Hawks are godlike, totem birds, representing what is noble and fierce. Lion and deer are the predators and victims, metaphors for all victimhood, neither blameworthy. Flora and fauna almost always fill a twofold function in his narratives: they are part of the realistic backdrop for the action; they also foreshadow the tragedy imminent in all drama, recalling animal surrogates of the year-gods and the sacrificial flowers which sprang from the gods blood. Rock is a consistent image of God, mysterious chthonic presence and stoic endurance; it is volcanic origins, the bones of mother earth. The sea is a mind-subduing expanse, life and death, matrix of all life, source of story, change of season. Mountain and headland are measure of the heavens and 405
reminder of human lifes precariousness. Storm represents elemental apocalyptic forces; earth, air, fire, water (quake, storm, holocaust, and deluge) all are fearful agents in Jefferss narratives. Clouds are a dream medium on which the poet projects human folly (The Great Sunset). Sky and stars are the universe beckoning. Stars are used both mythically, as in the constellation patterns of Orion and Scorpio in Tamar, but more often scientificallygigantic atomic fusion furnaces whose lifespan predicts the fate of our sun and solar system (Nova). The far stars and galaxies are the ultimate actors of Jefferss ultimate metaphor, the expanding and contracting universe which recycles every eighty-two billion years and is Gods heartbeat (The Great Explosion, At the Birth of an Age). Jeffers wrote and spoke little of his poetics. His 1938 foreword to Selected Poetry declares his intent to reclaim the subject matter which poetry had surrendered to prose. He meant to write about permanent things or the eternally recurring (Point Joe). He promised to pretend nothing, neither optimism nor pessimism. He would avoid the popular and fashionable; he would write as he believed, whatever the consequences. In Apology for Bad Dreams, an early ars poetica in lyric form, Jeffers indicates that he creates his narratives and dramas (bad dreams) principally for his own salvation. Using the vignette of a woman beating a horse amidst the magnificence of a coastal sundown, he attempts to reconcile mans perversity with the essential beauty of things. The landscape, he says, demands tragedy (pain, sacrifice, horror); the greater its beauty, the stronger the demand. It would seem that the poet wrote out these vicarious terrors in order to be spared the real terror of personal tragedy. Exactly what metaphysics is involved, Jeffers does not explain. He may write stories to educate himself to violence and the cycle, thus taking some of the terror out of the pain that he, as everyone, must endure. He may write as a form of therapy, letting out his inner violences, lest he act them out (and beat horses himself). Or he may see in his writing a way of participating in beings ritual, acting out a discovery-process that parallels Gods own creative processa kind of magic (as he calls it). Anyone who doubts the religious intent of Jefferss poetry should read carefully the choric invocation in Tamar (section V), his first narrative poem of note. He calls on the god of natural beauty to enter into his puppet charactersa brother and sister who have just committed incest and the disintegrating family that surrounds them. God, Jeffers says, chooses the twisted and lame to be his signs and the agents of his revelation. For this same reason God has chosen him. The same kind of lyric interruption greets us in The Women at Point Sur, Jefferss most tortured and convoluted narrative. Here again he has created human grotesques, he says, to praise God,
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puppets to speak of him; they stammer the tragedy. There are other writers, Jeffers tells us in the Prelude to the poem, who will tell tales to entertain; his vocation is to slit open the eyeholes in mankinds mask. Human resistance to God and to integration into the organic whole of the universe can be broken only by dramatic means (Roan Stallion): disorienting vision, limit-vaulting desire, unnatural crime, inhuman science, and tragedy. These break [the mould], these pierce [the mask], these deify, praising their God shrilly with fierce voices: not in mans shape. He approves the praise (Roan Stallion). Later Jeffers will clarify this view of storytelling and further its religious context in the lyric Crumbs or the Loaf where, in a parallel to Jesuss story of the sower and the seed (Matthew 13), he characterizes his narratives as parables, as contrasted with his lyrics which are confrontive apodictic pronouncements. Jefferss final statement on poetry comes toward the end of his writing career. In 1949, amidst the triumph of Medea and impending rejection of The Double Axe, he characterizes the truly great poet in an article for the New York Times, Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years. The poet, he says, stands alone. He renounces self-consciousness, over-learnedness, labored obscurity (by which Jeffers would probably have characterized most of contemporary poetry). He is direct and natural, saying what he must say clearly, out of the spirit of his time but as understandable for all times. Elsewhere I have called Jeffers the metaphysician of the West. Metaphysics is that most fundamental area of philosophy which studies being itself. Metaphysics has to deal with all that exists; it delves into the nature of all processes, of all that isthe workings and interactings of the universe and of the molecule and atom. Of the West suggests more than writing in and from the point of view of the West, or using its scenes as a setting. Jeffers does all these things, but his peculiar genius is his use of the West, the Far West, the continents end and drop-off cliff of the world on which he perched his home, to explore the nature of being, the relevance of the human race, and the bridge between man and the furthermost expanses of the cosmos. Jeffers represented his western landscape exactly; it stretched from Point Pinos in the north to Point Sur and Pfeiffer Beach in the south. This fifty miles of storm-scoured promontories, precipitous headlands, wavewracked points, wind-twisted trees, and precarious beaches was known intimately to him. It was the subject for solitary walks and family pilgrimages. The place names in his poems are almost all right off the geological survey map: Point Pinos and Joe, Robinson Canyon, Carmel Beach, Point Lobos, Mal Paso Creek, Notleys Landing, Palo Colorado Canyon, Rocky Point, Soberanes Reef, Bixbys Landing, Mill Creek, Little Sur River, Point Sur.
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The terrain, the beaches, the weather, the flowers, the animals are all trueto-life re-creations. Jeffers Country is no mythical Yoknapatawpha County; only the characters names are made up. Yet, in their own way, Jefferss characters are authentic, arising as they do from the violent legends of this forbidding and isolating terrain. Someone has suggested that the Big Sur country causes madness because of something in its dynamism which either produces or attracts the grotesque, the macabre. Robinson Jeffers himself suggests this in Apology for Bad Dreams. Jefferss characters are ranch families, self-exiled hermits in shacks, wandering Indian cowboys from a previous era. The land has never been domesticated; it is inconceivable that it ever will be; this is not so much remote backpacking country as impenetrable space. As one can see from the Sierra Club photo book, Not Man Apart, the coast is an almost continuous headlong precipice. The Coast Highway, an engineering triumph of the 1930s, strung a precarious ribbon of asphalt just above the drop-off, dynamiting through shoulders of rock, leaping over creek gorges with delicate butterfly bridges. Almost every winter a storm carries a lane of the highway into the sea. Behind this coast road are a few grassy knolls and fields, backed by wilderness. As one passes over it in a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, one sees tightly corrugated peaks and gulleys choked with trees and brushno roads, no lights, no water, no signs of life. This is wilderness in an almost mystic sense, a place to correspond to the empty places in the soul. One need not visit it; it was comforting to Jeffers just to know it was there and that it would never be humanized, subdivided, asphalted and fitted with sewer systems. Very conscious of writing as a westerner, Jeffers perceived his land and his conscience as scarred with the vestiges of westward expansion. All around him were the ghosts of Indians who were too easy a victim to the white mans ambitions and diseases. San Carlos Mission, a few blocks from Tor House, presided over the death of local tribes. A spade on his knoll may turn over the remains of a tribal feast, abalone and clam shells and charcoal from their fires. Jeffers is conscious that his Carmel River mouth is the center of a line which marks the final coast of migrations which began millennia ago, first crossing Europe, then the Atlantic, and finally the American continent (Tamar, Section V, makes use of this, as do The Loving Shepherdess and Continents End). Somehow this coast sums up all migrations and all that men have done for good or evil in their progress. Jefferss Doppelgnger, the self-stigmatizing hermit in A Redeemer, summed it up: Not as a people takes a land to love it and be fed, / A little according to need and love and again a little; sparing the country tribes, mixing / Their blood with theirs, their minds with all the rocks and rivers, their flesh with the soil . . . Oh, as a rich man eats a forest for profit and a field for vanity, 408
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So you came west and raped / The continent and brushed its people to death. Without need the weak skirmishing hunters and without mercy. Jeffers is not a regionalist in the usual sense of the wordone who writes knowingly of his geographic section, reflecting its genius and foibles, relating its topographic and climatic peculiarities, reciting its idiom and its philosophy. The California coast for him is not a region; it is a final statement, a philosophical, metaphysical study. There are neither enough people nor customs in his mountains for regionalism, and the landscape is unearthly, not picturesque. The final frontier is an ontological statement, not a geographic or cultural one. It is final as the coast is finalto all of mankinds hopes and illusions and indirections. Americas violence, its rape of the land, its betrayal of the Indians, its pillaging of resourcesall of these must ultimately be faced here. Before concluding a discussion of Jefferss themes and aesthetics, it is important to confront some of the objections to his writingnot in order to excuse his faults but to clarify his intent and identify his genre so that judgments may be better focused. With regard to his narratives, one can merely repeat what has been said above: Jeffers is a tragedian; he cannot write comedy for he saw comedy as an unfinished story. His stories are grotesque and usually end in blood. Whether he succeeded or not, his intent is to write parables, to instruct and to move his readers beyond their limits. His genre is, at an important level, ritualistic: that is, the story represents a Dionysian process, illustrating the cycles of life and death. His central characters, he says (in My Loved Subject), are the landscape: Mountain and ocean, rock, water and beasts and trees/ Are the protagonists, the human people are only symbolic interpreters. His human characters therefore are not primarily psychological or humanistic studies. Actually Jeffers chooses a sort of stereotyping (he has consistently called his characters puppets): his men tend to be Appolonian, stoic, cerebral, presumptuous that their power and plans will carry the day; his women tend to be Dionysian, sudden, intuitive, destructive; they are divine agents. Stories tend to follow the pattern of Pentheuss destruction by Agave in The Bacchae (Jefferss version: Humanists tragedy). The reader must be cautious: Jeffers should never be identified with his characters; their attitudes and statements are rarely or never his. He has no heroes or heroines, only maimed, floundering idols. At some points Tamar, Orestes, and Fayne Frazer might be exceptions. With regard to the short poems several additional precautions should be noted. Jeffers has many voices, the most prominent of which is, by far, that of prophet, a voice which may have been familiar to him out of the Old Testament literature of his childhood. The prophet primarily proclaims the truth, no matter how bitter the consequences. The prophet is a man obsessed and desperate to communicate. He has a vision of holiness which he 409
sees desecrated usually by a middle- or upper-class establishment who live by idolatry, injustice, and dishonesty. The prophet deals in exaggeration, overstatement, hyperbole. As Flannery OConnor notes: For those who are almost blind, the prophet must write in huge caricatures; for those who are marginally deaf, he must shout. A prophet by definition must shock to communicate. But just as Isaiah did not rant and excoriate all of the time but also cajoled, admonished, comforted, and extolled, so Jeffers has other intonations and messages. At times he is pure mystic, praying to his God in the solitude of his tower as in Night. At other times he is a teacher, reasoning and unfolding, suggesting how to live, as in Signpost, The Answer, or Return. He can be a discerning philosopher as in Theory of Truth. He can even be autobiographic as in To His Father or The Bed by the Window. He could assume a sort of priesthood over the rituals of nature and celebrate their holiness and rhythms as in Salmon-Fishing and To the House. He could turn himself inward to purify his art and sharpen his focus, always questioning the validity of his message and examining his poetic talents from the perspective of eternity as in Self-Criticism in February or Soliloquy. Often his tones take on the gravity of the ecologist, lamenting the imbalance and guilts perpetrated by his own nation, or the apocalyptist, judging cities the ultimate idolatry and forecasting global purgation. By this it should be clear that Jeffers should be approached with some patience and informed understanding. He cannot be summed up in one poem nor is he heard well until he has been listened to in several voices. He has often been dismissed by critics and the general reader as a misanthropist, pessimist, or nihilist. Isaiah might fall under the same charges. As one rightly balances the vitriolic rhetoric of the Old Testament prophets first chapters with his Book of Comfort (Isaiah, chapters 40ff.) or his suffering servant songs, so one needs to balance Jefferss heavier poems (Summer Holiday, November Surf, What Are Cities For?, Original Sin, for example) with the lighter, more positive statements: The Excesses of God or the final lines of The Beginning and the End. A final word on Jefferss role as western writer. When one reviews the spectrum of themes from the literature of the West, one sees that Jeffers came to grips with all of them. He dealt with agrarian and pastoral types, the epic sweep of migrations, hero archetypes, violence, search for Eden, the disaster of the American Dream, Indian extermination, land and landscape, the mysticism of wilderness, immersion in nature, the folly of progress, the moral dilemmas of ownership, land-development, law, power, and greed. Grandson of an early pioneer of Ohio, he was inextricably involved in the nations historical progress and in judgment upon it. There is in his poetry a deep-seated ambivalence, arising from the clash 410
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between mystic and prophet. On the one hand he espouses an Eastern, Buddhist type of passivity and inner peace, assuming that nothing can be done. War, betrayal, moral and political corruption are variations of a natural process of decay that inevitably follows the cresting of a nations vitality and idealism. He can pronounce this process not blameworthy as in Shine, Perishing Republic. On the other hand he can, and more often does, deal with it with a heavy prophetic hand. Though he rejected the savior syndrome, he acted in many ways the redeemer whom he pictured in the short narrative by that title, here on the mountain making/Antitoxin for all the happy towns and farms, the lovely blameless children, the terrible/Arrogant cities. He tried to base his peace in the philosophy of inhumanism. At times he seemed to reject not only American life but the life of the race as well. Yet he is ever conscious of his roots, ever ready to pay his birth-dues, to discover new meanings for his people. The westering experience was for him the exemplar of all journeys. Western motifs gave him vehicles for a larger philosophizing. The continents end provided a yardstick to measure the divine cosmos. The western shore was full of life, yet inhospitable, ancient and yet young, violent yet serene, a platform above the Pacific set for tragedy.
R OBERT B ROPHY , California
State University, Long Beach
Primary Sources 1. Works by Jeffers (in chronological order) Flagons and Apples. Los Angeles: Grafton, 1912. A little book of love lyrics, imitative of the Romantic poets. Californians. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Lyrics and narratives, still imitative, reflecting the Big Sur country. Lamar and Other Poems. New York: Peter Boyle, 1924. Dramatically different poetry; free verse, themes of incest, biblical and mythic patterns.
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A Literary History of the American West Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. Expanded volume, major publisher, mythological and cyclic imagery. The Women at Point Sur. New York: Liveright, 1927. I75-page narrative on a renegade minister grotesquely seeking God. Sexual themes, violence. Cawdor and Other Poems. New York: Liveright, 1928. Adaptation of the HippolytusPhaedra theme to the Big Sur coast. Dear Judas and Other Poems. New York: Liveright, 1929. Jesuss passion story as Noh drama. Second tale: Good Shepherd theme in Big Sur. Descent to the Dead. New York: Random House, 1931. Thursos Landing and Other Poems. New York: Liveright, 1932. Tragic flaw and heroic triumph through pain on a coastal ranch. Give Your Heart to the Hawks and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1933. A Cain and Abel story with transvaluation of values on a ranch above Pfeiffer Beach. Includes the 1931 poems from Descent to the Dead. Solstice and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1935. An adaptation of the Medea myth to the Big Sur Coast. Such Counsels You Gave to Me and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1937. A Scottish ballad motif as vehicle for an Oedipal conflict. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House, 1938. New, important introduction. Comprehensive collection. Be Angry at the Sun. New York: Random House, 1941. Strong response to World War II. Medea. New York: Random House, 1946. Adaptation from Euripides. New York theater production in 1947 with Judith Anderson. The Double Axe and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1948. Turbulent political poems against World War II and all wars. Hostile critical reception. Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years. Los Angeles: Ritchie, 1949. A New York Times article, defines the great poet as one who avoids trends and writes as though for future ages. Hungerfield and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1954. Powerful tale; in its lyric frame Jeffers confronts his wifes death. Themes in My Poems. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1956. Text and readings adapted from Jefferss 1941 lecture at the Library of Congress. The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1963. Posthumous collection. Uneven, final statements on man in the shadow of nuclear war. Title poem recapitulates evolution. Robinson Jefers: Selected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1965. Slim paperback of selections, mostly lyric, from his long career. The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968. Revealing letters, striking photographs. The Alpine Christ and Other Poems. N.p.: Cayucos Books, 1974. Early lyrics mostly unpublished, fragment of unpublished drama from World War I era. Brides of the South Wind: Poems 19171922. N.p.: Cayucos Books, 1974. Published and unpublished poems, edited by William Everson.
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In This Wild Water. Los Angeles: Ritchie, 1976. Suppressed poems from The Double Axe manuscripts, correspondence from publishers. What Odd Expedients and Other Poems. Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1981. Twenty-five mostly unpublished poems written about World War II, compiled from the Humanities Research Center manuscripts, University of Texas. 2. Manuscripts Beinecke Library, Yale University. Most of the major manuscripts from 1925 through 1933. Humanities Research Center, University of Texas. Many unpublished manuscripts, including the plays Alpine Christ and Elizabeth and Mary; the final depository of manuscripts from Tor House. Since issue 33, September 1972, the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter has intermittently run a series, Jeffers Scholarly Resources, which locates and describes manuscripts, library by library. Secondary Sources 1. Critical and Biographical Works Adamic, Louis. Robinson Jeffers: A Portrait. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1933. Elementary early pamphlet. Beilke, Marlan. Shining Clarity: God and Man in the Works of Robinson Jeffers. Amador City, Ca.: Quintessence Publications, 1977. Religious themes and developing philosophy. Bennett, Melba. Robinson Jeffers and the Sea. San Francisco: Grabhorn, 1936. Examines water imagery and does some psychological analysis. Less useful. . The Stone Mason of Tor House. Los Angeles: Ritchie, 1966. Preliminary biography. Collected materials and interviews from 1936. Brophy, Robert. Robinson Jeffers. Boise: Western Writers Series, 1975. 50-page pamphlet. Introduction to the man and his themes. . Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual and Symbol in His Narrative Poems. Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1973. His use of Bible, Greek and Roman fertility god myths. Use of cyclic, sacrificial, and sacramental imagery. Carpenter, Frederic I. Robinson Jeffers. New York: Twayne, 1962. Excellent general summary, introduction to philosophy, aesthetics, and themes. Annotated bibliography. Coffin, Arthur. Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Philosophical influences and themes. Expands on and modifies Squires. Everson, William (Brother Antoninus). Archetype West in Regional Perspectives. Chicago: American Library Association, 1973. Jeffers as central figure in study of the Pacific Coast as a literary region. . Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury. Berkeley: Oyez, 1968. Six essays and an elegy. Some Jungian analysis. Examines several poems in depth.
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A Literary History of the American West Gilbert, Rudolph. Shine, Perishing Republic: Robinson Jeffers and the Tragic Sense in Modern Poetry. Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1936. Rather absurd tribute. Greenan, Edith. Of Una Jeffers. Los Angeles: Ritchie, 1939. Flattering portrait by Edward Kusters second wife. Hotchkiss, William. Robinson Jeffers: The Sivaistic Vision. Auburn, Ca.: Blue Oak, 1975. A reexamination of Jefferss critics. Close reading of poems. Luhan, Mabel Dodge. Robin and Una. Berkeley: Bancroft Library, 1976. 36-page booklet. A friends observations and analysis. Biographical. Monjian, Mercedes. Robinson Jeffers: A Study in Inhumanism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958. Brief, philosophic, thematic. Good criticism. Nolte, William. The Merrill Guide to Robinson Jeffers. Columbus: Merrill, 1970. A pamphlet essay of introduction. . Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978. Reexamination of Jefferss romanticism. Powell, Lawrence C. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work. Pasadena: San Pasqual, 1940 (Original edition, 1934). First major study of Jefferss poetics and themes. Squires, Radcliffe. The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956. Important work: Jefferss relation to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lucretius, etc. Examination of philosophic themes. Sterling, George. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926. Brief, appreciative introduction. White, Kenneth. The Coast Opposite Humanity. Llanfynydd, Wales: Unicorn, 1975. Insightful essay of Jefferss philosophy and poetics by another poet. Zaller, Robert. The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Reassessment. Follows Oedipal thread. Integrates recently published early poems. 2. Bibliographical Works Alberts, Sydney. A Bibliography of the Works of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House, 1932. Masterly bibliography with extensive appendix of Jefferss uncollected works. Brophy, Robert. The Prose of Robinson Jeffers: An Annotated Checklist. Robinson Jeffers Newsletter, No. 46 (September 1976): 1437. 121 items: articles, introductions and prefaces, endorsements, answers to questionnaires, tributes, memoirs. Harmon, Robert. The First Editions of Robinson Jeffers. Los Altos, Ca.: Hermes, 1978. Alphabetic listing, descriptive. Several omissions and inaccuracies. Kafka, Robb. Robinson Jeffers Published Writings, 19031911: A Bibliography, Including Items Jeffers May Have Written Pseudonymously, with Reprintings of Poems Generally Unavailable. Robinson Jeffers Newsletter, No. 53 (June 1979): 4768. Nolte, William. Checklist of Robinson Jeffers. Columbus: Merrill, 1970. List of separate publications, bibliographies, biographies, and criticism.
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Rodgers, Covington. A Checklist of Robinson Jeffers Poetical Writings. Robinson Jeffers Newsletter, No. 48 (March 1977): 1124. Exhaustive, descriptive list, except for translations and anthology reprints, of Jefferss poems published since Alberts. , and Robert Brophy. Robinson Jeffers. In First Printings of American Authors. Chicago: Gale (Bruccoli Clark), 1978. Vardamis, Alex. The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1972. 1037 items divided into reviews, articles, and books; annotated.
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AROLD LENOIR DAVISS career as a writer is marked by a series of dichotomies, both as an artist and as an interpreter of the West. He was a maverick who stayed well clear of the literary cliques and trends of his time, yet he was deeply conscious of, and drew heavily upon, the literary tradition. He was very aware of his heritage in the West, and drew heavily upon it, yet he insisted that the history of the West was not separate or special but part of human history and tied closely to what had happened at other places in other times. Throughout his fiction his subject is the comedy and underlying pathos of the human condition, and humanitys astonishing capacity for foolishness and evil, as well as its courage, steadfastness, and love; and yet his most vividly lyrical writing is reserved for the western landscape. Finally, although both his poetry and his prose received high critical praise, including Poetry magazines Levinson Prize, the Harper Novel Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize, his work was neglected by scholars and critics until only recently. Davis was born at Rones Mill, Oregon, in 1894, although he later gave a variety of dates for his birth, and even claimed a variety of other 1 birthplaces around Roseburg, Oregon. His father was a schoolteacher who also trained horses and was known for his marksmanship, despite the handicap of having lost a leg in childhood. Harold was interested in horses throughout his life, owning his own whenever possible, and his knowledge of the firearms used in the American West was encyclopedic. Daviss grandparents on both sides had emigrated to Oregon from Tennessee in the 1850s and 60s, and he had an abiding interest in and detailed knowledge of that period in the history of the West, writing about it both in his poetry and his fiction. His best work, however, grew out of his own childhood and adolescent memories of Oregon. Daviss career as a writer began with poetry. While he was still serving a three-month stint in the army, in the fall of 1918, Davis sent eleven poems, collectively called Primapara, to Harriet Monroe, who published them with enthusiasm in the April 1919 issue of Poetry. For the next decade Davis published only poetry, attracting favorable notice from Carl Sandburg, 2 Robinson Jeffers, and other poets and critics associated with Poetry. Yet despite this promising beginning, Davis never fully found his voice as a poet. His presentation of the western landscape was vivid, often lyrically beautiful, but he peopled that landscape with figures that were vague, indirect,
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as if they spoke always with averted faces. Robinson Jeffers called it reti3 cence, but could not explain it. By 1928 Davis was beginning to experiment with new poetic forms, but he was also beginning, with encouragement from H. L. Mencken, to experiment with short prose pieces. He also married Marion Lay and made the decision to become a full-time writer. The shift to prose was made quickly and successfully, and Davis published no more poetry after 1933, with the exception of a volume of selected poems, Proud Riders, in 1942. All but a very few of the poems in this volume had been published in the 1920s, and so the collection did not represent a significant addition to Daviss poetic works. In 1978, Ahsahta Press published a selection of Daviss poems, including some found among his papers and never before printed. A few of these, notably Last Spring and Clearing Old Stones, show a directness and mastery of tone not often achieved in the earlier work, suggesting that had he continued to write poetry in his later years, Davis might have become a major poet of the American West. Lacking that later emphasis, however, his work as a western poet can be more objectively assessed as significant but not a major achievement. Aside from a few reviews, critical essays, and short occasional pieces in the Rocky Mountain Herald, Daviss short prose writings divide fairly easily into sketches, short stories, and regional essays. The first short story published under Daviss name was Old Man Isbells Wife, which appeared in the February 1929 American Mercury. There is some evidence, however, that two stories published in Adventure in 1928 under James Stevenss name 4 may have been written by Davis. While the sketches may contain fictionalized elements, they do not have fully developed story lines, or well-rounded characterization. Generally they deal with an individual character, a place or a region, or a particular community, with a strong element of history or nostalgia. The quality of Daviss short stories and sketches is uneven. Some are well-crafted works that deserve to survive and undoubtedly will; others are obviously formula potboilers written for sale to the relatively high-paying slick magazines such as Colliers and Saturday Evening Post. Of those that deserve to be remembered and read, perhaps the best stories are Old Man Isbells Wife, Shilohs Waters, Open Winter, The Homestead Orchard, and Stubborn Spearmen, all collected in Team Bells Woke Me and Other Stories. The best of Daviss sketches, including A Town in Eastern Oregon, also appear in that volume. In the short stories and sketches Davis began the development of the themes and techniques that he was to use in the novels that constitute his most important literary production. Old Man Isbells Wife is a remarkably polished first short story, with a complex use of point of view techniques 417
in which the story of a senile old man is seen, sympathetically, through the eyes of a boy. This pairing of a boy and an old man occurs again in Open Winter, and to an extent in Homestead Orchard, both initiation stories, and years later was developed most fully in Daviss next to last novel, Winds of Morning. Perhaps more important to the development of Daviss work, in the short stories and sketches he evolved the colorful, ironic, sometimes savage humor, very much in the straight-faced western tradition, that made it possible for him to set sharply drawn, clearly developed characters against the lyrical descriptions of the western landscape. With this wry, often boisterous humor as a mode of presenting his characters, Davis went beyond the reticent indirection that weakened his poetry. Daviss first novel, Honey in the Horn (1935), is a lively picaresque journey through the Oregon of the turn of the century, but it is also an initiation story about the progress of an adolescent boy becoming a man as he moves from isolated alienation to a capacity not only for the love of a woman, but also for the acceptance of the human condition, with all its guilt as well as its virtues. The humorous irreverence for Oregon society and culture already displayed in such short prose works as A Town in Eastern Oregon and Back to the LandOregon, 1907 had already earned him considerable local resentment in his home state, and when Honey in the Horn again displayed debunking of the more romantic western myths, the outcry in Oregon was loud. As emotions subsided, and the novel was read more perceptively, the essential human sympathy and the universality of the theme were more fully appreciated. Harp of a Thousand Strings (1947) was the second of Daviss novels to be published, although an early manuscript version of Beulah Land predated Harp. The twelve-year hiatus between publication of Honey in the Horn, with the acclaim accompanying the Harper Novel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, and the publication of Harp, was the result of a dispute between Davis and his publisher, Harper, not the result of any diminution of creative activity on Daviss part. Once contractual questions were settled and Davis shifted to William Morrow as his publisher, four novels and two volumes of collected short prose appeared in the next twelve years, and Davis was at work on another novel when he died in 1960. Harp is quite different structurally from Honey in the Horn. Rather than the picaresque series of adventures found in Honey, Beulah Land, and Winds of Morning, Harp presents a carefully even self-consciouslystructured series of triads based on the lives and adventures of a French revolutionary, a French noblewoman, and three Americans. To maintain the symmetry of the triads of love, vengeance, and ambition presented in the Frenchmans 418
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story, and in the stories of the three Americans (drawn from Aristotles triad of vice, imperfect self-control, and brutishness, and from Dantes similar three of incontinence, malice, and brutishness), Davis has to rely very heavily on dramatic coincidence. As a result, what purports to be an historical novel finally has to be read as an elaborate fable. In beginning his story in France and ending it on the prairie frontier in Oklahoma, however, Davis is making an important point about literature of the American West. He is showing that what has happened and is happening in the West is an integral part of the whole history of humanity. The western experience is a part of the total human experience, a unity that Davis felt had not always been presented by writers of the West: It is becoming clear . . . that the early writers [of the West] . . . must have missed something about it, since they failed to establish any unity between it and 5 the world out of which they wrote. What Davis felt they missed he expressed in a review of Robinson Jefferss The Women at Point Sur: Stories have actually neither beginning nor end. Every story is like a river; it began flowing with the beginning of the world, and it will not cease till the world 6 comes to an end. The stories in Harp, then, become stories in the American West, but they remain connected with the rest of the world, illustrating Daviss point that the West is a region neither isolated nor mythical, but rather a part of the whole of human history. Again in Beulah Land (1949) Davis gives us a western story that begins in the East, although still it is the universal human experience that is important rather than the setting. It is a story about love, what it can cost and what it can mean. The Beulah Land that the central characters, Ruhama and Askwani, are seeking is not a physical place so much as it is a place somewhere in which people could love without being shamed or frightened or exterminated for it. There must be such a place; it must be ahead, some7 where beyond the river, beyond the settlements. . . . Davis returns in Beulah Land to the journey motif that he used in Honey in the Horn, but like Harp of a Thousand Strings, Beulah Land is an historical novel covering most of the span of the nineteenth century and using major historical events as a framework for its plot: the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia, the Civil War as it was fought in the Indian Territory. This framework of time and place, however, remains only a concrete illustration of the common human condition in all times and places. Daviss fourth novel, Winds of Morning (1952), was perhaps his most successful both artistically and commercially. In it he returns to his own time and placeOregon in the 1920sand to the journey motif. Developing upon a pattern he used successfully in one of his best short stories, Open Winter, Davis presents the story of a late adolescent boy and an old man travelling through the back country of Oregon in early spring. It is a 419
picaresque adventure, a murder mystery, a love story, an initiation story, and a Christian fable of sacrifice and redemption, all rolled skillfully together. In a reversal Davis had experimented with in Open Winter, the boy is the jaded, worldly wise, cynical one, and the old man is the Adamic innocent who, through a spiritual crucifixion, redeems the sin of a failure of love in his youth. It is a western story in that the old man was an original settler in the region and presents the consequences of the dreams and expectations of the pioneers who saw the West as a new Eden, only to learn that they had brought Satan there with them. The boy, in turn, represents the disillusioned later generations who saw the shattered dreams and unrealistic expectations of the early settlers as romantic mistakes that they would not repeat. Each moves away from his own extreme position and learns from the other. The old settler accepts and learns to live with not only his own guilt but also the guilt of others. He acknowledges the imperfections of his Eden and finds a way to live with them. The boy, on the other hand, breaks out of his lonely cynicism in the discovery of the necessity for love and hope, even in a world that includes evil. When Honey in the Horn was published, much of the comment of its reviewers focused on the novels boisterous humor and colorful western vernacular. Some criticized these qualities and others praised them super8 ciliously. These characteristics were much less in evidence in Harp of a Thousand Strings and Beulah Land, although they did appear briefly from time to time. They reappear in full force in Winds of Morning, and this time the critics did not find them objectionable. Indeed, they add a special flavor and liveliness that Davis had previously achieved only in Honey in the Horn and some of his short prose. These ingredientsthe boisterous but straightfaced humor in the western tradition, the colorful vernacular, and the vividly beautiful landscape of Oregon in the early twentieth centuryall are present in Daviss most successful prose. It seems clear that he was at his best when he drew most directly on his own place and time. Away from those immediate roots he was a skilled writer; drawing directly upon them, he was a master of his art. Daviss last published novel, The Distant Music (1957), again is set in Oregon, but it differs in almost every other way from his four previous novels. Rather than moving an individual consciousness through the experience of a journey, as he did in his earlier works, in this novel Davis takes a place, a single homestead in Oregon, as the center, and shows us how being tied to that place affects three generations of the family that owns it. This is a somber novel that presents the ownership of the land as a kind of bondage that can limit and finally destroy the lives of the settlers and their descendants. Once they have become fixed in a place and are no 420
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longer moving westward, no longer aspiring to a new land, these people begin, as Walter Van Tilburg Clark observed in his review of the novel, to entertain such homemade illusions as Progress, Betterment, and Civic Vir9 tue. As Clark points out, this novel is the further, deeper development of the themes Davis first began to explore in 1930 in A Town in Eastern Oregon, an unflattering sketch of The Dalles. During the 1950s Davis wrote a series of eleven regional essays published in Holiday magazine. Nine of those were soon collected, with a preface and the title fable, into a volume, Kettle of Fire (1959). The essays are a fine evocation of the land and rural people of the Pacific Northwest, particularly Oregon. In Kettle of Fire, the story for which the volume is named, Davis created, late in his career, an outright fable using archetypal patterns and Swiftian irony with little pretense of realism. Daviss first short story, Old Man Isbells Wife, published in 1929, was about a man who had become an absurd figure in his old age, but who deserved respect and credit for what he had been and done in the early days of western settlement. Daviss last published short story, thirty years later, presents a similar theme. It offers strong Promethean and Oedipal overtones, and an openly symbolic journey through the foibles of humanity-all told to a young boy by a foolish old man who is remembering them from his youth. First and last, Daviss fiction presented the western experience as a continuation of the human experience in all times, with all its foolishness, cowardice, and shortsightedness, and all its courage and selflessness and love. Throughout his career Davis found many effective ways to express his vision of the West, but his basic themes remained the same.
P AUL T. BRYANT , Radford
University
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Notes
1. A somewhat fuller outline of the biographical facts of Daviss life, and the evidence upon which they were established, is presented in Paul T. Bryant, H. L. Davis, Twaynes United States Authors Series (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978), pp. 1327. Harriet Monroe, A Poets Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 423; Warren L. Glare, Poets, Parasites, and Pismires, Status Rerum, by James Stevens and H. L. Davis, Pacific Northwest Quarterly 61 (1970): 22-23. The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Ann N. Ridgeway (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 177. This evidence is discussed briefly in Bryant, H. L. Davis, pp. 20, 163. Davis, Preface: A Look Around, Kettle of Fire (New York: William Morrow, 1959), p. 17. Poetry 31 (1928):277. Beulah Land (New York: William Morrow, 1949), p. 189. See, as an excellent example of this, Mary McCarthy, Tall Timber, The Nation 141 (1935): 2489. The Call of the Far Country, New York Times Book Review, February 3, 1957, pp. 5, 29.
2.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Primary Sources 1. Papers and manuscripts By far the most significant collection of Daviss letters, journals, and manuscripts is in the Humanities Research Library at the University of Texas in Austin. Others are at the University of Oregon Library in Eugene, the Tennessee State Library Archives, the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, the Douglas County Museum in Roseburg, Oregon, and the Library of the University of Washington in Seattle. 2. Novels Honey in the Horn. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935. Harp of a Thousand Strings. New York: William Morrow, 1947. Beulah Land. New York: William Morrow, 1949. Winds of Morning. New York: William Morrow, 1952. The Distant Music. New York: William Morrow, 1957. 3. Collections Proud Riders and Other Poems. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942.
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Team Bells Woke Me and Other Stories. New York: William Morrow, 1953. Kettle of Fire. New York: William Morrow, 1959. The Selected Poems of H. L. Davis, with an introduction by Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1978. Secondary Sources Armstrong, George M. H. L. Daviss Beulah Land: A Revisionists Novel of Westering. In The Westering Experience in American Literature: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee. Bellingham, Washington: Western Washington University, 1977. Discusses Daviss unorthodox views of the history of the American West. . An Unworn and Edged Tool: H. L. Daviss Last Word on the West, The Kettle of Fire. In Northwest Perspectives: Essays on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest, ed. Edwin R. Bingham and Glen A. Love. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Pp. 16985. Bain, Robert. H. L. Davis. Boise State University Western Writers Series No. 11. Boise: Boise State University, 1974. A brief but insightful overview of Daviss principal works. Bryant, Paul T. H. L. Davis: Viable Uses for the Past. Western American Literature 3 (Spring 1968): 318. Discusses Daviss techniques for connecting western history with all human history and with the present in the American West. . H. L. Davis. Twaynes United States Authors Series. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. The only book-length treatment of Daviss work, including critical chapters on all novels and critical analysis of some poems and prose works; bibliography. Jones, Phillip L. The West of H. L. Davis. South Dakota Review 6 (Winter 196869): 72-84. Valuable discussion of Daviss novels. Kohler, Dayton. H. L. Davis: Writer in the West. College English 14 (December 1952): 13340. First major critical article on Davis; not yet superseded. Lauber, John. A Western Classic: H. L. Daviss Honey in the Horn. The Western Humanities Review 16 (Winter 1962): 85-86. First to compare Clay Calvert with Huck Finn.
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John Steinbeck
is among the most prolific and most accomplished western American novelists. He is the only western writer who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the only western novelist to have a book reach the top of the best seller list. Still, Steinbeck is not generally regarded as a typically western writer. Perhaps it is because he lived much of his life in the East and, late in his career, wrote books with neither western themes nor western settings. Or perhaps it is because he sometimes seems more than a regional writer. In many of his books he transcends region even as he writes about the West. But John Steinbeck was a western writer. His best novels and short stories are rooted in the fiber and fabric of the American West. In them, Steinbeck defines and gives meaning to what he perceives to be the unique nature of the western American experience. Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in the agricultural community of Salinas, California. He spent his childhood in the Salinas Valley, a fertile corridor of land which reaches south from Watsonville through the sleepy hamlets of Chualar, Gonzales, and Soledad to King City, and is bordered on the east by the Gabilan Mountains and on the west by the Santa Lucia Range and by the Pacific Ocean. As a young boy, Steinbeck roamed the valley, learning about it and its people. At that time, Salinas was a community of about 4,000 people, and was the principal packing and shipping center of the valley. Salinas shippers sent lettuce, celery and other vegetables north, south, and east to the major commodity markets of the West and Midwest. About the only other commercial activity in Salinas was the refining of sugar beets at the Spreckles factory where Steinbeck later worked as a laborer and straw boss. Salinas was a vibrant and prosperous community in 1900, but it was a cultural backwater. In this regard it was utterly unlike the towns along the shore of Monterey Bay, where the Steinbeck family owned a cottage where young John summered. Monterey, Pacific Grove, and Carmel were the seacoast of Bohemia, what writer Willard Huntington Wright, in 1910, caustically called a vortex of animated erudition . . . a magnetizing center for writers, near writers, notsonear writers, distant writers, poets, poetines, artists, daubers, sloydists, and aspiring ladies who spend their days smearing up 1 what would otherwise be very serviceable pieces of canvas. These towns were the watering holes for such notable California literati as George Sterling, Charles Warren Stoddard, Mary Austin, and Jack London, and
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such then-famous social activists as Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens. They set a kind of literary and social tone for life on the Monterey Peninsula which proved attractive to their more famous followers: John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers. As a boy, Steinbeck fell in love with the Monterey Peninsula. He was also charmed by the special softness of the Corral de Tierra which lies just west of Salinas, midway between coast and valley. And he was awed by Big Sur with its majestic sea cliffs and its dark misty forests. Steinbeck found the material for his dozen volumes of California fiction in the Salinas and neighboring valleys, along the shores of Monterey Bay, in the Corral de Tierra and on the Big Sur. Of Mice and Men (1937) opens a few miles south of Soledad where the Salinas River runs deep and green. And East of Eden (1952) begins with a hymn to the valley where the whole valley floor, and 2 the foothills too were carpeted with lupins and poppies. Several of Steinbecks novels and short stories are set along Monterey Bay, near Old Monterey which sits on the slope of a hill, with a blue bay below it and 3 with a forest of tall dark pine trees at its back. And the action in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954) occurs along a part of the Monterey waterfront which Steinbeck called a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. This is Steinbecks Cannery Row, the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whorehouses, and 4 little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop houses. Flight (1938), which is among Steinbecks best short stories, takes place along the wild coast of Big Sur on a small farm a few sloping acres above a cliff that 5 dropped to the brown reefs and to the hissing white waters of the ocean. To a God Unknown (1933) is set near the small community of Jolon, in the southeastern region of Big Sur, where there are forests with aisles and alcoves which seemed to have meanings as obscure and promising as the sym6 bols of an ancient religion. And The Pastures of Heaven (1932) is set in the Corral de Tierra where the orchard lay in dark green squares; the grain was 7 yellow and the hills behind, a light brown washed with lavender. Frederick Manfred, another western writer and a contemporary of Steinbecks, has noted that for most western novelists, its place that writes 8 your books. And surely the central California coast and valleys were to Steinbeck what Chicago was to Sandburg and Yoknapatawpha was to Faulkner. There is an informing sense of place, of region, in Steinbecks fiction. There is a way of seeing that gives meaning to the thematic design of his best work. In that work, landscape is central. Steinbecks California is a vital force in the lives of those of his characters who live in and move across it. 425
Steinbecks father was a merchant and a bookkeeper who became Treasurer of Monterey County. Steinbecks mother taught in one-room school houses all over Monterey County. She was a cultured and broadly educated woman who wanted her only son to be a great scientist or a great scholar. In the handsome mid-Victorian Steinbeck family dwelling on Central Avenue near Salinass main business district, she shaped her sons taste and nurtured his imagination by reading to him, first simple fairy tales and animal stories, and then such childrens classics as Treasure Island, Robin Hood, and Ivanhoe. Later, she introduced her son to the classicsFlaubert, Milton and Hardy as well as the works of such then-popular writers as James Branch Cabell and Donn Byrne. When Steinbeck was nine, she introduced him to the Morte dArthur of Sir Thomas Malory. Rarely in the history of American letters has a childs encounter with a book so forcefully influenced a career in literature. A half-century later, Steinbeck noted that it was this book which was in large measure responsible for his love of the English language, a statement which explains the fact that Arthurian overtones, both thematic and stylistic, pervade his fictional canon. Malorys stories helped form Steinbecks sense of right and wrong, his feelings of noblesse oblige, and his predilection for the cause of the oppressed over that of the oppressor. Indeed, critic John R. Milton, making what he calls safe generalizations about the western novel, has noted that the plot construction, point of view, and theme in many western novels derive from the medieval romance, from Malory, and from the morality plays. And surely this is true of many Steinbeck novelsof Tortilla Flat (1935) with its Malorian form and structure, of The Wayward Bus (1947), which is Steinbecks version of the Everyman allegory, and of In Dubious Battle (1936), the theme of which is informed by Steinbecks allusions to the epic struggle between good and evil, light and darkness. As a student at Salinas High School, Steinbeck was well-rounded if undistinguished, and after graduation he left home for Stanford University, which he attended intermittently for five years, leaving in 1925 without taking a degree. Between academic years, and sometimes during them, he worked at a variety of jobs as a rancher and cotton picker. After leaving Stanford, he went to New York to become a writer. He lived in that city for a year, working at various jobs while he tried unsuccessfully to publish some short stories. He retreated to California on a ship via the Panama Canal, a trip which provided him with the setting for his first novel, Cup of Gold, which was published in 1929. Cup of Gold is set in the Caribbean, and in it Steinbeck chronicles the life of the famous buccaneer, Henry Morgan. It was a commercial failure, and some time later Steinbeck admitted he wasnt very proud of it. Ive outgrown it and it embarrasses me, he wrote. The
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book was an immature experiment. . . . And I really did not intend to pub9 lish it. 1930 was a watershed year in Steinbecks life. In mid-January he married Carol Henning of San Jose, a woman of taste and intellect who would later exert a tremendous impact on his writing. The Steinbecks spent the early part of the year in and around Los Angeles. But in the summer, discouraged by high rents and with no financial prospects, they moved to Pacific Grove where they could live without cost in the Steinbeck family cottage. 1930 was also the year when Steinbeck began his association with Elizabeth R. Otis, of the literary agency of McIntosh and Otis. Not only his agent, Elizabeth Otis was Steinbecks close friend. She believed in him and was certain he would become a great writer. She remained his agent throughout Steinbecks career, and until her death early in 1981 was a great champion of his fiction. Most importantly, 1930 was the year in which Steinbeck met Edward F. Ricketts, the maverick marine biologist who owned and operated the Pacific Biological Laboratory on the waterfront in Monterey and who became Steinbecks closest friend during the two decades of the novelists most important work. Ricketts reinforced Steinbecks interest in science (which began when the novelist took a summer course in zoology at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove), and over the years provided much of the matter which makes up Steinbecks mature view of the world. So taken was Steinbeck with Rickettss person and ideas that he used the biologist as the persona in a half-dozen of his novels. Additionally the two men collaborated on an important work of non-fiction (Sea of Cortez), the content of which is seminal to an understanding of Steinbecks best fiction. Ricketts was a western emigrant who was born and grew up in Chicago. At the University of Chicago, he studied marine ecology with W. C. Allee, who schooled Ricketts in the theory that individual animals have instinctive drives toward communal life, toward patterns of aggregation, and that they cooperate for purposes of survival and reproduction. Ricketts came to California in 1923 and settled along Monterey Bay where the granite tidepools provided him with a ready-made laboratory for his studies of intertidal marine life. He studied the seashore with understanding and affection; he never tired of watching the changing tides and the breaking and retiring waves which to him were symbols of lifes most fundamental processes. His approach was to study things not for themselves but for the structure of their relations. Ed Ricketts believed and taught Steinbeck to believe that specialized visions are usually fragmentary, divisive, and reductionist. Not only a competent scientist who authored the most complete study of the marine invertebrates of the central Pacific Coast (Between Pa-
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cificTides, 1939), Ricketts was also a philosopher, a student of the arts, and an essayist. He was a humanist in the best western sense of the word: he applied knowledge which he gleaned from his study of what he called the good, kind, sane, little animals to form a meaningful view of indivisible man. Steinbeck seems to have understood the quality of Ed Rickettss person and his thinking. In a short essay which the novelist wrote after Rickettss death in 1948, he notes that Rickettss thinking was as paradoxical as his life, so that he was an original and his character was unique. . . . As a scientist, Ricketts mind had no horizons. He was interested in everything. And as a man, said Steinbeck, Ricketts influenced everyone near him. Some, he taught how to think, others how to see or hear. . . . he taught everyone without seeming to. The man Ricketts taught most was, of course, Steinbeck himself, so that when Ricketts died, the novelist insisted that it really wasnt Ed who had died but a large and important part of 10 oneself. Actually, Ricketts was one of several people who influenced the course of Steinbecks thinking during the early 1930s. The Monterey Peninsula was then a haven for western intellectuals. Robinson Jeffers lived in Tor House just south of Carmel. Steinbeck knew Jeffers. He and Ricketts read and discussed his poetry. Evelyn Reynolds Ott, a psychiatrist and former disciple of Carl Jung, operated a practice in Carmel, and from Dr. Ott Steinbeck learned Jungian psychology. Joseph Campbell, who would later become a famous comparative mythologist, was in residence for a time working on what would become his thesis of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. From them and from such lesser lights as Richard Albee, Carlton Sheffield, Beth Ingles, and Susan Gregory, Steinbeck shaped his views about the world. His second book (To a God Unknown) grew from an unfinished play by Webster F. Street, a Monterey attorney whom he met while a student at Stanford. Steinbeck converted Streets text into a novel which chronicles the life of Joseph Wayne, a visionary hero of god-like stature. The book was also a commercial failure, a fact Steinbeck anticipated when he told Elizabeth Otis that it would be a hard book to sell since its main characters make no more attempt at being human than the people in the Iliad. Boileau . . . insisted that only gods, kings and heroes were worth writing 11 about. I firmly believe that. John R. Milton has noted that the most representative characters in western novels tend to exist more in space than in time, and that they usually look outward into that space as much as they look inward into themselves. When there is a looking inward, says Milton, either on the part of the characters or by the novelist himself, it is generally less psychological 428
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than mystical in a land-oriented sense. To a God Unknown is one of Steinbecks only novels in which the protagonist looks inward, and that looking is surely more mystical than it is psychological. The novels importance lies in Steinbecks presentation of his developing holistic world view and his belief in mans almost mystical ability to break through to an understanding of that wholeness. Steinbeck understood the idea of breaking through as it had been developed by Robinson Jeffers in Roan Stallion. And To a God Unknown is, in large measure, Steinbecks morphology of breaking through, which he supports with a comprehensive structure of myth and symbol. Steinbecks first California novel is not flawless, but it greatly surpasses Cup of Gold in the concreteness of its setting and in the sweep of its authors creative imagination. When Steinbeck wrote that only gods, kings, and heroes were worth writing about, he added that the detailed accounts of the lives of clerks dont interest me much, unless, of course, the clerk breaks through into 12 heroism. The Pastures of Heaven is a book about clerks who try but fail to break through into heroism. The novel consists of a group of loosely related stories about the residents of the Corral de Tierra. These are simple people in retreat from complex urban environments which limit human freedom. But because they are shrouded in personal illusions and selfdeceptions, they are unable to adjust to the simple patterns of valley life. They are dreamers whose fantasies are destroyed by the hard facts of reality. They hang on slender threads from a world they do not understand and with which they cannot cope. In the volume, Steinbeck shows compassion for the plight of simple people who strive for but cannot achieve lasting happiness. Indeed, while writing To a God Unknown he may have believed that only gods, kings, and heroes were worth writing about, but by the time he finished The Pastures of Heaven, he realized that present-day kings arent very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are 13 the scientists and the poor. He would write about scientists in later novels; in this book about the Pastures poor Steinbeck never condemns their innocence or their simplicity, but he does portray their self-destructive tendencies towards fantasy and self-deception. The Pastures of Heaven is a bitterly ironic novel because in it Steinbeck shows that those Pastures, however lovely and redemptive, cannot be attained by most men on this earth. The Pastures of Heaven also failed to sell, though it was accorded a more favorable critical reception than Cup of Gold and To a God Unknown. Steinbecks first popular success came with Tortilla Flat, his collection of stories about the paisanos of Old Monterey, the structure of which springs from Steinbecks affection for Malorys Arthurian cycle. This is the first novel in which Steinbeck employed the Monterey Peninsula as setting and backdrop. The episodes in the volume follow logically from those in The 429
Pastures of Heaven as Steinbeck again deals with the inefficacy of retreat; he rejects the idea of dropping out as a means of coping with the complex problems of contemporary life. Steinbeck identified the theme of Tortilla Flat as tragic-comic for it shows, he said, how the paisanos court, like Arthurs round table, forms, flourishes, and dies. The story deals with the adventuring of Dannys friends, with the good they did, with their thoughts and their endeavors. And in the end, Steinbeck shows how the talisman was 14 lost and how the group disintegrated. Steinbecks stories of Danny and the paisano brotherhood were published by Covici-Friede after being turned down by a number of other publishers. Over time, Steinbeck and Pascal Covici became close friends, and when Covici joined the staff of Viking Press in 1938, he took Steinbecks work with him. Covici remained Steinbecks editor for the rest of the novelists career. Steinbeck wrote most of the fiction for which he will be remembered during the 1930s. His acknowledged masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, was published during the last year of that decade. A year later, he and Ed Ricketts embarked upon a scientific expedition to the Gulf of California, a record of which appears in Sea of Cortez along with, among other things, a narrative exposition of many of the ideas Steinbeck had been working out in his fiction. In Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck identifies man as a two-legged paradox who has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. . . . Perhaps, says Steinbeck, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of 15 thought and consciousness. This tragic miracle of consciousness is, for Steinbeck, mans greatest glory as well as his greatest burden. It is the central thematic concern in his fiction, from his characterization of Henry Morgans self-directed drive for power in Cup of Gold to Ethan Hawleys search for meaning in the spiritual wasteland of The Winter of Our Discontent (1960). Steinbeck perceived accurately the gulf between mans dreams and his ability to translate those dreams into reality. He argued, though, that man can transcend his own weakness if only he will not surrender to despair but will rather struggle against the darkness that confuses and disinherits. At the same time, he pointed out that there is no place for innocence in the contemporary world, and that while most men play out the allegory of innocence lost, they must move to a higher level of consciousness, knowing that their only reward may be the satisfaction that comes from accepting things as they really are. Steinbecks notion of the tragic miracle of consciousness underscores the stories in The Pastures of Heaven and Tortilla Flat. It is also a pervasive theme in his only collection of short stories, The Long Valley (1938). In 430
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The Harness, a widowed Peter Randall seeks emancipation from the shackles of a stifling marriage, but he cannot achieve it because he cannot come to terms with the fact of his wifes death. In The White Quail, Steinbeck creates in Mary Teller a character who wallows in fantasy and so cannot respond to the beauty of the environment in which she lives. And in The Chrysanthemums, perhaps Steinbecks most famous short story, Eliza Allens penchant for illusion and self-deception thwarts her attempts to achieve happiness. While the popular success of Tortilla Flat and The Long Valley made Steinbeck a national figure, his reputation was based largely on his ability to tell entertaining tales. And, indeed, while Steinbeck understood that a writer is always engaged in recording his beliefs about life as well as his observations of it, he followed the advice of Edith Mirrielees, his English teacher at Stanford, who taught him the short story writers medium is the 16 spotlight, not the searchlight. It is the spotlight that Steinbeck uses so effectively in his early fiction. Nowhere is this more true than in the final stories of The Long Valley which have been published separately as The Red Pony, and which detail the development of a young boy (Jody Tiflin) from childhood to maturity. The Red Pony tells of Jodys experiences with birth and death; they are stories of his initiation into a violent world where pain and death are everywhere and danger is always present. Gradually, Jody learns that nature fulfills its promise: that life continues, that individual lives end and then begin again, however painful that process may be to accept and understand. The Red Pony has its origins in Steinbecks own past. It was written, he noted, a long time ago, when there was desolation in my family. The first death occurred. And the family, which every child believes to be immortal, was shattered. Perhaps this is the first adulthood of any man or woman. The first tortured question Why? and then acceptance, and then the child becomes a man. The Red Pony was an attempt, an experi17 ment if you wish, to set down this loss and acceptance and growth. Steinbeck uses environment as meaning in telling the story of Jody Tiflin. His portraits of sinister forces working in a benign land, of human smallness in the midst of expansive nature, give his stories an added degree of tension and irony. He writes them out of what Leo Marx called the pastoral design. In The Red Pony, and in all of his best early fiction, he portrays inherently decent men and women who want only to live in peace and harmony in a green pasture. He shows also how dreams are destroyed by the follies and foibles of the dreamers as well as by the inevitable incursion of history, or how innocence gives way to growth of character that clarifies and enriches experience and enables man to make the necessary adjustments and adaptations to the way things are. As he grew to maturity as a writer, Steinbeck gradually became a 431
novelist of affirmation for whom the key to living comes not only in recognizing the wholeness of experience, but acting on that recognition to achieve worthwhile, purposive goals. Steinbecks most famous characters face squarely the tragic miracle of their own consciousness as well as the incompatibility of the pastoral ideal with the facts of contemporary life, and they move through and beyond these understandings to improve the human condition. To portray this theme in fiction, he needed first a broader, more expansive world view, and then a fictional vehicle large enough to suit his thematic purpose. The former he got in large measure from reading and from his friends, particularly from Ed Ricketts, who helped him see beyond a naive romantic anarchism to a philosophically sound order of things in which strong-willed individuals can grow beyond themselves and work to benefit all humankind. In the narrative portion of Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck and Ricketts identify an overall pattern of life in the Gulf of California in which everything is related to everything else. And this leads them to ponder the sociological and biological patterns which underlie this unity and underscore the equilibrium among all living things. They identify the worlds greatest thinkers as those who recognized this unity and acted responsibly on that recognition: a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein came to their greatness through a profound feeling that man is related to the whole thing, re18 lated inextricably to all reality known and unknowable. The vehicle which Steinbeck employed to portray his fully developed world view grew from his understanding of the complex socio-political problems of California agriculture. Steinbecks background in Salinas helped him understand the issues in the farm-labor conflict. When he worked in the fields for the Spreckles Sugar Company, he gained first-hand knowledge of farmworkers and their problems. He had come to understand that he could achieve real power and depth in fiction only if his narratives were true, if they resulted from things he knew through careful observations. And so he worked hard to place his stories in familiar settings and to be scrupulous about the accuracy of detail. Agriculture in California during the 1930s consisted largely of farm factories, owned and operated by large corporations who employed migrant laborers at low wages to pick fruits and vegetables. During the winter of 1934, Steinbeck heard about two farm labor organizers who were hiding in an attic in a house near Monterey. He visited them, and as the result of a series of long conversations with them, he acquired much of the material that went into his most ambitious and important fiction: Of Mice and Men, a novelette about two itinerant ranch hands who travel from job to job, always dreaming of a little house and a couple of acres with rabbits where they will live off the fatta the lan, In
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Dubious Battle, which was called the best labor and strike novel to come 19 out of our contemporary economic and social unrest, and The Grapes of Wrath, an epic treatment of the struggle of a group of tenant farmers as they journey from the Oklahoma dustbowl to the fruit and vegetable orchards of California. The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize. It has been in print continuously, and to this day remains an American classic. Of Mice and Men resembles much of Steinbecks earlier fiction in that he again employs the spotlight rather than the searchlight to tell the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, who come to a Salinas valley ranch where they have contracted to harvest barley. But the book surpasses his earlier fiction in scope of treatment because it takes on a parable-like quality as Steinbeck depicts mans voluntary acceptance of responsibility for his fellow man. George and Lennie dream an impossible dreamto have their own land where they can enjoy peace, leisure, and economic self-sufficiency. At one point in Steinbecks narrative, they almost translate their dream into reality when Candy, the bunkhouse swamper, offers George money to buy the ranch. But the dream collapses when Lennie, whose brute strength is not matched by an adult mind, accidentally kills the wife of the bosss son. The story ends when George kills Lennie to save him from an angry mob. Of Mice and Men is a sophisticated and artful rendering of the basic conflict between two worlds: between an idealized landscape and the real world with its pain and anguish. It is a moving story of two men who need each other and who want to live in delicate partnership with nature. But while Steinbeck portrays the gardens beauty and even allows his characters a momentary glimpse of it, he checks our fantasies (and theirs) by showing how the dream cannot be realized. A vision of an idealized community is undone because, alone in a world they do not understand, Lennie is destroyed and George reduced to a life of personal survival. In Of Mice and Men, then, Steinbeck pays tribute to the power of human friendship and to the Arcadian Garden, but those tributes are sadly ironic. In Dubious Battle is, in many ways, Steinbecks most expertly crafted novel. In it he uses the spotlight approach to plot and character he employed so effectively in his shorter fiction, but he does it in a narrative expansive enough to stand as a rich, full-bodied work of fiction. Steinbecks prose is less lyrical and more disciplined in In Dubious Battle. The surface of his narrative is more realistic than that in any of his earlier books. Yet narrative realism and accuracy of detail were not, for Steinbeck, ends in themselves. Rather, they were a means for him to portray in believable terms his view of the tragic miracle of human consciousness. While finishing In Dubious Battle, he wrote to friend and fellow writer George Albee:
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I dont know how much I have got over, but I have used a small strike in an orchard valley as the symbol of mans eternal, bitter warfare with himself. Im not interested in ranting about justice and oppression, mere outcroppings which indicate the condition. But man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle but himself, he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And his self-hate which goes so closely in 20 hand with self-love is what I wrote about. In Dubious Battle is a realistic strike novel, perhaps the best in our literature, but realism was not the determining factor in Steinbecks choice of the novels theme. Rather, he used facts from well-known California farm-labor disputes to write a complex novel which would be a parable of the human condition. From the earliest days of settlement, agriculture was what tied Californians to the land. Even before the gold rush, newly settled emigrants celebrated Californias central and coastal valleys as utopias of wheat, grapes, oranges and olives, where they and their children might realize the Jeffersonian dream of a life on the land. As early as 1852, newly settled emigrants wrote that the future wealth or poverty of California depends on the success or failure of our agricultural pursuits. But, from the beginning, the dream seemed doomed to fail. Overblown promises and hopes were matched by confusions of land titles and the uncontrolled growth of monopolies, as well as by natural difficultiesthe summer droughts which produced thick clouds of alkaline dust and the winter rains which turned fertile lands into impassable mud. Novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, who in 1879 visited Salinas (which he called a town of purely American character), identified the existence of these large land monopolies as the present chief danger and disgrace of California, and told his readers that we have here in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences which flow from the existence of these large landholdersland thieves, land sharks, or land grabbers, 22 they are more commonly and plainly called. The history of California agriculture is the history of the contradiction between mans desire to live and work on those lush and endless fields under vast and empty skies, and the complex political forces which forced the farmers to exploit their acres as they in turn were exploited by the forces that governed them: the railroads, the commodity markets, and the eastern financial establishment. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Frank Norris, Americas first great novelist of California agriculture, spoke to the subject in The Octopus. It was the most ambitious effort to date to put the raw history of California agriculture into significant fiction. But The Octopus fails as literature because of Norriss melodramatic plot, his over-reliance on myth and symbol, 434
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and the ambiguity of his social protest. In Dubious Battle succeeds where The Octopus fails, and largely because of history. By the mid-1930s, almost all of California agriculture was consolidated and monopolized. Norriss pastoral idylls were implausible in an era which witnessed the collapse of eastern markets, the disregard of the rights of labor, and the oppressions of capital. Steinbecks novel deals with the efforts of Mac, a seasoned labor organizer, and Jim Nolan, a political neophyte, to organize an uprising among the migrant poor in the Torgas Valley. With the help of migrant leaders and the assistance of Doc Burton (who is based in part upon a real doctor of the same namea union physician who worked in the fieldsand in part on Ed Ricketts), Mac and Jim organize the farmers and establish a camp on the land of a small grower named Anderson. When vigilantes destroy Andersons farm, the strikers disperse and the strike is doomed. The central characters in In Dubious Battle, Mac and Jim, are based upon two labor organizers who worked for the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, Pat Chambers and Caroline Decker. And the major events in the novel are composites of information Steinbeck gleaned from conversations with Chambers and Decker about a strike in a peach orchard in Tulare County and an uprising among cotton pickers near Bakersfield, both of which occurred late in 1933. But while the novel is, in this sense, realistic, it is by no means an historical record of the reaction by organized labor to California agribusiness. Indeed, Steinbeck wrote a friend just after the book was published: Im glad you liked the Battle. I knew what it was about once, but Ive heard so much about it that I dont know now. I still think that most realistic writing is farther from the real than most honest fantasy. The Battle with its tricks to make a semblance of real23 ity wasnt very close. In Dubious Battle is a brutal novel, a fact Steinbeck recognized when he acknowledged that it was brutal because it had no authors moral point of view. It is a tough-minded expos of the wrong perspectives, the wrong approaches, and the wrong solutions. The novelist uses a small strike in an apple orchard to symbolize mans eternal, bitter warfare with himself. The battle is indeed dubious; the goals sought by its protagonists reflect muddled social visions and distorted political objectives. Mac and Jim, unlike their real-life counterparts, are cold-blooded revolutionaries who care little for those whose plight they are trying to relieve. And Doc Burton, a scientist by training but a philosopher by disposition, who strives to see the whole picture . . . to be able to look at the whole 24 thing, is incapable of applying the insights of his understanding to alleviate the problems of the disinherited. At the end of the novel, Burton ends up a lonely man, working all alone, toward nothing. The book ends where it began, its characters clouded in confusion and nightmare. The epi435
graph from Miltons Paradise Lost is instructive and while, as Jackson Benson and Anne Loftis note, In Dubious Battle may not be Miltons hell, it is cer25 tainly hell, nevertheless. That this depiction of hell, this parable of mans self-hatred, is even today regarded as one of the most truthful novels of our time, is a comment on our time, on our tastes, and on our belief about relationships between literature and history. Whereas In Dubious Battle ends in chaos and confusion, The Grapes of Wrath ends in triumph. It is without question Steinbecks most successful novel; the epic scale on which the book is written enables the novelist to say virtually everything he knows and feels about the human condition. When Steinbeck began writing The Grapes of Wrath, he had just completed an assignment for George West of the San Francisco News, who had asked him to do a series of articles on the dustbowl migrants. Those articles were published as The Harvest Gypsies in September of 1936, and they remain today as superb examples of advocacy reporting. They conform to the mode of the documentary, popular at the time, and perfected by James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1946). Steinbeck was familiar with the documentary as artistic idiom. He had seen the famous photographs of Dorothea Lange and the films of Pare Lorentz, and he uses their techniques to heighten and enlarge the scope of the narrative in The Grapes of Wrath. That narrative is the story of the Joad family, a group of Oklahoma tenant farmers who pursue a dream of prosperity in the lush fruit orchards of California. What they find, of course, is poverty and squalor. They join the many thousands of migrant poor who compete for pitifully low wages and are forced to live in shabby, overcrowded accommodations not even suited for animals. There is, says Steinbeck, a failure . . . that topples all our success, a crime here that goes beyond denunciation, a 26 sorrow that weeping cannot symbolize. The Grapes of Wrath is dedicated to Carol, who willed it and to Tom, who lived it. The former is the novelists wife, who was an astute critic of her husbands work and helped him avoid the kind of self-indulgent lyricism which harms his earliest fiction. The latter was Tom Collins, a migrant camp organizer for the Federal Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration) who organized migrant camps, first near Marysville, north of Sacramento, and then at Weedpatch, near the small central California community of Arvin. Collins was a legend among Resettlement Administration employees on the West Coast. Steinbeck visited with Collins extensively while writing his articles for the San Francisco News, and used Collinss knowledge as a starting point for much of the factual detail that appears in The Grapes of Wrath. This books thematic design is informed by work Steinbeck had done on an essay he wrote while completing In Dubious Battle and which he 436
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called Argument of Phalanx. In it, he noted that men are not really final individuals, but are part of the phalanx which controls individual men and which, because it is more than a sum of its parts, can achieve ends beyond the reach of individual men. It is impossible, says Steinbeck, for man to defy the phalanx without destroying himself. For if a man goes into a wilderness, his mind will dry up and at last he will die of starvation for the suste27 nance he can only get from involvement in the phalanx. In In Dubious Battle, Doc Burton is unable to key into the striking migrant phalanx and provide direction to the blind party organizers. He grows lean and hungry and drifts away into the night. But in The Grapes of Wrath, Jim Casy, the clear-visioned ex-preacher who travels with the Joads to California, returns from the wilderness knowing we got a job to do. And he applies the principles of his unified view of life, of the wholeness of all experience, to bring the migrants together. He keys into the migrant phalanx and dedicates himself to help those folks out lonely on the road, folks with 28 no lan, no home to go to. During the course of the novel, Casy turns social activist, and he gives his life to help end the oppression of the dispossessed. He becomes a Christ who directs his disciples, the Joad family, from need to concept and finally toward action. His life and death serve as a catalyst which unites the Joads with the entire migrant family in the struggle for dignity and a decent standard of living. At the beginning of their journey from the dustbowl to the valleys of California, the Joads are a jealous, self-interested group of individuals. But, during the course of their journey, Steinbeck chronicles their movement from the I to the We, in which the Joads recognize their kinship with the vast human family which, 29 in Casys words, got one big soul everbodys a part of. Steinbecks story begins with the migrants sitting in the doorways of their houses, their hands busy with sticks and little rocks. The men sat stillthinkingfigur30 i n g . But, gradually, as need turns toward concept and action, the fear went from their faces, and anger took its place and the women sighed with relief for they knew it was all rightthe break had not come; and the break 31 would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath. Jim Casy and those members of the Joad family who become his disciples are, then, true Steinbeck heroes. They come to understand the unity of life; they know, as Tom Joad says, that man does not exist alone cause 32 his little piece of a soul wasnt no good less it was with the rest. And they break through the walls of self-interest to do battle against political and economic injustice. In East of Eden, Steinbecks last California novel, the novelist notes that while most men are destroyed, there are others who 33 like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. Jim Casy and his followers are those pillars of fire. They affirm Steinbecks belief that man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows 437
beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his 34 accomplishments. The Grapes of Wrath was published early in 1939, and it left Steinbeck exhausted. So when Ed Ricketts suggested that they collaborate on a study of the marine life in the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck jumped at the opportunity. Steinbeck and Ricketts traveled to the Gulf of California in March of 1940, and the record of that expedition was published in December of 1941. Most assumed that Steinbeck wrote the first part of Sea of Cortez, a narrative about the trip, and that Ricketts wrote the second part, a phyletic catalog. Actually, the book was a true collaboration. Steinbeck shaped the narrative from a log Ricketts kept during the trip. Sea of Cortez is a literate study of the ecology of the Gulf. It is also a work of travel literature and a treatise on philosophy and ethics. The best passages in the narrative portion are those in which Steinbeck and Ricketts depict a world-view in terms more mystical and intuitive than scientific, and in which they affirm the importance of a comprehensive culture. Putting together the narrative late in 1940, Steinbeck noted that the book was a good clearing out of a lot of ideas that had been working on him for a long time. It is a record of a scientific voyage and of explorations in philosophy, bright with sun and wet 35 with sea water, and the whole crusted over with exploring thought. The bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 changed the direction of Steinbecks life and work. Immediately, he donated his services to the war effort, and he authored various non-fiction pieces about the war and one play-novelette, The Moon Is Down (1942), a work about the invasion of a small Scandinavian village which was popular among resistance armies throughout Europe. The war deprived Steinbeck of the California idiom which underpins his best fiction. He tried to regain this idiom in Cannery Row (1945)) which is, as he claimed, a kind of nostalgic thing, written for a group of soldiers 36 who had said to me, Write something funny that isnt about the war. The book is set in Monterey and deals with the exploits of a group of waterfront vagabonds and Doc, their friend and protector (based largely on the person of Ed Ricketts), and is a light-hearted indictment of what we call civilized society. When, in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson visited Monterey, he wrote that the towns delightful denizens would not be strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and so the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a lower race, be37 fore the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza. When Steinbeck came to write Cannery Row, he shared Stevensons fear of the Big Bonanza, which seemed much closer in 1945 than when Stevenson visited the Monterey Peninsula nearly seventy-five years earlier. The characters in Cannery Row are Stevensons quaint and penniless 438
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people. They are an outrageous and wonderful group of men and women: Doc, Mack, Hazel, Gay, Lee Chong, and the girls of the Bear Flag. And the portraits of the vacant lots and back streets of Monterey, the great coastal tidepools, and the Carmel backcountry are charming and authentic. The setting is less authentic and the characters not nearly so endearing in Steinbecks next novel, The Wayward Bus (1947), a complex allegory of modem life in which a diverse, petty, self-directed group of people thrown together on a bus bound from one California community to another are forced during their journey to examine themselves and their relationships with one another. The novel ends on a positive note: the wayward bus and its redeemed passengers lumber on into San Juan de la Cruz, but somehow we just dont care. Juan Chicoy, the bus driver and Steinbecks protagonist, and the passengers he helps redeem do not grow beyond their concepts because they have none; they do not emerge ahead of their accomplishments because they accomplish little. Rather, they do what the animals that Steinbeck and Ricketts observed in the Gulf of California do: survive. And this is the books irony, the tragedy of mans pilgrimage through modem life. Steinbecks post-war fiction, Cannery Row and The Wayward Bus as well as The Pearl, which is based upon a fable Steinbeck heard during his Sea of Cortez expedition and which is set in the Gulf of California, reflects the vision of a man living in a changed America where the simple human virtues have given way to the onslaught of material civilization. To make matters worse, Ed Ricketts was killed in a freak train-car accident in May of 1948. Steinbeck was devastated. By this time he had divorced his first wife and married and divorced his second. He lived in New York and so distanced himself from the California backdrop of his best fiction. Still, he labored on a giant novel about California which he tentatively titled Salinas Valley and which was published in 1952 as East of Eden. During the composition of this novel, he completed work on his third play-novelette, Burning Bright (1950), which is less a work of art than an abstract piece of philosophizing which Steinbeck works out through an imaginary dialogue with Ricketts. He also finished a screenplay for Viva Zapata!, a fictional history of the Mexican agrarian reformer which Elia Kazan made into a successful film in 1952. In it, Steinbeck tells of Zapatas drive for land reform in Mexico. He not only recreates one of the most turbulent and exciting periods in the history of that country, but he conveys again his belief in mans personal capacity for greatness of deed and spirit. All the time, however, he continued work on his big novel. East of Eden is a sprawling study of three generations of two California families (the Trasks and the Hamiltons) in which Steinbecks central theme is his thesis that man can rule over sin. His thematic vehicle is the Hebrew word 439
timshel, which he translates thou mayest, and which he says is mans greatest gloryan affirmation of free will by which man can assert his moral impulse. Somehow though, East of Eden does not work. In combining the story of his own family, the Hamiltons (which he tells with great sensitivity to place, the California he knew and loved so well), with the story of the Trasks, given through a fictional dramatization of the Cain-Abel tale, Steinbeck confused narratives. More importantly, he allowed conventional morality to replace science and intuition as a way of seeing and so he moved away from his unique view of man and the world. His characters are symbolpeople whose symbolic values are not simply discernible but overwhelming. East of Eden is not a major work in Steinbecks overall literary canon. But this, the last of his major novels set in the American West, is certainly impressive for the largeness of its scope and for the expansiveness of its design. Steinbeck would write several more novels and works of non-fiction, but none would match his best works of the 1930s, nor even equal the ambitious range of East of Eden. Sweet Thursday (1954) is an empty sequel to Cannery Row. By the time Steinbeck wrote it, the sardine industry in Monterey had collapsed. The world of the novel is the world of the Row Steinbeck found after the war, where there were only silent canneries of corrugated iron and where a pacing watchman was their only life. The 38 street which once roared with trucks was quiet and empty. So is most of the novel; it is a bittersweet lament for the death of an era Steinbeck loved, and for the man, Ed Ricketts, who was its central symbol. Steinbecks next novel, The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957), is a languid tale about what happens to a retiring, middle-aged astronomer suddenly drafted to rule the unruly French. Set in Europe, it is a slight book which was written during a time when Steinbeck had begun work on a modernized edition of Malorys Morte dArthur. He prepared for this task by reading extensively about the Arthurian legends, and by travelling through the English and Welsh countryside with his third wife, Elaine. Over the course of several years Steinbeck translated major portions of the Morte dArthur. Five of the six parts of The Tale of King Arthur and other fragments were published posthumously in 1976 as The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. Steinbecks last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1960), is set in New England, and is a vision of the modern wasteland, a study of the moral vacuum in contemporary America, where all codes of decency and morality have given way to a fast-buck philosophy. Realizing, perhaps, that he had nowhere to go as a novelist, Steinbeck returned finally to non-fiction, a mode which reflected his personal interest in travel and in journalism. In 1962, he wrote Travels with Charley in Search of America, a record of his trip 440
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across the United States with his French poodle. In 1966, he wrote America and Americans, a book-length photo essay of reflections about Steinbecks America. Two years later, in December of 1968, he died in New York City. His body was carried back to S a1 inas for burial. Though Steinbeck remained, to the end, a writer of affirmationparticularly in America and Americans, where he notes that while we have failed sometimes, taken wrong paths, paused for renewal, filled our bellies and licked our wounds, we have never slipped back-he tone of his last book is of loss. The end of Travels with Charley is instructive: Steinbecks remark to a New York policeman that Ive driven this thing all over the countrymountains, plains, deserts. 39 And now Im back in my own town, where I liveand Im lost, reflects a sense of dislocation by a novelist who was a product of an earlier age and a different place. In his best work though, in those early treatments of the denizens of the Corral de Tierra, Salinas, and Old Monterey, and then in his great political novels of the 1930s, Steinbeck treated with sympathy and deep compassion mans fumbling efforts to deal with the realities of life. Against the backdrop of a California which held out the promise of unlimited possibility, Steinbeck wrote memorable pictures of American lives, not the way books are supposed to be written, as he once said about The Grapes of Wrath, but about the way lives are really lived. The subject of those books is the human condition. The excellence of such volumes as The Pastures of Heaven, Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, In Dubious Battle, and The Grapes of Wrath affirms that he is among the most important writers in the history of the western literary experience.
R ICHARD A STRO , Northeastern
University
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Notes
1. Willard Huntington Wright, Hotbed of Soulful Erudition, Los Angeles Times (May, 1910), as republished in Tales of Monterey, eds. Davis and Judy Dutton (Sausalito: Comstock Editions, 1974), p. 78. 2. John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Bantam, 1955), p. 2. 3. John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (New York: Viking Compass, 1963), p. 1. 4. John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (New York: Bantam, 1959), p. 1. 5. John Steinbeck, Flight, in The Long Valley (New York: Viking Compass, 1956), p. 45. 6. John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown (New York: Bantam, 1955), p. 29. 7. John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven (New York: Bantam, 1951), p. 113. 8. Frederick Manfred in conversation with Richard Astro, May 10, 1975. 9. John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis, as published in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, eds. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 17. 10. John Steinbeck, About Ed Ricketts, Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: Viking Compass, 1962), p. xi, xvii, x, xi, xiii. 11. John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis, as published in A Life in Letters, p. 69. 12. A Life in Letters, p. 69. 13. The Viking Critical The Grapes of Wrath, ed. Peter Lisca (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 861. 14. Tortilla Flat, p. 1. 15. Log from the Sea of Cortez, p. 96. 16. Edith R. Mirrielees, Writing the Short Story (New York: Doubleday, 1929), p. 3. Steinbeck acknowledges the influence of Ms. Mirrielees on his writing in his Preface to the Viking Compass edition of Mirrieleess Story Writing (New York: Viking, 1962), pp. viviii. 17. John Steinbeck, My Short Novels, published in Steinbeck and His Critics, eds. E. W. Tedlock and C. V. Wicker (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957), p. 38. 18. Log from the Sea of Cortez, p. 217. 19. Fred T. Marsh, New York Times (February 2, 1936), section 6, p. 7. 20. John Steinbeck to George Albee, as published in A Life in Letters, p. 98. 21. J. H. Carson, Early Recollections of the Mines, as published in Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 18501915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 192. 22. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Old Pacific Capital, in Tales of Monterey, p. 68. 23. John Steinbeck to Carl Wilhelmson, postmarked April 1, 1936, as printed in Jackson J. Benson and Anne Loftis, John Steinbeck and Farm Labor Unionization: The Background of In Dubious Battle, American Literature 52 (May 1980): 222223. The Benson-Loftis article is the best published study of the novels background. 24. John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle (New York: Bantam, 1961), p. 103. 25. Benson and Loftis, p. 223.
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26. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Compass, 1958), p. 477. 27. John Steinbeck, Argument of Phalanx, as published in Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973), chapter 4. 28. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 76. 29. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 33. 30. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 7. 31. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 592. 32. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 570. 33. East of Eden, p. 274. 34. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 204. 35. Log from the Sea of Cortez, p. 271. 36. My Short Novels, in Steinbeck and His Critics, p. 39. 37. The Old Pacific Capital in Tales of Monterey, p. 71. 38. John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday (New York: Bantam, 1956), p. 1. 39. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 245.
Primary Sources 1. Books by John Steinbeck (in order of publication) Cup of Gold. New York: McBride, 1929; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1937. The Pastures of Heaven. New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932; London: Allan, 1933. To a God Unknown. New York: Ballou, 1933; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1935. Tortilla Flat. New York: Covici-Friede, 1935; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1935. In Dubious Battle. New York: Covici-Friede, 1936; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1936. Of Mice and Men: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Covici-Friede, 1937. The Red Pony. New York: Covici-Friede, 1937; enlarged edition, New York: Viking, 1945. The Long Valley. New York: Viking, 1938; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1939. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1939. Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely ]ournal of Travel and Research, by Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts. New York: Viking, 1941. Republished in part as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, New York: Viking, 1951; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1958; adds About Ed Ricketts, by Steinbeck. The Moon Is Down. New York: Viking, 1942; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1942. The Moon Is Down: Play in Two Parts. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1942; London: English Theatre Guild, 1943.
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A Literary History of the American West Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team. New York: Viking, 1942. Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1945. The Wayward Bus. New York: Viking, 1947; London &Toronto: Heinemann, 1947. The Pearl. New York: Viking, 1947; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1948. A Russian Journal. New York: Viking, 1948; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1949. Burning Bright. New York: Viking, 1950; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1951. Viva Zapata! Rome: Edizioni Filmeritica, 1952; new edition, ed. Robert Morsberger, New York: Viking, 1975. East of Eden. New York: Viking, 1952; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1952. Sweet Thursday. New York: Viking, 1954; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1954. The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication. New York: Viking, 1957; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1957. Once There Was a War. New York: Viking, 1958; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1959. The Winter of Our Discontent. New York: Viking, 1961; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1961. Travels with Charley in Search of America. New York: Viking, 1962; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1962. America and Americans. New York: Viking, 1966; London: Heinemann, 1966. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, edited by Chase Horton. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976. 2. Short Fiction in Periodicals Adventures in Arcademy: A Journey into the Ridiculous. Stanford Spectator 2 (June 1924): 279, 291. Fingers of Cloud: A Satire on College Protervity. Stanford Spectator 2 (February 1924): 149, 16165. His Father. Readers Digest 55 (September 1949): 1921. How Edith McGillicuddy Met Robert Louis Stevenson. Harpers 183 (August 1941): 252258. How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank. Atlantic 197 (March 1956): 58-61. Miracle of Tepayac. Colliers 122 (December 25, 1948): 2223. Sons of Cyrus Trask. Colliers 130 (July 12, 1952): 1415. 3. Non-Fiction in Periodicals Always Something to Do in Salinas. Holiday 17 (]une 1955): 58ff. Conversation at Sag Harbor. Holiday 29 (March 1961): 6061, 129131, 133. Dubious Battle in California. Nation 143 (September 13, 1936): 302304. Fishing in Paris. Punch 227 (August 25, 1954): 24849. How to Fish in French. Readers Digest 66 (January 1955): 5961.
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Jalopies I Cursed and Loved. Holiday 16 (July 1954): 4445, 8990. The Secret Weapon We Were Afraid to Use. Colliers 131 (January 10, 1953): 913. Some Thoughts on Juvenile Delinquency. Saturday Review 38 (May 28, 1955): 22. The Stars Point to Shafter. Progressive Weekly (December 24, 1938) [np.]. 4. Manuscripts Steinbeck correspondence and/or manuscript material for his books is on file at the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, San Jose State University, Ball State University, and the Salinas Public Library. For a selected inventory of the contents of these collections, see A Handbook for Steinbeck Collectors, Librarians, and Scholars, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi, Steinbeck Monograph Series, No. 11 (Muncie: Ball State University, 1981), pp. 2944. Secondary Sources Astro, Richard. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973. A comprehensive study of the impact of Rickettss thinking on Steinbecks fiction and non-fiction. . and Joel Hedgpeth, eds. Steinbeck and the Sea. Corvallis: Oregon State University Sea Grant Program Press, 1975. Short volume of critical essays. . and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971. Articles on Steinbeck by literary critics, social historians, and friends of the novelist. Davis, Robert M., ed. Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Collection of better articles on Steinbeck written between 1930 and 1970. Fontenrose, Joseph. John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpetation. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963. Brief but useful introduction to Steinbeck with emphasis on his use of myth and legend in fiction. French, Warren. John Steinbeck. New York: Twayne, 1961. Solid critical introduction with a particularly valuable study of The Grapes of Wrath. Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. Steinbecks Literary Dimension. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1973. Collection of comparative essays which contrast Steinbeck with other major modern writers. . A Study Guide to Steinbeck: A Handbook to His Major Works. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1974. Critical introduction to the major works, with study questions. Kiernan, Thomas. The Intricate Music: A Biography of John Steinbeck. Boston: Atlantic, Little Brown, 1979. Informal, unbalanced and inadequate biography. Levant, Howard. The Novels of John Steinbeck. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974. Difficult but worthwhile study of Steinbeck as a stylist. Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958. Perhaps the best, most comprehensive study of Steinbecks literary achievements.
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A Literary History of the American West . John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1978. Brief volume for younger readers, but with new insights into Steinbecks use of myth and symbol. Marks, Lester. Thematic Design in the Novels of John Steinbeck. The Hague: Mouton, 1969. Useful study of Steinbecks major fictional themes. Moore, Harry Thornton. The Novels of John Steinbeck. Chicago: Normandie House, 1939. Dated but still interesting first study of Steinbeck. Steinbeck, Elaine, and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New York: Viking Press, 1975. A comprehensive autobiography in letters, carefully selected, expertly annotated. Valjean, Nelson. John Steinbeck: The Errant Knight. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1975. Interesting, folksy biography of Steinbecks California years.
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Theodore Roethke
THEODORE ROETHKE'S sudden, untimely death in summer of 1963, his work has been the subject of a steadily rising flood of critical assessments. The consensus of most of them is that his career can best be explained as an intense search for identity, wholeness, and grace. He shaped his private meditations into increasingly powerful esthetic forms that are at once original and charged with echoes from his various American and English poet-masters. A further aspect of Roethkes imaginative vision, however, remains to be adequately explored, namely his significant response to a regional Americathe Midwest of his youth and, climactically, the Pacific Northwest where he lived his final sixteen years. INCE
I Roethke arrived in the Northwest in autumn of 1947 to teach poetry at the University of Washington, which remained his academic address until his death. The move from Penn State westward marked the crucial turning point in his career and the beginning of a serious identification with place in America. There were, of course, hints of regional identity in Roethke from the earlier period as he alternately suppressed, deplored, and finally embraced his Midwest origins. Born in 1908 in Saginaw, Michigan, the son of a strong-willed, Germanic father who operated the local greenhouse, he lived an introverted, troubled childhood that bred lifelong demons of guilt and insecurity. His biographer Allan Seager portrays, and somewhat oversimplifies, Roethke as a self-absorbed youth who scarcely felt a spirit of place in his Upper Midwest: There is no memory of Roethke hanging around the old folks listening, like Faulkner, and his old folks were German, anyway. Their stories would have led him back to the Old Country which never interested him. He also ignores all the vivid racy tales of the lumber boom, tales that expressed courage, will, and cunning that might have engaged another man. Unlike Allen Tate or Robert Lowell, he ignores in his poetry the events of his regions history. He must have been aware of the Indians, for he collected a shoebox full of flint arrowheads in his rambles along the riverbanks. But, of course, many boys did that.
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Still, the environs of Saginaw and the Upper Midwest were implanted in a young poetic consciousness as a seminal force in the work to come. After graduation from Michigan and a year at Harvard, Roethke taught at Lafayette, returning home in 1935 to teach at Michigan State. In fall semester, he suffered a first mental breakdown. During convalescence, he recorded the following insight about himself in a long medical questionnaire: Afraid of being localized in space, i.e. a particular place like W. E. Leonard in Madison. Question: What is the name of this? Hate some rooms in that sense, a victim of claustrophobia (sp)? Wasnt Dillinger a victim of this? Arent many of the criminal leader types of this sort [sic] (The illuminating reference to Dillinger discloses Roethkes self-image of the poet as an outsider in the Midwest community, and recalls the alienation he felt even earlier: in one of his college essays at the University of Michigan, he had discussed the poet as criminal, the instance being Franois Villon.) His first two books of poetry firmly support a one-sided thesis that the maturing Roethke was never a midwestern regionalist, either by sympathetic identity or literary example. The year before Open House appeared in 1941, ten of the poems were anthologized in a volume titled New Michigan Verse. Hungry for a reputation, Roethke was delighted to be published, but he worried, too, that he might be regarded as a merely regional poet. Yet shortly after, he applied for a Guggenheim grant to write a series of poems about the America I knew in my middle-western childhood. . . . poems about people in a particular suburbia. Though he failed to receive the grant, Roethke persisted, and in his successful Guggenheim application three years later, he described two of his three projects as the writing of a distinctively regional verse: (1) a dramatic-narrative piece in prose and verse about Michigan and Wisconsin, past and present, which would center around the return of Paul Bunyan as a kind of enlightened and worldly folk-hero. (2) a series of lyrics about the Michigan countryside which have symbolical values. I have already begun these. They are not mere description, but have at least two levels of reference. To William Carlos Williams, who would understand this regional program, Roethke worried over the Paul Bunyan idea. The more I think about it, the less I like it. But Ive got to get some device to organize some of my ideas & feelings about Michigan, etc.not too solemn or God bless America or Steve Bentish. Maybe its worth trying, anyway. When The Lost Son appeared in 1948, readers would not discover Roethkes early ideas & feelings about Michigan to be organized around the Bunyan folk-hero; instead, he had created a primordial myth of the childs Edenic greenhouse 448
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world. But the urge to regional description and symbolization, as well as to natural immersion and union, had begun. After 1947 in his adopted Northwest, Roethke increasingly drew from Michigan scenes of his childhood. The Midwest lived in the residue of memory, at times bitter yet also positive and cherished, to sustain the older poet and enrich the strong poems that grace his final, prize-winning years. II As it would predictably have to be for the mercurial Roethke, the final period in the Pacific Northwest became an intense love-hate affair with the regional culture and geography. After only a few months there, his life amounted to a sort of physical and spiritual exile. I tell you, Kenneth, he wrote to Burke, this far in the provinces you get a little nutty and hysterical: theres the feeling that all life is going on but youre not there. Within the year, he had reverted to the earlier self-characterization of the poet as at best an outlaw celebrity in his tame middle-class community. As the only serious poet within 1,000 miles of Seattle, he wrote another friend in the East, I find I have something of the status of a bank robber in Oklahoma or a congressman in the deep south. Throughout his tenure at the University of Washington, he inquired into jobs elsewhere or applied for Fulbrights and other grants that might bring him relief or delivery from the scene at Seattle and the University. This alienation was caused, in part, by what to him was a psychologically depressing climate in the Northwest. The region also affected him physically, exacerbating the arthritis in his knees, the spurs in his shoulders, and the bursitis in his tennis elbow (the fiercely competitive poet had been tennis coach both at Lafayette and Penn State). Yet the Northwest had an immediate, salutary effect on the poet as well. Some eleven years before, a bookless Roethke in Michigan had lamented to Louise Bogan on his twenty-eighth birthday, No volume out and I cant seem to write anything. You can say what you want, but place does have a lot to do with productivity. By contrast, he exploded with ideas and poems after he arrived in Seattle, as one discovers from the Northwest images and tropes coming alive in the extant notebooks, in their disciplined growth amid the felicitous prunings of the manuscript poems, and in the final harvest of the published work. Through the 1950s, the huge, unlikely poet-teacher had caused an excited flowering of poetry on the Washington campus and in the Seattle community. By the end of the decade he brought home to the Northwest all the major literary prizes in America. He was earning a place among the distinguished regional poets of our literature. 449
III
The nature of Roethkes regional expression has only begun to be appreciated. His first book of poems in the Northwest appeared in 1951. Praise to the End ! is a tensed-up version of Wordsworths Prelude, according to Roethke, and carries nine new poems which can be read, in one sense, as his completing the lean-to beginnings in the previous Lost Son collection. Once more he tracks his voyage of the minds return to the dream logic, Mother Goose rhythms, and purposeful gibberish of childhood, and then back again to the varieties of rebirth after these mythic descents. Oblique and occasionally even direct influences from his early Northwest years can be recognized here and there in the expression and form of these verses. A stronger promise of the regional poems to come appears in the new verses of his next book, The Waking: Poems 19331953 (1953). A Light Breather, to select one, reveals a joyous dynamism of the spirit, small and tethered as before but now unafraid and singing. Symptomatic of a new phase, too, are poems like Elegy for Jane, totally inspired from Northwest experience, and the more ambitious efforts which show the poet escaping from his former prison of the self to engage the circumambient world and the being of other living creatures. Just before the book appeared, he had married Beatrice OConnell, his student during the year at Bennington a decade before. Seager believes that Roethkes marriage presently led him to a decisive awareness of the Northwest surroundings. As his capacity for feeling reached out to his young Beatrice, hesitantly, even reluctantly perhaps, he admitted her into those labyrinths within himself where his father still lived, and he began to love her, not in the same way that he loved his father but with a true love nevertheless. And from this time forward, she participated in his growth, encouraged and supported it. Then he could see the mountains, the siskins, the madronas, and begin to use them. Viewed in this regard, segments of the next book, Words for the Wind (1958), and especially the Love Poems, when thoroughly studied for their passionate metaphors of wind and seafoam, light and stones and rippling water as spirit and nature beat in one breast-bone, reveal the true beginnings of that distinctive Northwest sensibility which fully emerges in Roethkes subsequent poems, gathered in the posthumous The Far Field (1964). The title poem of Roethkes final volume comes from the North American Sequence, the great achievement of this last book and Roethkes finest effort in the vein of literary regionalism. In the years to come, the six interlaced long poems of the North American Sequence may rank among the great ambitious poetic works of the language. The genesis of the se-
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quence may be traced, in one fashion, to the summer of 1950. Roethke had bought his first car and had driven it back to Seattle. The trip created the stirrings of a symbolical journey, his own spiritual version of a Northwest passage. It suggested for next or possibly later book . . . a happy journey westward; but there would be a uniquely Roethkean variation of this traditional passagein a word, a symbolical journey in my cheap Buick Special toward Alaska and, at least in a spiritual sense toward the east of Russia and the Mongolian Plains whence came my own people, the Prussians. . . . By the end of the decade, Roethke had modified this journey to an exclusively North American and ultimately regional experience. What he developed, in fact, is an intricate triple motif of outer-inner journeys. First is the Northwest passage to the dark oceanic stretch in the face of death, and the periodic resolution experienced at the Pacific Coast shoreline, a journey out to the physical edge and metaphysical beyond and then back to reconciliation where sea and fresh water meet in the Northwest comer. The second passage or journey is a return to his origins, a movement eastward to the Michigan of his fathers greenhouse and childhood years. Third is a journey to the interior, imaged in an inland American geography perhaps equivalent, temporally, to the middle period of Roethkes initial breakdown in what he once termed that Siberian pitilessness, the essential ruthlessness of the Middle West. Of the three journeys, the Northwest passage is by far the richest and most dominant in the six poems of the sequence. Roethke gathers within it the shifting motifs of selfhood within the Northwests natural plenitude, identifications with birds, fish, trees, and flowers (and occasionally as relief, with the stillness of rocks, clam shells, driftwood, and natures minimals); the imagery of edges, abysses, and thresholds; the desire for convergence, resolution and union with the natural scene of salt water, fresh water, air, and earth; and on occasions, when blessedly aided by the soft regional light and wind, a felt convergence, with shimmerings of transcendence and beatitude. Roethke establishes these interwoven journeys and themes and alternating rhythms in the first poem, The Longing, and then carries the reader forward to a longed-for passage, finally with an American Indian vigor of exploration, toward the threshold of full spiritual awareness. The poem opens in bleak rain as the Northwest scene, natural and manmade, fumes in its putrefaction. We are then launched on one more characteristic Roethkean voyage of the mutilated modern soul in its tormented quest for light and wholeness, but this time through a heightened relationship with a western landscape at once visible, personal, and charged with historical memory. The speaker anticipates a version of the legendary Indian vision-
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quest, a rite of passage into the North American interior. . . . the mouth of the night is still wide; On the Bullhead, in the Dakotas, where the eagles eat well, In the country of few lakes, in the tall buffalo grass at the base of the clay buttes . . . Does the aging spirit dare to go primitive? No, if subjected to the ruthless plains of the interior. Yes, if sustained amid the inland waters. Old men should be explorers? Ill be an Indian. Ogalala? Iroquois. Meditation at Oyster River, the second poem, begins at twilight on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Roethkes explorer looks eastward to the first tide-ripples, briefly immerses his feet in the water, and then partakes of earth and air as well by ascending to a perch on the cliffside. In the Northwest twilight wind, light as a childs breath, the spirit quivers with alertness. A soundless pause has readied the time for meditation after urgent longing in the previous poem. The speaker takes us now on a backward motion toward the source, to the first trembling of a Michigan brook in April. He feels the quickenings of a younger spirit which, like the melting Tittebawasee in early spring, could awaken, expand, and burst forward into a new season of becoming. The meditation returns to Oyster River and closes with the harmonious resolution of youth and age as he is lulled into half-sleep in a Whitman-like sea-cradle. After his journey back to Michigan and forward once more to the waters of the Northwest, he merges now in quiet joy with the waves and the intrepid birds of the coastline. Arrivals on the threshold of naturalistic grace are momentary and precarious. In the third poem, Journey to the Interior, the speaker returns to the yawning mouth of the night which awaited him at the close of The Longing. He now embarks on a second American journey into the past, between Michigan beginnings and Northwest consummations, which takes the form of an actual trip westward through the North American interior. The second section concludes as he advances through the western prairies and beyond the Tetons. The past merges with the present, the random fluidity of the land journey is abated, and time folds / Into a long moment for the youth become, in the remembrance, confident father of the troubled man. In the final section, he still feels his soul at a still-stand, but this time with a difference. Reconciled to change and death, united with the soft elements of his region, he can breathe with the birds while he stands
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unperplexed looking out on the Pacific scene. All extremes dissolve on that other side of light, and The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep. The Long Waters was apparently written after but appears before The Far Field. Presumably, Roethke felt the need for a tranquil, sustained meditation piece to separate Journey to the Interior from The Far Field (which was once titled Journeys). The Long Waters occurs in a setting closely resembling Oyster River. The poem moves quietly among three Roethkean stagesretrogression (closing at times to infantile regression), thresholds, and convergence. These movements are experienced largely in Northwest images without the backward journey motifs of the previous poems. Roethke creates, instead, an alternating rhythm of gentle ebbing and flowing, action and reaction, that climaxes when the undulant long waters attenuate in the long poetic line and shape for the speaker a transformed moment of union and renewal: My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves; I lose and find myself in the long water; I am gathered together once more. I embrace the world. With The Far Field, the journey becomes an extended return to a timeless childhood, presumably in Michigan, and to moments of immanence in that far field, the windy cliffs of forever, / The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow. When he returns to the adults present, the speaker can sense a weightless change, a moving forward. The poem rises into gentle transcendence. The finite things which in previous lines of the sequence recalled a vulnerable place or a disturbing juxtaposition of death and life, now compose a constellation of Northwest images that the tranquil mind discovers to be the shape of infinitude. The final poem, The Rose, sums up and completes the North American Sequence. All three of the American journey-motifs are here, together with all of the inner stages of the soul and their supporting images. More fully than any of the preceding single poems, The Rose is Roethkes Northwest poetic creation par excellence. He begins at the Northwest seacoast: There are those to whom place is unimportant, But this place, where sea and fresh water meet, Is important
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He then draws the bountiful natural life into this ultimate song of himself. In the next fifteen lines, he describes some dozen Northwest birds and at the same time, predictably, he unites them to air, earth, and water. He no longer requires the agonizing interior journey through and out of the perplexed self. He can sway outside myself / Into the darkening currents with the quiet grace of the intrepid hawks he has just described. Still, in its apparently buoyant ease of passage, his spirit feels obscurely troubled, somehow adrift and incomplete. The realization he is seeking now approaches on the Northwest shoreline before his feet. His guide to final union and grace is the single rose in the sea-wind, the transcendent rose he had briefly invoked in The Longing. Its own excuse for being, the wild rose silently instructs by a dynamic staying in its true place, by flowering out of the dark, widening in noonday light, and stubbornly resisting encroachment upon its solitary life. The meditation upon the individualized wild rose leads the speaker associatively to one final journey to the greenhouse world of his childhood. In the reminiscence, the aged man repossesses the glories he had known when those flowerheads seemed to flow toward me, to beckon me, only a child, out of myself. The child had merged with the roses and both had flourished in the bountiful Eden created by his sufficient, protective father. The childhood memory then triggers the other, or later, journey into the past. Section three first echoes the early morning sound and silence of the Northwest scene in the opening lines of the poem. We are then taken on a last journey into the interior, to gather up and catalog the inland American sounds in this silencea Whitmanian excursion among industrial noises, the bravuras of birds, the ticking of snow around oil drums in the Dakotas, / The thin whine of telephone wires in the wind of a Michigan winter, and more. His second journey eastward into the past completed, the old explorer has reached the final definition of himself. His question in The Longing had been How to transcend this sensual emptiness? He has discovered the answer: the sensual emptiness has been transcended in the sensual fullness of the Whitman-Roethke gatherings of American plenitude, as in these fluid interior American sounds in this silence. And this possession, be it noted, has occurred within a primary context of the regional. Thanks to the final journeys of private and nativeand estheticself-realization that were stimulated by the roses expansive selfcontainment, he has again embraced his present world, his Northwest, and can rejoice equally with the bird, the lilac, and the dolphin in the calm and change which they accept in air, land, and water. In the lovely closing lines, he absorbs in his controlling solitary symbol the diversity of experience and imagery in this climactic poem.
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[I rejoiced] in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind, Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light, Gathering to itself sound and silence Mine and the sea-winds. And so ends an intensive drive toward definition of the many Roethkean selves, of the perplexed American in his country and his region. Even Roethkes drive toward God was climaxed in the ultimate landscape of the Sequence. The northern coast and oceanic far field of his adopted region served him perfectly to frame and extend his religious journeys in and out of time and space and even to resolve them in fleeting moments of joyous, tranquil union. The Rose appeared in a magazine one month before Roethke died of a heart attack while swimming in a private pool on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Returned to the physical regimen of earlier years, the restless, hard-driving poet was seriously charting in his notebook a new approach to western experience, this time through an epic poem on the North American Indian. His structural device would be, once more, a passage across the nations heartland. The speaker would stop to commemorate the scenes of tragic undoing which various tribes suffered at the hands of the white marauders and military. In this epic drama, which he hoped to create through suggestive and highly charged symbolical language, the heroic figures, indicated in his notes, were to include the Nez Percs Chief Joseph, the Oglalas Black Elk and Crazy Horse, as well as white adversaries like Generals Custer and Crook. Six large notebook pages are all that remain among his papers to suggest the mood, landscape, and action of his projected saga. Conceived at the full maturity of his powers, the poem may well have exceeded in imaginative range even the regional poems of The Far Field. At his death, Roethke had only begun to open the way to a new enrichment of western American literature. The extraordinary verses of his final book, however, remain an invaluable legacy for regional writers of the future to build upon as they embark on their own poetic journeys toward discovery and definition of a Northwest ethos.
KERMIT VANDERBILT , San
Dego State University
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Primary Sources 1. Poetry (in chronological order) Open House. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941. The Lost Son and Other Poems. Garden City, N. Y. : Doubleday, 1948; London: John Lehmann, 1949. Praise to the End! Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1951. The Waking: Poems 19331953. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953. Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1957; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961. I Am! Says the Lamb. Garden City, N. Y. : Doubleday, 1961. Party at the Zoo. New York and London: Crowell-Collier Press, 1963. Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical. Iowa City: The Stonewall Press, 1963. The Far Field. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966; London: Faber and Faber, 1968. Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems. Selected by Beatrice Roethke. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. Dirty Dinkey and Other Creatures: Poems for Children. Edited by Beatrice Roethke and Stephen Lushington. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. 2. Prose On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke. Edited with an introduction by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965. Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke. Edited with an introduction by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968. Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 194363. Selected and arranged by David Wagoner. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. 3. Unpublished Sources Special collections and repositories around the country are listed in McLeods Bibliography and Manuscript Checklist (see below). The Theodore Roethke Papers, University of Washington Libraries, is the largest collection of documents. It includes correspondence (192870), notebooks (193063), literary manuscripts, teaching notes, clippings, annotated books, and recordings of public readings. Criticism and Biography Blessing, Richard A. Theodore Roethkes Dynamic Vision. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974. The best study of Roethkes style in the service of his developing vision. Bowers, Neal. Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise. Columbia: Uni-
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versity of Missouri Press, 1982. Roethkes manic-depressiveness is seen as beneficial to the poets intensive search for identity and mystical union in all of his books. LaBelle, Jenijoy. The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Interpretive study of Roethkes borrowings, mainly from English and American poets. Malkoff, Karl. Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. Explication of the works, in chronological order, against the background of Roethkes evolving poetic style. Mills, Ralph J., Jr. Theodore Roethke. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963. The first comprehensive essay on Roethkes career. Parini, Jay. Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Emphasis on development of romantic influences and characteristics that highlight the Edenic-greenhouse center of Roethkes best work. Seager, Allan. The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. New York: McGrawHill, 1968. The authorized biography, it is hampered by failure to receive permission to quote from the poems. Sullivan, Rosemary. Theodore Roethke: The Garden Master. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975. Relates the poems to nature, mysticism, psychology, paternal influence, and other poets. Vanderbilt, Kermit. Theodore Roethke as a Northwest Poet. In Northwest Perspectives: Essays on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Edwin R. Bingham and Glen A. Love. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Greatly expands the treatment of Roethke and regionalism in the present literary history. Williams, Harry. The Edge Is What I Have: Theodore Roethke and After. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1977. Attempts to define Roethkes characteristic mode and his influence on several modern poets. Concordance and Bibliographies Lane, Gary, ed. A Concordance of the Poems of Theodore Roethke. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972. McLeod, James R. Theodore Roethke: A Bibliography. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973. Divided into works and materials by and about Roethke. Extensive and helpful, it lists reviews of the poetry volumes. . Theodore Roethke: A Manuscript Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971. Lists manuscripts of the works, correspondence, and notebooks held in nineteen repositories in the United States and one in Canada. Moul, Keith R. Theodore Roethkes Career: An Annotated Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Writings by and about Roethke from 1922 to 1973. The criticism is annotated. Robbins, Albert, and James Woodress, eds. American Literary Scholarship: An Annual. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963present. Includes annual comment on the foremost articles and books on Roethke.
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William Stafford
ARLY IN HIS CAREER William Stafford recognized that poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. In Writing the Australian Crawl he tells how he learned the poets craft at the University of Iowa where he joined Paul Engles workshop. That was in 1950 when, with his wife, Dorothy, and their two young sons, he pulled into Iowa City in their old green Chevy. Two years later when the Staffords left Iowa City, he had passed his orals and Winterward, a small volume of poetry, had been accepted for his thesis project. (Many of the poems in this volume were to appear in West of Your City in 1960.) Behind them the Staffords left the yeasty environment of graduate school; particularly he found the poetry workshop always within a syllable or two of something overwhelming. We witness the sociability of the Staffords in a passage from An Interval in a Northwest Writers Life 19501973 (in the William Stafford special issue of Northwest Review, 1973): Herb Wilner came over to our quonset and said [Walter Van Tilburg] Clark had consented to come over for dinner, and they didnt know whether they could adequately entertain him. Clark came, and late, latefar into the morning hourshe was telling his wonderful tales, relaxed, at home. It must have been on occasions such as this that the poet learned that any literary work must rely for its effect on bonuses and reverberations that derive from the resonance between human beings and their total experience, not from that little special tangent that comes from the Literary Succession. Stafford seems to have been aware of bonuses and reverberations, ever bending an ear to record the tone / offered by serious separate things. His singular angle of vision, that corner of his eye from which he caught the passing scene, and his sensitized ear for western American speech, make him the poet of the home town and the family circle and the most common place of allthe gradual grass of the western prairie. A cautious intellectual commitment to the primacy of the senses, to the judgment withheld until the evidence is tangible, good and evil weighed in the balance of immediate experiencethese are marks of Staffords thought. But with this hard core of native realism he combines an intuitive grasp of the infinite potential of the human soul. Stafford believes that our lives are being lived now amidst the confusion of feeling and sensations. Your job is to find what the world is trying to be, he quotes his father in the poem Vocation. What is nearby, what is familiarhome town shad-
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ows, his wife, his children, his house, his friends-all these sustained harmonious relations with people are embraced throughout his work. These old familiarities, however, are all felt in a Staffordian manner: a new manner and a new light that may cause us to pause while our minds adjust to Staffords. From the Gradual Grass exemplifies Staffords manner of endowing the commonplace with an inner life, with a personality that can be dramatized. Grass becomes gradual grass. The trope, or turn of thought, thrust upon the reader here forces him to think of grass in a new sense: as existing forever, endlessly from the worlds end / promising, calling. It is promising quiet to the voices announcing universal destruction. Many Stafford poems should be read at the beginning of a new day, poems like Montana Eclogue, first published in the New Yorker in December 1966. How else may one stop everything time brings, and freeze that one / open, great, real thingthe worlds gift: day? If we are not distracted, then perhaps we can go along with the character Logue (Logue whimsically derived from Eclogue). He is the man left behind to close down the camp in the High Valleythat lonely man works for us and carries for us everything that we load on him, / we who have stopped indoors and let our faces / forget how storms come. Logue becomes a Montana counterpart for a Homeric hero: but Logue, by being alone and occurring to us carries us forward a little, and on his way out for the year will stand by the shore and see winter in, the great, repeated lesson every year. A storm bends by that shore and one flake at a time teaches grace, even to stone. Stafford in his career as a poet has given us a new western myththe man on the street, the pioneer father, mother, brother, the schoolteacher, the preacher, as they may be seen in your house, our house, or on Main Street. While they are not divinities they are surrounded by something greater than man: in western towns they abide with courage and greatness of heart. In the body of his poetry we may find the soul of the continental reaches from Iowa to Oregon. This may be his unique achievement. He has lived, loved, dreamed, grieved; he has felt the mystery of the prairie grassland, the lure of the mountains and the rivers that drain the vast open country from Council Bluffs to Astoria. He knows it first-hand; it has become a part of him.
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Returning one night in 1956 over the Coast Range from teaching an extension course in Tillamook, Oregon, he came upon a dead doe beside the highway. His fingers touched her side; it was warm, her fawn lay there waiting, / alive, still, never to be born. And in the red glow of the taillight he thought hard for us all. He could hear the wilderness listen. Traveling Through the Dark has become Staffords best-known poem; first published in The Hudson Review in 1960, it later became the title poem of a volume that won the National Book Award in 1966. The poets sympathies felt in the expression alive, still, never to be born only heighten our apprehension of our own alienation from the wilderness. Are we victims of machinery too big to stop, too strong to wear out? A living presence is spread through all nature in Staffords poetry. Mountains, rivers, rocks, treesall are clothed with a veil of mystery; all speak out in his verse. His ear records many voices of the wilderness heard under the big sky of Montana and Wyoming, in the forests of the Cascade Mountains, and in the meadow of his summer home at Indian Ford in eastern Oregon. The latter is the setting for one of the poets finest lyrics, Sleeping on the Sisters Land. The country home he built sits on a wild acreage with pines, juniper, native grasses, and willows along the water course, and the plain stretching miles and miles to the horizon while in the opposite direction, west and south, gleaming white Cascade peaksThe Three Sistersrise. Sleeping under the sky, watching the stars slow turning and awakening at daybreak with filtered sunlight on ones faceto these Stafford adds a touch that distinguishes so much of his verse, intensely personal without intruding sentimentality. The whole poem develops from one line: Rain touches your face just at daylight. The title has to be invoked to picture the awakening out of doors on the Sisters land: and the world revolves into gray so bright that a glance like love falls deep toward the dreams that you left. It is not surprising that with his mind-set Stafford should develop an affinity for American Indians. Report to Crazy Horse is a dramatic monologue evoking a prayerful moment when the speaker, a young Indian (Staffords assumed persona), tells how he salutes the white mans flag: All of our promises, / our generous sayings to each other, our / honorable intentions he affirms. At these times he feels like shutting his eyes and joining a religious / colony at prayer in the gray dawn. And the young Indian concludes, I tell you straight / the way it is now, and it is our way: that the chokecherries in their valley still bear fruit and there is good pottery clay in our valley, and that he remembers our old places. For the young 460
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narrator, earth and sky and the old grooves in the rock are still the reliable truths. Stafford holds in loving memory his own childhood lived on the vanishing midwestern frontier. Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code. / We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God (One Home). What Pope said about ten low words creeping in one dull line was written before Stafford set Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code resonating in our ears to remind us of Miltons Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughterd Saints. Then there is the recollection of the girl who sang in the choir: Persons came near in those days. The family circle of mother, father, brother, and sister plays an important role in his poems. In a large portion of Staffords poetry . . . the spirit of his father is invoked very much as if he were a scriptural figure, D. Nathan Sumner has pointed out in The Poetry of William Stafford: Nature, Time, and Father. Earl Ingersol Stafford, the poets father, was a versatile person; at one time he was a trouble shooter for the Bell Telephone Company; later he became an auditor for Rosier Oil Company of Hutchinson, Kansas, the town where his son William was born on January 17, 1914. He also worked for El Dorado Refinery. Several removals took the family from Hutchinson to Wichita to Junction City and to Liberal, Kansas, where the poet spent his high school senior year. On his graduation day the town was struck by a tornadoan event commemorated in Before the Big Storm. This poem, by the way, is an example of Staffords use of juxtaposition and surrealistic imagery. These Kansas towns coalesce, merge into one another when Stafford recalls Our Town. Serving with Gideon gives us a poets view of the adolescent life that was evangelical in tone but tempered by the intellectual enlightenment fostered by the city library, where Stafford was a frequent visitor. With such human sympathies, Stafford invests the western scene and the western manner with universal meaning. In the grandstand of the rodeo he sees suffering faces, and beside the embers of his campfire among the firs he hears an owls cry, and the night sound struck a nerve; he cries out: My voice went echoing, inventing response around the world for all our greatest need, the longest arc, toward Friend, from All Alone. For that brief tenure my old faith sang again along the bone. (A Bridge Begins in the Trees) These references demonstrate that in spite of his identification with numerous local scenes from Kansas to Oregon, Staffords poetry is not paro-
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chial. In images he establishes the local settingMain Street, the church spire, the bunkhouse, the kitchenall vivid particulars that he has lived with. From these he projects his message outward to the major intellectual concerns, philosophical, religious, political, or aesthetic, of the contemporary world. In the poem For You Walt Whitman the message is carried by a lichen on a stone. This later poem (1979) contradicts the confidence of the Gradual Grass. Stafford now sees a storm coming, threatening the world we are standing on. Frequently, when confronted with the meanness of contemporary mores, Stafford turns to satire. His manner becomes deceptive, soft-spoken, yet it hits hard. One line in Religion Back Home disposes of the old beliefs: When Gods parachute failed, sometime in the spring of 1945, we all sailed easily into our jet age; the minister smoked, he wore spats, and there was that woman in the choir. The shock of this poem hits us when we see the loss of faith equated with the loss of decorum: Our Father Who art in Heaven / can lick their Father Who art in Heaven. Satire is a weapon that Stafford uses when he confronts the ironic predicament of the intellectual in the 1940s and 1950s. The satirical thrusts in The Poets Annual Indigence Report are not relieved by laughter, but rather they lay bare the pretensions of your thinkers. Adults Only has its didactic side (But we have to witness for ourselves what comes to us), yet we may hear with an amused detachment of the wild woman who danced at the state fair, when that woman came farming right out of her clothes, / by God. A Documentary from America hits the mindlessness of TV audiences without a smile. At the Chairmans Housewarming, ridiculing academic stuffiness, is a comedy of manners: the poet smiles at whatever they said, and his talk poured out on the table and died in the sugar bowl. In A Visit Home he laughs at his own posturing and swagger: In my sixties I will buy a hat / and wear it as my father did. He, the poet, remembering how his father was cheated there in 1929, will return and the slant of his hat will symbolize his triumph, while at the same time it will be a deft caricature. Those who have heard Stafford read his verse may best judge his humor. A good example is his casual, low-key reading of The Star in the Hills, in which the dialogue between the police guard, who took the oath, and the poet is filled with innuendo, heightened when Stafford reads it assuming the role of the innocent poet. Like many satirists aware of dishonesty, cant, and meanness, Stafford feels a strong kinship with all human destiny and its inevitable confrontation with the unknown. Death is not euphemistically treated. Of his fathers death, memorialized in Elegy, he wrote: When you left our house that night and went falling / into that ocean, a message came: silence. In 462
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this poem, he remembers walking westward with his father over the cornfield farms drowned in August. He also remembers the sound of his fathers voice coming to him from another room and the recollection prompts him to write: If only once in all those years, / the right goodby could have been said! When he wrote Some Evening, which appears in Stories That Could Be True (1977), he had acquired, like Dante, a synoptic view of suffering: You happy beings, watch every face for those you pass caught in the midst of life by some horror, their souls gone dim, cursed or unlucky, exiled under a stone. This kind of witness to grief and concomitant shame appears again in Con fessor in the 1982 collection A Glass Face in the Rain. While it may be uncomplicated in its structure, it does probe profoundly the feeling of brotherhood with fellow human beings who have felt singled out by some blow. As he reads their distress and their shame in their demeanor, he assumes, as a sacred duty, their burdens: All right. I listen. My life sinks a little farther, for the pity; from now on I know it with them. Well take a stand, wherever the end is. We go forward by this quiet sharing, they one way, I another. I am their promise: no one else is going to know. How much of the poets feeling for the dignity of free souls and how much of his stoical perspective on cosmic forces dates from his four-year service as a conscientious objector? A few days after Pearl Harbor he was drafted in Lawrence, Kansas, where he was a student at the University of Kansas. After an appeal to the draft board, he was classified 4E; he was assigned to conservation and forest service camps for the duration of the war. Down in My Heart (1947), a collection of essays on the life in these camps, reports Staffords experience without polemical pretense: quietly he shared his fate with others, realizing their common alienation from conventional society. The work reveals how much Stafford owes to men like Lennie, one of his companions in camp, who when asked by a ranger why he wasnt in the army replied: Do you have two hours to give to that question? Well, then, forget itIm tired trying to set right in two minutes what the radio and the papers and movies have been setting wrong for years. Two years before the war ended Stafford met Dorothy Hope Frantz when she came with her father to visit at Los Prietos camp. Her father was the minister of the Church of the Brethren in Glendale, California. They 463
were married in 1944, and are the parents of four children. The Staffords enjoy their children; poems grew out of what the poet would call their resonances. The pulse of the family finds expression in At Our Home, published in Allegiances. Coming home late he finds one lamp turned low; he checks every childs room, hears the slow, sure breath then: Suddenly in this doorway where I stand in this house I see this place again, this time the night as quiet, the house all well secured, all breath but mine borne gently on the air And where I stand, no one. Here a moment of insight embraces love and death. Staffords verses are so tightly woven that his technical skills may go unnoticed while we examine his message, smile at his wit, or catch a breath with surprise as we read. My poetry is essentially courteousbut not tame. This line epitomizes so much of his poetry: quiet, courteous, but not tame. It is off-hand, not poetic-standing alone it is prose; it is the antithetical afterthought that gives the line poetic tone: My poetry is essentially courteousbut not tame. We can be sure that this structuring, this accuracy of ear for casual rhythms of speech patterns, is the mark of craftsmanship. He sees the process of writing as a sequential unfolding of a heightened consciousness. In Writing the Australian Crawl he tells us how he composed The Woman at Banff: Firstthe simple piece of writing. Doodling around one morning, I found myself with the aimless clause While she was talking. This set of words led me to add to it, by a natural dogpaddling impulse, a closure for the construction; I wanted to have something be happeningjust anything. I put down a bear happened along. I remembered the bears we had seen at Banff swaggering bears, dangerous and advertised as such, but valued. They were violent, or potentially so; they were protected by law. I began to put together phrases from that trip to Banff from that set of impressions; the result was a poem. It is the last line of that poem that Stafford savors: the moose had faded off winterward, / Up toward the Saskatchewan, and he savors it for what he calls its rich offering of syllables in Saskatchewan. Writing the Australian Crawl, published in 1979, discloses how thoroughly Stafford understands his own art. 464
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Dramatic monologue may be Staffords major stylistic device for engaging his reader or audience. In these monologues the pronoun I (Staffords persona) subsumes the various stances of the poet: the witness to the event, the amused bystander, questioner, thinking hard for us all. He also speaks as the archetypal father-son-brother figure. Staffords readers or audiences frequently are directly addressed as you and a dramatic I-you exchange becomes the energizing force in the poem. But most frequently he assumes the role of the thoughtful observer. Like many of his contemporary fellow poets, Stafford gives us the intensified point in timethe moment sharpened, highlighted, following the manner of William Carlos Williams. Richard Eberharts clam diggers caught in a moment of time serve as well as Dr. Williamss little sparrows that hop ingenuously / about pavement / quarreling / with sharp voices. These sharply etched scenes seize a moment of breath-taking compassion; another good example is Roethkes Meadow Mouse: having eaten his three kinds of cheese, he lies in the corner of an old shoe box, his tail curled under him, his belly big / as his head; his bat-like ears / twitching, tilting toward the least sound. Many such rich moments occur in Staffords verse. There is the poem about the old dog who could not get up even when I rattled her pan. / I helped her into the yard, but she stumbled. A second glance at this may convince one of the economy of phrase by which it is achieved. Another example is found in Blackbirds, a lovely lyric imbued with the feeling of flight as shared by migrating birds (the birds tell it as they fly over): by miles it grandly / came below the edge of our wings, while they were borne up by thousands of songs / from throats of Northland birds. One of his later poems exemplifies psychological probing of states of consciousness. Watching a Storm is here reprinted from In the Clock of Reason: Clouds the ocean dreams come around us, a long, slow dance Babars cousins across the West. A thought behind, rain comes with wind slow through space to touch our house where nothing holds. You come slow into a room that your presence makes. I turn around. The clouds turn with me, tug the sky. Put out your hand. Help me stay. 465
The heart of this poem is the last line: Put out your hand. Help me stay. It is a kind of anguished cry from a person watching an approaching stormstorm clouds and wind have translated him into space; he appeals, Help me stay. The scene is pictured by Nancy Craig, the illustrator. In her drawing, lines of force create a vortex of wind and cloud (clouds in elephantine shapes). A human figure, hair flying, muscles tensed, hands outstretched, anxiety in his face, floats in space with a moon or planet swirling in the void behind him. The drawing and the poem reinforce each other. Retaining something of a childs intuitive vision enables Stafford to project himself into the mysterious adventures of the human psyche. A childs thought is free to wonder, to make believe. With artistic sophistication Stafford does the same. The Animal That Drank Up Sound, shows us how, In all the wilderness around he / drained the rustle from the leaves into the mountainside / and folded a quilt over the rocks, and all was silence until spring came again and a cricket tried its voice, and water splashed, and a bird screamed. With this kind of seeing and hearing William Stafford has lived in the West, listening, hoping, believing, giving to each living thing its due and receiving gifts in return, such as a message from a lichen on a stone. Staffords campus lectures have reached generations of young poets and poetry lovers. The lecture circuit takes him to campuses in almost every state. He tells us, I crisscrossed the nation many, many times, from east to west and from north to south. In 1972, sponsored by the United States Information Agency, he read his poetry and discussed American literature with university students in Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran. The honors he has earned as poet and teacher Stafford wears comfortably like an old coat. While serving as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (197071) and living in Virginia he wrote home to Oregon: Our family are buoyantly taking in the East. We do what scurrying around we can, in order to exploit this time in the Big Time. To their Lake Oswego home the Staffords returned after their term of service in Washington, D.C. Tom McCall, then Oregons governor, named Stafford Poet Laureate of Oregon in 1974. In 1976 he was awarded an Honorary Life Membership in the Western Literature Association. Since this time Staffords career has been uninterrupted: he says, there are no days when I cant write. In 1977 Stories That Could Be True was published; Things That Happen Where There Arent Any People came out in 1980; Sometimes Like a Legend in 1981 and A Glass Face in the Rain in 1982. Things That Happen is a collection of thirty poems focusing on the theme of an impersonal universe and what man does about it in order to live. In this book all rocks are sacred: 466
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Mornings a shaft of light pauses to read a stone beside a mountain path high beyond the snow. I left it there one day, climbing alonefor one who once was with me. Dismissed after a glance, ignored by the dawn wind, that shelter for my thoughts is my abiding friend: no one now can find it, and only the sun reads those erased years and the name I know. In this same collection appears An Address to the Vacationers at Cape Lookout. It warns the vacationers that The whole weight of the ocean smashes on rock, and this place is too real for that blame / people pin on each other, for honor or dishonor. This poem cancels our illusion about ultimate human destiny; it tells us our world is spinning in cold space where the one gift to mankind is to be able to walk away, not writhe in regret or twist in the torture bush. After all there is such a thing as justice in friendship. Here in these lines is the summation of Staffords humanism: creeds and philosophies, social and political ideologiesall the dogmas that divide the tribes of mankindthese lies that people pin on each other for honor or dishonor, are superficial in the light of justice in friendship. And, after all this is said, here we stand, in a world that spins in cold space to contemplate our mortality, to go forward sharing our humanness. J. RUSSELL R OBERTS , SR ., Pacific University
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Primary Sources All About Light. Athens, Ohio: Croissant Company, 1978. Allegiances. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Around You, Your House and a Catechism. Knotting, England: Sceptre Press, 1979. At Home on Earth. Hudson Review 23 (Autumn 1970): 481491. Braided Apart: Poems by Kim Robert and William Stafford. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1976. The Design on the Oriole. Hurdle Mills, North Carolina: Night Heron Press, 1977. Down in My Heart. Elgin, Ill. : Brethren Publishing House, 1948. Reprinted 1971. Friends to This Ground: A Statement for Readers, Teachers and Writers of Literature. Champaign, Ill. : National Council of Teachers of English, 1967. A Glass Face in the Rain. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Going Places: Poems by William Stafford. Reno: West Coast Poetry Review, 1975. In the the Clock of Reason. Victoria, B.C.: Soft Press, 1973. Listening Deep. Great Barrington, Mass.: Penmaen Press, 1984. Poems by Ghalib. New York: Hudson Review, 1969. The Quiet Land. New York: Nadja, 1979. The Rescued Year. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Roving Across Fields: A Conversation with William Stafford. Edited by Thom Tammaro. Daleville, Indiana: Barnwood Press, 1983. Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry. With Marvin Bell. Boston: Godine, 1983. Smokes Way: Poems by William Stafford. Port Townsend, Wash.: Graywolf Press, 1978. Someday, Maybe. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Sometimes Like a Legend. Port Townsend, Wash. : Copper Canyon Press, 1981. Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Temporary Facts. Athens, Ohio: Duane Schneider, 1970. Things That Happen Where There Arent Any People: Poems. Brockport, New York: BOA Editions, 1980. Traveling Through the Dark. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Tuft by Puff. Mount Horeb, Misc.: Perishable Press Limited, 1978. Tuned in Late One Night. Dublin: Gallery Press; Deerfield, Mass.: Deerfield Press, 1978. Two About Music. Knotting, England: Sceptre Press, 1978. Two Lectures: Leftovers; A Care Package. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1973. West of Your City: Poems by William Stafford. Los Gatos, California: Talisman Press, 1960. William Stafford: Eleven Untitled Poems. Mt. Horeb, Wisc.: Perishable Press Limited, 1968.
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The World as a Metaphor. In The Achievement of Brother Antoninus, edited by William Everson. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1967. Writing the Australian Crawl. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978. Secondary Sources Bayes, Ronald H., and Sam Ragan, eds. Special edition on William Stafford, The St. Andrews Review 2 (Fall/Winter 1972). Quotes Stafford on the state of American letters, the elements of time and place in his poetry, and his preference for the work of Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur. Bunge, Nancy. William Stafford: An Interview by Nancy Bunge. American Poetry Review 10 (November/December 1981): 811. Stafford tells how he conducts a class in poetry writing and explicates his poem Accountability. Davison, Peter. The New Poetry. Atlantic Monthly 210 (November 1962): 8588. Here is an early recognition of Staffords promise of becoming a poet of major status. Dickey, James. Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now. New York: Octagon Books, 1979. Quotes The Well Rising as an example of Staffords natural mode of speech. Dickinson-Brown, Roger. The Wise, the Dull, the Bewildered: What Happens in William Stafford. Modern Poetry Studies 6 (Spring 1975): 3038. Asserts a thesis that overlooks insights other authorities find inherent in Staffords poems. Ellsworth, Peter. A Conversation with Stafford. Chicago Review 30 (1978/79): 94100. The craft of poetry and the duties of the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress are two of the several topics covered here. Engle, Paul, and Joseph Langland, eds. Poets Choice. New York: The Dial Press, 1962. Stafford discusses The Farm on the Great Plains as his favorite poem. Hall, Donald, and Robert Pack, eds. New Poets of England and America ( Second Selection ). New York: World Publishing Company, 1962. Includes Stafford. Haskell, Dennis. The Modern American Poetry of Deep Image. Southern Review 12 (1979): 137166. This suggests that the poetry of Robert Bly, Donald Hall, W. S. Merwin, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, and James Wright forms a body of new American poetry best defined as poetry of the deep image. Hoffman, Daniel. Poetry: Schools of Dissidents. Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, edited by Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Surveys Staffords career as a poet and relates him to the contemporary American poetry scene, appraises and explicates selected poems. Holden, Jonathon. The Mark to Turn: A Reading of William Staffords Poetry. Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1976. From an informed critical perspective the author here sets forth the recondite meaning of Staffords metaphor. Howard, Richard. Alone with America: Essays of the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. New York: Atheneum, 1980. Calls Stafford our Widsith of the Great West. Hugo, Richard. Problems with Landscapes in Early Stafford Poems. Kansas Quar-
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Roberts, J. Russell. Listening to the Wilderness with William Stafford. Western American Literature 3 (Fall 1968): 217226. Explicates Some Shadows and Traveling Through the Dark. Has been reprinted in The Literature of the American West, edited by J. Golden Taylor. Shapiro, Janet D. William E. Stafford: Consultant in Poetry in English to the Library of Congress. Special Libraries 61 (September 1970): 3536. Quotes Staffords one-line parody: The New Family from Chicago Their cat comes on little fog feet. Stepanchev, Stephen. American Poetry Since 1945: A Critical Survey. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Calls Stafford a poet of Existential loneliness and Western space. Sumner, D. Nathan. The Poetry of William Stafford: Nature, Time, and Father. Washington State University Research Studies 36 (1968). Compares Sylvia Plaths father image with the scriptural figure of his father depicted by Stafford. Turner, Alberta T., ed. Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. New York: Longman, 1977. Quotes Staffords poem Ask Me and his explication of its composition: my entry into the process was through inward satisfactions I felt as the language led me onward. Wagner, Linda W. William Staffords Plain Style. Modern Poetry Studies 6 (Spring 1975): 1930. Discusses the elements of the plain style that contribute to Staffords impact as a poet and to his stance of responsibility. Venn, George. Continuity in Northwest Literature. In Northwest Perspectives: Essays on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Edwin R. Bingham and Glen A. Love. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Relates Staffords poetry to major themes in Northwest literature, especially the theme of traveling through unknown territory in search of sacred space as it is found in the Journals of Lewis and Clark.
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tumbled as dramatically from critical acclaim as did William Saroyan. There were many reasons, not the least of which was his personality. Because, as Saroyans son Aram has argued, the writer came to personify what might be called the mythic potential of his particular social-historical moment, Saroyans self-centered, sometimes abrasive character became perhaps more important than his writing in the eyes of some. William Saroyan was, during the first half of his career, as much a public figure as an artist, and the confusion of those two roles made it easy to ignore his literary accomplishments once his notoriety faded. In fact, the artists psychological contradictions are finally much less important than the quality of his art and, from his first published volume (The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, 1934) until his last (Obituaries, 1979)both of which were cited as among their years best booksSaroyan was an authentic, singular American genius. He was also, as Bob Sector has pointed out, his own biggest fan. Another factor in the Fresno natives fall from critical grace was the adversarial relationship he had developed with critics. He wrote in 1940:
EW AMERICAN WRITERS
. . . I acknowledge the partial truth and validity of every charge brought against my work, against myself personally, and against my methods of making my work public. What is lacking in their criticism is the fullness and humanity of understanding which operates in myself, in my work, and in my regard for others. . . . Consequently, it is difficult for them to make sense in themselves that which is complicated and unusual for them. What should enlarge them because of its understanding, drives them more completely behind the fort of their own limitations. Little wonder he was a prime candidate for literary ostracism. Today, with the authors personality no longer a factor, Saroyans work is enjoying critical reevaluation. His work, not his ego or pugnaciousness or reclusiveness, is at issue, and it stands up very well indeed. As David Kherdian recently observed: His writing had a quality of innocence and eagerness and wonder about a momentany moment of livingthat made us feel more
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alive ourselvesmore alive, that is, than we actually were, but for this very reason it made us yearn and stretch and seek a way to grow. And H. W. Matalene has asserted that the place of William Saroyan in the history of the American theater still seems as secure as he always told us it would be. After World War II, the Californian fell with a thud out of critical fashion. Not only were the books he published slammed, but his earlier achievements were ignored or slighted, making him a kind of literary nonperson. Even in his native West his accomplishments were neglected; he was not listed in the annual bibliographies published by Western American Literature, although much of his best writing was set in the West. My Hearts in the Highlands,The Time of Your Life, and Hello Out There, Saroyans three finest plays, employed distinctly western settings and tones, as even negative critics acknowledged. William Saroyan was very much a writer of his time, of his place, and of his dynamic cultural blend, Armenian-American. Add to those distinguished dramas stories such as The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, The Pomegranate Trees, and Seventy Thousand Assyrians, novels The Human Comedy, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, and Tracys Tiger, as well as memoirs such as The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, Not Dying, and Obituaries, and it appears that few twentiethcentury American authors produced a richer, more diverse body of work. Saroyan straddled the worlds of high and folk culture. He was an artist of unique and powerful gifts, marred by an apparent lack of discipline, but one who moved both regional and ethnic expression to new heights. Mary McCarthy, writing in Partisan Review in 1940, pinpointed a source of both Saroyans greatest art and perhaps some of his problems with the literary establishment. He still retains his innocence, she observed, . . . that is, he has had to fight off Ideas, Movements, Sex, and Commercialism. He has stayed out of the literary racketsthe Hollywood racket, the New York Cocktail-party racket, and the Stalinist racket, . . . What is more important, the well of inspiration, located somewhere in his early adolescence, has never run dry. When he died on May 19, 1981, in Fresno, Saroyan had won both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Time of Your Life (the first writer to be so doubly honored), an Academy Award for The Human Comedy, and the California Gold Medal for Tracys Tiger. William Saroyan emerged as a writer during the Great Depression,
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while America was in the throes of a national loss of faith and questioning of values. Although many critics had trouble accepting his optimistic, original stories, readers did not. He was powerfully pro-human. He talked and wrote about the human spirit. That Saroyan also did such things as turn down his Pulitzer Prize certainly did little to raise his stock among insiders. His behavior, like some of his writing, seemed downright unliterary. As novelist Herbert Gold wrote following Saroyans death, He didnt want to be the greatest Armenian-American writer in the world. He wanted, very boyishly, just to knock everyones eyes out with beauty and fun and delight. Born in Fresno in 1908, Saroyan was placed in an Oakland orphanage at the age of three following the death of his father, a poet and ordained minister. Four years later, his family reunited and returned to Fresno where he grew up. Experiences that would later resurface as rich literary material in such books as Little Children (1937) and My Name Is Aram (1940) marked the remainder of Saroyans childhood. He worked at odd jobs, rubbing elbows with a lively group of people of all ethnic types, developed earthy rural values, and was always assured of the support of his extended family and the Armenian community. He did not graduate from high school. Small wonder that Saroyans work evidences little social or intellectual pretension. He has also refused to be limited; in Seventy Thousand Assyrians his protagonist says: I am an Armenian . . . I have no idea what its like to be an Armenian . . . I have a faint idea what its like to be alive. Thats the only thing that interests me greatly. That is, while everything he writes is influenced by his Armenian and poor, small-town and western heritage, that influence emerges from within rather than being imposed from without. When he tells his truth well enough, it is everyones. In 1928, while working in San Francisco, Saroyan published a story in Overland Monthly and Outwest Magazine and decided to make writing his career. Six years later his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, was published. It was a fresh, zany, ironic, and highly individualistic collection. Try to be alive, the author advised in his preface. You will be dead soon enough. If the collection exhibited many of the considerable strengths that were to mark Saroyan as a cutting-edge artist unconcerned with established literary forms, many of those same innovative tales were viewed by critics as undisciplined. Saroyans response to Eric Bentleys complaint about careless writing perhaps sums up his attitude: One cannot expect an Armenian to be an Englishman. Whatever its sourcethe writers ethnicity, his San Joaquin Valley upbringing, his distrust of established tastemakersSaroyan showed during the 1930s a vivacity and originality that seemed exactly correct for those grim times. I cannot resist the temptation to mock any law which is designated to hamper the spirit of man, he wrote in an early story. Critics of 474
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that period, burdened by polemic proletarian positions or still awakening to the power of naturalism, didnt know how to treat this brash westerner; Nona Balakian asserts, Saroyan was inevitably misunderstood or belittled. By the beginning of World War II, Saroyan estimated that he had written more than five hundred tales. His craft progressed so that not only great talent but considerable skill marked his writing, and he began to evidence a profound sense of place in his fiction. Increasingly in his writingespecially in the superb My Name Is AramSaroyan returned to Fresno and Californias San Joaquin Valley for both setting and subjects. In so doing, he produced some major western American literature. Howard Floan, noting the artistic growth these valley stories demonstrated, points out that in his early tales the young people of Saroyans stories had been essentially undiluted projections of himself. In Little Children and My Name Is Aram the writer uses such characters to greater effect, for the stories are not selfcentered, they are about the immigrants of Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley, the people recalled from his boyhood days whose images gave him the impetus to extend himself beyond the lyricism of his early tales to the more dramatic later ones. . . . If Saroyan had not discovered the literary uses of Fresno and the Valley, he could not have given us the best of his short storiesnor his plays. He was, then, very much a western writer. Saroyans plays demonstrate even more clearly than his stories the importance of the oral tradition and his ethnic heritage in his work. He explained: Everything I write, everything I have ever written, is allegorical. This came to pass inevitably. One does not choose to write allegorically any more than one chooses to grow black hair on his head. The stories of Armenia . . . are all allegorical, and apart from the fact that I heard these stories as a child. . . I myself am a product of Asia Minor, hence the allegorical and the real are closely related in my mind. In fact all reality to me is allegorical. . . . When in 1939 he converted a short story, The Man with the Heart in the Highlands, into the play My Hearts in the Highlands, he demonstrated not only his comfort with spoken language, but his allegorical bent. The play was successful and even his detractors agreed that the Californian had provided a radical departure from usual theatrical fare. Both George Jean Nathan and John Mason Brown considered it the finest Broadway play of the 193839 season. The following year Saroyan produced one of the classic plays of the modem American theatre, The Time of Your Life. It confirmed what the authors earlier dramatic work had hinted, that he was as original and ir475
reverent on stage as he was in print. Balakian points out that nothing quite so informal and spontaneous had happened on the American stage before Saroyan came along. Audiences were well advised to attend Saroyans remarks about allegory if they sought to understand his dramas. The theatre became a major outlet for Saroyans work. The Beautiful People, Jim Dandy: Fat Man in a Famine, and The Cave Dwellers (his last Broadway production, in 1957), among others, all illustrated his quest, stated earlier in a short story: If I want to do anything I want to speak a more universal language, the heart of man, the unwritten part of man, that which is eternal and common to all races. From the beginningas early as the publication of The Daring Young Man on the Flying TrapezeSaroyan evidenced a freedom from conventional literary modes of reality that marks him today as an early exemplar of what has been called Magical Realism. Merged levels of consciousness, powerful intuition, an insistence upon what is perceived rather than what is expected, little concern for chronological time, these and other elements led Edmund Wilson to praise These magical feats which he said are accomplished by the enchantment of Saroyans temperament, which induces us to take from him a good many things that we should not accept from other people. Another giant of American criticism, John Mason Brown, proclaimed that Saroyan has managed to widen the theatres horizons by escaping from facts and reason. . . . Saroyan himself explained his gift this way: . . . I do not know a great deal about what words come to, but the presence says, Now dont get funny; just sit down and say something; itll be all right anyway. Half the time I do say it wrong, but somehow or other, just as the presence says, its right anyhow. I am always pleased about this. During World War II, the Californian produced two of his most successful novels, The Human Comedy and The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, the latter a picaresque version of army life with a somewhat hard edge which Wilson admired. The former book began as an award-winning screenplay, over which Saroyan battled with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, trying to buy it back, then retreated to write a play, Get Away Old Man, that dramatized the conflict. It opened on Broadway in 1943. If Saroyan got the final word, MGM seems to have managed the final laugh: the play flopped. Following the war, Saroyan went into a critical tailspin. Disillusioned by his military experiencehe served in the Armytax problems, and the collapse of his marriage to Carol Marcus, his mood and literature darkened. By his own admission, he drank too much and gambled too much. Three years in the army and a stupid marriage had all but knocked me out of 476
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the picture and, if the truth is told, out of life itself. His sons biography, William Saroyan (1983), offers the other side of the story. He gradually brought his drinking and gambling under control, and once more began producing high-quality work. But, critically at least, it was too late. As Matalene points out: . . . One senses that critics have been less interested in discovering and teaching Saroyans message than they have been in congratulating themselves for having been so democratic as to have admitted to the canon of recognized literature the work of an uneducated, penniless Armenian from Fresnoat least for as long as he seemed amusing. He no longer seemed amusing, and he was dropped like the outsider he always was, one of the less savory and defensible episodes in American literary history. During the final years of his life he produced several probing, sometimes delightful memoirs, the first of which, Not Dying (1963), led Herbert Mitgang to observe in The New York Times: A hardboiled romantic, Saroyan shows that he can be more in the vanguard than many of the official literarymap personages in Esquire; that hell be around long after this years hipsters have become next years squares. Often Saroyans mood was morose in his later works; he seemed preoccupied by death. Of Not Dying he observed, I havent laughed once in the writing of this book. William Saroyan had always been concerned over the degree to which artificiality dominates reality in human experience, a situation he thought literary critics apotheosized. Ironically, in the biography which offers his exwifes and his childrens perspectives on the authors life, Saroyans son Aram asserts that the truth of his fathers character remains obscure, while his legend, dating back to the earliest part of his career, continues to dominate popular consciousness of both his literary career and public image. A more balanced assessment of Saroyan has been offered by his friend and associate James H. Tashjian, editor of The Armenian Review. No question: William Saroyan was a battlefield on which Ormuzd and Ahriman fought relentlesslygood versus evil, he wrote in his preface to My Name Is Saroyan (1983), explaining: . . . There is little question that Saroyans personal conduct was in direct contradiction of his fathers rigid codeSaroyan gambled and gamboled, he was flaky and notoriously unreliable, he drank heavily on occasion, wenched and was twice divorcedall misvirtues. . . . But he was, at the same time, a dedicated pacifist, a 477
ridiculer of the goosestep, a foe of peonage and patronage. He was impatient of dissimulation, generous and charitable. . . and was respectful of all religions. William Saroyan was a flawed, passionate man, a complicated mixture of virtue and vice whose great talent magnified all aspects of his personality. Tashjian makes one other major point, observing that Saroyan is only enigmatic to those who cannot . . . understand what his Armenian heritage meant to him. Both Aram Saroyan and Tashjian agree that a major element in William Saroyans makeup was the early death of his father, Armenak, a subject he returned to, both directly and indirectly, throughout his literary career. It forged in him a basic Oedipal urgeto find the father who had left him, Tashjian points out. This was to grow into a veritable passion in his manhood. It colored his thoughts and his career. Perhaps the most touching of such work is Armenak of Bitlis ( Letters from 74 rue Taitbout, 1969), which recounts a visit to his fathers grave in San Jose, then leads the author to recount a sterile meeting with his own son in New York. It is a powerful piece that illustrates well the writers continuing abilities. Sham remained a continuing theme. Early in his career Saroyan had lamented the influence of tastemakers such as literary critics this way: Its wonderful to get up in the morning and go out for a little walk and smell the trees and see the streets and the kids going to school and the clouds in the sky. . . . This is a nice world. So why do they make all the trouble? Late in his career, once he had become somewhat reclusive, his tone changed. Can a society which has thrived on lies be expected to survive? he asked. He answered himself this way: Possibly, but the people of that society cant be expected not to be grotesque. In some places, his style turned preachy and verbose. Still, flashes of the old spirit surfaced. In a 1978 interview with Herbert Gold, Saroyan remarked, Im growing old! Im falling apart! And its VERY INTERESTING! He worked out of one of two tract houses in Fresno which he had bought in the 1960she also kept an apartment in Parisand rode around his hometown on a bicycle. An eleven-year-old neighbor remembered, I saw him ridin with no hands and everything, lots of times. He was a great favorite of neighborhood children, and they were favorites of his. Bella Stumbo, in the Los Angeles Times, added that He refused all interviews with the press (on the grounds that the knotheads asked him stupid questions), and even turned down invitations to the White House in 478
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later years. Shortly before his death, Saroyan called the Associated Press to leave a posthumous statement: Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what? Following Saroyans death, a memorial service was held in Paris. His Holiness Vazken I, the Catholicos of all Armenians, eulogized the author, calling him the prodigy of the nation, the vehicle through which three millennia of Armenian experience was perhaps most perfectly expressed. The Catholicos concluded by observing that William Saroyans writing, his humanism, speaks not just about or to Armenians but to all people. As usual, Saroyan himself merits the last word. The final sentence of the final volume published during his lifetime, what Herbert Gold calls his wonderful late book, Obituaries, reads: I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isnt it the least we can do for one another?
G ERALD W. HASLAM , Sonoma
State University
Saroyan has been the subject of an exhaustive bibliographic study by David Kherdian; it is definitive up to 1964. A volume in the Twayne United States Authors Series, written by Howard Floan, provides both biographic information and critical assessments of Saroyans work. See also James H. Tashjians interesting preface to My Name Is Saroyan. The Floan book and the Matalene article listed below both contain annotated bibliographies of secondary articles on Saroyan. What follows is intended only to supplement them. Balakian, Nona. Writers on the American Scene. Ararat, Winter 1977, 1525. Points out Saroyans position as the preeminent ArmenianAmerican writer. Floan, Howard. William Saroyan. New York: Twayne, 1966. The most complete examination of Saroyans art yet published. A good place to start. Foster, Edward Halsey. William Saroyan. Boise: Boise State University, 1984. The finest short survey of Saroyans career, stressing his singular perspectives and
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A Literary History of the American West his distinctive voice: Saroyan was one of the few welcome breaks in that grey literary landscape. . . . Also draws interesting parallels with beat writers. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Saroyan: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. The best available version of Saroyans life and times. Strangely organized but well written, it points to three traumas as major in the authors life: his fathers death, his marriage to Carol Marcus, and his induction into the army which knocked him off his literary pinnacle. A major book. Gold, Herbert. Conversation with William Saroyan. California Living (Los Angeles Herald Examiner), Dec. 9, 1979, pp. 8, 10, 30. An intimate portait of the mature Saroyan. Fascinating. . The Fervency of William Saroyan. San Francisco Focus, November I 984, pp. 6974. An intimate, insightful articleas good as any ever published on Saroyanthis essay also served as an Afterword to a limited anniversary edition of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, issued by Yolla Bolly Press. . It Is Right That You Should Not Die. . . Review ( San Francisco Examiner/ Chronicle ), May 24, 1981, p. 9. This touching eulogy makes a good companion for the Kouymijian article, for it stresses the authors final years. Kherdian, David. A Bibliography of William Saroyan, 19341964. San Francisco: R. Beacham, 1965. Indispensable list that needs to be updated. Kouymijian, Dikran. A Letter to Saroyan. International Herald Tribune, June 5, 1981, p. 24. A revealing eulogy that discusses Saroyans life and work in Paris, especially his later years. Matalene, H. W. William Saroyan. Dictionary of Literary Biography 7 (1980). A comprehensive reassessment of Saroyans career, with emphasis on his position as a major playwright. Excellent bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. Saroyan, Aram. William Saroyan. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. A painful biography, one that reveals as much about its author as about its subject. Of little literary value. What follows is a list of Saroyans books published after Kherdians bibliography appeared. Books are listed chronologically and contents other than fiction are indicated in the titles. One Day in the Afternoon of the World. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. After Thirty Years. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. Short Drive, Sweet Chariot. New York: Phaedra, 1966. Look at Us; . . . . New York: Cowles Education Corporation, 1967. I used to believe I had forever, now Im not so sure. New York: Cowles, 1968. The Man with the Heart in the Highlands and Other Stories. New York: Dell, 1968. Letters from 74 rue Taitbout; or, Dont go, but if you must, say hello to everybody. New York: World Publishing Company, 1969. The Dogs, or Paris Comedy, and Two Other Plays. New York: Phaedra, 1969. Inhale & Exhale. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1972, 1936. Places Where Ive Done Time. New York: Praeger, 1972. Sons come and go, mothers hang in there. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
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Chance Meetings. New York: Norton, 1978. Two Short Paris Summertime Plays: Assassinations, & Jim, Sam & Anna. Northridge, California: Santa Susana Press, 1979. Obituaries. Berkeley: Creative Arts Books, 1979. Births. Berkeley: Creative Arts Books, 1983. My Name Is Saroyan. Edited by James H. Tashjian. New York: Coward-McCann, 1983. The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Covelo, Calif.: Yolla Bolly Press, 1984. The library at California State University, Fresno, contains a William Saroyan Archive.
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Prophets on the Burning Shore Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and San Francisco
California, a prophet on the burning shore California, Ill be knocking on the golden door. Like an angel, standin in a shaft of light, risin up to paradise ~ I know Im gonna shine. Estimated Prophet 1 John Barlow and Bob Weir 1977, 1979 Ice-Nine Publishing
ACK KEROUAC
and Gary Snyder met in late September 1955 at a gathering held to plan the Six Gallery poetry reading that would introduce Allen Ginsbergs Howl to the public, as well as mark the first public performances of poets Ginsberg, Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure. Kerouac was not a reader at the event nor a San Franciscan, merely a visitor. But the connection of his name and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance is a justifiable one. Despite Ginsbergs relatively brief residence in San Francisco, the beats of New York and their Bay Area poet friends would prove inseparable subjects to the media and historians to follow. The liberated sensibility the beats had found for themselves in New York would germinate in California, giving both themselves and their local compatriots an entirely new atmosphere in which to create. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald on the rich, Californians are not as you and I. The estimated prophet of San Francisco that Barlow and Weir evoke above identifies the paradox of the citys contributions to American culture as the center of what may be called the counter-culture: a sheaf of undoubtedly valuable therapies, philosophies, and information sets from gestalt to Zen to the Whole Earth Catalogue rests beside a streak of hedonism that can result in contemporary psychobabble and narcissistic selfindulgence. 482
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Much of the citys unique atmosphere has been generated by its extraordinary geographical vantage point. San Francisco is not only to the west of the continental United States, it is at the end of the land itself. Blocked from the pervasive influence of New York City by the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevadas, and the encircling coastal range, it overlooks the Pacific such that its view is as much west to Asia as it is east to the rest of the nation. Its heavy Asian population confirms that the city is as much part of the Pacific basin as it is part of the North American continent. There is more: The mild climate, dreamy, sensual fog, views of the magnificent Marin headlands and Angel Island, and above all the hovering presence of Mount Tamalpais (held sacred by the original Bay Area Native American inhabitants) make it a city responsive to nature in ways uncommon to other American cities. Snyder wrote of the North Beach neighborhood in which he lived as the bow of a ship, and it is an apt association. It is like no other American city. That is not only mystical fog, but historically reasonable. San Francisco, as Kenneth Rexroth first pointed out, was the only major American city settled not by protestant mercantile or manufacturing interests, but via a gold rush that chaotically filled it up with miners, neer-do-wells, whores, Latinos, Asians, Jews, and later sailors and longshoremen-in general, by citizens frequently lacking any attachment to WASP notions of behavior. Despite its late Victorian pretensions to European sophistication as embodied in the Opera House and its vigorous high culture, San Francisco has been since 1849 archetypally western as a conscious sanctuary for personal freedomsexual, political, and socialin the traditional western context of outlaws and cowboys beyond the civilizing impact of women and the law. Snyder is the very model of a San Francisco poet, based not only on simple residence but on his values and practice as a poet. Kerouac lived intermittently in the city and wrote much of his best material there, but was ultimately rootless. His true connection with San Francisco was through his great friend Neal Cassady, whom he described in On the Road as a sideburned hero of the snowy west. The journeys on the road that defined Kerouac to himself and established his art were westward bound. Snyder said of the city: San Francisco taught me what a city could be, 3 and saved me having to go to Europe. Kerouac wrote of the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her 11 mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness of the late afternoon of time . . . California characters with their end-of-the continent sadness, handsome, decadent . . . hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhopsa lemon lot, and hows a man going to make a living with 4 a gang like that.) The two menSnyder the practical-minded Zen Bud483
dhist, Kerouac the romantic, self-obsessed observerneatly capture two of the major facets of a unique place. Yet it was still part of the United States, and it would be wise to review the nation in 1955. In the previous twenty-five years, her citizens had passed through a depression, a drastically modernizing world war, a cold war, a police action, and an internal political bloodletting. Now there was prosperityprosperity bought with the coin of a conformity that serviced the corporate technocracy, but prosperity nonetheless. The G.I. Bill had helped a major portion of an entire generation to climb at least one layer in the social strata, and millions pushed into the managerial class with its suburban perquisites. Conspicuous consumption eased both social dislocations and the intimidation of personal freedom that Truman had initiated, McCarthy had capitalized on, and the Supreme Court let stand. Cars dripped chrome and exploded with fins. TV Guide and Playboy, the young-man-onthe-makes introduction to consumer values, surfaced as the nations most popular periodicals. Herman Wouks Marjorie Morningstar and Sloan Wilsons The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit exemplified the desire to believe in the virtues of conformity. The age of marriage dropped radically and the percentage of young women who were mothers jumped sharply as an entire generation rushed into the security of marriage. The two most popular books of the era also spoke to the subliminal doubts many felt about the increasing rigidity of American social life. Mickey Spillanes murderous Mike Hammer acted as a vicarious avenger who was always an individual, no matter what else. And Grace Metaliouss Peyton Place, filled with stock characters receiving Puritan justice for their acts, reassured its readers that the individual still counted, even as the power of large-scale organizations increased dramatically. As in most things, San Francisco was a bit out of step with the rest of the country. Where left-wing ranks had been annihilated by McCarthyism, Harry Bridges could defy the Justice Department in San Francisco and be reelected forever to his union presidency. Where Stalinism had divided the left in New York and elsewhere, San Francisco had maintained throughout World War II an Anarchist Circle of Finns and Italians and the Randolph Bourne Council, which had offered support and counseling to many conscientious objectors from the Waldport, Oregon camp. Robert Duncan, an important San Francisco poet, was in 1955 teaching at the San Francisco State Poetry Center headed by Ruth Witt-Diamont, another vital source of activity. He had returned some years before from Black Mountain College, the 50s most remarkable educational institution, attracting some former students, including the poet Ed Dorn and Knute Stiles, who owned the bohemian bar known as The Place.
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Further south, the Henry MillerRobinson Jeffers bohemian tradition at Big Sur continued to carry considerable meaning, as did the presence of Jaime de Angelo, anthropologist and post-war anarchist/bohemian culture hero, a friend of Jeffers and a student of American Indian lore. In the citys bohemian neighborhood North Beach, Lawrence Ferlinghetti had opened City Lights Bookstore, a coffeehouse without coffee and a natural focal point for non-traditional literary interests. And most importantly, the city had Kenneth Rexroth, rejected from Communist Party membership in the 30s for being too individualistic, an elder brother who dispensed radical political talk along with poetry news and opinion on his program on public radio station KPFA in Berkeley, itself a unique element in the Bay Areas cultural life. For all that, Snyder told an interviewer in 1959 that I was in isolation 5 for 10 years (until 1955). I only had Whalen to talk to. It was Allen Ginsberg, who had fled New York in 1954 and blossomed in the fertile atmosphere of San Francisco, who brought together all of the poets, including Kerouac and Snyder, for the catalytic Six Gallery Reading. To review Kerouacs life before 1955: Born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac grew up as a Roman Catholic mystic obsessed with freedom, the wider world, and spiritual search on one side of his life, and with a desire for the stability and traditions of his native French-Canadian culture on the other. The split had begun in the psychic turmoil over his brothers death when Kerouac was four, and it would tear him apartfirst opening within him a rarefied sensibility that would make his mark as a writer, and finally killing him. In the meantime, he escaped Lowell with a football scholarship to Columbia University, dropped out of college, and shipped out as a merchant seaman during the war. He came to be close friends with Ginsberg and also William Burroughs, and with them adumbrated a romantic/existential philosophy they called the New Vision, a set of beliefs based on Rimbauvian sensation-seeking via drugs and the exploration of sexuality. Kerouac also used musicspecifically bop jazz as played by Charley Parker, Thelonious Monk, and many othersas a trance medium to expand consciousness. In 1947 Kerouac met Neal Cassady, whose whirlwind energy and perception made him a role model. While following Cassady about the road, Kerouac wrote and published a traditional novel, The Town and the City. Dissatisfied with the books style, which did not jibe with his current lifestyle or learning, he experimented with his style and eventually wrote the spontaneous On the Road and then his equally spontaneous masterpieces, Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax. This new work was unsaleable, and from 1950 until the 1957 publica-
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tion of On the Road he wandered in poverty around the U.S. and Mexico. In 1954 he encountered Buddhism through Thoreau and became a serious student, among other things writing the Buddhist poetry Mexico City Blues in the summer of 1955. Ginsberg had sent him news of the interesting atmosphere in San Francisco and a copy of his new poem Howl, and in September 1955 Kerouac caught an illegal ride on a train north from Mexico to visit. Snyders road was different. Born in 1930 in San Francisco, he had been brought up on a scratch farm in Washington State, the child of depres6 sion radicals. His grandfathers words to him were: Boy, read Marx. He spent summers in the mountains around Spirit Lake and Mount Saint Helens, and as a teenager worked as a copyboy for the UPI and the Oregonian newspaper. Like Kerouac, he had also shipped out as a galley worker on a freighter. In 1951 he graduated from Reed College, and after one semester as a graduate student in anthropology at Indiana University he returned in 1953 to San Francisco to attend classes in Japanese and Chinese at the University of California at Berkeley, eking out a living working on the docks in San Francisco. Until he was disqualified as a security risk for his left-wing connections, he worked as a lookout in the Mount Baker National Forest. That solitary confrontation with wild nature was crucial. As Joseph Conrad put it, to you as an ordinary person, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylumshow can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a mans untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitudeutter solitude without a policemanby the way of silenceutter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering 7 of public opinion? IWW anarcho-syndicalist politics and a profound commitment to wild nature were joined by an ever-deepening study of Zen Buddhism. In the fall of 1955 Snyder was preparing to leave the following spring for residence in the Rinzai Zen Daitoku-ji monastery in Japan. A few years later he would list Mao, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Crazy Horse as his heroes, and Buddhist thought, Chinese poetry, American Indian logic, and western science (he urges his correspondents to read the mathematical ecologist H. T. Odum) as his main sources of inspiration. Moving forward from 1955, he spent a year in Japan, returned briefly to the U.S., spent several more years in Japan, both in meditation and on an island commune, traveled in India, and returned to the United States in late 1966 in time to be a leader of San Franciscos Great Human Be-In in January 1967. Subsequently, he moved to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada above San Francisco with his wife Masa and sons Gen and Kai to take a 486
stand in the manzanita, find a place, and urge the earth consciousness that his poetry so brilliantly depicts. Kerouac, of course, was to become famous with the 1957 publication of On the Road, publish many more books, write a few more, and fall prey to his insecurities and the glare of fame by diving into a bottle until he died in 1969. It is his notoriety that is one of the complications of discussing Kerouac and Snyder together. Though Snyder may become more well known as a result of his membership on the board of Friends of the Earth, he is to this point not a media star but an acknowledged spokesman of a real and functioning subcultureEarth People, for lack of a better termliving his lifestyle nationwide but in particular in northern California and Oregon, the area tagged as Ecotopia in Ernest Callenbachs novel. Snyder has had little national publicity, and none of the racier sort. Kerouac, on the other hand, had a best-selling bohemian novel at a time when social oddities like bohemians were scarce, and consequently became the subject of some of the most scurrilous reporting and criticism in American intellectual history. The inaccurate linking of his work with violence and obscurity has clouded his single message per se: that young kids in this country, instead of yearning to be jet pilots should have turned their attention to Rimbaud and Shakespeare and struggled to draw their breath in pain to tell a brothers 8 story. To consider all this in another way, one might wonder why an outspoken radical like Gary Snyder was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry while Jack Kerouac became a critical football never once honored with any sort of award at all. There are many reasons for all this, but the one that seems most germane is that Snyder fulfills at least one of the major critical criteriahis practice is from a classical rather than a romantic stance. It is a common presumption that the post-war bohemian counter-culture of those alienated from middle-class materialism and sexual standards and toward mystical and ecological awareness is purely a romantic phenomenon. Critical theory tends to value form as the sine qua non of writingand of course an intuitive, spontaneous writer like Kerouac was anathema to these values. Generally the romantic upstarts going back to Blake, Whitman, and the preWorld War I era valued creativity over order, passion above stability, and so forth. This point of view toward the counter-culture ignores the fact that it is part of what Snyder calls the great subculture, a tradition quite as old if not so widespread as the Western intellectual tradition that flows from Aristotle. As to Snyder: his praxis as a poet and the content of that poetry are supported by two traditions that are classical in terms of concern with form, craft, and the detached expression of emotions (however mystical), 487
but still distinctly separate from the Western tradition of progress and reason: Zen and the American Indian steady-state ecological model and mythology. All of this suggests that the western tradition of bohemianism may well be far more complex and sophisticated than previously acknowledged, and that northern Californias primary role in introducing Asian and American Indian material to that subculture needs to be more closely examined. Kerouac, of course, can be completely identified with the romantic wing of the western counter-culture, as in his most famous sentence: I shambled after as Ive been doing all my life, after people who interested me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but 9 burn, burn, burn . . . He wrote spontaneously fromto describe it oversimplisticallythe ear, based on the model of Charley Parker and jazz improvisations. Like Snyder, therefore, he stepped out of traditional western high culture to a third-world culture, but like most observers he perceived the Afro-American culture in Dionysic terms, and certainly bop jazz had intensified emotion leading to a trance highness as a fundamental element. In describing his attitude toward his art, Snyder wrote, Poetry a riprap 10 on the slick rock of metaphysics. (Riprap is a forestry term for hand-laid stone steps along a trailsteps, wrote the critic Richard Howard, that en11 able the reader to ascend on earth, not to slide back nor to fly.) This is the Zen mode, ultimately not mystical at all, despite western assumptions about it. Snyder seeks to recreate the natural state of the wilderness in the mind, really the same goal as Kerouacsto be very highbut from the other side of the fence. It is poetry written from the eye-imagist poetry closely connected with William Carlos Williamss dictum no ideas but in things, for the natural state with which Snyder is so familiar is classical i.e., ordered, structured in a natural hierarchy. Thus Snyder wrote in his journal while a lookout on Sourdough Mountain some three years before he met Kerouac, Strange how unmoved this place leaves one; neither articulate nor worshipful; rather the pressing need 12 to look within and adjust the mechanism of perception. Conversely, Kerouac was an urban man who wrote brilliantly articulate celebrations of the wilderness, but was ultimately terrified by it when he too was a lookout, a year after meeting Snyder. Kerouac saw himself as a recording angel for his times, a solitary witness self-obsessed but stormily moving; Snyders work as a poet is shamanistic, an invocation to an ancient and fully felt tradition, less turbulent but perhaps more grounded and enduring. For two men of nearly the same generation both vagabond Buddhists, 488
Snyder and Kerouac were remarkably different. In personality they were poles apart: Kerouac was mercurial and contradictory, an erratic genius as a writer but a man torn between light and dark. Snyder had his moods, but was almost ostentatiously healthy, disciplined, focused, and self-reliant. He is a superb reader/performer of his own work, for instance; Kerouac could speak in public only when innoculated with alcohol. Their attitudes toward women are precise opposites: trapped in a Roman Catholic virgin/whore complex, Kerouac could never fully absorb the pagan Great Mother mythology at the root of all incantatory poetry, a faith that accepts the dark mysteries of life, the instincts and passions to which the Church so often attached sin. Snyder was relaxed about trivia like nudity and an active and cheerful lover as a younger man, and is the happily married father of two today. Kerouac had three brief marriages and an essentially unacknowledged daughter. Politically, both were anarchist in orientation. Kerouac was essentially apolitical, but resented any impingement on personal freedom and urged his friends to follow Confucius and avoid the authorities. Snyder was and is a sophisticated political thinker who said, The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the 13 basic self/void. We need both. Because of the pained split within him, Kerouac focused almost exclusively on personal issues, an obsession with self that critics have often rejected as narcissistic (a quality frequently associated with San Francisco, as well). Whatever Snyders personal painshe does not see fit to reveal themhe has written most about the public pain of ecological damage to the earth and its various inhabitants, human and non-human. Some critics have recently likened him to his mentor Pound, who distracted himself away from poetry with public issues. Yet both Kerouac and Snyder shared a path lived, as Perry Miller wrote of the transcendentalists, as an expression of religious radicalism in revolt 14 against a rational conservatism. Much as Snyder writes poems now about liquid metal fast breeder reactorsDeath himself . . . stands grinning, 15 beckoning. / Plutonium tooth-glow . . . Kerouac wrote in his 1955 Mexico City Blues, Western Sorcery is Sad Science / Mechanics go 16 mad / In Nirvanas of hair / and black oil . . . They shared a rejection of Aristotelian either/or logic, as in Kerouacs addiction metaphor, which William Burroughs would exploit at length in Naked Lunch some four years later: 489
They wind up trying to find about Plato, Aristotle, they end up in a vicious Morphine circle The only cure for morphine poisoning 17 Is more morphine logic goes round and round, but never catches up with experience. A fine example of their intellectual relationship focuses on love and the Buddha. Snyder would write in his journal in the summer of 1956, The giving of a love relationship is a Bodhisattva relaxation of personal fearful defenses . . . Enlightenment is this interior ease and freedom carried not only to persons but to all the unil8 verse . . . Having already read Mexico City Blues, perhaps he retained a memory of the 157th chorus: Bring on the single teaching Its all indeed in Love; Love not of Loved Object Cause no object exists, Love of Objectlessness, When nothing exists . . . Yet there are some specific and revealing differences in their mutual practice of the Way. Kerouac thought of himself as a dreamy Mahayana Buddhist, because Zen didnt concentrate on kindness so much as on confusing the intellect to make it perceive the illusion of all sources of things, 19 and Zen ideas are only technical explanations without tears and truth. Though both Snyder and as serious an authority as the Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, head of the Tibetan order of Buddhism now centered in the U.S. at Naropa Institute, would agree that Mexico City Blues is very great Buddhist poetry, Snyder would also point out that the split between Zen and 20 Mahayana didnt exist, that Zen was part of Mahayana, stylistically different through its use of koans (the sound of one hand clapping) rather than relying solely on the sutras that Kerouac revered. Aside from his disputes with Buddhist doctrine, Kerouac never entirely ceased being a Roman Catholic, frequently attempting to convince Snyder that Christ was Maitreya, the Buddha who was to come. Since Snyder was then writing of Them Xtians out to save souls and grab land / Theyd steal Christ off the cross / if he wasnt nailed on, they had a considerable point 21 of difference. Either one accepts the pagan/Zen notion that divinity is
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within each human being or one does not; an external God, generally leads to hierarchy and paternalism, as in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Though Kerouac would at times inveigh against Christs messiah complex, he would also write in 1956 that No man is exempt from sin any 22 more than he can avoid a trip to the toilet. Sin is not a very Buddhist concept in the way Kerouac meant it. Kerouac had sought out Buddhism from a deep personal need, seeking a transcendental Repose Beyond Fate, in Ashvagoshas words, and his repetitions of the cardinal features of certain sutras were colored by his sentimentality into the rote of a frightened man holding onto reality with ceaseless prayer: The Bodhisattva must . . . retain his nonenity [sic] state and avoid fame. He must walk through to his goal not caring what happens on the way, realizing his self is not the Bodhisattva but a mind believed phenomenon without reality. He must enter the bright holiness at once, go into his mind essence, and return no more to the hedgings and cavils of the 23 world . . . In his 1956 poem Myths and Texts, second shaman song, Snyder wrote: One moves continually with the consciousness Of that other, totally alien, non-human Humming inside like a taut drum, Carefully avoiding any direct thought of it, 24 Attentive to the real-world flesh and stone . . . As Yoka Daishi wrote, For walking is Zen, sitting is Zen. Much of Snyders later material is of Zen, not on it; it is in his bones now. Rather than deny the world as Kerouac often did to fight his pain (the narcissistic element of the puzzle of San Francisco, say), Snyder would write a few years later: A clear, attentive mind Has no meaning but that Which sees is truly seen. No one loves rock, yet we are here. . . . . . . coyote 25 Watch me rise and go. By contrast, Kerouac wrote of meditation as instantaneous / ecstasy like a 26 shot of heroin. Snyders work is, I submit, a clearer rendering of the same brilliant but romantically murky insight that Kerouac gave to the nation. By the time of his 1970 book Regarding Wave, Snyder had achieved a masters touch with his art, perhaps due to the fact that he had meditated for roughly twenty years, as compared to Kerouacs three or four. Zen is,
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Snyder recently told an interviewer, practice . . . not aesthetics, or haiku, 27 or spontaneity, of minimalism . . . green tea or sitting on the floor. This is not to say that Kerouacs poetry, which Snyder pronounced the 28 greatest piece of religious poetry Ive ever read, (italics mine), is inferior, merely that it is the product of a romantic western temperament. Its style is overt rather than the integrated Zen of Snyders work, based on a jazz-blues long line rather than Snyders images. It is brilliant nonetheless: The wheel of the quivering meat conception Turns in the void expelling human beings, Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits . . . All the endless conception of living beings Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness Throughout the ten directions of space Occupying all the quarters in and out, From supermicroscopic no-bug To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell Illuminating the sky of one Mind Poor! I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel 29 and safe in heaven dead That is, as Snyder or the Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche would agree, a superb rendering of the ornate sutra style of Buddhist eschatology and cosmology. More, it is a naked revealing of the consciousness at work, a spontaneous eavesdropping on Kerouacs inner mind. Each man had or has something to give to the subculture that stands against western notions of mechanical progress which currently, Snyder holds, threaten the end of upper mammalian evolution in our lifetime. Kerouac was the lightning rod (and a sacrificial lamb, as well) who stimulated thousands of young people across the country to challenge the conventions and reconsider their lives; a fewBob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, David Bowie, Janis Joplinfollowed, and begat a new generation; and so forth. In northern California and across the country, the example of Snyder has focused much of that inspiration into an ongoing life, and very possibly a prophetic one. Carlos Castanedas teacher Don Juan Mateus said, Only if one loves 3o this earth with unbending passion can one release ones sadness. It was his inability to love the earth or any particular part of it that led to Kerouacs sad death. Snyders example is a happy one, a search for higher consciousness united with living correctly that can produce a gem of a poem like For the Children out of the depressing statistics of the Club of Romes popula-
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tion survey: The rising hills, the slopes / of statistics / lie before us. / The steep climb / of everything, going up, / up, as we all / go down. Kerouac intuited the horrors and urged all to love their brother; Snyder recommends that and a bit more: stay together learn the flowers 31 go light.
D ENNIS M CN ALLY , San
Francisco, California
Notes
1. Bob Weir and John Barlow, Estimated Prophet (Copyright 1977, 1979 by Ice-Nine Publishing, San Rafael, California). 2. Gary Snyder, The Old Ways (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 1977), p. 46. 3. Gary Snyder, interview in City Miner, October 1977, p. 44. 4. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 141. 5. Gary Snyder, interview with Alfred G. Aronowitz, 1959. 6. Gary Snyder, remark at public poetry reading, San Francisco, December 1979. 7. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 82. 8. Jack Kerouac to Alfred G. Aronowitz, January 12, 1960. 9. Jack Kerouac, On the Road, p. 9. 10. Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts (New York: Totem Press/Corinth Books, 1960), p. 43. 11. Richard Howard, Alone with America (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 486. 12. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 4. (August 28, 1952 journal entry.) 13. Earth House Hold, p. 92. 14. Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), p. 8. 15 Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1976), p. 67.
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A Literary History of the American West 16. Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 21. 17. Mexico City Blues, pp. 133, 134. 18. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold, p. 34. 19. Jack Kerouac to Alfred G. Aronowitz, January 20, 1959. 20. Gary Snyder to Dennis McNally, December 15, 1975. 21. Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts, p. 12. 22. Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959), p. 42. 23. Jack Kerouac (journal excerpt), Jack Kerouac Tells the Truth, in Robert Lowrys Book/USA (Fall 1958), no pagination. 24. Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts, p. 38. 25. Gary Snyder, Riprap (New York: New Directions, 1972), p.6 26. Jack Kerouac, Scattered Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1971), p. 27. 27. Gary Snyder, interview in City Miner, October 1977, p. 40. 28. Gary Snyder to Alfred G. Aronowitz, March 1959. 29. Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, p. 211. 30. Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (New York: Bantam Books: 1977), p. 41. 31. Gary Snyder, Turtle Island, p. 86.
Primary Sources 1. Works by Jack Kerouac Desolation Angels. New York: Coward, McCann, 1965. The Dharma Bums. New York: Viking Press, 1957. Lonesome Traveler. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960. Mexico City Blues. New York: Grove Press, 1960. On the Road. New York: Viking Press, 1957. 2. Works by Gary Snyder Axe Handles. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983. The Buck Country. New York: New Directions, 1968. Earth House Hold. New York: New Directions, 1969. He Who Hunted Birds in His Fathers Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth. Bolinas, Calif.: Grey Fox Press, 1979. Myths and Texts. New York: Totem Press/Corinth Books, 1960. The Old Ways. San Francisco: City Lights, 1977. Passage Through India. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1984. The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979. Edited by Scott McLean. New York: New Directions, 1980. Regarding Wave. New York: New Directions, 1970. Songs for Gaia. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1979.
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Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974. Notes on the Religious Tendencies. Liberation (June 1959), p. 11. Secondary Sources Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Indisputably the single best collection of beat and other open form poetics. Allen consulted with the poets themselves on the selection, and the result is an enduring work. Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1971. Except for the seminal work of Alfred G. Aronowitz in the New York Post, Cook was one of the first journalists to have anything decent to say about the beats. Unfortunately, his research is superficial (although he does describe interesting encounters with Kerouac and Gary Snyder) and minor errors abound. Kherdian, David. Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Fresno: The Giligia Press, 1967. Biographical and poetic statements regarding Rexroth, Snyder, et al. Limited in scope but utterly reliable. Meltzer, David. The San Francisco Poets. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971. Meltzer was part of the late 50s poetry scene (and later part of the 60s rock and roll scene) and knows whereof he speaks; the book is personal, idiosyncratic, and extremely useful. Molesworth, Charles. Gary Snyders Vision: Poetry and the Real Work. Literary Frontier Series. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983. Parkinson, Thomas. The Poetry of Gary Snyder. Southern Review 4 (Summer 1968): 614620. Parkinsons Casebook on the Bears was the first intelligent academic response to the beatsdetached yet sympathetic and well-informed. This article is perceptive, precise, and an extremely good introduction to the man I would suggest is our greatest living poet. Saroyan, Aram. Genesis Angels. New York: William P. Morrow, 1979. This attempt to place Lew Welch in his literary and historical context ends up more as an evocative mood piece than a formal study. In that it can be helpful, although it is hard to understand how any serious student of northern California poetics can place Welchs disappearance on the foothills of Mount Tamalpais (ten miles north of San Francisco) rather than in the Sierra Nevada, 150 miles away. Tytell, John. Naked Angels. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. A sound and intellectually substantial overview of the beats. Sometimes criticized as selling them, it remains highly valuable.
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SECTION II
The Southwest
Introduction
HE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST is a region of sun, space, and silence. As one travels across the area, moving toward the setting sun from Texas to Arizona, prairie grasslands shade off into high plains which in turn give way to basin and range, desert and distant mountains. The features of the earth change, but always there are the big sky arching overhead and the chronic or sporadic aridity that, in one way or another, has shaped the look of the land. In the Southwest, as Ross Calvin has truly said, sky determines. In this region, as in the American West as a whole, the immensity of nature, of earth and sky, dominates the imagination. The human history of the Southwest is storied and colorful. Native Americans have dwelled on the regions soil for at least twenty-five thousand years. Their cultures flourished in the area for millennia before the arrival of the first Europeans a mere four and a half centuries ago. These Europeans, the Spaniards, brought with them a pastoral, easygoing way of life that blended well with the conditions imposed by the natural elements in the Southwest. Reminders of the Indian and Spanish past are everywhere apparent in the region. But the Southwest is nothing if not paradoxical; it is both ancient and new, the home of centuries-old civilizations and now, increasingly, a place of sprawling urban concentrations and of high-tech industrial complexes that sit uneasily upon the land. Mans relationship with nature has long been a theme of southwestern life, but so, as the twentieth century draws to a close, are the abrasions and dislocations of modern urban existence. In terms of the social organization of human life, the Southwest today is, first and foremost, a borderland, a transition zone in which AngloAmerican culture from the North meets and mingles with Hispanic-Indian culture from the South. As in any borderland there is conflict, but there is also rich cultural interchange, borrowing and lending, voluntary and involuntary, of language, customs, attitudes, and values. Anglo civilization in the Southwest is different from that of other regionseven other subregions of the American Westbecause, from the beginning, it has rubbed
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THE SOUTHWEST
against the culture of the Native American, the culture of the MexicanAmerican, and (in the eastern reaches of the area) the culture of the black, and in the process has been irrevocably changed. There is too much ethnic strife in the Southwest to claim that it is a model of the American melting pot, but no other region in the country, it seems safe to say, has contained more radically different cultures that have had to learn to accommodate one anotherand to interact with and learn from one another. The literature of the Southwest has, inevitably, been formed by the natural, social, and historical environments from which it emerged. There is scarcely a southwestern book that does not, in some way, mirror the immense power of land and weather. And certainly a major subjectperhaps the major subjectof southwestern writing is the collision of cultures, the forced, and sometimes fortuitous, melding of disparate ethnic and cultural groups. The first work of printed literature to issue from the Southwest, Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vacas La Relacin, published in Spain in 1542, clearly sets forth these shaping themes and ideas. Shipwrecked off the coast of Texas in 1528, Cabeza de Vaca and three companions wandered for eight incredible years through the coastal marshes, the plains and mountains of what is now the American Southwest. They were eventually rescued by fellow Spaniards in northern Mexico in 1536. Following a brief stay in Mexico City, Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain where he composed La Relacin as a kind of report to his king, Charles V, on his adventures in the New World. Though it was published in Europe, Cabeza de Vacas account was molded in the crucible of a new and strange environment, and as a result, it is a peculiarly American-and southwesterndocument. La Relacin, even when read in translation, is plainly a work of art, laced with laconic subtlety and ambiguity, and it has intrigued readers for centuries. In the Relacin Cabeza de Vaca chronicles his odyssey through a vast emptiness, a land of awe-inspiring dimensions, of unfamiliar flora and fauna. He tells how he ultimately reached physical safety andby implication, at leastspiritual maturity. Cabeza de Vacas account is the prototype of one of the most common vehicles of American literature: the journey inward, a journey in which the physical ordeal is but the outward manifestation of an underlying spiritual trial and discovery. Much of Cabeza de Vacas spiritual growth was apparently assisted by the Native Americans he met along the way. Experience by experience, year by year, Cabeza de Vaca shed the hauteur of the conquistador as he acquired respect, and even love, for the people of an alien culture. In the search for exemplary models of southwestern writing, the Spaniards La Relacin seems a good place to start. Historically the Southwest is both old and new; the same may be said of the region as a literary entity. It is old in that it has been the home of 497
notable literature for thousands of years. It is new in that only in the last half-century or so has it produced literary artists who have gained at least a measure of general recognition as competent belles lettrists. The oldest southwestern literature, of course, is that of the Native Americans. In all comers of the region many groups of Native Americans generated, long before the arrival of Europeans, unique inventories of prose tales and poetry that gave creative voice to the American Indians philosophy and worldview. The Native Americans literary tradition was an oral tradition, and while many of their stories and songs have been translated and recorded in print, most have no doubt been lostor remain untranscribed. Native American literature is discussed in detail elsewhere in this volume, but it must at least be mentioned in passing in any general survey of southwestern literature. The first Euro-Americans to write about the Southwestbeginning, as mentioned, with Cabeza de Vaca in the mid-sixteenth centurywere the Spanish. Such narratives in Spanish as Pedro de Castaedas chronicle of the Coronado expedition and Gaspar Prez de Villagrs history of Oates colonization of New Mexico are fully as imaginative and literary as betterknown contemporary works, in English, by John Smith and William Bradford. In addition to a formal literary tradition, the Spanish brought with them a rich folk heritage which evolved, in the New World, in interesting ways. Folk drama, such as Los Pastores (the shepherds play, concerning the nativity of Jesus, that to this day exists in many versions across the Southwest), and corridos, border ballads springing largely from AngloMexican conflict, are two literary forms of the Hispanic folk culture that developed in the region from the seventeenth century on. However, as is true of American literature generally, it is widely believed that the first real southwestern literature was composed in English and began to appear only when-in the case of the Southwest, in the nineteenth centuryAnglo-Americans began to settle the area. Zebulon Pikes Expedition (first published in 1895, though written much earlier) and Mary Austin Holleys Texas (1833) set the tone for this early literature. Nineteenthcentury southwestern writing comprises an abundance of narratives of exploration, travel accounts, promotional tracts, letters, journals, histories, and an assortment of miscellaneous materials of the kind. Most of these works are not literature at all. They are historical documents that possess, in varying degrees, incidental literary value. Many of them are merely tedious chronicles of everyday life and experiencesgrist for the historians mill perhaps, but scarcely sustained achievements of the creative imagination. Luckily there is a handful of works of this type from the nineteenth century that transcend the usual level of such books. There are, for example, 498
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memorable narratives by mountain men who invaded the Southwest: James O. Patties Personal Narrative (1831), George Frederick Ruxtons Life in the Far West (1848), and Lewis H. Garrards Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail (1850). There are a few inspired pieces of journalism, such as George W. Kendalls Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition (1844). There is the classic journal of the Santa Fe Trail by Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies (1844). There is the well-known account of the founding of the Texas Republic by a survivor of Goliad, John C. Duval, entitled Early Times in Texas (1892). And perhaps most accomplished of all, in terms of literary quality, there is a batch of memoirs by observant and perceptive women who came to the Southwest in the nineteenth century: Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, 18461847 (first published in 1926), by Susan Shelby Magoffin; The Land of the Pueblos (1889), by Susan Wallace, wife of General Lew Wallace; and Vanished Arizona (1908), by Martha Summerhayes, are notable examples of the genre. In terms of national literary and cultural significance, the most important historical event to occur in the Southwest in the nineteenth century was the development, in the last three or four decades of the century, of the cattle ranching industry and the emergence of the cowboy, the central figure of that industry, as a national folk hero. The cattle ranch and the cowboy were created in their most recognizable forms after the Civil War, in South Texas, as the result of increased demand for beef in the North. Cattle drives from Texas to the Kansas railheads were, of course, the immediate answer to that demand. Later vast ranching operations and expansion of the nations network of rail transportation supplied more permanent answers. Most of the equipment and terminology that quickly became associated with ranching and the cowboy evolved along the Texas-Mexican border, as Anglo stockmen adapted Mexican ranching techniques to their own peculiar conditions. The cowboy and all his accoutrements quickly spread northwestward, and by the turn of the century the cowboy was a folk figure associated with the entire West. Historically, however, he originated in the Southwest, specifically in Texas. Gallons of ink have been spilled by historians and other interpreters of the cowboy in an attempt to set the record straight, to preserve the cowboy in print as he really was. Some of the best nonfiction on the cowboy may be found in the memoirs and autobiographies of cowboys themselves. A very handy and useful work of this genre is The Trail Drivers of Texas (1924), a collection of more then two hundred homely reminiscences by old-timers who had gone up the trails from Texas in the late nineteeth century. The classic cowboy memoir, however, is Charles Siringos A Texas Cowboy (1886), a volume Will Rogers once called the cowboys Bible, indicating the degree to which Siringo shaped the late nineteenth-century cowboys 499
image of himself. Many old-time cowboys left behind accounts of their adventures, only a few of which can be mentioned here. Perhaps the most literary of these accounts is J. Frank Dobies A Vaquero of the Brush Country (1929), Dobies reworking of the reminiscences of the Texas cattleman John Young. Lucky 7: A Cowmans Autobiography (1957), composed by Will Tom Carpenter and edited by Elton Miles, is one of the best firsthand descriptions of the cowboys day-to-day activities. From the Pecos to the Powder: A Cowboys Autobiography (1967), by Bob Kennon as told to Ramon F. Adams, is another excellent firsthand account of ranch life in the Southwest. For pioneer ranching from a womans perspective, No Life for a Lady (1941), Agnes Morley Cleavelands well-known chronicle, cannot be topped. As for formal history of the ranch and the cowboy, many titles could be mentioned, but a few stand out above the rest. Walter Prescott Webbs The Great Plains (1931) is interpretive history at its best, and is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the origins of the plains cattle kingdom. J. Frank Dobie, in The Longhorns (1941) and Cow People (1964), tells many artful tales of the ranch country, some of them authentic, others considerably embellished by the authors active imagination. J. Evetts Haley, a historian who has been neglected and much underestimated as a writer, is the author of The XIT Ranch of Texas (1929) and Charles Goodnight (1936), the stories of a legendary ranch and a legendary ranchman. Another celebrated cowman, Shanghai Pierce, is the subject of an entertaining biography, Shanghai Pierce: A Fair Likeness (1953), by Chris Emmett. The King Ranch (1957), by Tom Lea, is the official history of that famous spread by one of the Southwests best-known writers. Virtually all of the works mentioned so far are history, biography, and memoirs, most of them from the nineteenth century. As already indicated, they are not literature in the strictest sense of the term. If literature is defined in the usual wayas comprising works of some genuine imaginative and artistic merit that were created within the Euro-American literary tradition and were composed with the intention that they be considered and judged as literaturethen southwestern literature is largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century. The relatively few pre-twentieth-century attempts to create a fiction, poetry, or drama of the Southwest usually turned out to be technically and intellectually immature. Beginning with the anonymous novel Lheroine du Texas, published in Paris, France in 1819, nineteenthcentury fiction set in the Southwest was for the most part melodramatic and wildly unrealistic. Southwestern poetry of that period tended to be sentimental and metrically unimaginative. Obviously there are exceptions to any such sweeping generalizations as the foregoing. One that comes to mind immediately is Adolph Bandeliers The Delight Makers (1890), a novel which remains readable and relevant. Even Charles H. Hoyts popular play 500
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A Texas Steer ( 1890), a work which helped create many of the Texas stereotypes that abound today, continues to stand up fairly well (certainly it is as much a work of art as Larry L. Kings Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, written and produced in the 1970s). Chronologically, then, southwestern literature is preponderantly a literature of the twentieth century. Generically it is a literature of prose. Novelists, short story writers, folklorists, historians, journalists, and practitioners of various kinds of expository prose have flourished within the regions borders throughout most of the present century. Until very recent yearsthe last decade or sopoets and playwrights have not. Again there are exceptions to this generalization. Poets such as Glenn Ward Dresbach, Arthur Sampley, and Fray Angelico Chavez practiced their craft honorably and sometimes well during the early and middle years of the century. And, in New Mexico especially, a group of talented immigrant poets from other parts of the countryWitter Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, Haniel Long, Winfield Townley Scott, and otherswrote verse that was at least partially shaped by the poets experiences in the region. Probably the only southwestern playwright of any significance in the early decades of the century was Lynn Riggs, whose Green Grow the Lilacs was transformed into one of the most popular American musicals ever to be staged, Oklahoma. If poetry and drama have not flowered in the Southwest, fiction is the literary genre that has flourished in the region in the twentieth century. Immediately after the turn of the century fiction writers began to appear in profusion. Most of the best of the early southwestern fictionists deal with life in the cattle kingdom. Andy Adamss Log of a Cowboy (1903), Emerson Houghs Hearts Desire (1903), Stewart Edward Whites Arizona Nights (1904), and Eugene Manlove Rhodess many novels and stories set in southern New Mexico all illustrate the generalization. A writer whose contribution to the literary depiction of the southwestern cattle country is sometimes overlooked is William Sidney Porter (O. Henry). Porter was a southerner by birtha North Carolinian, to be specific and later an adopted son of New York, a city he portrayed memorably in some of his most famous stories. As a young man, however, Porter spent two years on an isolated ranch in southwest Texas near the U.S.-Mexican border, working in a desultory way as a cowboy and a sheepherder. He later lived in the cities of Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. When Porter became O. Henry, he naturally began to draw on his experiences and observations as the stuff of his fiction, to transmute those experiences into literary gold. Not surprisingly, the Texas years form the backdrop for a sizable number of his tales. Most of O. Henrys southwestern stories were collected in Heart of the West (1907). Their portrayal of South Texas ranch life at a time when the 501
West was still at least semi-wild is as accurate as the authors powers of observation and absorption could make it. Among the more notable tales in the collection are The Higher Abdication, The Princess and the Puma, The Hiding of Black Bill, Hygeia at the Solito, and The Last of the Troubadours. Of the final work named, no less an authority than J. Frank Dobie has saidin his Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest it is the best range story in American fiction. While that seems an overstatement, The Last of the Troubadours is an interesting and authentic narrative of Texas ranch life in the late nineteenth century. In terms of lasting influence, one of O. Henrys most important stories is The Caballeros Way, which features as a character the Cisco Kid, who has appeared and reappeared throughout the twentieth century in film, radio, and television. In praising The Caballeros Way in his Guide, Dobie focuses on the authors knowledgeable use of background detail: nobody, says Dobie, has written a better description of a prickly pear flat. At the height of his celebrity O. Henry worked with astonishing speed, turning out more than a story per week. Such haste could not possibly contribute to the attainment of high literary quality. To satisfy the demands of his many readers, the author inevitably slipped into the use of the melodramatic, the sentimental, the plot formula, the cheap, pat surprise ending; these are qualities, needless to say, that have not enhanced his reputation among recent critics of American literature. In addition, his facile, flowery style grates against the modem readers sense of aesthetic rightness. Still, O. Henry was a born storyteller whose words have pleased millions through the years. Certainly his southwestern tales are worth reading. They are, for example, realistic in that he ordinarily wrote only about things of which he had some firsthand knowledge. Though they are perhaps too glib and cheery to be realistic in the deeper sense, O. Henrys southwestern stories and sketches are valuable portraits of the cattle kingdom at the end of an erathe age of the open range. It seems clear that a major chronological dividing line in southwestern writing was the 1920s. In fact it was during that time that the regions literature began to emerge from its primitive stage, to mature and come of age. In Texas and New Mexico, especially, the decade of the 1920s was a fruitful literary period. In New Mexico immigrant artists, writers, and intellectuals first began to congregate in Santa Fe and Taos at about that time. As early as 1918 Mabel Dodge (later known by her married name, Mabel Dodge Luhan) and Mary Austin had moved to northern New Mexico. Luhan would eventually produce Winter in Taos (1935) and Edge of the Taos Desert (1937), autobiographical accounts that attempt to describe the authors mystical attachment to the Southwest. Austins southwestern volumes of
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note include The Land of Journeys Ending (1924) and One-Smoke Stories (1934). Willa Cather, though only a brief resident in New Mexico in the 1920s, was inspired by her experiences there to write one of the best of all southwestern novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). The most famous literary immigrant to New Mexico during the decade was, of course, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence, who lived sporadically on a ranch near Taos from 1922 to 1925. Lawrence once wrote that, when he first saw the brilliant light of northern New Mexico, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. Though the Southwest directly influenced only a couple of Lawrences short stories, much of the material in his excellent collection of essays, Mornings in Mexico (1927), was drawn from his time in New Mexico. In Texas during the 1920s J. Frank Dobie began to publish the results of his forays into southwestern folk culture. In so doing, he ushered in a literary and cultural era that the states writers and intellectuals are still attempting to come to terms with. Dobies career spanned many decades, but the roots of everything he accomplished are in the pioneering work in Texas and southwestern folklore that he did in the 1920s. Unquestionably Dobies major achievement was that almost single-handedly he made southwesterners of the 1920s and 1930s, when very little southwestern literature as such existed, aware of the literary possibilities of their folk heritage. At the beginnings of his career, Dobie helped provide direction and vigor for the young Texas Folklore Society, editing its annual publication from 1922 to 1943. The Society remains today, thanks in part to Dobies influence, one of the states most important literary and cultural groups, and its long list of publications is a rich store of regional folk materials, both original and interpretive. In recent years Dobie has been chastised severely by the so-called scientific folklorists, who deplore the Texans lack of devotion to folklore as a systematic and rigorously precise discipline. (Dobies professed, and only half-joking, attitude toward the collection and publishing of folk materials was that he never let the truth stand in the way of his telling a good story.) But despite Dobies contributions to the collection and study of southwestern folklore of various kinds, he was not himself essentially a folklorist, and it is at this point that the criticisms of the scientific folklorists miss the mark. Certainly he was an avid collector and aficionado of folktales, but he used those tales as raw material and inspiration, not as finished products safely preserved in an index and properly cross-referenced by theme and motif. Stories filtered through a writers intelligence and transmuted by an artists imagination are naturally going to be changed from their original
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form. Dobie did not attempt, as would the academic folklorist, to transcribe faithfully the folktales he had gathered from field research; he strove instead to transform them into literature. He saw himself in the grand tradition of oral storytellers he had known and felt that he was handicapped by having to use a pen rather than his voice. In a sense he modeled his works after the style and organization of the great taletellers he had listened to. His books often seem choppy and disorganized because they are composed of many short tales clustered around a common theme; with good reason, he called his works mosaics. They are meant to approximate the breaks in thought, the abrupt disconnections of the storytellers monologue. The best of Dobies books are successful, however, because their hidden and underlying threads are never broken, and each tale included develops and enlarges an overall pattern. Dobies method worked best when he wrote on the vast lore concerning the Southwests lost mines and buried treasureCoronados Children (1931) and Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver (1939) are his two books structured around that general topicand when he allowed his imagination to wander through the myriad of folktales and traditions having to do with southwestern animals, as he did in The Longhorns, The Voice of the Coyote (1949), and The Mustangs (1952). Finished just before his death in 1964, Cow People is also one of his better books; it is a delightful compendium of tales of eccentric southwestern ranchers and stockmen and springs from the authors firsthand knowledge of such people as well as from extensive reading about them. Some may downgrade Dobies efforts and others dismiss him altogether, but his books will be read and his influence will endure as long as there are people who love the lore and legendry of Texas and the Southwest. Though Dobie possesses the best claim to the title of Mr. Southwest, as Lawrence Clark Powell has called him, he is often linked in the popular mind with his colleagues and contemporaries, Walter Prescott Webb and Roy Bedichek. One of the things that united this triumvirate of friendsso different in temperament and specific interestswas a determination to explore the various aspects of Texas and southwestern history and culture. Of the three, Dobie was the most prolific, and his dominating influence as a public figure as well as a literary personage ensures his historical importance. Webb was the most original and fertile thinker. Bedichek was perhaps the best writer. As a historian, Webbwho taught for three decades at the University of Texas at Austinmust be judged elsewhere, though it seems safe to say that an understanding of his ideas is basic to any study of the history of the American West; as a writer, Webb was a creator of luminous and flowing prose, and unquestionably his books are literary accomplishments that deserve to stand alongside those of Dobie and Bedichek. In
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the writing of each of his major works The Great Plains (1931), The Texas Rangers (1935), and The Great Frontier (1952)he began with a shaping concept, then chose the appropriate language in which to frame his ideas. The results of his labors were books of provocative intellectual scope composed in a vivid, readable style. Roy Bedichek, the third member of the triumvirate, was for many years director of Texass University Interscholastic League and, in that demanding position, had little time to write. In fact, he began to publish his books only after retirement from directorship of the League. By that time he was nearing seventy, and his mind had ripened and mellowed. A lifetime of observing nature and of wide and intelligent reading had produced a truly remarkable understanding of the workings of the natural order. His Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (1947) is a quiet statement of joy in the observation and appreciation of southwestern plant and wildlife; it is at once a philosophical treatise, a celebration of life, and a minor classic in the field of natural history. Karnkawuy Country (1950) and The Sense of Smell (1960), sequels to his first book, are on only a slightly lower level of achievement. The era of Dobie, Webb, and Bedichekwhich began in the 1920s and encompassed four decadesis now closed. Among Texans and southwesterners, these three writers attained the status of an institution, celebrities known and admired by thousands who had never read any of their books. Perhaps, as has been charged, their reputations during their lifetime were inflated far beyond the bounds that a dispassionate study of their works would impose. That point remains for future generations of readers and critics to decide. But while the final dimensions of their accomplishment have not yet been determined, it seems clear that their most important function was to serve as literary pioneers. They demonstrated that their native region contained cultural materials to satisfy the imaginative requirements of the most curious and the most talented, and that from these local and regional materials writers, philosophers, and historians might construct art of the highest order. The acknowledging of their example, then, appears at least as important as the measuring of their various achievements. One of J. Frank Dobies most significant contributions to the recognition and study of southwestern literature was his initiation and teaching of a celebrated course at the University of Texas at Austin: The Life and Literature of the Southwest, first offered in 1930. (From this course, incidentally, emerged Dobies bibliography, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest.) Other earlyday classes in southwestern literature were taught by Mabel Major at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and by T. M. Pearce at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The decade of the 1930s was a period of ebullient optimism concerning the viability of the con-
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cept of regionalism as a key to understanding the American experience, and the presence of such courses in college curricula provided a cloak of legitimacy for the idea of a coherent and unified southwestern culture. The mass media provided further support. During the 1930s, for example, the Saturday Review of Literature, the most prestigious literary magazine of the day, devoted an entire issue to the blossoming of southwestern writing. Indeed the impetus supplied by Dobie and others in the late 1920s and early 1930s issued into a kind of golden age of southwestern literature. The four decades or so between 1925 and 1965 constitute the regions classic literary period. The areas biggest literary names come from this time. Katherine Anne Porter, Harvey Fergusson, Paul Horgan, Oliver La Farge, and William Eastlake, for instance, are each the subject of a full chapter to follow. Other southwestern writers from these decades who ought not to be forgotten include Dorothy Scarborough, Edwin Lanham, John W. Thomason, Jr., George Milburn, George Sessions Perry, Ross Calvin, Haniel Long, Frank Goodwyn, Stanley Vestal, Loula Grace Erdman, Tom Lea, William A. Owens, Max Evans, William Goyen, and William Humphrey. Three writers in particular from the periodConrad Richter, Edwin Corle, and Fred Gipsonthough not treated in separate chapters, deserve special mention. A native of Pennsylvania, Conrad Richter resided in New Mexico from 1928 to 1950. Like so many immigrant artists before him, Richter was from the first fascinated by the Southwest, by what seemed to him a lovely, exotic land. He traveled throughout New Mexico and adjacent states, listened to tales told by the regions old-timers, and dug through back issues of newspapers and into manuscript collections. The results of his probings filled several thick notebooks. The notebooks, in turn, supplied background materials for a series of memorable and authentic stories and novels set in New Mexico and the Southwest. Of his twenty-one published volumes, only four are about the Southwest, but they are among his best and most memorable works. Richters first southwestern book, Early Americana (1936), is a gathering of short stories set in West Texas and New Mexico. The second, The Sea of Grass (1937), is one of the regions classic works. Historically and mythically The Sea of Grass concerns the nineteenth-century conflict between cattleman and nester, or more generally between the old West and the new West. In terms of the story the conflict is shown dramatically as a personal triangle: the cattleman Jim Brewton, his wife Lutie, and the district attorney Brice Chamberlain, who champions the nesters cause. Interestingly the triangle extends into the next generation, the Brewton children: Jimmy is a replica of his father; Sarah Beth closely resembles her mother; and Brock looks and acts like Brice Chamberlain (whose son he is). The nar506
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rative spans about two decades, during which wrenching changes occur. At first the cattleman rides tall in the saddle. Gradually, however, the nesters gain control of the land, plowing under the native grasses to put in their crops. Extended drought eventually proves that dry-land farming is not feasible in the area, blows away much of the topsoil, and drives out the nesters, leaving the land, minus its precious grasses, for Brewton to reclaim. The character in the book who arouses the most sympathy in the reader is Jim Brewton, a circumstance that suggests that Richters loyalties were clearly with the old order, though the author could not deny the historical reality of progress and change. However arrogant and privileged he seems at the beginning of the novel, Brewton ultimately shows himself to be a responsible and compassionate human being, much more so than the self-serving and politically motivated Brice Chamberlain. Tacey Cromwell (1942), the story of a bawdy house madam who becomes a respectable mother and businesswoman, and The Lady (1957), based loosely on the unsolved mystery of Judge Albert J. Fountains 1896 disappearance somewhere between Lincoln and Las Cruces, New Mexico, are Richters remaining southwestern novels. The quality of Richters southwestern fiction is admirable. In particular the authors mastery of language his ability to suggest much in few wordswas remarkable. Richters daughter, Harvena, once wrote that her father attempted to create swift pictures that were employed to compress the times and spaces of a country into tight mythic structures. This indeed was one of Richters favorite literary devices, and when it succeeds, as it often does in his narratives, even a brief passage may unfold a suggestive complexity that works at once on the intellectual, imaginative, and mythic levels of awareness. Another adopted son of the Southwest, Edwin Corle, began to study the lore and history of the region in the 1930s, as a hobby to break the routine of his job as a radio script writer. Eventually he traveled widely in the area getting to know the people and places as well as their history. His personal and scholarly knowledge of the region is evident in two superlative works of interpretive nonfiction, Desert Country (1941) and The Gila: River of the Southwest (1951). It is also apparent in several works of exceptionally good fiction. Following Mojave: A Book of Stories (1934), an inauspicious debut, Corle published Fig Tree John (1935), his masterpiece and one of the finest of southwestern novels. The title character of Fig Tree John is an Apache who in the early years of the twentieth century uproots himself from his home in Arizona and resettles in the Salton Sea area of southern California. Isolated from his people, he grows increasingly bitter and vengeful, as first his wife is murdered by a pair of white tramps and then his son is gradually lured from the old ways and into the white mans world. John comes to view 507
the whites as the source of all evil; the inevitable result of such a clash of cultural values is hatred, violence, and ultimately the Native Americans destruction. Despite the authors penchant for commenting a bit too obtrusively on the working of the primitive mind, Fig Tree John is a superbly realistic and powerful novel. Though he never fulfilled the promise of his first novel, Corle continued to publish creditable fiction for two decadesa total of seven more novels. People on the Earth (1937) and In Winter Light (1949) are readable and sensitive fictional studies of the plight of the reservation Navajos immediately before and after the Second World War, a time when the Native Americans traditional culture was being systematically eroded by white teachers and missionaries. Burro Alley (1938) is quite unlike any of the authors other books; it is genuinely funny, a hilarioussome might say scurriloussatire of Santa Fe during the tourist season. Billy the Kid (1953), Corles last published book, is a provocative account of the life of the notorious southwestern gunman. Based on thorough research, the work, according to the author, should be considered as fiction; it might, indeed, be called an early-day nonfiction novel. Corle, invoking the license of fiction, offers interesting solutions to some of the enduring mysteries surrounding the Kids life. The one nearly unique aspect of the novel is that the writer seems neither pro-Billy nor anti-Billy; unlike the myriad of interpreters before him, Corle remains thoroughly neutral in reporting the Kids actions. Corle died at the still young age of fifty. Even with such a foreshortened career, however, his achievement is impressive: one excellent novel and several very good ones, plus some nonfiction that every serious student of the Southwest should be familiar with. Corle has never been ranked very far up in the hierarchy of southwestern writers. He should be. He produced more and better work than many southwestern authors whose reputations are greater. One of the most popular of southwestern writers in the 1940s and 1950s, if not necessarily the best, was Fred Gipson. Gipsons tales of the Texas hill country have charmed young and old alike, in print and in film, for nearly four decades. Several of his stories were made into motion pictures by the Disney company, and these movies have no doubt done more to keep the authors name alive than the books-though the books continue to be read, particularly by young people. Gipson had the rare ability to appeal simultaneously to many different levels of intelligence; pre-teen children and sophisticated literary critics can read his novels apparently with equal pleasure and appreciation. Gipsons two best novels, by far, are Hound-Dog Man (1948) and Old Yeller (1956). Both are narratives of the Texas frontier, and both are initia508
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tion stories; the first is told by a twelve-year-old named Cotton, the second by a fourteen-year-old, Travis. Hound-Dog Man is structured around a threeday raccoon hunt during which Cotton is initiated into the ritual of the hunt and into some of the mysteries of adult life by Blackie Scantling, the hound-dog man of the title. The novel is notable for presenting a memorable array of hill country types who make cameo appearances in the story. Old Yeller, on which the best known of the movies made from Gipsons works was based, is again a tale of growing up. Young Travis assumes an adult role when his father leaves on a months-long cattle drive to Kansas. With the aid of his beloved dog Old Yeller, Travis successfully battles the elements and a threatened plague of hydrophobia to keep family and farm intact until his fathers return. Gipsons remaining works of fictionsuch as The Home Place (1950) and Recollection Creek (1955)do not come close to matching the high quality of his two best novels. Some critics have professed to see latent literary greatness in Gipsons work. This seems, however, to claim too much. Gipson was a top-notch storyteller, one of the best the Southwest has spawned. He had a good ear for dialect and a light hand in transcribing it. He handled well, if not very originally, that most familiar theme in American fiction: initiation. He was conscientious and honorable as a craftsman, and he will be read when writers with flashier reputations have disappeared without a ripple. To say that greatness eluded him is not to say that he failed. Following the plethora of excellent southwestern writers that appeared in the middle decades of the century, the 1960s proved a watershed period in the regions literature. The 1960s were, of course, a time of upheaval and change for the nation as a whole, and the Southwest did not escape the cultural tremors that shook the rest of America. The two predominating impulses that had motivated and guided the regions writers up to that decade were a preoccupation with an undeniably colorful past and a passion, often ambivalent but nonetheless intense, for a harsh and beautiful land. But in the 1960s these two traditional subjectshistory and landscape began to seem increasingly implausible. The romantic past had become ever more remote and had begun to fade even from the memories of oldtimers; there were scarcely any left who remembered how it was before the turn of the century. And though the region still possessed open spaces in abundance, the landscape appeared to have been greatly diminished by urban sprawl and by modem transportation and communication; the country no longer seemed as formidable or as beautiful as it once had. During the last quarter-century, the most important social and cultural movement in the Southwest has been from village and country into the burgeoning cities, away from the land and the beliefs and traditions it nur509
A Literary History of the American West tured. This movement has given birth to drastic and, to some extent, still unforeseeable consequences. One clearly discernible fact, however, stands forth: the Southwest is now predominantly urban, and many southwesterners have been forced over the past couple of decades to adjust to a pattern of life wholly different from the one in which they were reared. Writers mirror their environment. In the past southwestern writers have been mainly rural in origin, and as a result they have written about their feelings for the land, about a past still vividly remembered. But in recent years the southwesterners roots-and the writers no less than his fellowshave been wrenched from the soil and planted in concrete. The southwestern writers image of himself, consequently, and his conception of his function seem to be changing, perhaps radically. The regions authors are still attempting, and no doubt many in the future will continue to attempt, to take fresh views of the past and of a wonderfully varied landscape. But at present the task that many southwestern writers appear to have set for themselves is to come to grips with a rapidly evolving society. In particular, they seem bent on trying to understand the city, on absorbing its essential qualities and incorporating those qualities into their books. Exceptions to the foregoing generalization must be immediately acknowledged. One of the Southwests most accomplished novelists, Benjamin Capps, who is discussed in a chapter that follows, continues to explore the regions nineteenth-century history. So did R. G. Vliet, who, before his untimely death in 1984, wrote a pair of innovative novels about nineteenthcentury Texas, Rockspring (1974) and Solitudes (1977). Elmer Kelton, himself the son of a West Texas cowboy, has published more than a score of novels during the last three decades that chronicle the cowboys evolving role in regional culture. Keltons best books are The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971), The Time It Never Rained (1973), and The Good Old Boys (1978). Of these The Time It Never Rained, set during the disastrous West Texas drought of the 1950S, is a genuinely moving and well-crafted novel. The narratives central figure, Charlie Flagg, is one of the last survivors of a dying breed, an old-time ranchman whose fierce independence and unyielding code of conduct make him an unforgettable, if anachronistic, character. Another seeming exception to the generalization is Edward Abbey, whose writing career began with The Brave Cowboy in 1956 and is still flourishing in the 1980s. The recurring theme of Abbeys work, in his own phrase, is the necessity to preserve wilderness and freedom. And yet the amount of space he devotes to railing against population growth and technological progress in the Southwest is indicative of the degree to which these conditions have come increasingly to characterize the region. Perhaps the career of Larry McMurtry supplies a more suggestive paradigm of what
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has happened to the southwestern writer in the past two decades. In the early 1960s McMurtry dragged southwestern fiction, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century; McMurtrys salty language and racy subject matter were unusual, if not unique, in the regions literature at the time. In his first three novels, McMurtry wrote about rural and small-town West Texas, deftly and effectively mixing nostalgia and social criticism. In his fourth novel, Moving On ( 1970), however, the author shifted his setting to an urban locale, Houston, and he has not looked back since. In subsequent books he has continued to write about Houston, and has laid his most recent fiction in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas. The urban milieu and its attendant social dislocations, then, have gradually come to dominate southwestern writing, particularly fiction. Dan Jenkins, Gary Cartwright, John Weston, Peter Gent, Shelby Hearon, John Rechy, Bryan Woolley, Georgia McKinley, Laura Furman, and Stephen Harrigan are but a few of the recent southwestern novelists who have effectively used urban settings and developed social themes in their fiction. Edwin Shrakes But Not for Love (1964) and Strange Peaches (1972) are especially vivid evocations of the southwestern urban environment. The first set in Fort Worth, the second in Dallas, these novels accurately project the rootless, valueless ambience of modem city life. Even books set in relatively small cities often concern big-city problems. An example is John Nicholss Chamisaville trilogyThe Milagro Beanfield War (1974), The Magic Journey (1978), and The Nirvana Blues (1981)which deals with racial conflict and existentialist angst in a thinly disguised Taos. Moreover, the murder mystery, traditionally an urban genre, has recently made an appearance in the Southwest. Tony Hillerman in New Mexico and David L. Lindsey in Texas are mystery writers who show promise of attracting large national followings. In this ninth decade of the twentieth century, southwestern literature appears in the process of ferment and significant change. In addition to the increasing influence of the urban environment on the regions writers, other changes are also occurring. For instance, in the last few years poetry and drama have assumed an importance in the areas literature that they did not previously possess. The astonishing growth in the volume of poetry published in the Southwest (if not in its quality) seems directly attributable to the proliferation of small presses in the region. The expansion of dramatic activity, however, has probably been stimulated primarily by the muchpublicized financial success of a handful of recent plays by southwestern playwrights, prime examples being Preston Joness Texas Trilogy and the aforementioned Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Another trend in contemporary southwestern literature that appears 511
likely to extend well into the future is the growth in the number of writers from the regions minority ethnic groups. Mexican-American writers especially have been active in recent years. With His Pistol in His Hand : A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), by Amrico Paredes, long-time professor of English and folklore at the University of Texas at Austin, was a pioneer book in its field, as much a work of the creative imagination as of scholarship. Paredes was the forerunner of a group of talented Texas Mexican writers that includes Rolando Hinojosa, Toms Rivera, Aristeo Brito, and Estela Portillo Trambley. Rudolfo Anaya in New Mexico and Miguel Mndez in Arizona are equally important contributors to the rapidly expanding Chicano literature of the Southwest. N. Scott Momadays House Made of Dawn (1968) and Leslie Marmon Silkos Ceremony (1977) are notable works of fiction by contemporary Native Americans from the Southwest. Both Mexican-American and Native American writers are discussed in detail elsewhere in this literary history. Another current trend in southwestern literature is the ever-growing influx of writers from other regions. As mentioned above, literary immigration is a phenomenon that has long been familiar to New Mexico. Now, as the region as a whole prospers economically and culturally, the migration of artists and writers to all parts of the Southwest becomes more pronounced. In Texas especially authors seem to materialize with the arrival of every incoming bus. Carolyn Osborn, Marshall Terry, Shelby Hearon, Max Apple, Laura Furman, Beverly Lowry, John Irsfeldthese are just a handful of the gifted writers from other states who in recent years settled in Texas, either permanently or temporarily, and have written about the state. These writers bring to Texas and southwestern literature a sophistication and cosmopolitan outlook that, for the most part, it has lacked in the past. They also help to nudge the regions literature more into the mainstream of American writing. But with every gain there is a corresponding loss. Unquestionably the future of literature in the Southwest is bright. The future of southwestern literature, on the other hand, is somewhat less certain. The changes alluded to, many of which benefit southwestern culture, and the increasing volume of writing and the sheer number of writers in the region are signs that encourage those interested in the advancement of southwestern literature. However, the question remains: will the region continue to stimulate writing that smacks of the flavor of the Southwest; or will southwestern literature become more and more part of an homogeneous national literature? The literary hopes and expectations of southwesterners who desire the former are grounded most securely in the knowledge that the Southwest is a unique place, a region that works strongly and fruitfully on the imaginations
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of writers who were born or have lived there. The region grows and changes, and yet the distinctive sense of place that it emanates remains unchanged, a shaping force on the cultural life that it supports. It seems likely that there will always be a niche in American literature that is recognizably southwestern.
W ILLIAM T. PILKINGTON , Tarleton
State University
Anderson, John Q., Edwin W. Gaston, and James W. Lee, eds. Southwestern American Literature: A Bibliography. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1980. The most extensive and up-to-date bibliography of southwestern writing. Bennett, Patrick. Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980. Though limited to Texas authors, the interviews collected here are revealing and, for the most part, entertaining and useful. Campbell, Walter S. The Book Lovers Southwest: A Guide to Good Reading. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. A fascinating guide to browse in, though now badly outdated. Campbell usually wrote under the pen name of Stanley Vestal. Dobie, J. Frank. Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Revised Edition. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952. A classic work. Though out of date, Dobies Guide is arguably the most humane and readable bibliography ever compiled on any subject. Fergusson, Erna. Our Southwest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. Still an excellent introdution to the region, by the sister of Harvey Fergusson, one of the Southwests major authors. Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1966. Many of the novels referred to in Folsoms survey are by southwestern writers.
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A Literary History of the American West Frantz, Joe B., and Ernest Choate. The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. The best discussion to date of the cultural and literary roots of the cowboy myth. Gaston, Edwin W. The Early Novel of the Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1961. Scarce on analysis, Gastons book provides plot summaries of scores of nineteenth-century southwestern novels. Graham, Don, James W. Lee, and William T. Pilkington, eds. The Texas Literary Tradition: Fiction, Folklore, History. Austin: College of Liberal Arts of the University of Texas and the Texas State Historical Association, 1983. Essays by writers, critics, and scholars that cover the spectrum of Texas literature. McMurtry, Larry. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Austin: Encino Press, 1968. Essays on topics cultural and literary by one of Texass best-known authors. See especially the essay entitled Southwestern Literature? Major, Mabel, and T. M. Pearce. Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with Bibliographies. Third Edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972. The most thorough reference tool available to support the study of southwestern literature. Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Particularly good on Harvey Fergusson and Frank Waters. Pettit, Arthur G. Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980. Helpful analysis of the portrayal of Mexican-Americans in a wide array of southwestern novels. Pilkington, William T. My Bloods Country: Studies in Southwestern Literature. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1973. Critical essays on a half-dozen of the regions most important authors. Powell, Lawrence Clark. Southwest Classics. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1974. Appreciative introductions to a score of classic southwestern books. Sonnichsen, C. L. From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1978. An opinionatedand highly entertainingdiscourse on western fiction. A majority of the novels mentioned are by southwestern authors.
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The Cowboy in Short Fiction

as a prominent figure in American short fiction lived for only the first three or four decades of the twentieth century. The main reason for this foreshortened life-span should be obvious: these decades were the great age in American culture of the general, masscirculation periodicals, and such periodicals created a demand for cowboy fiction. With the death of the general magazines, the cowboy in short fiction also more or less expired. The cowboys appeal to the kind of general audience addressed by the slicks is beyond question. Many scholarsincluding Henry Nash Smith, Russell Nye, and James K. Folsomhave traced, beyond any need for repetition, the fictional cowboys literary descent from the Leatherstocking Tales. Long before such scholarly attention, an anonymous contributor to the Saturday Evening Post s Out-of-Doors column (1 April 1911) said much the same:
HE COWBOY
Perhaps we have always admired the cowboy because he represented typically our own American youth and self-reliance. . . . He exists as sort of a Leatherstocking figure, which will perhaps go down to the future as a definite and permanent conception. It has been noted, too, with adequate scholarly documentation, that other of the cowboys genes and chromosomes came from the dime novels that erupted virtually with the firing on Fort Sumter and flourished throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. Still, there would have been neither the necessity for nor the possibility of such scholarly disquisitions had it not been for the growth of the cowboy in magazine fiction. In the closing decade of the last century, the triumvirate of Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister and Frederic Remington was foremost in the literary upgrading of the West and its denizens in the tastemaking magazines Atlantic, Century, Harpers, Scribners. Their offerings from pen and palette in essence limned and hymned the nations successful conquest of its great western expanse. Wallace Stegner has suggested that examining the collaboration between Wister and Remington reveals the ontogeny of the cowboy as a literary figure. Such redoubtable students of the cattle kingdom as Bernard DeVoto, J. Frank Dobie, and Walter Prescott Webb, as well as Stegner, have attested their belief that Wisters The Virginian (1902) clothed the cowboy with literary respectability. It is not intended here to dispute 515
these investigators conclusions, but to note firmly that The Virginian caused no upsurge in the incidence of Western stories in the quality, mass-circulation magazines between 1900 and 1910. Neither did it alter in any significant way the image of the cowboy presented weekly and monthly to millions of readers of these magazines. The magazines referred to included Colliers, McClures, Cosmopolitan, American, and Everybody s. Perhaps the most representative of the general magazines, certainly the most successful in attracting readers, was the Saturday Evening Post. Examination of more than 400 issues of the Post published during the first decade of the twentieth century reveals that Western stories constituted only seven percent of its short fiction for that period, five percent of its articles, and a minuscule proportion of its serial-story offerings. These figures parallel the ratio of western materials in the contents of other mass-circulation periodicals from the same time segment. Of the Post s Western stories, about one-third belong to what may be termed the Wolfville genre, which dominated the art form in this decade. The most prolific producers of such stories, those whose output gives the anecdotal Wolfville genre its place in the evolution of the cowboy in literature, were Alfred Henry Lewis (who created the actual Wolfville locale), Emerson Hough, Henry Wallace Phillips, William R. Lighton, Kenneth Harris, Rex Beach, and John Haslette. Some of O. Henrys Texas stories also fall into this category, as do Thomas Janviers prose sketches of Santa Fe Charley. Many of the early Western stories by Stewart Edward White and Owen Wisters Scipio Le Moyne tales, forerunners of The Virginian, meet the Wolfville criteria. Wolfville fiction presents a thoroughly masculine society, in which women, by and large, are stage properties stuffed with sawdust. Such tales feature a picturesque setting quite distinct from the urban East, such as Lewiss Wolfville (based largely on Tombstone, Arizona) or Houghs Hearts Desire (based on White Oaks, New Mexico), and often a continuing and reappearing central character, such as Phillipss Red Saunders, Lightons Billy Fortune, and Harriss Ricky Redmond. A plot is not essential; if there is one, it borders on mellerdraymah. There is explosive physical action, not necessarily with pistols, and the cowboys and other characters are given such tags of dialect, mannerism, and costume as to positively distinguish them from their more combed and curried and convention-bound fellows. Humor in these stories is important. It is broad and masculine, often verging upon adolescent, locker-room low comedy, but it should be remembered that this humor is equal to the action in both story content and flavor. The line of descent from the writings of Bret Harte and Mark Twain to the Wolfville stories seems unmistakable. These tales took the Harte-Twain 516
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legacywhich incorporated self-reliance, individualism, acceptance of danger, disdain for class distinctions, pride in country, and a self-imposed obligation to aid those in distressand began its expansion into what later became The Code of the West, a code that engendered and included the stereotyped characteristics of the fictional cowboy. As the Strenuous Decade turned into the decade of the teens, there were signs and portents in the writings of Eugene Manlove Rhodes and George Pattullo that the cowboy might become a full-bodied, fourdimensional literary figure who would truly reflect and represent the frontier experience that had forged and shaped and tempered him. Of all those who wrote about the cowboy, only a very few had Rhodess advantage of prolonged, personal involvement in the horse-and-cattle West, and none of these few had Rhodess literary craftsmanship. That Rhodes was a romantic, that he idealized the real, rather than making the real ideal, is beyond doubt. Yet what he wrote about his West rings true as a shod hoof on malpais, and upon what he wrote, barring certain romantic confections, the reader may depend. His novella The Little Eohippus was the very first cowboy-and-the-lady romance to grace the pages of a major magazine (Saturday Evening Post, 30 November through 28 December 1912). It is important to recall, in considering this claim, that The Virginian was not serialized as such, but was reworked and refined by Wister from prior short stories and two-part episodes. George Pattullos version of the West arose from a markedly different background than did that of Rhodes. A Canadian-born Scot, Pattullo was editor of the Boston Herald at the time he spent the first of three consecutive summers, 19081910, roaming the Southwest with Erwin Smith, one of the great photographers of the cattle kingdom. Pattullo saw with a reporters eye, and he wrote of what he saw with a deep awareness of the foibles of mankind, the idiosyncrasies of livestock, and vagaries of chance. Gene Rhodes, a horseman himself, believed that Pattullos Corazon (McClure s, July 1910) was the finest horse story every written. Between 1909 and 1917, Pattullos short stories and articles appeared in the leading magazines, although the Saturday Evening Post was his primary outlet. A long-developing literary groundswell, beginning in the early years of the century, became the wave of the future that inundated the work of Rhodes and obliterated that of Pattullo. In 1904, Street & Smiths Popular published Bertha M. Bowers Chip of the Flying U, the first of almost sixty short stories, novels, and serial installments she would contribute to that semi-pulp magazine over the next six years. Clarence E. Mulfords now famous Hopalong Cassidy stories, anecdotal in form, raucous with action, and haloed by gunplay, were launched in 1905 by Outing, a limited517
circulation monthly travel magazine. In the decade of the teens two popular writers of Western tales, William MacLeod Raine and Charles Alden Seltzer, began to publish voluminously. Both wrote mainly long fiction, however, and seldom broke into the magazine market. In 1912 the cowboy achieved his apotheosis in a book whose impact is still being felt. This was Zane Greys Riders of the Purple Sage, a work which, in Lawrence Clark Powells words, More than any other book determined the universal stereotype of the West. Grey had been discovered, as it were, in 1910 by Popular, which serialized his first successful Western story, The Heritage of the Desert. The venerable publishing house of Harper & Brothers, which would not sully the pages of its monthly magazine with such offerings, read the nations tastes correctly and published the story in book form, with such success that they did the same with Riders of the Purple Sage, which had been serialized in Field and Stream. With the latter work, Grey became foremost among the early Formula FabulistsMulford, Raine, and Seltzer being the othersand he became the only one of the four to leave a deep imprint in the pages of the major mass-circulation magazines. The climate of opinion in the year of Theodore Roosevelts Bull Moose attempt to regain the White House may explain the instantaneous success of Riders of the Purple Sage. Whereas the raffish, unconventional characters of the Wolfville genre had given vicarious expression to a growing distaste for the constricting social conventions of an increasingly urban milieu, the cowboy of the Fabulists reflected a deep desire to find personal solutions to complex political and economic problems through direct, individual action which would produce immediate and beneficial results. The cowboy had thus become Galahad in a morality play for Everyman; the clearly and cleanly limned proponent of good over evil; protector of the weak from the rapacious; bringer of benefits to others through his courage, self-sacrifice, and hard-twisted moral fiber. He became, in short, the Sun God produced by all peoples in all ages in time of needblood brother to Taras Bulba, El Cid Campeador, and Robin Hood. His virtuous solemnity was made necessary by the tensions and conflicts of his righteous errands into the wilderness of what had become for the Fabulists a timeless and unchanging West. In this setting, the inhabitants partook quite logically of the Wests positive influence in creating essential nobility of character. This and related themes were used by other than the Fabulists. Long before he wrote The Shame of the Cities, Lincoln Steffens reported on a bronco-busting contest at Denver, Colorado (McClure s, December 1902), wherein he made it clear that he found a nobility among the contestants, fresh from the range, that was lacking in eastern urbanites.
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Examples of the theme of western nobility in the short fiction of this period are abundant. Edison Marshalls Count a ThousandSlowBetween Each Drop (American, December 1915) features Trantler Bill and Texas John, together with Long-Ear Joe, their trusty burro, who rescue a little girl after her parents die from thirst when their wagon breaks down. The story is subtitled A Hero Story of Thirst in the Desert. Marjorie B. Cookes Harriganof the Rockies (Collier s, 24 April 1915) concerns a prospector who sells out his claim for a tidy sum and sashays forth to give New York a whirl. There he meets a girl who is leading an artsy-BohemianGreenwich Village existence, because she has no real interest in or purpose to her life. She is redeemed by the cleansing love of a Real Man, and they head west together after proper matrimonial pronouncements. One of the winners in Colliers prize story contest for 1914, for which Theodore Roosevelt was a judge, was Francis Hills Anent: A Biscuit Shooter (24 April 1915). The plot concerns a gambler who promises to marry a girl and then does not. In order to get rid of her, he seeks to drive her into a life of prostitution, a risky plot device for the times, but a gambling cowboy is the catalytic agent that sees their union sanctified. Roosevelt said of this story, The gambling cowboy is an excellent figure. Emerson Hough took eight installments of The Man Next Door ( Saturday Evening Post, 8 April through 27 May 1916) to relate the tale of a Wyoming ranch-raised girl whose widowed father takes her to the East to live after selling his ranch in order to provide her the opportunities she deserves. The old ranch foreman goes with them, and most of the story concerns the efforts of father and foreman to find a suitable, gentlemanly, cultivated easterner for the girls husband. The same theme of solid, clean western values versus those of the frothy, decadent East appears in Wallace Irwins serial Venus in the East (Saturday Evening Post, 13 July through 31 August 1918). A stalwart son of the true West visits New York where he becomes involved with both a beautiful woman who is cynical and heartless and a wholesome New England miss, the latter of whom, needless to say, gets the hero in the end. In advertising the book version of Rex Beachs Heart of the Sunset (1915), Harper & Brothers said it had the breezy bravery which is the American Cowboy type. Herman Whitakers Over the Border (1917) wrings the most out of its chase-sequence plot by having three rowdy cowboys in Villas Mexico enable an American girl trapped below the border to reach safety by sacrificing themselves one by one. The cowboy as symbol was never so plain as in Herbert Johnsons editorial cartoon (Saturday Evening Post, 2 June 1917) showing Uncle Sam in cowboy garb applying his LIBERTY brand to the left ribs of the Kaiser Wilhelm bull.
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Following World War I the character of the cowboy did not change, but he did proliferate, competing successfully with the heroes of War Birds and Flying Aces, as well as with the hard-boiled sleuth and the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In particular pulps flourished during this period. Among the slicks Ladies Home Journal brought out its first Western stories in 1920 and began serialization of its first Zane Grey offering, The Call of the Canon, the following year (November 1921). One attempt to gauge the popularity of American authors in the immediate postwar period placed Grey at the top of the list, based on sales of his published books. He and his fellow Fabulists were joined in post-war years by J. Allan Dunn, Eugene Cunningham, W. C. Tuttle, and, with blare of trumpet and ruffle of drum, the old master of thud and blunder, Frederick Schiller Faust, who reserved three of his many pen names, the best known of which became Max Brand, for his Western output. While only Grey found his major market in the quality, mass-circulation magazines, the others had prominent publishers for book versions of their works, because of magazinegenerated demand. Mody Boatright once said of the Saturday Evening Post that George Horace Lorimer, long-time editor of the magazine, kept before his readers the cowboy as a symbol of the rugged individualism that had made America great. Careful analysis of the Post s fiction offerings during the post-war years does not support this statement. It does show that in these years Lorimer strove to give his readers renewed pride in their country and in their countrymens past accomplishments which would help them face an uncertain future with their traditional values unimpaired. One means toward this end was to encourage the western epic. Lorimers first offering in the epic vein, and it was a spectacular success, was Emerson Houghs The Covered Wagon (1 April through 27 May 1922). Another Hough epic, North of 36, the story of the first longhorn herd to take the long trail north from Texas, was published posthumously. Of all the epic Westerns brought out in the Post, the one with the greatest sweep and scope was written in a series of forty-three related stories, containing more than ninety illustrations by W. H. D. Koerner and appearing between 5 July 1930 and 23 March 1935. Collectively these constituted Stewart Edward Whites saga of Andy Burnet and his long rifle, the veritable Boone gun, moving from the Ohio River to California and from Burnets mountain man days to his subsequent successful life as a ranchero. With the addition of the epic dimension, the evolution of the cowboy in short fiction was completewith one exception. This came with the work of Ernest Haycox and the brothers Glidden, who wrote under the pen names of Luke Short and Peter Dawson, the latter being one of Fausts earlier noms de plume, in the years surrounding World War II. Haycox was 520
the pioneer of the trio in employing two women in his plots. One of these is good, but tinged with Lilithian passion; the other is bad, but suspect of having a heart of gold. This formula added a touch of emotional suspense and sexual titillation to what remained essentially the action-packed yarn concocted by the Fabulists; it also consumed a great deal of the readers time while the hero untangled his hormones. In the years following World War II, cowboy stories began to fade out of the slicks, even as the mass-circulation magazines themselves faded. The portrayal of the cowboy became more and more the province of the novel, the motion picture, and television. A few authors, notably Jack Schaefer, published creditable short fiction about the cowboy during this period, but the market for such fiction began to diminish, and writers moved on to other forms. In todays serious literature about the cowboy, he is often seen as Joseph McCoy saw him a century past: evil and degenerate and without redeeming qualities, an anti-hero. Admittedly the magazine Fabulists unrealistically idealized the cowboy as noble, virtuous, and heroic. Their view, however, was no more distorted or bogus than is the currently fashionable portrayal of this legendary figure.
W. H. HUTCHINSON , California
State University, Chico
The primary sources upon which my contribution has been based consist of some five thousand issues of various slick paper and semi-pulp magazines, which span the period 19001940. This work was carried on over a thirty-year period and resulted in the following publications, which may be of interest. Hutchinson, W. H. A Bar Cross Man: The Life and Personal Writings of Eugene Manlove Rhodes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956. . A Bar Cross Liar: Bibliography of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Who Loved the West-that-was When He Was Young. Stillwater, Oklahoma: Redlands Press, 1959.
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A Literary History of the American West . Grassfire on the Great Plains: Story of a Literary Battle. Southwest Review 41 (Spring 1956): 181185. . Virgins, Villains and Varmints. Huntington Library Quarterly 16 (August 1953): 381392. . The Western Story as Literature. Western Humanities Review 3 (Jan. 1949): 3337. . The World, the Work and the West of W. H. D. Koerner. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. Besides the works of James K. Folsom, Russell Nye and Henry Nash Smith mentioned in the text, the following secondary sources have been useful in providing background material and whetstones to sharpen the edge of opinion. Easton, Robert. Max Brand, the Big Westerner. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970. Frantz, Joe B., and Julian E. Choate, Jr. The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. Goulart, Ron. Cheap Thrills: An lnformal History of the Pulp Magazines. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972. Gruber, Frank. Zane Grey: A Biography. New York: World Publishing, 1970. Jones, Margaret Ann. Cowboys and Ranching in Magazine Fiction, 19011910. In Studies in Literature of the West, vol. 20 of the University of Wyoming Publications Series. Laramie: University of Wyoming, 1956. Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19301968. Pattee, Fred Lewis. The New American Literature, 18901930. New York: Century, 1930. Powell, Lawrence C. Southwest Classics: The Creative Literature of the Arid Lands. Pasadena: Ward Ritchie, 1974. Shaul, Lowana Jean. Treatment of the West in Selected Magazine Fiction, 1870 1900. Unpublished Masters Thesis, University of Wyoming, 1954.
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The Novel of the Cowboy

novelists captivated by the history of the West have been writing about the life of the cowboy. Fewer than a hundred novels of the cowboy genre can be said to have literary qualities, yet the genre retains a great popular appeal; and occasionally its adventurous narrative and cowpoke characters say something basic about the human condition. Criticism of the cowboy novel seems to have gone through three stages of a refining processsomewhat like flour sifted through the silks of an oldfashioned flour mill. The first sifting of the novel in the 1920s and 30s produced the bran, substantial but uncomplicated critiques, measuring fictional versions of cowboy life against the critics first-hand knowledge of range and trail activity. Authenticity is the chief criterion for the judgments of J. Frank Dobie, Phillip Rollins, Douglas Branch, and Walter Prescott Webb. The second sifting yielded the shorts, gritty commentary still insisting that the novel must be true to cowpuncher life, but beginning to search for universal implications in the fictional re-creation of range and trail activities. Joe B. Frantz and Julian E. Choate, Jr. examine cowboy fiction in their study, The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality (1955), and conclude that the genre has evolved from the romance to the realistic novel by the 20s and later is often fragile prose-poetry. Only recently the third critical sifting has occurred, producing critical attitudes with scholarly objectivity, although occasionally, like the ultimate product of the flour mill, drier than the original materials and not so palatable unless consumed with a grain of salt. Critics of late, too, are devoting considerable energy to assessment of earlier critics of the cowboy novel. The history of the fictional cowboy begins early. No sooner did the longhorn cow chasers of the South Texas brush country begin to learn their business from the Mexican vaqueros after the Civil War than dime novelists introduced the cowboy as a western hero. Beadles Dime Novel readers, however, demanded unrelenting action, so Dime Novel heroes were more often pursuers of outlaws than of cattle. Then in 1878, Thomas Pilgrim, a Texas attorney using the pseudonym of Arthur Morecamp, published Live Boys; or Charley and Nasho in Texas, the first authentic narrative of a trail drive from Texas to Kansas, according to Dobie. In Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (1942), Dobie praises the novel for its realistic depiction of the cowboys job. The essential experience of the trail drive is capOR A CENTURY NOW,
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tured in descriptions of thunderstorms, stampedes, rampaging rivers and confrontations with outlaws, which Charley and Nasho witness as members of Captain Dicks trail crew. It was not until the turn of the century, however, that observers and participants began to see the fictional possibilities in the life of the working cowboy. Eastern journalist Alfred Henry Lewis, who spent his restless youth as a ranch hand in Texas and Arizona, re-created his experiences in Wolfville (1897) and six subsequent volumes. Although they are collections of tales about Arizona frontier activity more than they are novels, Lewiss narratives introduce one memorable character, the garrulous and witty Old Cattleman, who, as narrator, filters frontier experience through the consciousness of a pragmatic ex-cowboy, and elevates this experience to the status of the tall tale. In the year Lewiss Wolfville Days and Wolfville Nights (1902) were published, another easterner who had been to the West created a cowboy novel which was very little involved with the cowpunchers vocation but which established patterns of avocational activity to be emulated by cowboy novelists for the next thirty years. Although Dobie said Harvard man Owen Wisters hero in The Virginian does not even smell of cows, he joins most critics in praising Wister for capturing the code of the range and creating an unforgettable hero. A year later, a bonafide cowboy chose the trail drive narrative as the vehicle for relating not only the adventures but also the hardships of the punchers life. Andy Adams, native of Indiana, had herded cattle and trailed horses from San Antonio to Kansas a few times, but much of his cowboy knowledge came from listening to cowboys and cowmen tell stories about their lives as he rode the Texas brush country collecting horses. When Adams settled in Colorado after a decade in Texas, he wrote The Log of a Cowboy (1903), considered by many to be the best of the cowboy genre. Almost plotless, the narrative is structured around a trail drive from the Rio Grande to Montana in 1882. The serious business of the drive, as well as the campfire storytelling, the pranks and the cowtown sprees are narrated by trail crewman Tom Quirk. Sharp detail and first-person narration give events of the drive an immediacy not present before in fiction about the cowboy. Wister created an immortal cowboy hero, but it was Andy Adams who first breathed life into the everyday working cowboy as a protagonist in fiction. Adamss later novels about cowboys and cattlemen are not considered to be as successful as his first. Cowhand Quirk again is narrator in A Texas Matchmaker (1904), story of an early Texas cattle ranchers thwarted efforts to marry off his cowboys and thereby produce some young life on his ranch. Adams employs Quirks point of view to describe another trail drive in The 524
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Outlet (1905), but despite a more complicated plot, the novel rehashes much of the material of the first novel. Reed Anthony, Cowman: An Autobiography (1907) is not notable for its reflection of cowboy life, but Adams explores for the first time the evolution of an early Texas cowboy into an influential cattleman. A knowledgeable observer and a collector of facts, Andy Adams left as his heritage not only one outstanding cowboy novel, but two plot motifs, the trail drive and the cowboy success story, for subsequent novelists to play their variations on. Before 1920, novelists who produced range fiction of literary value generally took their cue from Adams and aimed for authenticity, although they ignored the plot potentials Adamss work suggests. George Pattullo, who came to Texas from Boston to learn about western life, created a believable New Mexico cowboy named Lafe Johnson, who becomes a sheriff and finally a rancher in The Sheriff of Badger Hole (1912). The New Mexico cowboy writer, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, acclaimed for his faithfulness to the facts of the cowhands life, published his first novel, Good Men and True, in 1910. Rhodes digresses in his novel Stepsons of Light to observe: Let the dullest man tell of a thing he knows first hand, and his speech shall tingle with battle and luck and loss, purr for small comforts of cakes and ale or sound the bell note of clear mirth; his voice shall exult with pride of work, tingle and tense to speak of hard-won steeps, the burden and heat of the day and the bright face of danger; it shall be soft as quiet water to tell of shadows where winds loiter, of moon magic and far-off suns, friendships and fire and song. (pp. 6566) Herein, Rhodes tells much about his own strengths as a novelist of the cowboy. His weaknesses are several, critics point out. His cowboy characters are often one-dimensional, his women characters are self-conscious paper dolls, his plots episodic and his structure flawed. But most say he is a master at depicting the cowboys occupation and conveying the landscape of New Mexico. Realistic dialogue and sharp humor are trademarks of this cowboywriter as well, although some say his cowpunchers speech is too literary. Although he wrote most of his work as an expatriate of his beloved Southwest, his command of place and cowboys vocation come from his sharp observation of New Mexico where he held many jobs during his youth and early manhood between 1881 and 1906. He punched cattle, wrangled horses and even at one time washed dishes to survive. Mostly self-educated in book learning, Rhodes was a thinking cowboy and his philosophizing digressions are often as interesting as his plots. Rhodes is best-known for his short novel Pas por Aqu, in which the soft-hearted outlaw Ross McEwen risks his own safety to nurse a Mexican 525
family near death with diphtheria. Pat Garrett, the sheriff in pursuit of the gallant bank robber, is touched by the outlaws humane act and allows him to escape. Rhodess portrayal of a cowboys everyday life is more evident, however, in the novels Bransford in Arcadia (1912), The Desire of the Moth (1916), and Copper Streak Trail (1917). It is a corrupt banker, law enforcement officer or lawyer who challenges the cowboy heroes of each of these novels. The cowboy triumphs in the end, but it is his everyday activities on the ranch or the trail or his socializing with companions that the reader finds believable and interesting in these tales. In Stepsons of Light (1920), Rhodes describes in detail his own horse ranch in the San Andres mountains. In the first chapter of the novel, the author explains the ranch roundup in his description of Bar Cross Ranch activities. The story itself hinges on cowman Charlie Sees foiling of the scheming deputy sheriffs efforts to hang an innocent puncher for murder. Rhodess most successful novel financially was The Trusty Knaves (1931). Another story of an outlaw with heart, this novel conveys the feel of the cattle drive as George Carmody searches for grass and water during a drought. W. H. Hutchinson sums up best why Gene Rhodess work is an asset to the fiction of the cowboy: It is a fact that . . . the totality of the free range experience was summated in his personal life, that makes his writings come from the inside-out, from a deep wellspring of personal experience that was the abiding strength of his life (p. xxii, Introduction to The Rhodes Reader, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975). As the ranching industry became big business, spreading across the western plains, and fences began to define ranch boundaries, writers gained perspective. They began to explore at least four thematic possibilities. Adams had structured novels around the cattle drive and the cowboy success story. A good many earlyday cowboys had run away from their midwestern or southern homes and headed west to become cowpunchers, and by 1920 old-timers were recounting those youthful adventures. Novelists were soon building fiction with these materials about the making of a cowboy. A few sensitive writers began also to examine the life of the ranch wife who had followed her cowboy into an often barren existence. The ready-made structure and limited time element of the trail drive, which Adams employed so skillfully, challenged Emerson Hough, who as a young lawyer in New Mexico witnessed the growth of the cattle industry. Events of his best-known novel, North of 36 (1923), take place on a trail drive from Caldwell County, Texas, to Abilene, Kansas. The drive outfit includes Alamo, a memorable lead steer, Jim Nabours, old cowboy foreman and boss of the Del Sol outfit, and Taisie Lockhart, female owner of the
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ranch. Details of the drive are graphic. Critic Douglas Branch reports that an old cowboy pronounced the characterization of Nabours the genu-wine stuff, but portrayal of Taisie is not so successful. She is out of place on the drive, not because she is female, but because she is more sentimental girl than courageous frontier woman. Her lover, Don McMasters, is a less forceful reincarnation of the Virginian. The steer Alamo is considered by some critics to be the most interesting character in North of 36. In the next notable trail drive novel another steer steals the show. Walter Gann gives lead steer Sancho equal billing with cowhand Bill Sanders in The Trail Boss ( 1937). Sanderss admiration, and finally his defense, of the remarkable animal dominate the action of the otherwise predictable plot. It was not until 1965, when Benjamin Capps won the Western Writers of America Spur Award for his account of a would-be trail boss in The Trail to Ogallala (1964), that the trail drive narrative received attention for realizing its potential for dynamic character development. Two years later, Robert Flynn published a compassionate parody of the traditional trials of the cowboy on a drive in North to Yesterday (1967). Many of the most melodramatic of the trail drive novels, like Zane Greys The Trail Driver (1937), described realistically the spartan and sometimes dangerous life of the cowhand on the trail. Characterization, however, separates Cappss and Flynns fiction from the earlier yarns. Both have consciously chosen to portray what seem at first to be stereotyped cowhands in their novels. Trite nicknamesDandy, Professor, Scratchy, the Kid, and the Colonellead Cappss readers to expect the usual one-trait cowpunchers. Instead, Capps creates motivated, believable and three-dimensional cowboys, including Bill Scott, who should have been trail boss, but is compelled to take over the drive without seeming to usurp the stupid Blackies titular power as boss. Flynn exaggerates his characterizations in North to Yesterday to satirize trail drive stereotypes. He depicts a latter-day drive organized by old storekeeper Lampassas, who has longed to go up the trail all his life. Absurd and comic as they seem, the cowboys Flynn creates are human. Lampassas, his broken-down cowhands, and the runaway girl Covina and her baby stubbornly chase the longhorns and their dream north on foot toward Trails End. Although Flynn allows his comic touch to degenerate into slapstick often, the muted tragedy implied in the situation of a motley bunch of hasbeens searching for their impossible dreams suggests both the potential of human beings and the usefulness of the trail drive theme for exploring that potential. Before Flynns story appeared, Richard Gardner in Scandalous John (1963) had created a deranged old cattleman with the same intent Flynn
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has in his depiction of Lampassas. Old John McCanlesss herd is a single cow; his trail crew, a single Mexican named Francisco Jimenez Xumen, but he pushes on to die tragically in a gun battle in Chicago. Robert Days modem-day cattle drive across Kansas in The Last Cattle Drive (1977) gives another novelist an opportunity for raucous humor in sharp satirical needling of the cowboy myth. When fences and railroads began to proliferate across the Southwest and West after 1880, a cowboys ambitions and lifestyle had to be redefined. Those punchers with foresight had already begun to build herds and acquire land of their own, while others remained itinerant, hiring out their skills as whim, season and pay dictated. At least two novelists of the cowboy have written penetrating studies of the cowboy who became a rich cattle baron. The reader can only assume that Jim Brewton, whose New Mexico ranch in Conrad Richters The Sea of Grass (1937) is larger than Massachusetts with Connecticut thrown in, has built his spread from scratch with grit and shrewd maneuvering. Brewton resents and fights the squatting nesters who seem bent on destroying his sea of grass. Ben Cappss Sam Chance (1965) is the most perceptive chronicle exploring the evolution of the Civil War soldier into Texas cowboy and finally cattleman who becomes a legend in his own time. Willing to work hard, suffer deprivation and risk death, Sam slowly builds his herd and stakes his land claims. What he believes about his relationship with Martha, his wife, reveals how he feels about himself, as his obsession with acquiring cattle and land grows. He thinks, Then, too, she did not understand his occupation with the forces that he studied and estimated and manipulated: grass, cattle, land, climate, water, equipment, menhow he felt impelled to work with them on a grand scale, how he was wrapped up in planning with them, how he was challenged, intrigued with the possibilities. Aging finally into an irascible, misunderstood eccentric, Sam lives to confront the legend already abuilding around his colorful history when a small booted boy with toy sixguns threatens him during a train trip. The tyke tells Sam he is pretending to be Sam Chance, who was a big, big giant, and he shot Indians and buffaloes and cows and people too. And branded them. . . . I think he lived once upon a time. In three of Larry McMurtrys novels, his most astute characters are old cattlemen who have also been hard-working cowpunchers all their lives. Lonnies granddad, Homer Bannon, in Horseman, Pass By (1961) and Jim Carpenters stepuncle, Roger Wagonner, in Moving On (1970) exhibit the pragmatic resoluteness of two old cowmen whom the world has passed by,
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but who cling tenaciously to values and ways that have served them well all of their lives. In the character Gideon Fry in Leaving Cheyenne (1963), McMurtry traces the life of a twentieth-century cowboy who struggles mightily to live up to the code his cattleman father has instilled in him. He never gives up, and his stubbornness ultimately leads to his death. In both Cappss and McMurtrys cowboy-to-cowman sagas, the best friends of both determined protagonists are happy-go-lucky cowboys without ambition. Sam Chance has given hell-raising friend Lefors numerous opportunities to settle down with him as a partner, but Leforss restless roaming finally lands him in jail in Denver where he dies. Johnny McCloud cowboys for Gid all his life in Leaving Cheyenne, but he never buys a foot of landnor does he want to. Both punchers exemplify more nearly how a fair number of cowpokes lived during the time a few ex-cowboys became cattle barons. One other phenomenon of cowboy life has provided structure for the cowboy tale. After the Civil War, adventurous adolescents, some runaways or orphans, went west dreaming of becoming cowboys. Their education as cowhands resulted in their lifetime devotion to what they believed was the best life offered. In Cowboy (1928), Ross Santee narrates the making of a cowboy out of an East Texas farm boy who graduates from horse wrangler to cowpuncher before he is twenty. John Culps Born of the Sun (1959) and The Bright Feathers (1965) feature teenagers who learn the art of survival and earn the status of manhood on the trail. Jack Schaefers Monte Walsh (1963) narrates Montes life as a cowboy from age sixteen to his death forty-one years later. In his time the public attitude toward Montes vocation changes, but Montes independent spirit never alters. Roscoe Banks, orphaned in preliminary skirmishing which led up to the Wyoming Johnson County fracas, strikes out on his own at sixteen in William Deckers To Be a Man (1967). He drifts from ranch to ranch across the Southwest, serving well wherever he cowboys. Finally, crippled and old, he settles in Coconino, Arizona. Roscoe himself sums up what to be a man really means to him when a friend reminds him that his kind isnt in demand anymore. Roscoe says, Maybeso, but people have been telling me that all my life and Ive managed to get along. . . . If Id of raised a son Id of made sure he knew things people like us know. Not just how to part cows and calves, but what it takes to be a man, what his word is worth, and things that really matter. Seventeen-year-old Charley in The True Memoirs of Charley Blankenship (1972) by Capps runs away from his Missouri home to learn about life as a
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cowboy on the trail and on a series of ranches. He comes home for a visit after ten years, but he will not stay long. He believes himself too good a cowhand to give up the business. And what of the women who came west to marry cowboys or cattlemen? Few novelists have ventured to write fiction which reflects the womans point of view in the cowboy novel. Frontier wives were strong or they perished. Sam Chances wife Martha in Cappss novel dies at age forty-two. The puzzled doctor observes before her death that she appears like a woman dying of old age. Lutie Brewton, unable to cope with the cultural barrenness that she found when she came west to marry Jim in The Sea of Grass, disappears finally for many years, abandoning a young son who turns outlaw. The only novel of the cowboy to develop fully the point of view of a woman protagonist is Dorothy Scarboroughs The Wind (1925). Set in West Texas during the drought years of the 1880s, the novel contrasts two feminine responses to the hard life of early-day ranching. Cora, robust, beautiful and outspoken, accepts the hard work of raising four children and caring for her man Beverley on their hard-scrabble ranch. She is a survivor, but Cousin Letty, fresh from the green hills of Virginia, is finally driven mad by the wind, the isolation, and the grim marriage she shares with Lige on the Godforsaken Cross-Bar Ranch. Lige loves Letty, but his struggle to survive as a small-time rancher leaves little time for comforting the lonely, vulnerable girl, who has married him for a home. Scarboroughs realistic depiction of the cowboy-ranchers back-breaking work and unrelenting worries is sympathetic. Nature is the adversary here, and it wins the battle. The novel ends tragically with Lettys murder of her seducer and her horrifying surrender to madness as a West Texas sandstorm closes in. No other cowboy novels filtered through the sensibility of a woman have appeared since Scarboroughs, although the novel of the cowboy has become fair game as a vehicle for social commentary. In Edward Abbeys The Brave Cowboy (1956), Jack Burnss disdain for present-day social values brings on his ignominious death as he clings stubbornly to the code of the Old West. C. W. Smith explores contemporary Anglo-Mexican relationships in West Texas ranch country in Thin Men of Haddam (1973). The complexities of this relationship are reflected in the stories old cowboypreacher Bond narrates unceasingly as he rides the range in a jeep with Mendez, a young ranch foreman with a gargantuan guilt because he has made it while his people are still living in squalor. Clair Huffaker, taking his cue from Kipling, brings East and West together in a tale of the most original trail drive yet described. In The Cowboy and the Cossack (1973), fifteen assorted cowboys under the leadership of Levi Dougherty land a herd of Montana longhorns on the coast of Siberia in 1880. The Slash-Diamond outfit is met by an equal number of renegade 530
Cossacks under Rostov, who are to help drive the herd to a destination the cowboys have not foreseen. During the drive, not unlike one from Texas to Kansas amid dangers and hardships, hostilities metamorphose into friendships, and dislike for each other as foreigners is displaced by admiration as they combine skill and courage to complete the long hazardous drive. Gary Jenningss intent in The Terrible Teague Bunch (1975) is to deflate the cowboy myth. An old trail boss, L. R. Foyt, who decides while driving a herd off the Texas caprock in the Blizzard of 1902 that theres got to be an easier way for a man to make a living, drifts to East Texas with his simple friend Eli. There he teams up with Gideon Karnes, an articulate oil field rigger, and Moon Boudreaux, a Cajun logger, to rob a train. Their independent determination gets them nowhere. Their intricate plans lead only to failed expectations. They are failures as outlaws, but turn out to be decent Good Samaritans when widow Wilmajean and daughter Heather need help. In Jory (1969), Milton Bass preaches more than he creates in his exploration of mans potential for violence, chronicling the deadly adventures of an adolescent cowboy with a talent for gun fighting. In recent years, the modem working cowboy, often more victim than hero, has given novelists a theme. Max Evans in The Rounders (1960) chronicles the ongoing battle Dusty Jones and Wrangler Lewis wage against Old Fooler, a deceptively mean bronc, and Jim Ed Love, their wily, pennypinching boss. Not so successful is Evanss next novel, The Hi Lo Country (1961). The improbable romance of Big Boy Matson and Mona Birk, former call girl, dominates the story, but details of the hard life of cowboys on drought-stricken New Mexican ranches in the 1930s are graphic. Evanss short novel, One-Eyed Sky (1962), is a stark narrative about the kinship of three survivors, an old cowboy, an ancient cow and an elderly coyote. In My Pardner (1963), Evans introduces the preacher-cowpoke, Old Boggs, who knows the isins and aints of the world. On a horse drive from Starvation, Texas to Guymon, Oklahoma, in the early 1930s, twelve-year-old Dan gets an education in self-reliance from Old Boggs. In William Deckers most recent novel, The Holdouts (1979), ranching techniques are modem, but the cowboys work is still hard. He is as independent and ingenious as always, as he goes about solving a cattle rustling mystery. The most knowledgeable and perceptive contemporary novelist to write of both historical and present-day cowpunchers is Texan Elmer Kelton. He grew up on a ranch around story-telling old cowhands, so Kelton acquired first-hand much of the knowledge of cowboy life he depicts in his fiction. For a number of years Kelton wrote popular Westerns. Then in The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971), Kelton recreated the Canadian River cowboy strike of 1883, when cowboys rebelled against ranchers who would dictate whether they could start herds and own land of their own while 531
employed as punchers. In the novel, Kelton introduces cowboy Hugh Hitchcock, who sees both sides of the dispute. Hitchcocks breadth of character is Keltons announcement to his public that character development has become important in his novels. In both The Time It Never Rained (1973) and The Good Old Boys (1978), Kelton characterizes memorable Texans. Charlie Flagg, self-reliant and stubborn, weathers the 1950s West Texas drought, defiantly refusing federal aid for his hard-hit ranch in The Time It Never Rained. Charlies courage, his love for his land, his strong loyalties to his wife, his son and his Mexican employees, and even his struggles against nature and his adversaries say much about human nature and human courage. Hewey Calloway in The Good Old Boys is the other kind of cowboy. He wants no part of land ownership or domesticity, although he is sorely tempted when he returns to his brothers ranch in 1906 for a visit. His sister-in-law Eve is determined that he settle down. Heweys philosophy is that the Lord had purposely made every person different, and he cannot understand why so many people were determined to thwart the Lords work by making everyone the same. Almost innocently, Hewey often finds himself in trouble. He is sometimes rowdy and often impulsive. At the last minute, he bids goodbye to his intended, schoolteacher Spring Renfro, and rides off with his old sidekick Snort Yarnell to join another cow outfit. Spring lets him go, recognizing he is a free spirit. There are no stock characterizations in this book. Both the men and women are unique and real. Kelton explores here with a sure pen the complexities of the kind of human spirit that can never alight in one place long. Keltons last two cowboy novels suggest that writers more intrigued with human nature and its potential than with social commentary may yet succeed in conveying, through the fiction of the cowboy, the drama, the complexities and the uniqueness of western life, and at the same time reveal universal truths about the human spirit. Old Charlie Flagg mourns to young Manuel in The Time It Never Rained, All the old principles that a man is anchored to, theyve come a-loose; nobodys payin attention to them anymore. Hes an old grayheaded man living in a young mans world, and all his benchmarks are gone. Manuel answers, The good benchmarks are still there, Mister Charlie. The knell has been sounded by some critics for the novel of the cowboy. The requiem may be premature if talented novelists write with their eyes on the good benchmarks in cowboy fiction.
L OU R O D E N B E R G E R ,
McMurry College
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Primary Sources Abbey, Edward. The Brave Cowboy. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956. Adams, Andy. The Log of a Cowboy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903. . The Outlet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905. . Reed Anthony, Cowman: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907. . A Texas Matchmaker. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904. Bass, Milton. Jory. New York: Putnams, 1969. Capps, Benjamin. Sam Chance. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965. . The Trail to Ogallala. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1964. . The True Memoirs of Charley Blankenship. New York: Lippincott, 1972. Culp, John. Born of the Sun. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959. . The Bright Feathers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. Day, Robert. The Last Cattle Drive. New York: Putnams, 1977. Decker, William. To Be a Man. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. . The Holdouts. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. Evans, Max. The Hi Lo Country. New York: Macmillan, 1961. . The One-Eyed Sky. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. . My Pardner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. . The Rounders. New York: Macmillan, 1960. Flynn, Robert. North to Yesterday. New York: Knopf, 1967. Gann, Walter. The Trail Boss. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937. Gardner, Richard. Scandalous John. New York: Popular Library, 1963. Grey, Zane. The Trail Driver. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936. Hough, Emerson. North of 36. New York: Appleton, 1924. Huffaker, Clair. The Cowboy and the Cossack. New York: Trident Press, 1973. Jennings, Gary. The Terrible Teague Bunch. New York: Norton, 1975. Kelton, Elmer. The Day the Cowboys Quit. New York: Doubleday, 1971. . The Good Old Boys. New York: Doubleday, 1978. . The Time It Never Rained. New York: Doubleday, 1973. Lewis, Alfred Henry. Wolfville. Chicago: A. L. Burt, 1897. . Wofville Days. New York: F. A. Stokes, 1902. . Wolfville Nights. New York: F. A. Stokes, 1902. McMurtry, Larry. Horseman, Pass By. New York: Harper and Row, 1961. . Leaving Cheyenne. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. . Moving On. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Pattullo, George. The Sheriff of Badger Hole. New York: Appleton, 1912. Pilgrim, Thomas. Live Boys; or Charley and Nasho in Texas. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1878. Richter, Conrad. The Sea of Grass. New York: Knopf, 1937.
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A Literary History of the American West Rhodes, Eugene Manlove. Bransford of Arcadia, or The Little Eohippus. New York: Henry Holt, 1914. . Good Men and True. New York: Henry Holt, 1910. . Once in the Saddle and Pas par Aqu. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. Santee, Ross. Cowboy. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1931. Scarborough, Dorothy. The Wind. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925. Schaefer, Jack Warner. Monte Walsh. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Smith, C. W. Thin Men of Haddam. New York: Grossman, 1973. Wister, Owen. The Virginian. New York: Macmillan, 1902. Secondary Sources Graham, Don. Old and New Cowboy Classics. Southwest Review 65 ( Summer 1980): 193303. A critical comparison of two trail drive novels, The Log of a Cowboy and The Trail to Ogallala. Savage, William W., Jr. The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History and Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. A study of the influence of the cowboy on American culture. Frequent allusions to literature of the cowboy. Sonnichsen, C. L. From Hopalong to Hud. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1978. A collection of essays on western fiction. From Hopalong to Hud: The Unheroic Cowboy in Western Fiction, pp. 101128, comments on most significant fiction of the cowboy. Bibliography. Walker, Don D. Criticism of the Cowboy Novel: Retrospect and Reflections. Western American Literature 11 (Winter 1977): 275296. A survey of critical approaches to the cowboy novel. Westbrook, Max. The Authentic Western. Western American Literature 13 (Fall 1978): 213-225. A definition and defense of denotative authenticity as a criterion for the literary Western.
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J. Frank Dobie
HE WRITINGS of J. Frank Dobie appeal strongly to readers who appreciate good tales, students of the southwestern land, and all who value freedom and the natural order. Known to a generation of admirers as Mr. Texas, Pancho Dobie inhabited a world that was never limited by the borders of his native region. The man who knows all there is to know about longhorns, to paraphrase the Latin citation accompanying an honorary degree conferred during his year of teaching at Cambridge University, became a man whose works were increasingly concerned with exploring the universal principle of freedom and the relationships of humans and the physical world around them. Like Robert Frost, Dobie became a realmist rather than a regionalist. The authors decades of writing yielded varied and voluminous publications. These works reflect Dobies skills as a storyteller, chronicler, folklorist, and historian of sorts. They also reflect his deep love for the land and its people, combined with an equally deep affection for classic literature in the English language. Love for literature, particularly English literature, and for the natural world began to grow in Dobie almost from the time of his birth in 1888 on a ranch in Live Oak County, deep in South Texas. However, he was in his forties before his first major work, A Vaquero of the Brush Country, appeared in 1929. Publication of Coronados Children shortly thereafter brought national attention. Dobies desire to chronicle the life of his region never waned, although his interests eventually transported him far beyond the bounds of the cattle kingdom of his birth. In 1952, in The Mustangs, Pancho Dobie noted proudly that searching out the stories for that book had carried him out of the confines of his native region, across centuries and geographical boundaries. The roots of any writers growth are complex. Dobies early years included ample time for riding and working on his fathers ranch; there was also time for considerable reading and attending a country school. The first crucial turn in the authors life came while he was enrolled at Southwestern University, a Methodist college in Georgetown, Texas: it was there that thoughts of studying for the bar changed to a desire to teach literature. Dobie indeed became a teacher, principally at the University of Texas at Austin, until he and the schools administrators parted company in 1947 in a widely publicized dispute. On the surface the matter concerned Dobies request for an extension of a leave of absence; the request was denied, and
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Dobie subsequently declined to report for classes as he had been ordered to do. The grounds for the conflict were actually highly political. Dobie had made no bones about being dissatisfied with what he perceived as a fascist mentality dominating the universitys board of regents. Dobies years at Southwestern University, in any case, engendered in him a love of literature and an early commitment to teaching. They were also the time when he met Bertha McKee, an undergraduate at Southwestern and a student of language, literature, and the Southwest in her own right. Frank and Bertha Dobie were married in 1916 after a six-year courtship. The authors life for more than a decade after he left Southwestern in 1910 was a series of comings and goings. He taught and served as highschool principal in the Big Bend country of West Texas, and there met John Young, whose story became the subject of his first book. He was briefly on the staffs of several Texas newspapers and thought, fleetingly, of becoming a full-time reporter. In 1912 he returned to Southwestern University as a special assistant and teacher of English. Enrollment as a graduate student at Columbia University in 1913 led to a deeper commitment to English literature and also expanded Dobies world in other ways. That academic year marked his first extended visit to a major city, New York, where he learned to appreciate the theatre and the pleasures of out-of-the-way bookshops. The antipodal pulls of city and ranch country were to remain a strong internal conflict in Dobie throughout his life. Completing the Master of Arts degree in mid-1914, Dobie in the fall joined the English faculty of the University of Texas. Among the most important of the authors early friendships was a lasting one with the great folklorist Stith Thompson. At Thompsons urging, Dobie became a member of the Texas Folklore Society, an organization Dobie was to rejuvenate in the 1920s. With Americas entry into World War I, Dobie volunteered for military service, even though he was by then married, and was awarded a commission as lieutenant in the field artillery. He served overseas with a battery of horse-drawn field pieces, but saw no combat. He became acquainted with France during the war, but was not to visit the England he loved through its literature until he went to Cambridge University in the midst of World War II. His army service and his stint at Cambridge are joined in a sense for, as Dobie wrote in the 1940s, the interval spent learning how to fire artillery and his stay at Cambridge studying and teaching American history were the times he had gained more brain power than he had in any other periods of his life. Dobie returned to Texas in 1919. For the next year he managed his Uncle Jim Dobies ranch on the Nueces River south of San Antonio. It was on his uncles ranch that Dobie befriended a vaquero named Santos Cortez,
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and as a result finally established a goal for his life. He listened with fascination as Santos spun stories through the long South Texas nights. As Dobie wrote in his newspaper column of November 17, 1957: While Santos talked, while Uncle Jim and other cow men talked or stayed silent, while the coyotes sang their songs, and the sandhill cranes honked their lonely music I seemed to be seeing a great painting of something Id known all my life. I seemed to be listening to a great epic of something that had been commonplace in my youth but now took on meanings. I was familiar with John A. Lomaxs Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Indeed, I knew John Lomax himself very well. One day it came to me that I would collect and tell the legendary tales of Texas as Lomax had collected the old-time songs and ballads of Texas and the frontier. While this passage is perhaps filtered through the well-known Dobie romanticism, the decision to collect and to tell the folk stories of his native region was firm, and the vision recounted in the passage remained with the author throughout his life. In the early 1920s disastrous financial conditions for cowmen, including Jim Dobie, hastened Panchos return to the University of Texas, where he remained, except for a brief period spent as head of the English Department at what is now Oklahoma State University, until 1947. In the 1920s and 1930s Dobies life was increasingly active with teaching, public appearances, and writing. Establishing himself in the 1920s as a well-paid author of magazine articles for national publications, he also became a steady contributor to the Southwest Review, an excellent regional journal. Opening another channel of communication as the decade closed, he developed his Life and Literature of the Southwest course at the University of Texas; the class, one of the most popular offered at the University during the 1930s, demonstrated Dobies knowledge of the land, people, and literature of the Southwest, as well as his great vitality as a teacher. A brief mimeographed reading list prepared as the course was organized in 1929 evolved into the renowned Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (1942; revised edition, 1952). As late as 1979, James K. Folsom, writing in The Western: A Collection of Critical Essays, adjudged the Guide the most useful single bibliography of Western Americana. In the 1920s Dobie commenced interviewing scores of trail drivers, cowmen, treasure hunters, and other oldtimers likely to have good tales to tell. He traveled countless miles to secure these interviews, placing the tales in his growing files for use and reuse; it is not an exaggeration to say that Dobie practiced oral history of a sort long before tape recorders were invented. He loved the open road, and he enjoyed getting away from campus
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to refresh his mind and spirits in the countryside. Still his primary responsibilities were academic and urban in setting. Much of Dobies scholarly work in the 1920s was associated with the Texas Folklore Society, which he was largely responsible for reorganizing in the early part of the decade. Dobie edited the Societys annual publication from 1922 to 1943. His literary reputation was finally and firmly established with the publication of A Vaquero of the Brush Country ( 1929) and Coronados Children (1930), the latter title chosen as a Literary Guild selection. These works reflect the methods of assembling materials and of writing that Dobie was to employ for the remainder of his career. He gathered the tales, wrote short articles for the Texas Folklore Society annual or for magazines, then rewrote the shorter pieces for book publication. The books themselves are a blend of narrative, short lyrical passages, history, folklore, and natural history. In Vaquero, Dobie used autobiographical materials provided by John Young, an old cowman who had once trailed cattle from Texas northward toward Canada before fences ended the trail-driving epoch. Dobie was later to claim, in a list he made of outstanding range country books, that A Vaquero of the Brush Country, along with The Longhorns (1941), supplies a fairly full and accurate account of the beginnings and early development of ranching in Texas. If Vaquero is a story of the open range, Coronados Children takes as its theme the quest for lost treasure. These tales are not creations of mine, Dobie writes in introducing Coronados Children. They belong to the soil and to the people of the soil. He then says the book is a collection of just tales. The reader familiar with Dobies work will note characteristic touches here. The author often pointedly identifies himself with the soil and its people. He also often injects a disclaimer, such as the just tales phrase, to avoid being labeled a folklorist or historian or scientist of any kind. As Vaquero was followed some years later by The Longhorns, so the treasure tales published in 1930 were followed in 1939 by Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. The latter was the first of many of his works to be brought out by Little, Brown and Company; the author dealt with five publishers during the 1930s before establishing a permanent relationship with the Boston company. Dobie had grown up among Spanish-speaking people and was always interested in their folk culture. During the early 1930s he traveled extensively in Mexico, adventures funded in part by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. The literary result of his travels was Tongues of the Monte (1935), reprinted as The Mexico I Like (1942). Francis E. Abemethy, in his excellent pamphlet J. Frank Dobie (1967)) notes that this book on Mexico, while never a big seller, has become for many readers their favorite Dobie volume. Cast as a picaresque novel, Tongues of the Monte features Don Federico as its central character; the extent to which Don Federico is also 538
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Frank Dobie remains vague. The protagonist, in any event, rides through five separate episodes in northwestern Mexico. The geography of the narrative is never clearly mapped out, but it seems to be set in the dry brush country east of the Sierra Madre and south of the Texas Big Bend and New Mexico. A highlight of the work is the tale of Juan Oso, son of a bear and of a woman (a variant, of course, of the Bears Son Tale, an archetypal story that appears in the folklore of many cultures). Tongues of the Monte does not go very far in developing the character of Don Federico, and is therefore not a good novel; the book is successful, however, in vividly showing the life of the Mexican earth and its people. The Longhorns, published in 1941, represents Dobie at the peak of his powers. The author begins the book with a statement that the longhorns belong to history, a past so remote and irrevocable that sometimes it seems as if it might never have been. He advises readers who object to facts to begin with chapter four and then merely to skim all the others. The work is a rewarding mixture of fact, lore, and history. Entertaining tales, such as that of Sancho, the steer who returned, on instinct, to his native Texas range after being trailed to Wyoming, enliven the text. Sundown, the twelfth and final chapter of The Longhorns, carries a double meaning, one imposed by history, for as this work appeared World War II was about to become a global conflict with Americans involved directly. Dobie closes the book with praise for the longhorns for their great strength, vitality, endurance, and nobility. Within three years of finishing The Longhorns, the writer would be admiring the English people for some of these same qualities. Dobie went to England during the war to serve as a visiting professor at Cambridge University. It was there that he became contemporary with myself, as he expressed it, a transformation that can best be seen by following the Sunday newspaper column he began in September, 1939 and produced without fail until his death. My Texas was the original title of the column which was published in several newspapers, notably the Houston Post and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In An American Original: The Life of J. Frank Dobie (1978), Lon Tinkle cites a note found in one of Dobies Autobiographical files, a note in which the author wrote of becoming unconsciously contemporary with the world at about the time World War II arrived. He could not, he said, be aware of the Nazis bombing English civilization out of existence and. . . go on tall-taling about Texas as if all were right with the world. He concluded by speaking of the Fascist spirit asserting itself at home. Dobies responsibility at Cambridge was to lecture on American history from 1774 to the 1940s, a responsibility that set him to cramming like a college freshman before an exam. The Dobie who long had loved English literature, especially Shakespeare and the Romantics, found in England a 539
civility and civilized freedom, a serenity and a sense of harmony that moved him deeply. He had not planned to write of his experiences in England, but an article about Cambridge for the Saturday Evening Post and notes jotted down for the Sunday column became, with rewriting, a book unique to his long list of publications, A Texan in England (1944). In a notable chapter, The Lark at Heavens Gate, he writes as a Wordsworthian Romantic preparing to go out onto Grantchester Meadows to hear the skylarks of which such poets as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Shelley had written; but in the same chapter he poignantly and realistically describes the longing for liberty that he had seen in two golden eagles in the London zoo, creatures that remind him of a caged eagle observed years earlier on an Oklahoma ranch. What England Did to Me, the final chapter, reveals a man very different from the creator of The Longhorns, a book written just a few years previously. As Tinkle noted in An American Original (p. 185): The year at Cambridge crystallized many points of view for Dobie, ideas that had invigorated and enlarged him in the past but that had never dominated his thought. Among the ideas were the relationship of the universal and the provincial, a growing attachment to the metaphor of the earth, and increased respect for imagination as contrasted with illusion. Notable also is the strengthening of Dobies affection for England. The break with the University of Texas in 1947, the involved details of which need not be of concern here, freed Dobie to devote his entire time and energy to writing. The files of materials he had collected, earlier publications in magazines and newspapers, and memories stored over the years formed the basis for several important works published in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Voice of the Coyote (1949), like his other animal books, blends folklore with natural and cultural history. How humans perceive the coyote is at least as important in the book as factual information and description. The author is forceful in his opposition to the frontier tradition of killing for the sake of killing. A hunter from boyhood, Dobie in The Voice of the Coyote expresses anger at those who slaughter coyotes for no good reason. As opposed to the traditional Anglo attitude, Dobie was attracted to the Indian view of nature, a view which stresses living in harmony with ones natural environment. The author seemed to see such a view reflected in the career of the old hunter Ben Lilly, who had begun on the eastern fringes of the Southwest and eventually moved across Texas into the mountains of northern Mexico, New Mexico, and Arizona. Lilly was in his seventies when Dobie first met him in New Mexico in 1928, and the file of materials on Lilly gathered over the years finally evolved into The Ben Lilly Legend (1950). Lilly was a paradoxical man, impossible in human relationships because of his devotion to hunting and moving on. Dobie was fasci540
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nated with Lillys primitive knowledge of forest and mountain range, with his energy, vitality, strength, and love of freedom. Old Ben Lilly was a son of the natural world that Dobie adored, but it is interesting that the writer gives only a few words in his Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest to the Lilly book, fewer words in fact than to any of his other works. The Mustangs, published in 1952, may well prove to be the most enduring of Dobies books. The English Romantic, the lover of the open range, and the critic of contemporary society merge into the marvelously elegiac opening lines of the volume: Like the wild West Wind that Shelley yearned to be, the mustangs, the best ones at least, were tameless, and swift, and proud. The author says that he has chosen to write about the mustangs at a time when so many proclaimers of liberty are strangling it. The reference is to the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, an ism that Dobie deplored because of the fears and the tightening of freedoms that it engendered. Pancho Dobie was often more direct in his political commentary, such as in the newspaper column in which he compared a prominent Texas politician unfavorably with a rattlesnake, but in The Mustangs he wrote obliquely of the spiritual truth of freedom, a value he believed the wild horses and their world embodied. Such a principle, of course, had been defined by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the few American writers to significantly influence Dobie. The tales and facts collected in the book, however, have a vital tang of actual experience that transcends the abstract message. Years of collecting notes and of reading about the horses of the West preceded the writing of The Mustangs. Prior to composing the book the author also did concentrated research under a grant from the Huntington Library in California; Dobie later said the research conducted at the Huntington was equal to that required for the writing of a doctoral dissertation. Pride in the resulting work is apparent in the lengthy annotation found in Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (revised edition). Dobie explains in the annotation that the volume incorporates an earlier, briefer work, as well as a large part of the Texas Folklore Society annual of 1940. The first third of The Mustangs traces the Arabian progenitors of the Spanish horse, the horses brought to the New World by Spaniards, and the horse strains developed by the western Indians. Later there is room for legends and tales of Anglo mustangers. Probably a million range horses, Dobie notes, left Texas during the time of the longhorn drives, and by the end of the nineteenth century the last herds of mustangs had been reduced to scrub stock. In The Mustangs Dobie largely avoids sentiment, something he was not always able to do in previous works. The concluding prose hymn to the mustangs, once free upon a vast range and now free of all confines of time and flesh, seems noble and fitting rather than sentimental. Tales of Old-Time Texas (1955) continued to mine the familiar lode, as 541
did Ill Tell You a Tale (1960), a selection of some of the best of Dobies previously published stories. The tales in the latter volume were chosen by Isabel Gaddis, herself from the range country and a former student of Dobies. The stories are gathered under such headings as The Longhorn Breed and Characters and Happenings of Long Ago, and they represent Dobie at his best in doing what he did with artistry-telling a tale. An advance copy of Cow People was in Dobies hands only days before his peaceful death in September, 1964. The book summarizes and distils all the vast knowledge of cattlemen that Dobie had acquired over a lifetime of personal experiences and reading. Lon Tinkle claims that Dobie became a better, more realistic writer during his final years. Cow People bears out that judgment. The portraits of cattlemen in Cow People are expertly drawn, sometimes with humor, always with canny understanding. Following Dobies death several posthumous volumesmost notably Rattlesnakes (1965), Some Part of Myself (1967), Out of the Old Rock (1972), and Prefaces (1975)were sewn together and published. The lengthy bibliography compiled in 1968 by Mary Louise McVicker shows, through its more than 700 entries (excluding newspaper columns), how voluminously Dobie wrote. Tinkles A Bibliographical Note at the close of An American Original nicely supplements McVickers essential bibliography and summarizes well the significant body of writings by and about Dobie as of the late 1970s. That Dobie was a literary son of the cattle kingdom is known widely; less well known are the extent and variety of his writings. As McVickers bibliography demonstrates, he not only wrote extensively for periodicals, but also contributed 134 items to books by varied hands. Pancho Dobie could ride the range and treat cattle infected with screwworms, but he was also a literate writer firmly grounded in the best standards of English literature. At times late in his life Dobie worried that he was perceived by the public only as a colorful yam-spinner. Tinkle ponders the question of whether or not Dobie became trapped in the image he so carefully cultivated early in his career. In the final chapter of An American Original, A Joy to Him and a Joy to Hear, Tinkle concludes that indeed Dobie found himself entrapped within his loyalties and his public role, but that Dobie the man never stopped growing. Pancho Dobie was in general a beloved figure in his native Texas and Southwest, and his long life spanned a period of remarkable transitions within the region. His life, if not his works, reflects many of those transitions. How will Dobies reputation fare in the future? Students of literature know that judging a writers accomplishments is usually a lengthy process; reputations must be sifted. A single doctoral dissertation devoted solely to Dobie and a few worthwhile undergraduate papers cited by Tinkle suggest
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that there has not been an excessive amount of scholarly interest in the author. Larry McMurtry, the Texas novelist, offers strong, generally negative criticism of Dobie (and of the writers friends, historian Walter Prescott Webb and naturalist Roy Bedichek) in a piece included in In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968). Dobie and his colleagues, McMurtry writes, revered Nature, but were never able to resolve their ambivalent passions: love for the range and love for the library. McMurtry asserts that Dobie is at his best in Tongues of the Monte and in the terse opinionated annotations of the Guide. Only time will test the validity of McMurtrys belief that Dobies audience will probably not outlive him much more than a generation.Another Texas writer, Larry Goodwyn, concludes in his essay The Frontier Myth and Southwestern Literature that Dobie was the most significant . . . of the interpreters of the oral tradition, but while he described a way of life, he never found a way to describe its meaning. Perhaps the best judgment of Dobie now possible is suggested by the opening sentences of Francis Abernethys pamphlet J. Frank Dobie. Abernethy begins with a story Dobie relates in A Vaquero of the Brush Country. A thirsty, bored cowboy rides into Dogtown, and after a visit to the saloon mounts his horse, spurs it, and whoops for a while to express the buoyancy of his unconquerable spirit. Dobie, Abernethy says, decided to whoop us into consciousness of what we had and what we have, and of the tremendous life and vitality of things of which we are a part. Chronicler of the cattle kingdom and teller of tales, folklorist, historian, bibliographer, man of letters, teacher, lover of freedom and of nature and of life, and a well-loved figureDobie was all of these. Future generations of readers will no doubt confirm that he wrote at least a handful of enduring books about his native region and its animals and people. At times, in addition, he did a lot of whooping and stirring the dust.
H ENRY L. AL S M E Y E R , JR .,
Hendrix College
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Primary Sources ( in chronological order) A Vaquero of the Brush Country. Dallas: Southwest Press, 1929. Coronados Children. Dallas: Southwest Press, 1930. Tongues of the Monte. Garden City: N.Y. : Doubleday, Doran, 1935. Reprinted as The Mexico I Like. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1942. Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939. The Longhorns. Boston: Little, Brown, 1941. A Texan in England. Boston: Little, Brown, 1944. The Voice of the Coyote. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949. The Ben Lilly Legend. Boston: Little, Brown, 1950. Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Revised edition. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952. The Mustangs. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952. Tales of Old-Time Texas. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955. Ill Tell You a Tale. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. Cow People. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. Rattlesnakes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Some Part of Myself. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Out of the Old Rock. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. Prefaces. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. Secondary Sources Abernethy, Francis E. J. Frank Dobie. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1967. Combines biography and critical appraisal. Cited by Tinkle (below) as the best critical survey of Dobie published thus far. . J. Frank Dobie. In Southwestern American Literature: A Bibliography, edited by John Q. Anderson, Edwin W. Gaston, Jr., and James W. Lee. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1980. Convenient listing of works by and about Dobie. Alsmeyer, Henry L., Jr. J. Frank Dobies Attitude Towards Physical Nature. Dissertation, Texas A&M University, 1973. Authors thesis is that Dobie was surrounded by nature as a child and through the years developed increased knowledge of and sympathy with many forms of physical nature. Bode, Winston. A Portrait of Pancho. Austin: Pemberton Press, 1965. Reprinted as J. Frank Dobie: A Portrait of Pancho. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1968. Book version of a television documentary that combines words and photographs in a memorial look at Dobie as man and writer. Cook, Spruill. J. Frank Dobie Bibliography. Waco, Texas: Texian Press, 1968. A sixty-three-page labor of love. Bertha McKee Dobie wrote the foreword. Dugger, Ronnie, ed. Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967. Memoirs of the three friends, rich in personal insights and anecdotes, by people who knew them.
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Dykes, Jeff. My Dobie Collection. College Station: Friends of the Texas A&M University Library, 1971. Published on the occasion of the gift by Dykes and his daughter of a major collection of Dobie materials totalling more than six hundred items. Supplements the Cook and McVicker bibliographies. Goodwyn, Larry. The Frontier Myth and Southwestern Literature. In Regional Perspectives: An Examination of Americas Literary Heritage, edited by John Gordon Burke. Chicago: American Library Association, 1973. See especially pp. 18688 for consideration of Dobie and the oral tradition of the Southwest. Written by a member of the Center for Southern Studies, Duke University. Hudson, Wilson M. Adams, Dobie, and Webb on the Use of Regional Material. In American Bypaths: Essays in Honor of E. Hudson Long, edited by Robert G. Collmer and Jack W. Herring. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 1980. McMurtry, Larry. Southwestern Literature ? In In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Austin: Encino Press, 1968. A sharp look at Dobie, Webb, and Bedichek by a younger Texas writer. The authors judgments may be challenged, but should be considered. McVicker, Mary Louise. The Writings of J. Frank Dobie: A Bibliography. Lawton, Oklahoma: Museum of the Great Plains, 1968. Essential to any serious study of Dobies voluminous writings. An excellent bibliography. Owens, William A. Three Friends: Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. Reprints letters of the three, augmented by materials from transcribed interviews. The author is a Texas writer and Columbia University professor. Tinkle, Lon. An American Original: The Life of J. Frank Dobie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Major biography written by a former Southern Methodist University professor, now deceased, who was also a close personal friend of Dobies. Balanced and helpful. Makes good use of previously unavailable letters.
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Harvey Fergusson
HE OVERRIDING THEMES of Harvey Fergussons best fiction are the emasculating effects of time and the inevitability of change. In Fergussons world view the forces of time and change are equally potent in shaping the lives of individuals, of societies, and of regions. The finest of his fiction is set in the American West, and it is historical fiction in the best sense of the term. Through the experience of individual characters, Fergusson encapsulates in microcosm the history of human life in the Westor, more specifically, the Southwest. Taken as an aggregate, the authors works constitute a historical diorama of breathtaking and provocative scope. Fergusson was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1890, and was descended from men prominent in his native states commerce and politics. His maternal grandfather, Franz Huning, came to Albuquerque via the Santa Fe Trail and stayed to become one of the citys most important merchants in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. His father, Harvey Butler Fergusson, was territorial representative and later the first congressman from New Mexico when the territory became a state. As a child Fergusson loved to hunt and fish and to wander through the wilderness areas of northern New Mexico. He also developed very early an abiding interest in the unique and colorful history of his state and region. Nevertheless at age twenty-two, following graduation from his fathers alma mater, Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, Fergusson moved from Albuquerque and never again made that city his official residence. When he left Albuquerque, he went first to Washington, D.C., where for a decade he covered the national political scene for a variety of newspapers. During that decade he met H. L. Mencken, at the time a powerful arbiter of literary taste. Fergusson and Mencken became friends, and Mencken encouraged the younger man to try his hand at fiction. Working for nearly two years, mainly at nights and on weekends, Fergusson produced a manuscript which Mencken was instrumental in getting published. The manuscript was a novel entitled The Blood of the Conquerors, a tale of love, greed, and racial discrimination set in twentieth-century Albuquerque. It was brought out by Alfred A. Knopf in 1921. In the more than three decades from his first book until his last one, published in 1954, the author turned out fourteen volumes, ten of which
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are novels. In order to support his serious writing, however, he found it necessary to move to New York City in the 1920s and churn out formula stories for the mass-circulation periodicals (as did F. Scott Fitzgerald at about the same time). In the 1930s he was employed as a screenwriter by several Hollywood movie companies (as were Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and other important American writers of the period). From the early 1940s until his death in 1971 at age eighty-one, Fergusson lived in Berkeley, California, occupying a small apartment in the lovely hills behind the University of California campus. Though he continued to write until the end, he was unable to find publishers for several manuscripts completed after 1954. His work of the 1960s, he believed, was too alien to contemporary literary fashion for writing about misery, violence, and perversion, the unholy trinity of publishing success. Harvey Fergusson was, as one critic has suggested, a spiritual Westerner but an intellectual Easterner. The authors ancestral and emotional roots were in the West, but he was educated in the East and always aspired to be taken seriously as an eastern intellectual. He was proud of such books as Modern Man: His Belief and Behavior (1936) and People and Power: A Study of Political Behavior in America (1947), works which juggle ideas from the realms of philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics. In these treatises Fergusson takes the liberal view of American democracy and individualism. He welcomes change, particularly the expansion of the American economy and growth in personal liberty. He argues that large cities are the locales in which such change is likely to occur, not in the nations repressive small towns and rural areas. In these two books, at least, Fergusson hardly mentions the West at all; reading them, one might easily conclude that the author was reared in Cambridge, Massachusetts rather than Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fergussons eastern works are Modern Man and People and Power, the novels Capitol Hill (1923) and Women and Wives (1924), stories set in Washington, D.C. and New York, and even the novels Hot Saturday ( 1926), Footloose McGarnigal ( 1930), and The Life of Riley (1937), which are laid in twentieth-century New Mexico-but are written from an eastern perspective and feature a decidedly hostile attitude toward the West. These are the weakest of Fergussons books. They are for the most part angry but curiously bloodless harangues against middle-class, small-town America; they lack emotional resonance and any restraint that wisdom might have imposed. Even worse, they now, in the 1980s, appear badly dated period pieces. By far Fergussons most convincing, readable, and fully realized books are those in which he tries to come to terms with the past, with history. As he himself once admitted, he was strongly attracted to the past, but he always had to struggle to prevent his falling into a shallowly romantic worship 547
of the past. It is perhaps this tensionstrong attraction balanced by willed skepticism and detachmentthat accounts for the manifest superiority of the books that deal, in one way or another, with the history of the West. The volumes referred to are Rio Grande (1933), a wonderfully engrossing history of New Mexicos storied river valley, Home in the West (1944), a work of autobiography and personal history, and the novels Wolf Song (1927), In Those Days (1929), Grant of Kingdom (1950), and The Conquest of Don Pedro (1954). Remarks here will focus on these half-dozen books since they form the core of Fergussons achievement as a literary artist. Rio Grande does not attempt to encompass the whole of the great rivers history, only that of its two-hundred-mile flow between the Colorado border and Albuquerque. The life that exists between those two points is demonstrably supported by the rivers precious water, and within the area it drains, an astonishing variety of human experience and social forms has existed over the centuries. Fergusson not only read about the history of this region; during his lifetime, he carefully explored every part of its topography, from the floor of the river valley to the summit of Wheeler Peak near Taos, more than thirteen thousand feet above sea level. The writer had an opportunity to observe firsthand the life-giving properties of the Rio Grande; it is a river, according to his sister Erna, that he has swum in, hunted along, jumped when it was low, fought when it was high. In Rio Grande personal experience, diligent research, and the writers gifts as a prose stylist are brought into perfect register, and the resultant blend more than meets the late J. Frank Dobies definition of good historical writing: when interpretive power, just evaluation, controlled imagination and craftsmanship are added to mastery of facts. Rio Grande divides neatly into three parts: an account of the Southwests pre-Columbian inhabitants, the native Americans; a chronicle of the arrival of the Spanish, in all their feudal splendor, in the seventeenth century; and the story of the intrusion in the nineteenth century of the Anglos, who brought with them, along with their money and technology, the modern spirit. If the materials in Rio Grande are structured around a single theme, that theme seems best summed up in the following statement from the book: The character of a country is the destiny of its people. . . . A land as harsh and demanding as northern New Mexico inevitably plays a part in shaping the lives of its inhabitants. Probably Fergusson is saying much the same thing here as Ross Calvin says in Sky Determines. In New Mexico, writes Calvin, whatever is both old and peculiar appears upon examination to have a connection with arid climate. Peculiarities range from the striking adaptation of the flora onwards to those of the fauna, and on up to those of the human animal. The Southwest attracts certain kinds of animals and people and repels others; those who remain must adapt 548
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themselves to its special ways and are irrevocably changed in the process. Even the money-culture of the Anglo, in the face of impenetrable necessity, subtly adjusted to the regions unique conditions. Change, Fergusson asserts in Rio Grande, will and must occur, but land and sky endure; they resist only those who fail to acknowledge their awesome power. In sum, Rio Grande brings together in one book the history, geography, sociology, and anthropology of northern New Mexico. Still it is not a compendium of these disciplines, but a synthesis with all the fat rendered out; a lean book, it is the work of an artist rather than a fact-gatherer. The works conclusions depend as much on intuitive feel as on research (though, as indicated, it contains plenty of that as well). Probably only a person like Fergusson, whose roots were deeply and sensitively embedded in southwestern soil, could properly employ such a potentially dangerous method; however, the method was without doubt expertly used, and from it issued a splendidly readable and enlightening interpretive study of a regions long and colorful history. Home in the West: An Inquiry into My Origins was published when Fergusson was fifty-four years old. The book is partly autobiography, partly (as the subtitle indicates) a retrospective search for an ancestral heritage, and partly the account of one mans halting and sometimes painful education. The writer was born in the nineteenth century and was nurtured on nineteenth-century values and beliefs, and only with considerable difficulty was he able to teach himself to become a modern man. As the story of an educational process, the work properly ends when the education is complete; chronologically, the final event in the narrative is a frank description of the authors sexual initiation in Washington, D.C. during World War I when he was in his late twenties. The principal significance of Home in the West is that it is the personal record of a crucial period in American history-he decades between 1890 and 1920. During those years, Fergusson says, the nation was undergoing a profound social and ethical revolution. The social revolution had to do mainly with a large increase in population combined with a rapid changeover from a rural to a predominantly urban society. During this period the distance between large cities and rural areas seemed infinitely greater than the mere miles that separated them. Because of the rural and small-town peoples suspicions of the wicked city on the one hand and the urban dwellers contempt for the country bumpkin on the other, divisions arose within the nation that have not been wholly resolved to this day. The ethical revolution had to do largely with a gradual relaxation of the strict sexual mores that most nineteenth-century Americans had adhered to. All of this Fergusson chronicles with admirable detachment and restraint. Throughout Home in the West he illuminatingly demonstrates how 549
his own personal experience paralleled the evolving social history of the nation as a whole. Maintaining his equilibrium in the narrative, the writer presents himself as a noteworthy, even singular, personality, while simultaneously showing that his life is in some ways representative of the age in which he lived. The result is an exemplary autobiography, one that remains relevant and interesting to a time that is now far removed from the era that it describes. Fergussons quartet of novels that dramatically portray the nineteenthcentury history of New Mexico are his most important literary monument. Wolf Song, the first of the series in terms of composition and publication, is one of the best of the batch. It is also, probably, the most neglected classic in western American fiction. John R. Milton, a leading critic of western literature, recently adjudged Wolf Song as probably the best mountain man novel we have. When one considers that the novels competitors for that title include such perennial bestsellers as A. B. Guthries The Big Sky (1947) and Frederick Manfreds Lord Grizzly (1954), Miltons praise is indeed impressive. Certainly a book that ranks withor aboveThe Big Sky in the hierarchy of western fiction deserves more recognition and appreciation than it has thus far been accorded. Like all of Fergussons fiction laid in the nineteenth-century West, Wolf Song is grounded in a thick layer of historical detail. The story issues, at one level anyway, from Fergussons wide reading in western historyin this instance, the history of the mountain men, a handful of semibarbaric Anglos who roamed the great open stretches of the West in the 1830s and 1840s in search of adventure and beaver pelts. Virtually all of the mountain men were remarkable, almost absurdly heroic and courageous figures, lonerssuch as Sam Lash, the novels protagonistmostly from primitive communities in the Middle West and Upper South who had fled westward to a wilderness that offered both grand isolation and incredible hardships. The heyday of the mountain man was brief; by the middle of the century, he was most definitely an anachronism. But the mountain men had provided, by the time they exited from the scene, an unintended example for the ensuing waves of Anglo settlers that swarmed over the West in succeeding decades: they had plundered natures bounty to support a prodigal and recklessly romantic life style. Fergusson knew well the primary sources that chronicle the history of the mountain men, and he convincingly, yet unobtrusively, employed that knowledge in the writing of Wolf Song. (He drew heavily, for example, on characters and incidents described in George Frederick Ruxtons Life in the Far West, a classic eyewitness account of the western trappers.) The authoras he would later demonstrate in Rio Grande was also intimately familiar with the manners and mores of the southwestern Indians and of the 550
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Spanish ricos (the rich ones, the feudal aristocrats) who ruled much of New Mexico throughout the nineteenth century. Fergussons masterful portrayal, in Wolf Song, of the rigid, tradition-bound social structure that the ricos established in the colonial Southwest supplies the tale with an especially rich and authentic cultural backdrop. The history and culture of a region, however, provide only the raw materials of art. Fergusson usesand uses consummately wellthose raw materials, but his real triumph in Wolf Song is his brilliant projection of his characters psychology and motivations, as well as their historical and cultural milieu. Sam Lash, Lola Salazar, and Black Wolf are the most prominent actors in the drama that the novel unfolds. In a general way, these three people represent the traditional triangle of southwestern social and ethnic strifeAnglo, Spanish, Indian. Their reality as individualized characters, however, springs from their personal interactions and conflicts, and from the thoroughly believable resolutions of conflictthrough violence and lovethat are achieved in the course of the narrative. The storys major characters may indeed be viewed as representative cultural types, but beyond such a simplified sociological interpretation of their roles, they are intensely realized and plausible human beings. In that fact, certainly, lies much of the novels success as a work of art. The style in which the novel is framed is another key to its success. The language of Wolf Song is appropriate to the heroic events that it describes. It is a lyrical and poetic language. Here are the opening lines of the books first chapter: Up from the edge of the prairie and over the range rode three. Their buckskin was black with blood and shiny from much wiping of greasy knives. . . . Hair hung thick to their shoulders. Traps rattled in rucksacks . . . The alliteration (with its inevitable echoes of the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic Beowulf ) and the swift rhythm of these lines sing to the readers ear. Fergussons intention in Wolf Song wasas the style suggests and the very title of the book confirmsto tell a story in epic song as much as in the forms of more conventional fiction. He was successful in this purpose. Style and story combine in the novel to create an esthetic and emotional power that continues to speak to new generations of readers. In Those Days: An Impression of Change, published in 1929, is a novel loosely based on the life and career of Fergussons grandfather, Franz Huning. When he died around the turn of the century, Huning left a memoir that his grandson read for the first time in the 1920s. (The memoir, under the title Trader on the Santa Fe Trail, was published in 1973.) By his own account Huning was born in Germany, arrived in America as a teenager in 1848, and came to New Mexico as an ox-driver on the Santa Fe Trail. The young Huning was involved in several adventurous escapades appropriate to the wild western setting in which he found himself. He once trekked into 551
Apache country to buy cheap mules that the Indians had stolen in Mexico; he and his party, however, were trapped in a snowstorm in the White Mountains of what is now Arizona, and were lucky to escape with their lives. After this incident he opened a general store on the plaza in Albuquerque, an enterprise that was an immediate success. Over the years he also built a flour mill and a sawmill and bought a great deal of farm and ranch land around Albuquerque. Toward the end of the century Hunings financial successes became reverses, and at his death his possessions had dwindled to his house and the grounds on which it stood. According to Fergusson, his grandfather was not really a businessman. In fact, he disliked and distrusted the kind of urban businessman that the railroads brought to Albuquerque in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Franz Huning was a merchant-adventurer, a creature of the old Southwest who was, as he himself realized, wholly alien to the bustling commercial atmosphere of turn-of-the-century America. There are many parallels between the career of Franz Huning and that of Robert Jayson, the central character of In Those Days. In the novel Fergusson subtly points up the historical significance of the western merchants and storekeepers. Their role in the taming of the West was, as a matter of fact, probably more important than that of the violent types so widely portrayed in popular fiction and films. In the Southwest the storekeeper was often the most powerful person in his community. As the towns chief supplier and creditor, he possessed considerable political leverage, the delicate exercise of which became a kind of local art form. The principal purpose of In Those Days, however, is not to supply a mercantile history of the Southwest; it is rather to illustrate dramatically one of the authors favored themes. The novels subtitle, An Impression of Change, provides a clue to that theme. Fergusson believed that the history of the West was a great drama of endless change and of peoples responses to changetheir meeting or failing to meet the challenge of change. When an individual resists the swift current of change, the author contended, that individual and the institutions of which he is a part become rigid and inflexible; they are no longer viable. Concerning In Those Days, Fergusson once commented that his aim in writing the book was to trace the long curve of a human destinyto take an overview from which the forces that shaped that destiny might be more clearly discerned. The more chronologically detached the view, the author claimed, the better one sees that Jayson is dominated rather than dominating. Time and Change are the mighty characters in this story. In order to follow the long curve of a human destiny, Fergusson begins his tale with a portrait of Robert Jayson as a callow but energetic youth, lured by the westering impulse from his Connecticut home to territorial 552
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New Mexico. He concludes the story by showing Jayson as an impoverished old-timer, a man content to relax and daydream about the glorious excitement of the past. Jaysons life is long and eventful; it stretches, in terms of regional history, from the freight wagon to the automobile. This very circumstance, however, gives rise to a serious flaw in the book. The novel is not really lengthy enough to project a sense of fullness in chronicling so long a life. Fergusson settles, therefore, for zeroing in on four crucial stages of Jaysons career. Inevitably such a technique, and the abrupt shifts and lapses in chronology that it requires, makes the narrative seem choppy and disjointed in places. The reader wishes for more detail and smoother transitions than the brevity of the story can possibly allow. In Those Days, then, is the weakest of Fergussons historical fictions. Even so, it remains a readable and thought-provoking novel. Set against the grandeur of the northern New Mexico landscape, Grant of Kingdom, published in 1950, is perhaps Fergussons best novel; it is, in addition, one of the great novels of western American literature. The story is based on the history of the Maxwell Land Grant, an enormous tract of nearly two million acres centering on the town of Cimarron, New Mexico. Ceded to Carlos Beaubien by the king of Spain, the land was held during the middle decades of the nineteenth century by Beaubiens son-in-law, Lucien Maxwell. Grant of Kingdom is Fergussons fullest, most illuminating treatment of southwestern history. History, indeed, is the books subject not just historical facts, but the meanings inherent in the facts. In his foreword to the novel the author makes clear that he intends not only to develop a specific fragment of regional history but also to project a much wider vision of mans collective experience. Like the Souths William Faulkner, Fergusson in Grant of Kingdom effectively uses the history of a plot of land a postage stamp of soil, in Faulkners phraseas a microcosm of a regions past; as Faulkner is said to have fashioned a legend of the South from the history of Yoknapatawpha County, so from the story of the Maxwell Land Grant Fergusson creates his legend of the American West. Once again, in Grant of Kingdom as elsewhere in his fiction, Fergusson is concerned to show the workings of change on individuals and societies. Jean Ballardan extension of Wolf Songs Sam Lashis for a long while an energetic swimmer in the current of change. An ex-mountain man, he marries into the Coronel family and is transformed into el patron, the absolute ruler of a minor kingdom, strictly feudal in its social structure. He establishes order by means of personal loyalty, rather than by smoothly functioning organization. Almost by force of personality alone, he brings peace, prosperity, and civilization to his grant, and his lifes labors result in progress for an entire region. By the time he dies, however, Ballard is a human relic. He possesses no business sense, distrusting banks and risky investments. In553
evitably he runs afoul of the go-for-broke economic system that settled over the West in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. For Ballard late in life, work and physical danger are simple things to deal with. What makes life hard is the bewilderment of change and complication, the rush of people and money, the impact of unexpected things. . . . With the intrusion of railroads and money into what had been, even in Ballards heyday, an unspoiled wilderness, an irrevocable change is worked: these instruments of modern society destroyed one kind of man and created another. The man they create is the wheeler-dealer speculator and financier, Major Blore. Blore, for better or worse, is a modern man in every sense of the term. He understands the importance of proper organization, and he knows how to use money and technology. His lust for money and power springs from his childhood status as a poor white in the classconscious South, and he discovers in the newly opened West a formative society in which he may freely indulge his savage ambitions. Naturally Blore delights in toppling so exalted an aristocrat as Jean Ballard. He wrests control of the grant from the aged Ballard, divides it into small ranches and homesteads, and sells out at an enormous profit. However, Blores dream of a populous city on the grant eventually withers and dies when the railroad passes the area by. Of novels set in the nineteenth-century West, Grant of Kingdom is certainly one of the most suggestive and illuminating. It is chronologically inclusive, yet compact. It convincingly displays in microcosm the stages of social development, the cultural and technological forces, the procession of character types that shaped the history of the West. In reviewing the book when it first appeared, J. Frank Dobie said that Grant of Kingdom, though perhaps defective in minor ways, would endure as a work of art because it somehow evokes the unique tempos of both earth and metal. Dobies focus on narrative rhythm is very much to the point in evaluating the novels effectiveness. The storyand the style in which it is toldadvances not only with the leisurely pace of a great pastoral kingdom, but also with the clangorous urgency of invading money and machinery. With grace and wisdom, Grant of Kingdom suggests both the tragic disruption and the hopeful promise of time and changeand that, after all, is the dramatic rhythm of all human history, not just western history. Fergussons final published novel, The Conquest of Don Pedro, appeared in 1954. The authors last book was probably his most successful one in financial terms. It was made a Literary Guild selection, and a special edition of the novel was printed for members of the book club. In addition the work enjoyed good sales as a paperback. Moreover, the novel was well received by reviewers. Dan Wickenden, in a page-one review of the book in the New York Herald Tribune book review section, wrote: In his fine, clear prose, 554
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Harvey Fergusson has carved from the raw material of the Southwest a notable work of art. . . . With The Conquest of Don Pedro, the fourteenth of his published works, one of Americas finest writers comes triumphantly into his own. Wickendens praise is high, but deserved. The Conquest of Don Pedro is without question a gem of a novel, and it comes very close to matching the literary quality of Grant of Kingdom. As Grant of Kingdom extends and elaborates the story of Sam Lash from Wolf Song, The Conquest of Don Pedro further develops the central concerns and subjects of In Those Days. The protagonist of Conquest is Leo Mendes, a gentle, reflective Jewish peddler who abhors violence and declines to carry a gun, even in a society in which weapons are ubiquitous. Leo, then, is a different kind of heroa conqueror who triumphs by thought and patience, but one whose accomplishments are just as important to the regions development as those of the men of action. Like Robert Jayson in In Those Days, he is a member of that fraternity of southwestern merchant-adventurers to which the authors grandfather belonged. Leo possesses many unusual but genuinely useful qualities. He is an invader of sorts; he contributes nothing to the conquest of the wilderness, but for the business of penetrating a human society he had certain gifts which were not common among American pioneers. He is a fatalist, calmly accepting the circumstance that a mans destiny is a thing he discovers, a mystery that unfolds, and he pursued his ends always in the spirit of inquiry rather than of heroic determination. One of the things that make Leo such a formidable antagonist in business and in love is his fatalistic resignation to what has to be, combined with an unflinching competitiveness. His conquest is the establishment of a store in the village of Don Pedro, a small town a few miles north of El Paso. The title of the book is not merely ironicthough there is probably a touch of irony in itfor in a sense Leos achievement is indeed a conquest. He is not ostentatiously heroic in the manner of Sam Lash or Jean Ballard; his virtues are patience and a quiet determination, by means of which he penetrates, more completely than he ever could have by physical bluster, the towns rigid feudal society. The novels technical virtuositywhich includes balanced and rounded structure, limpid style, and characters that are vivid and aliveis truly dazzling. But technical perfection in itself does not make a work great, and the special power of The Conquest of Don Pedro derives largely from the emotional vitality embodied in the character of Leo Mendes. In this narrative Fergusson is more interested than he had been in previous stories in following the mental processes of his central character, and most of the tale therefore is filtered through Leos remarkable mind. Time and again the reader sees how Leos long and sometimes painful reflections are the source 555
of his actions. This meticulous reconstruction of motivation and behavior results in a character who becomes one of Fergussons most attractive and believable people, a man drawn from the writers rich store of thought and experience. Taken together, Grant of Kingdom and The Conquest of Don Pedro manifest the fruition of the authors genius. Coming at the conclusion of a long career, these exceptional books dramatize, in their wisdom and sympathy, the writers vision of life. Fergussons historical fiction easily ranks his achievement as among the best so far fashioned by a western American writer. Yet, particularly during his life, the author found it difficult to please or even to get the attention of critics. Recently, however, writers and collectors of western literature have discovered his books. In addition critics have begun to examine the works in detail in order to isolate their special qualities. In recent years two books on Fergusson have appeared, as well as several worthwhile critical articles. John R. Milton, in The Novel of the American West, sees Fergusson as one of the half-dozen best western novelists. According to Milton, Fergussons muted artistry is so smooth and efficient that it has attracted much less attention than it deserves. At his best, writes Milton, he handled style, structure, imagery, tone, and symbolism so quietly, simply, and capably that his virtues were hidden in his craftsmanship. There was nothing eccentric or startling or faddish for the critics and reviewers to pull out and examine. As favorable critical responses accumulate, then, acknowledgement of Fergussons accomplishment grows. The writers posthumous reputation seems destined to acquire, in the not-too-distant future, dimensions more commensurate with his actual, very considerable achievement.
W ILLIAM T. PILKINGTON , Tarleton
State University
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Primary Sources (in chronological order)
The Blood of the Conquerors. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. Capitol Hill A Novel of Washington Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. Women and Wives. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924. Hot Saturday. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Wolf Song. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927. In Those Days: An Impression of Change. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. Footloose McGarnigal. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930. Rio Grande. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933. Modern Man: His Belief and Behavior. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936. Followers of the Sun: A Trilogy of the Santa Fe Trail. (Contains Wolf Song, In Those Days, and The Blood of the Conquerors. ) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936. The Life of Riley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937. Home in the West: An Inquiry into My Origins. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944. People and Power: A Study of Political Behavior in America. New York: William Morrow, 1947. Grant of Kingdom. New York: William Morrow, 1950. The Conquest of Don Pedro. New York: William Morrow, 1954. Secondary Sources Cohen, Saul. Harvey Fergusson: A Checklist (leaflet). Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles Library, 1965. By far the best bibliography of Fergussons published works. Dobie, J. Frank. Earth and Metal. Southwest Review 35 (Autumn 1950): xviiixxi. Perceptive comments on several of Fergussons books by a wellknown southwestern author. Folsom, James K. Harvey Fergusson (pamphlet). Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1969. Very helpful introductory essay on the writer and his works. Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Includes a lengthy chapter on Fergussons fiction. Ranks Fergusson among the top western novelists. Pilkington, William T. Harvey Fergusson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. A book-length biographical-critical study. Powell, Lawrence Clark. Books: West Southwest. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1957. Graceful tribute to Fergussons southwestern writings by an enthusiastic commentator on the regions literature. Robinson, Cecil. Legend of Destiny: The American Southwest in the Novels of Harvey Fergusson. The American West 4 (November 1967): 1618, 6768. Convincingly explores mythic and legendary aspects of Fergussons fiction.
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A Literary History of the American West . With the Ears of Strangers: The Mexican in American Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1963. Includes a thorough examination of Fergussons use of Mexican-American characters and customs in his writings. Wickenden, Dan. Long Ago, and Far Away. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 27 June 1954, pp. 1, 12. Notable review of The Conquest of Don Pedro. High praise for the writers works, combined with good analysis of the novel.
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Katherine Anne Porter and the Southwest

(18901980) Katherine Anne Porters relationship with her native state was a complex and strained one, characterized by mistrust and suspicion on both sides. She felt that she was a prophet without honor in her own country, and her own country in turn felt that by living abroad and finding the stuff of her fiction elsewhere she had 1 failed to do it honor. When Texans did make gestures of homage towards her, she was delighted. Often, however, the gestures were not carried through. Thus, when she thought in 1939 that her book Pale Horse, Pale Rider (which comprised, besides the title story, Old Mortality and Noon Wine) might win the award given by the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book by a Texas writer, she was bitterly disappointed. The prize went instead to a favorite son, J. Frank Dobie, because of the indigenous nature of his subject matter. Her anger at that time was reactivated years later when her expectation that the University of Texas in Austin was going to name a library for her proved unfounded. The pattern of hope and disappointment created by such incidents increased Porters tendency to swing between alienation and reconciliation in her attitude towards her birth-state. She often turned against it in disgust, but she always yearned for a final reconciliation. Such an eventuality seemed likely when, in her eighty-sixth year, Porter received an invitation from Howard Payne University to accept an honorary doctors degree and to be the guest speaker at a banquet in her honor. Porters satisfaction in this invitation was very great because Howard Payne University is situated in Brownwood near the now-defunct town of Indian Creek where she was born. The visit was a joyous homecoming, the high point of which for Port er was her visit to her mothers grave in the 2 Indian Creek cemetery. After her own death, three years later, Porters physical remains were brought back, according to her wishes, and placed in her mothers grave. It seemed that she had really come home at last. Her large and important literary archive, however, was willed to the Katherine Anne Porter Room at the University of Marylands McKeldin Library, and it is there that Porter scholars must do their research. This two-fold disposition of her remains correctly indicates that the ambivalences of a lifetime were never finally resolved.
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To a large extent, the source of her dissatisfaction with her native place lay in the complex personal problems of her early life. Her childhood was a time of great unhappiness, blighted by material and emotional deprivation after the death of her mother when she was two, with her sufferings aggravated by her extreme sensitivity. When she reviewed her early life she found it impossible to accept the circumstances of her childhoodthat she was Callie Porter, one of five children, born in a log house to an impoverished dirt farmer and raised in a fundamentalist religious atmosphere. She was impelled by a strange necessity to recreate her childhood and fabricate a heritage more suited to her personality and her talents. In both her fictional and autobiographical accounts she described herself as the descendant of a line of distinguished American statesmen. She did not claim affluence but chose to indicate that she was raised in the decayed splendor of an earlier age. She described family mansions falling into disrepair, libraries well stocked with fusty books, and former slaves bound to the family by ties of loyalty and affection rather than by material rewards. Students of her work had trouble locating the scenes of her early life. When she spoke of herself as a member of the guilt-ridden white pillar crowd, they wondered if the white pillars, more common in the eastern states of the South than in Texas, were those of Austin, San Marcos, and San Antonio. They were not. When Porter described the stately homes of her childhood in fiction and in autobiography, she transferred to the small towns of the blackland farming country the ample homes she knew during a five-month period of retreat on the islands of Bermuda. The Porters small house in Kyle was replaced in her accounts by Hilgrove, the ancestral home of the Hollis family of Baileys Bay. The Porters shack in the country between Buda and Mountain City was replaced by the Hollises house, Cedar 3 Grove. From time to time, Porter did write in a realistic vein about the Texas she really knew. Austere towns like Salem, Massachusetts and Basle, Switzerland for some reason evoked the mood of the hard life of the Texas farmer, and in these places she wrote The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, He, and Noon Wine. Critics were quick to note the vividness of these fictions and they praised Porter for her ability to make the imaginative leap from her own 4 aristocratic background to the humbler world of the Plain People. The leap, however, was in the reverse direction, from the Plain People she knew to the imagined aristocratic world of Miranda Gay. It is a measure of her inability to reconcile herself to her own background that she has no fictional representative in her stories of the Plain People and no character with whom she closely identifies. The characters of Noon Wine were based on members of her own family, and they were so 560
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easily recognizable (their names were barely changed) that there was talk in the family of a lawsuit. In spite of this closeness to actuality, Porter is careful in her commentary on the story to disclaim kinship with the characters. She writes in Noon Wine: The Sources: Let me give you a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, not as they were in their real lives, for I never knew them, but as they have become in my story. The woman I have called Mrs. ThompsonI never knew 5 her name So great was her discomfort with this whole area of her experience that she compared the job of explaining the sources of Noon Wine to the 6 gruesome process of having ones spinal fluid tapped. Porters attitude, then, to her postage stamp of native soil was shot through with ambivalence. Yet for all that, there was one part of her birthright about which she was perfectly straight and uncomplicated in her mind. She loved and cherished her native tongue, and the language she claimed was not the English language in general, nor American English in particular, but very specifically the language which was spoken in central Texas during the last part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century. She told of returning to that part of the state when she was in her middle years and of listening to the speech with a joyful shock of recognition: And did I not tell you about standing at the edge of a field and listening to an old man, leaning on a plow, a childhood friend of my fathers, talking, and how I said to myself, Why, that is my own speech, that is what I was born to; oh, I might have lost it if I had waited much longer to hear it again! For it was the oldest and most beautiful speech of the south, stately, literate, idiomatic, aristocratic; dignity and gentleness itself, strong without emphasis, pleasant, human. The speech of my own people, from England and Ireland to Kentucky to Texas: and it was spoken by a man in ragged blue jeans, toothless and old, tired and solitary, who had come to it was [sic] his fate, and he knew it without 7 thinking about it. . . . In 1978, when R. G. Vliet accepted a prize from the Texas Institute of Letters for his novel, Solitudes, he used the occasion to discuss the characteristics of a literature of the Southwest. Quite naturally, he spoke of the language in which such a literature would be written and also quite naturally he devoted part of his address to a description of Porters language. He correctly discerned the difference in tone which exists between Porters 561
stories Old Mortality and Noon Wine, but he ascribed that cleavage to the geographical and linguistic divide on which Porter spent her formative years after she left Indian Creek: As you drive toward Austin through, for instance, Kyle, the town where Katherine Anne Porter was raised by an archetypal grandmother and where much of her early fiction is set, the boundary is palpable. On your right is the rich, black, softly rolling cottonfarmland of the South, on your left the leading edge of the rocky, cedar and post-oak, ranch-section Hill Country. There is very nearly a clean division in idiom there too: toward the right the soft, drawling pronunciation general to the South, to the left the brusque, consonantal harshness understood as western that so reflects the harsher landscape. This accounts for the difficulty we sometimes have in deciding whether Katherine Anne Porter in her early fiction is in fact writing about the South or the Southwest. In her great short novel, Noon Wine, she is writing about the Southwest. In Old Mortality and in the series of sketches in The Old Order, she is writing about the South. South and Southwest ran simultaneously through her childhood, right there in 8 Kyle. While conceding the accuracy of Vliets description of the distinction between the speech of the South and that of the Southwest, I would like to take issue with his extension of that distinction to the language of Porter. It is true that the difference of subject matter and social setting that separates Old Mortality from Noon Wine calls forth some different linguistic usages. But it is my contention that the linguistic differences between the two stories are slight and that the strength of Porters distinctive idiom in all her work derives from her combining and harmonizing of the qualities of the speech of both the South and the Southwest, as Vliet has defined those qualities. It seems to me, moreover, that the unique combination of soft lyricism with harsh brusqueness is a marked feature not only of Porters writing but of her own physical voice and of her conversation. Porters voice, immortalized in numerous recordings, has always taxed the descriptive powers of commentators. It has been described as breathy, velvety and drawling and at the same time as having a certain hoarseness. The hoarseness has sometimes been attributed to the recurrent bouts of bronchitis from which she suffered. But is it not possible that these health problems simply aggravated a regional trait? During her lifetime, Porter was valued not only as a writer and reader
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of her own stories but among her friends as a peerless conversationalist. 9 Lady Bird Johnson said that her conversation was as flawless as her writing, and the poet Raymond Roseliep described her as the most colorful conver10 sationalist he had ever met because her image-making facility was so alive. A feature of her speech and a source of much amusement to her listeners was the extent to which she drew upon the colloquial and racy expressions of her local dialect. Because conversation is by nature occasional and evanescent I should like to convey the flavor of her diction by quoting from a letter written by one of her guests who was invited for a goose dinner, because honeyif you aint got a gaggle of friends around, it just aint worth the time worrying about a goose. As it happened, not only was the goose undercooked, but the keys to the deep freeze and the wine cellar had been misplaced and the elegantly served dinner turned out to be catastrophic: After she had cut a slice or two and served the stuffing with a lovely silver spoon, she noted that the closer she got to the center of the critter, the rawer it looked. She quietly put down the silver spoon, looked around her . . . and said Well babies, we got store bought bread, and we aint got but half enough wine and now this here bird seems to have come out half done and I just pray, as she reached into the innards of the bird, grabbed a handful of the stuffing and splatted it onto a plate, that the Good Lord, or whoever is running this God Damned show will shortly put an end to it. All of this had been delivered by that lovely show piece who was dressed to the nines, was perfectly coiffed and made up and 11 garnished with several yards of pearls and the Porter emeralds. The contrasting styles evidenced in this incident informed all her speech and also her writing. In formal addresses she often introduced lively images and expressions with the phrases, as we say in Texas and where I come from they would say. . . . Noon Wine: The Sources contains extremely lyrical passages and also many colloquialisms that give the flavor of the region she is describing. But these opposites are present in equal measure in Ship of Fools as well as in the regional stories. Mr. Hatch is seen in Noon Wine shifting his plug and squirting tobacco juice at a dry-looking little rose bush that was having a hard enough time as it was, standing 12 all day in the blazing sun. Very close to that style is the description in Ship of Fools of David Scott waking up with a crashing hangover:
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He slept at last, for an hour, and woke in the horrors of headache fit to crack his skull, a leaping gorge, blazing thirst, and a stomach so estranged it refused to harbor its only friends, aspirin and cold 13 water. Robert Penn Warren tried to describe this really flexible style for all seasons by contrasting Porter with Machiavelli in his rural retreat at San Casciano when he spent his days with the rustics and at night changed into curia1 robes before he communed with literature: The other type of writer is, on the contrary, peculiarly of a piece, less ritualistic if not less devoted. His work is a mere extension, in a direct and fairly innocent way, of his being. . . . This is the sort of writer Katherine Anne Porter is. She has no curial robes, and without bothering to change her muddy shoes, she may speak 14 quite wittily or wisely to the rustics. It is the mark of a significant artist that he uses his medium in a highly individualistic fashion. Porters language, accordingly, is her own distinct possession, quite unlike that of any other writer. Nevertheless, she uses the regional speech to which she was born as the basis of her own individual style. In doing so, she not only exploits the virtues of that speech for her own purpose, but in turn extends it for others. Later writers using the same speech find it richer for her having used it. And indeed, Porters influence on other Texas writers has been great and has been acknowledged by them. William Humphrey in paying homage to her influence has mentioned particularly that he learned something about language from her. When he sent her a copy of his novel, Home from the Hill, he wrote in it that she taught him the most important thing that one writer could teach another, that for a writer the place and the life and the speech to which he was born were his place and his subject and his speech. He had told her earlier that her being from Texas was the important thing for him. In spite, then, of her tortured relationships with Texas, Porter remains an important part of the literary tradition of Texas and of the Southwest. Porter herself saw her position as that of a pioneer, and she wrote of it boastfully to the President of Howard Payne University. It is somehow characteristic that she could not let slip the opportunity while she was on the subject to make a dig at her long-time rival, J. Frank Dobie, who she felt had often (and unjustly) usurped the prominent place she deserved in the states estimation: I happen to be the first native of Texas in its whole history to be a professional writer. That is to say, one who had the vocation and practiced only that and lived by and for it all my life. We have 564
had a good many lately in the last quarter of the century perhaps and we have had many people who wrote memoirs and saved many valuable stories and have written immensely interesting and valuable things about Texas: and they are to be valued and understood. But I am very pleased that I am the first who ever was born 15 to the practice of literature. . . .
J OAN G IVNER ,
University of Regina
Notes
1. Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porters Texas, Vision: The Magazine of the Public Communications Foundation for North Texas 2 (September 1979): 1822. This article gives a fuller account of Porters relationship with Texas. 2. Joan Givner, A Fine Day of Homage to Porter, The Dallas Morning News, Sunday, May 23rd, 1976, p. 5G. This article describes Porters visit to Howard Payne University in Brownwood. 3. Joan Givner, The Plantation of This Isle: Katherine Anne Porters Bermuda Base, Southwest Review 62 (Autumn 1978): 33951. 4. Mark Schorer, Afterword in Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (New York: Signet, 1967), pp. 16775. 5. Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Dell, 1973), pp. 478, 481. 6. The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings, p. 468. 7. Letter from Katherine Anne Porter to William Goyen, May 28, 1951. 8. R. G. Vliet, On a Literature of the Southwest: An Address, The Texas Observer, April 28, 1978, p. 19. 9. Letter from Lady Bird Johnson to Joan Givner, December 7, 1977. 10. Letter from Reverend Raymond Roseliep to Joan Givner, November 19, 1978. 11. Letter from Lt. Commander William R. Wilkins to Joan Givner, July 10, 1980. 12. Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965), p. 249.
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A Literary History of the American West 13. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 475. 14. Robert Penn Warren, Introduction to Edward Schwartz, Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Bibliography, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 57 (May 1953). 15. Letter from Katherine Anne Porter to President Roger Brooks of Howard Payne University, October 7, 1975.
Primary Sources Porter, Katherine Anne. Ship of Fools. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962, . The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965. . The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Delacorte Press, 1970. Secondary Sources Core, George, and Lodwick Hartley, eds. Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1970. This collection contains many of the best critical essays on Katherine Anne Porter, and also includes the important Katherine Anne Porter: An Interview by Barbara Thompson, reprinted from Paris Review 24 (Winter-Spring 1963). Demouy, Jane Krause. Katherine Anne Porters Women: The Eye of Her Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. A reappraisal of Porters work and reinterpretation of many of her stories by focusing on the women characters. Givner, Joan. Katherine Anne Porter: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. The definitive biography. Hardy, John Edward. Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Ungar, 1978. A balanced and useful full-length study of Porters works. Hendrick, George. Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Twayne, 1965. The earliest full-length study of Porters work, this remains a useful tool with sensible readings of her stories and of Ship of Fools. Kieran, Robert F. Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976. The most comprehensive listing of Porters collected and uncollected works, this is an indispensable book for students of Porters work. Warren, Robert Penn, ed. Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979. It is unfortunate that this handbook in a series on which students depend contains so much material that is not useful. The biographical introduction is totally misleading and seven of the essays appear in Katherine Anne Porter: A Critical Symposium. The remaining selections are valuable-a sampling of the early reviews of Ship of Fools and a reprinting of the important interview, A County and Some People I Love by Hank Lopez from Harpers, September, 1965.
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Oliver La Farge
ROM HIS EARLIEST EXPERIENCE in the Southwest as a Harvard University anthropology major actively pursuing his practical studies in Harvards Arizona diggings, to his settlement in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1940 as a nationally recognized novelist and authority on southwestern Indian life and culture, Oliver La Farges name has been intimately linked with that of his adopted region. In many ways, such a linkage was inevitable. The southwestern scene constituted the chief background of his first and probably most important-fictional topic, the richly varied tribal life of the Navajo Indians. As a field representative of the U.S. Indian Service and president for three decades of the Association on American Indian Affairs, La Farge considered the southwestern Indians part of his larger official responsibility. And long before his choice of the Southwest as his permanent home he had come, as he tells us in his autobiography Raw Material to know and love the regions rugged landscape and variegated social pattern. Born December 19, 1901, La Farge grew up on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, and after attending Groton Academy, the Harvard college preparatory school, was duly matriculated into the universitys freshman program for 1920. At Harvard, in addition to his regular studies, he competed successfully for both the presidency of The Harvard Advocate and the editorship of the college humor magazine, the Lampoon. After his graduation in 1924 with a degree in anthropology, La Farge continued his studies at Harvard, receiving his masters degree in ethnology in 1929; in the meanwhile he engaged in the more practical aspects of his profession, including a stint at Tulane University as assistant to the universitys chief archeologist Frans Blom and several field trips to Central America. The publication in 1929 of Laughing Boy, however, which won the Pulitzer Prize for the same year, brought him instant financial success and enabled him to free himself from the tedium of a settled academic life and to undertake the more heady career of a free-lance writer. La Farges professional literary career falls roughly into three partly overlapping phases or periods: (1) the decades of the thirties and early forties, which were devoted primarily to his exploitation of subject matter associated with Indian life and custom; (2) the period from the late thirties until immediately after World War II: a time for La Farge of a serious rethinking of his basic literary assumptions; and (3) the period from his return
567
home after the war in 1946 until his death in 1963: a period of prestige and fame as a regional and national author. During the approximately fifteen-year span of the first of the periods just outlined, La Farge continued to enjoy the popular success signalized by Laughing Boy, which had launched him so precipitously into the lucrative profession of writer of Indian fiction. During the next eight years he published two other Indian novels, Sparks Fly Upward in 1931 and The Enemy Gods in 1937, the first capitalizing on his experiences as an archeologist in Guatemala, the second returning to the American Southwest to probe again the social problem of modem Indian youth caught in the complexities of a changing civilization. La Farge also contributed regularly to such prestigious national mass-circulation periodicals as Scribners, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and Harpers Bazaar. In 1935 he gathered his magazine production together into book form in All the Young Men. In addition to fiction, La Farge also published a number of non-fictional works associated with his professional interests: The Year Bearers People (with Douglas Byer) in 1931, Introduction to Indian Art (with John Sloan) in the same year; As Long as the Grass Shall Grow and An Alphabet for Writing the Navajo Language (the latter with J. P. Harrington), both in 1940. In 1942 he edited the anthology, The Changing Indian, to which he was also a major contributor. Sometime in the late thirties La Farge became increasingly dissatisfied with his performance as a writer. He was burdened by a sense of frustration that he had overworked his Indian vein, so that he was in danger of becoming stereotyped in the minds of the public and the critics solely as a popular writer of romantic Indian fiction. He sensed also that by his actions he had severely compromised his artistic integrity. In addition he was plagued by the thought that in Laughing Boy he had yielded far too much to a childhood predilection toward romanticizinga tendency, he felt, that had been further heightened at Groton Academy by his frequent recourse to dreams and fantasies as a means of escaping the unpleasant realities of a harsh boarding school regime. La Farges exploration of the personal uncertainties besetting him at this time is recounted principally in Raw Material (1945), which, though it does cover in some detail the larger outlines of his life and career, was initiated primarily by his need to resolve his special artistic dilemma and to reformulate his objectives as a literary artist. The final result of this soul-searching, as he records it in the volume, was a firm determination, first, to eschew Indian fiction altogether, with its familiar romantic formula, and, second, to choose only that subject matter with which he himself was personally and intimately acquainted and which would, consequently, in its final delineation, bear the stamp of authenticity and truth. For his first novel following his period of artistic introspection, La Farge turned to the French Quarter of New Orleans, with which he was well 568
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acquainted from his earlier sojourn in the southern city during his Tulane University days. The Copper Pot, which came out in 1942, depicts a struggle very much like that which had engaged La Farges own artistic conscience: that of a young painter living in the Quarter who is forced by adverse circumstances to work out a new artistic destiny for himself by rejecting his earlier, more mundane ambitions and devoting himself to developing a painting style distinctively and uniquely his own. The Copper Pot was followed by a series of stories based on the day-to-day life of the working anthropologist, toiling in the dusty museum of the university anthropological laboratory or engaged in the more exciting pursuits of archeological exploration in steaming Central American jungles. Certainly, La Farges own practical experience as an anthropologist laboring under similar circumstances admirably qualified him for the exact rendering of technical details necessary to give such tales authenticity and to recognize story potentials hidden beneath the surface of the routine activities of the professional anthropologist. And certainly such tales would fulfil1 his strongly felt need for subjects evolving ultimately out of his own personal life and career. In 1946, following his service in World War II as head of the historical section of the Air-Transport Service Command, La Farge returned home to Santa Fe, where during the remainder of his life his writings were to be marked by both versatility and a strongly indigenous flavor. One of his first efforts in the latter respect was a series of biographical essays published as Behind the Mountains in 1956a beautiful and charming account of his wife Consuelo Baca La Farge, growing up with her two sisters and brother on the ancestral Baca ranch in the pleasant mountain valley of Rociada, New Mexico. Also of this period, in a more popular vein, was a thinly fictionalized biography of the famous Apache chief Cochise, Cochise of Arizona (1953); two historical and interpretive studies based on the region: The Mother Ditch (1954), recounting the development of irrigation farming in the area, and Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town (with Arthur N. Morgan, 1959), a chatty handbook on Santa Fes colorful past and present; and, finally, A Pictorial History of the American Indian (1956), to which he contributed the descriptive text. It is interesting to note from the preceding listing that La Farges longer works of this period are represented chiefly by non-fiction. As a matter of fact, he discontinued writing novels altogether after The Copper Pot in 1942, his fictional output thereafter consisting solely of short magazine fiction. Sixteen of the magazine stories were later republished in book form in 1957 in A Pause in the Desert and twelve (posthumously) in 1965 in The Door in the Wall. The contents of each of these volumes show La Farge continuing to be guided by his earlier decision to write only of that which could be put to the test of personal experience and observation: the selections in 569
the first range from stories based on remembered episodes of his boyhood to stories set in the streets and byways of New York City, where La Farge lived for a while prior to the second World War; those in the second deal with incidents and settings drawn from the life of the professional anthropologist. Perhaps La Farges chief claim to local fame in his adopted Santa Fe was a weekly column in the Santa Fe New Mexican which he had been asked to write shortly after returning from the war. Though begun ostensibly as a literary column, it quickly developed into a gossipy, genial springboard for a whole gamut of sprightlysometimes controversialtopics dealing with community and city affairs, and ranging even further afield on occasion with discussions of state and regional as well as local problems. A representative selection of the columns was published in 1966, after La Farges death, as The Man with the Calabash Pipethe title being derived from the epithet given by La Farge in his columns to a mythical, amiable, and somewhat crotchety gentleman (not improbably La Farges own alter ego) who appears from time to time to speak his mind as a genial but astute observer of life. La Farges final reputation as a literary artist will probably rest upon his Indian fiction: the two novels, Laughing Boy and The Enemy Gods, plus certain of the short stories in All the Young Men. The dominating theme of all three of these volumes is basically the decline and ultimate disintegration of the ancient tribal structure of the Navajo nation beneath the eroding force of a materialistic Anglo-American civilization. All the Young Men, the title story of the short story collection, offers an excellent example of this theme at work. Old Mountain Singer, once a great singer and medicine man, has in his latter days lost status and prestige in the tribal council and wanders off the reservation searching for the Navajo country of his youth, where he might die in peace and with some degree of dignity. After numerous degrading adventures, he is arrested for drunkenness and thrown into an American jail, where he dies in shame. Both Mountain Singers son-in-law (who has caused Mountain Singer to become a drunkard to keep him from revealing the secret that he is bootlegging liquor into the reservation) and Mountain Singers daughter speak educated English and wear American clothes and espouse the American way of life generallyincluding lip service to the white mans religious teachings. The two are typical, the story implies, of the state to which the dignity and the glory of the older Navajo civilization have fallen in the modern world. Of the two novels, Laughing Boy and The Enemy Gods, the latter offers the more powerful and sustained examination of the modern Indian in transition. The Enemy Gods recounts the return of Myron Begay to the Navajo reservation after ten years at the American Indian school, where he has been thoroughly Americanized and is preparing to attend a religious college 570
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for further training as a Christian Indian preacher. But his plans are abruptly terminated when in a fight with a Mexican he leaves the latter, as he thinks, for dead and flees to the reservation as a fugitive. There, after many months, he is gradually rehabilitated into the ancient tribal ways and brought to acceptance once again of his native gods. Although by the end of the novel Myron has undergone a long and severe ordeal, he has nonetheless become possessed of a hard-won wisdom, a wisdom which he now wishes to share with his people when they have come to accept and trust him again: the knowledge that the Navajos can neither continue to follow the old Navajo ways nor walk in the white mans road, but must, in order to survive, obligate themselves to learn to use all that is valuable in the white mans culturehis knowledge, his weapons, his machinesand yet still remain Navajos. For the setting of Laughing Boy, La Farge deliberately returned, as he himself declares in the Foreword to the Sentry Edition of the novel (1963), to an earlier period in Navajo history, that of the Navajo Age of Innocence of around 1915a time when the evil of Anglo-American encroachment upon Navajo life had only just begun its erosion of the ancient Navajo culture. As a matter of fact, Laughing Boy, as a typical Navajo youth of the isolated northern tribes, knows little if anything of Americans and American ways, though in his own tribe he has some position as a singer and accomplished artisan in silver. It is Slim Girl, the heroine, whom the mission school system and American influences have truly ruined. Hers is indeed a sad plight, being forced as she is to live on the outer fringes not only of the Navajo world of her birth but of the American world as well, no satisfactory life in either being possible to her since she is a real part of neither. It is an index to her character and self-sufficiency, however, that she audaciously determines through marriage to Laughing Boy and relearning of Navajo arts and customs to return with him to his people and thus to be once again part of the Navajo culture. It is only by a quirk of fate, a bullet not meant for her that takes her life in the very moment of her triumph, that she does not ultimately attain her objectives. As the foregoing pages testify, La Farge was equally at home in each of the principal prose genres: fiction, biography, and essaythe latter perhaps represented most fully by his book-length ethnological and regional studies, though the miscellany constituted by his weekly newspaper column, with its personal slant and lively style, should perhaps rightly be classified as a series of personal essays. And although La Farges three major novelsThe Copper Pot, Laughing Boy, and The Enemy Gods may be said to lack structural complexity, they are superb in those other techniques necessary to the evocation of a vivid sense of the human environment: characterization, narrative and descriptive detail, and graphic language. The same is true of 571
his short stories and non-fictional works as well. Indeed, sound craftsmanship is a hallmark everywhere in La Farges writing, evident throughout his literary career, whether one is perusing the idyllic yet tragic love story of Slim Girl and Laughing Boy that initiated his career or listening to the tobacco-fragrant discourses of the man with the calabash pipe that concluded it.
E VERETT A. GILLIS , Texas
Tech University
Tribes and Temples (with Frans Blom). New Orleans: The Tulane University Press, 1927. Laughing Boy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929. Sentry Edition, 1963. Introduction to American lndian Art (with John Sloan). New York: Exposition of lndian Tribal Arts, 1931. Sparks Fly Upward. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931. The Year Bearers People (with Douglas Byers). New Orleans: The Tulane University Press, 1931. Long Pennant. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933. All the Young Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935. The Enemy Gods. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937. Zia Edition, 1975. An Alphabet for Writing the Navajo Language (with J. P. Harrington). Washington: United States Indian Service, 1940. As Long as the Grass Shall Grow. New York: Alliance Book Corporation, 1940. The Changing Indian (editor). The Civilization of the American Indian Series, vol. 23. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1942. The Copper Pot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942. War Below Zero (with Corey Ford and Bernt Balchen). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944. Raw Material. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945.
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Santa Eulalia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Publications in Anthropology, 1947. The Eagle in the Egg. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Cochise of Arizona. American Heritage Series. New York: Aladdin Books, 1953. The Mother Ditch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Behind the Mountains. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. A Pictorial History of the American Indian. New York: Crown Publishers, 1956. A Pause in the Desert. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town (with Arthur N. Morgan). Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. The Door in the Wall. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. The Man with the Calabash Pipe (Winfield Townley Scott, editor). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Archival collections (first editions, manuscripts, unpublished materials, foreign editions, book reviews, etc.) at the University of Texas and the University of New Mexico. Secondary Sources Allen, Charles. The Fiction of Oliver La Farge. Arizona Quarterly 1 (Winter 1945): 7481. Bunker, Robert. Oliver La Farge: In Search of Self. New Mexico Quarterly 20 (Summer 1950): 211224. Gillis, Everett A. Oliver La Farge. Southwest Writers Series, No. 9. Austin: SteckVaughn, 1967. Pearce, T. M. Oliver La Farge. New York: Twayne, 1972. Of the four sources listed, Pearces biography of La Farge, a thoroughly researched book-length study of his life, offers the fullest introduction of the group to La Farges life and career. Gilliss study, though it touches on the salient features of La Farges life, is devoted primarily to a critical appraisal of his major writings and an evaluation of his literary art. Allens article on La Farges fiction provides brief critiques of each of La Farges novels and volumes of short stories up to 1945, the date of its publication. Butlers article traces what he feels to be a close parallel between La Farges personal maturation and that of several of his major fictional characters.
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Paul Horgan
is known as the Dean of southwestern writers. F o r over fifty years, beginning in the 1930s and extending into the 1980s, Horgan has written fiction, history, biographyeven the libretto for a folk operaabout the people and places of the Southwest. Two of his histories about the Southwest, Great River and Lamy of Santa Fe, have won Pulitzer Prizes. Numerous other local and national writing awards and honors attest to his recognition as a western writer. Despite the fact that many of Horgans novels and short stories have the East as their setting, his image as a western writer prevails among most readers of western American literature. But Horgan insists that he is transcontinental and not a champion of any one place for its own sake, not reducible to easy classificationbe it Catholic writer, realist, or regionalistEast or West. Pursuing this apparent contradiction between how Horgan is perceived by the common reader and how he perceives himself leads to a broader understanding of regionalism and of Horgans writing. He is a southwestern writer; however, he is also something more: an artist who happens to write about the places he has lived in and knows. But Horgans Southwest is not incidental to his character as a man and as a writer. As inspiration and as theme, Horgans Southwest is an integral and reciprocal part of his America and his perception and rendering of it. A look at a few of Horgans many remarks on regionalism reveals that he does not repudiate it as such, categorically. Part of Horgans reluctance to accept regionalist designation involves what he sees as the stereotype of a southwestern writer as a cowboy writer; Horgan is definitely not a cowboy. Oliver La Farge implied in a review of Horgans Centuries of Santa Fe that Horgan was somehow less authentic and convincing as a western author because he chose to live outside the Southwest and was much too formal a 2 dresser. Horgan sees no need to wear boots and a big hat as visible credentials to write about the West. He similarly believes that his friend Peter Hurds western dress does not make him into a cowboy artist, and in his biography of Hurd, Horgan attempts to separate the personality of an extremely sophisticated artist who lives on a ranch and dresses like a range horseman from the dreadful tourist-souvenir and movie-goer idea of what a 3 cowboy was or is. Horgan himself has lived in Middletown, Connecticut, in a book-filled house on the campus of Wesleyan University, ever since the early 1960s.
AUL HORGAN
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Much more an advocate of high culture and its values than popular culture, Horgan believes that the originally innocent and unselfconscious concept of regionalism has been corrupted by, among other things, the commercializations of the media to the extent that, Where once the term stood for uncommonized local ways, it now stands for any almost comic cartoon-like view of the varied life-styles to be found in the physical varia4 tions of our land. Horgan is much more interested in probing the universally human in his writing than he is in stressing regional differences. And he insists that in the creation of his novels and histories a consideration of the appropriate form in which to contain truth has always preceded region5 alism, which does not have much determining relevance to this interest. So what relevance does place, does the Southwest, have in Horgans lifelong search for beauty and truth? If not a determining relevance, Horgans Southwest has considerable relevance to his life and art. Born in Buffalo, New York on August 1, 1903, and raised in a GermanIrish family of amateur writers, actors, musicians and painters, Horgan acquired his sense of culture in the East and not the West. As he explains it, I have derived most of my education informally from the cultural expressions best exemplified in the intellectual and artistic life of the East and of Europe, and I have been concerned with people without regard exclusively to the typical character imposed on either eastern or western environment 6 by other writers or observers. When, because of his fathers tuberculosis, Horgan moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1915 at the age of twelve, the eastern and European cultural expressions he had experienced up to that time, such as they were, met with the otherness of Native American and Mexican American cultures. The Spanish and Catholic cultural expressions in New Mexico were essentially more familiaras were those of other AngloAmericans living there. The landscape was utterly alien. In a sense, this move to the West provided for Horgan a microcosmic model of the third stage (i.e., the Anglo-American) in the colonization of the Southwest which Horgan, seemingly in accord with the frontier themes of Frederick Jackson Turner, writes about in Great River and The Heroic Triad, in From the Royal City and The Centuries of Santa Fe, in Josiah Gregg, Lamy of Santa Fe and other of his writings. The Common Heart and the final novel in his Richard trilogy, The Thin Mountain Air, seen as Albuquerque novels, fictionalize Horgans biographical move West. Although more interregional, Main Line West is also an Albuquerque novel. And most if not all of his novels and short stories about the West have something to do with some phase or aspect of either Hispanic or Anglo-American colonization of the region over three centuries. A place with even more relevance to Horgans Southwest is Roswell 575
and the Pecos Valley area of southeastern New Mexico. Much more like West Texas in its ambiance than the northern cities of Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos, Horgans Roswell is depicted in numerous short stories in The Return of the Weed, Figures in a Landscape, and The Peach Stone; and in the novels A Lamp on the Plains, Far from Cibola, and Whitewater. The folk opera, A Tree on the Plains, is essentially Roswell too. Roswells New Mexico Military Institute figures prominently in Horgans Southwest for several reasons. First, Horgan was a cadet there from 1919 to 1921 and from 1922 to 1923. Next, he was librarian at the Institute between 1926 and 1942. And it was in these almost two decades at a military school that Horgan somewhat ironically discovered himself as a writer (after a time at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York from 1923 to 1926 studying voice and working in stage production)as a cadet meeting and collaborating with his life-long friend, Peter Hurd; and later writing more than one unpublished and twelve published books there. During his tenure as librarian, Horgans colleague at the Institute Maurice Garland Fulton also was a stimulus to Horgans southwestern writing, and they joined together on a special kind of state history text, New Mexicos Own Chronicle all primary sources with splendid arrangement and incisive commentaryand on the Diary and Letters of Josiah Gregg, for which Horgan wrote a long introductory biography later incorporated into Josiah Gregg and His Vision of the Early West. Horgan resigned as librarian in 1942 to serve in the Pentagon as a General Staff Corps officer in charge of disseminating various information to U.S. Army troops. After leaving the Army in 1946 as a Lt. Colonel, Horgan taught at the University of Iowa for a semester and then returned to New Mexico Military Institute as Assistant to the President. A Guggenheim fellowship in 1947 allowed him to devote his full attention to his major work, Great River, and the next stage of his career as historian and novelist. Santa Fe, in addition to Albuquerque and Roswell, is another place of some relevance to an understanding of Horgans Southwest. During Horgans first years in New Mexico, from 1915 until 1923, that is, during his teenage years, he frequently visited Santa Fe and was influenced by what he felt to be the European and Romanesque aspects of the city, left in large part by Jean Baptiste Lamy, the first bishop and archbishop of Santa Fe. Horgan during that impressionable time also was surprised to come across Willa Cather at work, he guesses, on her novel about Lamy, Death Comes for the 7 Archbishop. Horgan has much in common with Cather as novelist (and with their mutual subject, Lamy)in their cultural attitudes, in their remote Wests of New Mexico and Nebraska, in their sensitivity toward the aesthetic power of the Southwests vast and lonely landscapes. Cather is at the top of 576
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Horgans list of favorite western writers. Next comes Harvey Fergusson, 8 whom Horgan knew and admired in Albuquerque, and William Goyen. Horgans address, Willa Cather and the Incalculable Distance, given before the Century Association in the spring of 1978, affords further evidence of his deep appreciation of Cathers biography and her art as a literary mi9 grant. In his analysis of Cathers visual world and place-pictures and her regionalism, Horgans kinship with Cather becomes even more obvious. Horgan sees the determining aspect of Cathers writing to be her aspiration (evidenced in characters like Lucy Gayheart) to travel the incalculable distance from country to city, between the mundane binding of 1 0 life and the utmost freedom and exaltation. In Horgans Southwest, it is perhaps not too farfetched to think of Santa Fe as the northern city, distant from the comparatively more provincial, younger Roswell, filled with all New Mexico had to offer of exaltation, of history and European culture, and of other writers who congregated there. Certainly in Roswell Horgan developed on his own terms his view of the Southwest. If, however, as Horgan suggests, part of Cathers own incalculable distance was the aspiration to bring civility and cultivation to remoteness through her writing, part of Horgans incalculable distance was to live the civilized artists life in the remoteness of Roswell. He also lived it in the Santa Fe of Cather and Witter Bynner and later, in the 1950s and 60s, through support of such an expression of high culture as the Santa Fe Opera, and in recounting in his many books the centuries of Indian, Hispanic and Anglo-American culture which had come to Santa Fe and the Rio Grande. Horgans history of the Southwest seen metaphorically through the Rio Grande, Great River, marks a kind of midway point in his life and work; and, aside from the later A Distant Trumpet, Lamy of Santa Fe, Whitewater, The Thin Mountain Air, and Mexico Buy, Horgan in 1954 turned again to works with settings other than the Southwest. This is not to suggest that Horgans writing before Great River is southwestern and that published subsequently is eastern. Far from it. From Horgans first published novels, The Fault of Angels and No Quarter Given, most of his fiction mixes, at least in some proportion, West and East. But in the early 1960s Horgan took up residence in Connecticut, first as a Fellow at Wesleyan Universitys Center for Advanced Studies, and then as its directorand after that, in 1967, as a professor of English and writer in residence. The Southwest now became for Horgan a place for yearly visits, when possible, and for rememberings of his former life. It would seem, then, that the years Horgan spent in Albuquerque, Roswell and Santa Fe between 1915 and 1942, and from 1946 to 1960, established the biographical and imaginative boundaries of his Southwest. 577
A more detailed consideration of some of his writings should help map Horgans Southwest. During the late 1920s, the 1930s and into the early 40s Horgans Southwest began to take shape in his novels, for example, The Fault of Angels (1933), No Quarter Given (1935), Main Line West (1936), A Lamp on the Plains (1937), Far from Cibola (1938), The Habit of Empire (1938), and The Common Heart (1942). It also played a role in his short fiction, as found in The Return of the Weed (1936) and Figures in a Landscape (1940), and in essays, poetry, reviews and word-pictures or descriptive sketches in such journals and publications as Folk-Say, B. A. Botkins regional miscellany; T. M. Pearces and Telfair Hendons America in the Southwest: A Regional Anthology; The New Mexico Quarterly, edited by Pearce; John McGinniss Southwest Review; The New Mexico Sentinel, published by Cyrus McCormick; Laughing Horse, known as a dilatory journal of the Southwest and edited by Willard Spud Johnson; The Yale Review, Poetry magazine, and numerous others. Horgans ability to see western lands with a painters eyea talent he has nurtured throughout his career by literally painting many of his field notes for his books and then incorporating their feelings and detail in lyrical descriptions and evocations of landscapeis evidenced in a series of ten American Landscapes done in 1936 for the New Mexico Quarterly and other American Pictures done in 1937 for The New Mexico Sentinel. One of these word pictures (done, Horgan suggests, in tempera on gesso, a technique perfected by Hurd in his landscapes), entitled Divide in the Rockies, attempts to capture three feelings of elevation and distance and transcendent escape, where the world falls away: First is the feeling of universal light, light as a part of air, light from over and under the world both. Second is the feeling of starry bleakness, wonderful and not habitable, bare rock and wind driven gray wood. Third is the roll of land on the known earth; and there feeling takes color, and is recognized in its green of timber, its blue of valleys, its tawny plains, and its silver vein of run11 ning river bearing the wonder of the look outward forever. Horgan attempts consistently to give the reader a sense of place in what he refers to as painterly terms such as this. His Pages From a Rio Grande Notebook, which serve as a prologue to The Heroic Triad, and served him in the writing of Great River, are perhaps the most conspicuous instances of 12 this technique. Horgan, however, uses the technique throughout his fiction as well. Horgans poem Westward is another example of his talent for the 13 imagistic evocation of landscape. A long poem of settlement divided into 578
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four parts (The Prairie Sleepers, The Branding, Threads of Sky, and Last Indian Sign), Westward catalogs first the feelings the land evokes in pioneers headed West: In the American sky take flight their deeds. / In the last gift of the dawn-quenched fire / Their faces are sweet with freedom from desire. Then follows the branding of calves by men and the branding of men by weather: The sky is iron-white with heat at noon. / The smells of labor and the labors tune / Simmer together / Like joyous weather. Next comes the railroad and its crew: Into the wooden ties their irons strike. / Like threads of sky / The steel rails lie. And last, in proof of the finality and relentlessness of progress, comes the death in Autumnal Taos / In a shadowed house of an old scout and the witnessing of the dead Indians spiritual journey by An Indian hunter, / Stalking winter / . . . where the feathery aspen trembles. . . . Not entirely satisfying as a poem, Westward nevertheless shows in theme and scope how Horgan first sought to combine figures in a landscape. Several essay reviews on books about the Southwest also point to the importance of landscape in literature for Horgan. Long a friendly journal, ever since Horgan saw his first published story appear there in December of 1929, The Yale Review ran many Horgan reviews in the early 1930s. Interesting to readers of western American literature are Horgans responses to the books of Erna and Harvey Fergusson and John G. Neihardt. Horgan recognizes Erna Fergussons Dancing Gods as a fine book devoted to Americas regional exposition, filled with historical background of the Southwest in which her lyrical appreciations of the country and its heritage are valuable. . . when she enables us to visualize the dances as she describes 1 4 them. In his reading of Black Elk Speaks Horgan is moved by the respect 1 5 and dignity which Indians hold towards their beliefs and their destinies. Regarding Harvey Fergussons Rio Grande, the book on the great river which preceded Horgans own history of the river, Horgan writes in terms that might, ironically, apply to his own book: What Mr. Fergusson does here is to make a panorama of the different sorts of life that have been in the Southwest, arranging his essays in a sequence of chronology, from the early Indians to the latest A.T. & S.F. Country Club occupation. . . . The design of this book is inspired by the valley of the Rio Grande, and by all the lives l6 that found that river and went north against its course. From reading such authors as the Fergussons and Neihardt/Black Elk, Horgan expanded his understanding of western lands, peoples, and authorship. Three of Horgans Folk-Say contributions also focus on southwestern land and people: Episodes from the Passionate Land ( 1929), The Witch (1930), and Figures in a Landscape (1931). In Episodes Horgan follows the changes Christianity brings in the lives of Isleta Indians and their pueblo near Albuquerquethe superstition surrounding the rising of the 579
coffin of a murdered priest in the Isleta church, the Christmas Eve dance and procession at the church prior to Midnight Mass, the prayerful requests of Jenny Chiwiwi for her family and their simple blessings. Probably occasioned in part by Erna Fergussons taking Horgan to Isleta one Christmas Eve to see the ceremonies inviting the Christ Child to the village, Horgans triptych is a beautiful reflection not only of the passion in the Indian people and place he writes about but also of the passionate impact place had on a l 7 Catholic northeasterner. The Witch concerns the superstitions of yet another New Mexico village, protected by hills and beyond the hills by omnipresent mountainsit is any one of many similar spots north of Albuquerque. The occasion is a Mexican-American party, filled with music and dancing, something Horgan stages effectively. All goes well while a slightly drunken woodcutter, Lupe Castillo, dances with the lovely Andrella. Then Lupe knocks an oil lamp off the wall, catching on fire first his shirt and then Andrellas hair, disfiguring her face. Rumors soon grow that Andrella is a bruja. A doctor in Santa Fe tells Andrella that her hair will never grow back. Her love for Lupe turns to hate and a determination to indeed become a witch. Under her witchery, she believes, Lupe turns ill and scarred and finally dies. But Lupes death is really the result of syphilis, of an evil girl in Santa Fe who spoiled him. As for Andrella, she confesses her flirtation with black powers, is absolved by the priest and within a year is confirmed in her Christian faith by the visiting Archbishop. Horgans moral is, as the old ones observe, although there were strange things in this world, it 1 8 took a lot, quite a lot, to lose the Holy Lord in Heaven . . . As a prelude to Horgans 1940 collection of short fiction by the same title, Folk-Say s Figures in a Landscape is another suite of five sketches of Pecos Valley old-timer character types and locale. Framing everything is a sweeping account of a thunder storm descending on The Landscape, the sky, the plain, El Capitn mountain, the towns of the valley, the peoples lives and romances: The green valley; the plain, subject to the sky; the foothills broken with deep green patches of scrub pine, pion, hardy crawling plants; the mountainsides climbing into the blueyour lovers are your 19 conquerors. Violet Soulder, the Tularosa Bobcat, sister to bad man Jing Soulder, and herself the only Female Cattle Rustler in New Mexico, is one of the lovers and conquerors. She lives into old age and legend in the homeland of Billy the Kid. Old Lady McDonny is another. At the age of eighty-plus, on her deathbed, she relives the pioneering pains and joys of crossing Kansas and coming to the Pecos Valley sixty years before. Her children stand around her listening in silence as she thanks God for her life and its struggle. And The Captain is a former Ranger who met his dangers with as much style and wit as brawn. He wears no boots or sword as a 580
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rancher and banker today. But in his demeanor is all the authority he once commanded when Tombstone was the headquarters of hell. Juanita is another Pecos Valley personagea girl who leaves the village of Arabella for work in town, the adoption of American talk and ways and a reputation as Hot Stff: You tellem keed. Wa thi h-h-hell! I don geeve a hell por nada! What she does want is to become a married American woman with a car. Attaining that for a time until her bus-driver husband leaves her, she heads finally for El Paso and the life of a prostituteLight red silk underwear, a white fur coat, slippers with decorations of ostrich feathers, a gold bed, and expensive perfumewhy not? Blending satire with stereotype, Horgan as early as 1931 was, through his observations and writing, turning life around Roswell into his own special imaginative Southwest. Never at a loss for material, Horgan had not only his present but the whole past historyIndian, Spanish, Mexican-American, AngloAmericanof the Southwest to make his own. His 1933 essay for the Southwest Review, About the Southwest: A Panorama of Nueva Granada, is perhaps the most seminal of all his early writings, for it provides the large design for his encompassing vision of the Southwest, a vision that would lend itself to combined expression in fiction and non-fictiona lifetime of possible topics and variations. In one long passionate concluding sentence from that essay, seeking in his very style to reflect the magnitude of the place, Horgan tells how and why the Southwest exists for him: It [the Southwest] exists upon realities because the land is so tremendous, so bare of human life in so many million acres, because there are so many plains rising sharply to mountainhood, so much communion between sky and earth with great slow-sailing clouds and stars that watch the night like near eyes; because to go from one place to another it is necessary so very often to drive in cars along lonely roads with nothing in sight but the gently lifting and falling horizons of low hills; because the conditions of natural life raise no clamor like that sustained daily by tiring nerves in other regions; because, no matter what the manner of people, they must be moved by the beauty of Texas plains and Oklahoma wheat fields and New Mexico mountains and Arizona deserts alike; and because, though the survivals are only travesties to be noticed amidst the developments of our time, the color of past splendors of race and deed is mixed with the land by the agency of our 20 imaginations; and we pay it tribute, as it nourishes us. How the Southwest as theme and inspiration nourished Horgan through five decades into the 1980s, through hundreds of thousands of words in short stories, novels, histories, biographies to a body of work and achieve581
ment that merits Horgans being called the Dean of southwestern writers cannot be traced here. But it is clear that throughout his career the Southwest has meant very much to Horganclose to being a determining relevance. There is much of him in all of his southwestern heroes. For all of the characters with whom Horgan sympathizes and seems to identify, there is a greater world beyond the remoteness and loneliness of the Southwest. Traveling Cathers incalculable distance is something Horgans protagonists invariably must do, either bringing the civilities of the East to the West or leaving the West for the Eastboth of which Horgan himself was compelled to do. The Southwest thus becomes a world elsewhere, in Richard Poiriers terms, that is ambivalently attractive and repellent, a free and spacious place to escape to for a new start, and a small, culturally confining place to escape from when greater amenities call. If, as Poirier says, The most interesting American books are an image of the creation of America itself, of the effort . . . to Build therefore your own 21 world, then Horgans books and life qualify for their share of attention. The world elsewhere theme is common to Horgans writings and invariably, in striving either to go west or get away from the West, the place and the idea are always retained somehow. Whitewater, The Thin Mountain Air, and Mexico Bay are Horgans most recent, and it can be argued, his best novels about the American Southwest. They show Horgans powers, as an artist who draws much of his inspiration from his travels and times in New Mexico and Texas, in seemingly perpetual ascendancy even now as he enters the eighth decade of the century and the eightieth year of his life. Although The Thin Mountain Air is more truly a part of the Richard Trilogy and in general portrays the town of Albuquerque and the ambiance of northern New Mexico as Horgan (Richard in the novel) knew it through the events surrounding his own fathers illness and the familys move to that climate and region, it also forms a key portion of Horgans dramatizations of Texas as it looks and feels and sounds in Whitewater and Mexico Bay. The town of Belvedere in the West Texas of Whitewater and the presence of Amarillo in Mexico Bay and to some extent, even the Rio Grande and Gulf Coast scenes in Mexico Bay serve as imaginative projections of Roswell, the Little Texas area of southwestern New Mexico which was so important to him during his years at the New Mexico Military Institute, both as a young cadet and later as librarian. Thus, both northern and southeastern New Mexico are transposed into the locales of his Texas novels and together make up his Southwest. For that matter, much the same thing can be said about his Texas fiction in The Peach Stone. It is no startling revelation to suggest that both the people and the places of Horgans Southwest, the lives and the landscapes as he calls 582
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them, are composite combinations of his real life experiences and his artists imagination. It is not especially earth-shaking to suggest that Horgan is in his own characters, and that they enjoy with him, and with those readers who come to share, perhaps revisit, the Southwest through his novels and other writings, an exhilaration and affirmation of the significance of life in that enchanting and magnificent portion of the country. Even so, to read the southwestern works of Paul Horgan is to come profoundly alive to that world as an artist constantly, decade after decade, remembers and reworks its ordinary and sublime vistas and solitudes. If ever a western writer was a match for his subject, his region, so much a match that the subjectcharacter, setting, theme, and imagerybecame a symbol of the larger significance of westering, then that writer is Paul Horgan, the Dean of southwestern writersand then some.
ROBERT G ISH , University
of Northern Iowa
Notes
1. Lawrence Clark Powell, Great Constellations (El Paso: El Paso Public Library Association, 1977), p. 4. 2. Oliver La Farge, review in The New York Times Book Review, October 7, 1956, p. 4. 3. Paul Horgan, Peter Hurd: A Portrait Sketch From Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 57. 4. Paul Horgan, The Pleasures and Perils of Regionalism, Western American Literature 8 (Winter 1974): 169. 5. J. Golden Taylor, ed., The Western NovelA Symposium, The Literature of the American West (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 41. Reprinted from the South Dakota Review (Autumn 1964). 6. The Literature of the American West, p. 40. 7. Paul Horgan, In Search of the Archbishop, The Catholic Historical Rewiew 46 (January 1961): 411414.
583
A Literary History of the American West 8. The Literature of the American West, pp. 3031. 9. Paul Horgan, Willa Cather and the Incalculable Distance, address to the Century Association, April 25, 1978, unpublished. 10. Willa Cather and the Incalculable Distance. 11. Paul Horgan, American Landscapes, The New Mexico Quarterly 6 (August 1936): 167. 12. See Paul Horgan, Pages From a Rio Grande Notebook, in The Heroic Triad (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 319. 13. Paul Horgan, Westward, Poetry 43 (December 1933): 144149. 14. Paul Horgan, review in The Yale Review 22 (September 1932): 206. 15. Ibid: 207. 16. The Yale Review 23 (September 1933): 212. 17. Paul Horgan, Episodes from the Passionate Land, in Folk-Say (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1929), pp. 120124. For Horgans account of his Isleta trip, see Paul Horgan, Erna Fergusson and New Mexico, in her New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), p. xii. 18. Paul Horgan, The Witch, in Folk-Say (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930), pp. 197211. 19. Paul Horgan, Figures in a Landscape, in Folk-Say (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1931), p. 186. 20. Paul Horgan, About the Southwest: A Panorama of Nueva Granada, Southwest Review, Special 50th Anniversary Issue, 59 (Autumn 1974): 362. 21. Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 3.
Primary Sources About the Southwest: A Panorama of Nueva Granada. Southwest Review 59 (Autumn 1974): 337362. American Landscapes. The New Mexico Quarterly 6 (August 1936): 163168. A Distant Trumpet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960. Episodes from the Passionate Land. In Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany, edited by B. A. Botkin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1929. Erna Fergusson and New Mexico. In New Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples by Erna Fergusson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973. Figures in a Landscape. In Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany, edited by B. A. Botkin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1931. Figures in a Landscape. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940. Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954. The Habit of Empire. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939. The Heroic Triad. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
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Indian Arts. The Yale Review 22 (September 1932): 205208. In Search of the Archbishop. The Catholic Historical Review 46 (January 1961): 409427. Josiah Gregg and His Vision of the Early West. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Mexico Bay. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. Mountain Standard Time (includes Main Line West, Far from Cibola, and The Common Heart). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962. New Mexico. The Yale Review 23 (September 1933): 211213. New Mexicos Own Chronicle, ed. with Maurice Garland Fulton. Dallas: Banks Upshaw and Company, 1937. No Quarter Given. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935. Peter Hurd: A Portrait Sketch from Life. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965. The Peach Stone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967. The Pleasures and Perils of Regionalism Western American Literature 8 (Winter 1974): 167171. The Return of the Weed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936. The Saintmakers Christmas Eve. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955. A Tree on the Plains. Southwest Review 28 (Summer 1943): 345376. The Thin Mountain Air. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Westward. Poetry 43 (December 1933): 144149. Whitewater. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. Willa Cather and the Incalculable Distance. Unpublished address to the Century Association, April 25, 1978. The Witch. In Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany, edited by B. A. Botkin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930. Secondary Sources Brogan, D. W. Introduction to Mountain Standard Time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962, pp. viix. Brogan sees Horgan as a regional novelist of the High Plains and Rockiesand of New York. But he sees his real theme as the human situation in society. Carter, Alfred. On the Fiction of Paul Horgan. The New Mexico Quarterly 7 (August 1937): 207216. As a colleague of Horgans at NMMI, Carter takes an important first look at the promise Horgan has as a fictionist after his first four novels. Carter thinks Horgan avoids false antiquarian interests in the Southwest such as local color quaintness and sets out to interpret America as fully as did Mark Twain. Day, James M. Paul Horgan. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1967. Days is a valuable survey study (the most comprehensive to date) of Horgan as a southwestern writer up to 1967. Marred somewhat by factual mistakes. Gish, Robert. Albuquerque as Recurrent Frontier in Paul Horgans The Common Heart. New Mexico Humanities Review 3 (Summer 1980): 2334. This essay
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A Literary History of the American West attempts to illustrate how Horgan structures his book around interpolated stories which reinforce recurrent frontiers in history, place and individuals. Hall, Jacqueline D. The Works of Paul Horgan. Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, Inc., Western American Writers Cassette Curriculum, 1976. A lecture on four novels: Main Line West, A Lamp on the Plains, The Common Heart and Whitewater. Hall contrasts what she sees as Horgans attitudes toward Hispanic and Anglo conceptions of time and the spiritual and physical isolation of the plains. Kraft, James. No Quarter Given: An Essay on Paul Horgan. Southwestern Historical Quarterly 80 (July 1976): 132. About the only biography of Horgan thus far. Laird, W. David. Foreword to The Return of the Weed. Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1980, pp. xixviii. Brief summary of Horgan as a western writer relating to this reissue of Horgans early volume of short stories. Lindenau, Judith Wood. Paul Horgans Mountain Standard Time. South Dakota Review 1 (May 1964): 5764. Comparative study of westering themes in Horgans trilogy. Pilkington, William T. Paul Horgan. In My Bloods Country: Studies in Southwestern Literature. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1973, pp. 5164. A short, clear-eyed book-by-book analysis of Horgans southwestern fiction to 1960. Sees Horgans shorter works as his most powerful and esthetically complete. Regards The Return of the Weed as a novella. Taylor, J. Golden, ed. Paul Horgan, and The Western NovelA Symposium, in The Literature of the American West. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971, pp. 4044. (Reprinted from South Dakota Review, Autumn 1964.) Valuable interview with well-considered responses by Horgan. Westbrook, Max. Introduction to Far from Cibola. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974, pp. vxiii. Points to Horgans use of myth and symbol in the story and structure of Cibola. Bibliographies Kraft, James. A Provisional Bibliography. In Approaches to Writing, by Paul Horgan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. McConnell, Richard M. M., and Susan A. Frey. Paul Horgan: A Bibliography. Western American Literature 6 (Summer 1971): 137150.
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William Eastlake
during the First World War, William Eastlake was old enough by the 1930s to experience the Great Depression and then to serve as a replacement infantryman in World War II. That war, and the following police actions and wars, served him as subject matter for two novels, but nothing made as large an impact on his writing as his experience living in the American Southwest. Four of his seven novels are set in New Mexico, and his two war novels include southwestern characters. As an amateur rancher and professional writer in northern New Mexico, Eastlake has learned to know the peopleAnglo and Spanish ranchers, Navajo Indians, small town businessmen, the military and scientific communities of Los Alamos and Albuquerque, and even the strange and alien tourists who pass through his novels. Most of all, Eastlake has come to know the land, through both an intellectual understanding of its geological evolution and what Gerald Haslam has called his ability to feel, shamanistically, the emotional and spiritual relationship of the land to the people who live on it. He is, indeed, a western novelist, even though he was born in Brooklyn. Before he was a year old, his family moved to Caldwell, New Jersey. When he was old enough for school, his parents enrolled him in an Episcopalian boarding school, Bonnie Brae, in nearby Liberty Corners. The school operated a farm, and the students did farm chores before and after classes. After this working education, he returned to Caldwell for high school and was graduated into the jobless world of the Great Depression. Like many other males, Eastlake decided to see something of America as a hobo, and he traversed the country hitch-hiking and riding the rods, working at a variety of jobs where he could find them. He ended up as a clerk in Stanley Roses bookstore in Los Angeles, where he not only met a young artist, Martha Simpson, whom he married, but a number of American writers, including William Saroyan, Theodore Dreiser, and Nathanael West. Then came the war, and Eastlake enlisted in the army in 1942. He trained in camps in California and Oregon, served for a time as a military policeman, but then signed up as a replacement in the infantry. In 1944 he was sent to England, and landed in the second wave of the Normandy invasion. He served in Belgium and France, and was wounded while leading a platoon during the Battle of the Bulge. He was returned to the United States, and was finally given a medical discharge from the Army in Van Nuys, California. He returned to Europe after the war when a former army buddy, also 587
ORN IN 1917
interested in writing, found a backer for a literary magazine. The backing lasted for only one issue, and Eastlake attended the Alliance Franaise for a semester under the GI Bill, studying French and history. He had a brief career as a professional soldier, writing propaganda, being a weapons instructor, and finally a border guard for Israel during the first of the Arab-Israeli wars. After he returned to America, he and Martha bought some land in Van Nuys, sub-divided it, and built houses, designed by Martha, on the lots. They had become real estate developers in order to make the money necessary for writing and painting, but not, evidently, without suffering a good deal of guilt. No other occupation, with the possible exception of designing and building nuclear weapons, has received more satirical treatment in his novels than real estate development. After visiting several times with Marthas brother, paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, in the New Mexico mountain country, the Eastlakes decided to move there themselves. They found a four-hundred-acre ranch near Cuba, New Mexico, northwest of Santa Fe, and lived there until recently, when they moved to another ranch in Arizona. William Eastlake has not become a tremendously popular writer either with eastern or western readers, nor has he been adequately treated by the critics, although his reputation among western critics is growing gradually. Almost all of his novels have received good reviews at the time of publication, but there has not yet been the continuing appreciation of his work that would lift his reputation to the first rank of writers. There are several reasons for this failure of the critical community. In the first place, as he told the editors of TriQuarterly s special western edition, never . . . let a publisher put a picture of a horse on the dust jacket of any novel [you] might happen to publish. The people who buy it will think its some goddamned 1 shoot-up, and theyll hate it when it isnt. Another reason is that Eastlake is a highly individualistic and experimental writer. He once suggested, in discussing one of his contemporaries, that the writer would never become first rank because he would not take risks, he would not experiment, he was too content to remain in the mainstream of the naturalistic novel. Finally, although Eastlake has developed into a superb craftsmanespecially as a sardonic humorist-his vision of the world and his approach to that vision have been too intellectual to satisfy most westerners and too uncompromisingly honest to please the easterners. Eastlakes first three novels (Go in Beauty, 1956; The Bronc People, 1958; and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses, 1963) are set in Indian Country, the high mesa and mountain country in New Mexico, and any one of them could have featured a rider on horseback on its cover. Eastlake was immediately tagged as a Western writer, yet his works were not the type of Westerns that would sell. 588
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The first, Go in Beauty, is an exceptionally good novel about betrayalof brother betraying brother with slight suggestions of the Jacob and Esau relationship, or of Joseph and his brothersand a resulting drought in the land. It is a complex novel concerned not only with the mystic relationship between mans sin and nature, or the earth, but also, since the older brother, Alexander, is a writer, with the writers relationship to the spirituality of that land, his homeland, within himself. Thus, as the Indians know, when Alexander steals his younger brothers wife, rationalizing that the artist must experience everything, he loses his integrity and his meaning. The land dies, and only Alexanders return can bring the rain. But George, the younger brother, who had years ago left his older brother to die in a mine shaft and then played the hero by discovering him only when he was about to be discovered by someone else, is unable to call him home. After his artistic disintegration, Alexander is killed in Mexico, his body is returned to Indian Country, and the drought is ended. In this novel, the prevailing mood is elegiac; the land broods, in Eastlakes treatment, in a way that emphasizes what Gerald Haslam has called a contrast between natures 2 slow, certain, yet dynamic time, and tense human temporality. In the second novel, The Bronc People, the predominant mood toward the land is one of wonder and exhilarationa celebration of nature and the land as beauty and continuum. The narrative perspective, a limited omniscience that follows closely the growth of two young boys, one white and one black, and their young Indian friends, allows Eastlake to maintain this powerfully celebratory mood throughout an episodic novel in which many of the episodes might otherwise seem only loosely integrated. It is a novel about Little Sant Bowman, who wants to grow up to be a really cowboy, and Alistair Benjamin, the black youth who presumes in his intellectual way to find some meaning to his heritage and his existence. If Go in Beauty can be said to be a novel about loss, then The Bronc People may be called a novel about finding. The novel begins with a gun battle between the black owner of the Circle R and the white owner of the Circle Heart, a battle made ludicrous by the comments of two Navajo Indians as they watch from a vantage point in the rocks just above Big Sant Bowman, the white owner of the Circle Heart. The Indians watch, amazed, as Big Sant critically wounds the Gran Negrito and then rushes into the burning cabin to try to save him. The Gran Negritos son escapes and is taken to an orphanage by the Indians. Later, he finds his way back to Indian Country to find his past and is adopted by the Bowmans. The novel develops through the friendship and escapades of the sons of the two antagonists. In the end, Little Sant finds that he must leave home to become the bronc rider that he is meant to be, and Alistair Benjamin learns that revenge solves nothing, it merely continues the unreasonable hostility that is at the base of human 589
conflict. More important, he learns from an old westerner, Blue-Eyed Billy Pearsall, that he must fight his own battles, that he must do it alone. The Bronc People has deservedly received more detailed critical attention than any other Eastlake novel. Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses is, perhaps, the least successful esthetically of these novels. The thread on which a number of shortstory-like episodes are strung concerns a long days dying theme with Ring Bowman passively resisting the quicksand that threatens to kill him, while quietly watching the painting that his friend, Twenty-Six Horses, has painted on the face of the mountain. He remembers the meaningful episodes of his life that involve his, and his Indian friends, estrangement from his father, trader George Bowman. As the novel progresses, the reader discovers that both Ring and Twenty-Six Horses have left home because George Bowman has taken a young Indian girl, Nice Hands, into his blue hogan. This novel, too, then, is about finding, about finding ones way back to wholeness through tolerance and understanding. The nature described in this novel has a duality not clear in the earlier novels. In the arroyo, where there is quicksand, there are sinister shadows of evil. In the mountains, however, there is the clear air of freedom and the sun of vitality. Not one of these western novels would appeal to the reader of formula Western fiction. Each is deeply charged with myth, is concerned with the contrast between the Indian belief in the individuals harmony with nature and the white mans materialistic manipulation of nature to fit his own needs, and is written in a gradually developing style that has become as identifiable as the style of a Hemingway or a Faulkner. John R. Milton, in discussing Eastlakes use of landscape, has described him as a witty, ironic, and frequently irreverent writer . . . whose Indian novels are technically 3 more suited to urbane readers. Eastlake has experimented, and usually his experimentation has been successful. He has been called an absurdist, a surrealist, a black humorist. Frequently his humor is modern, yet he has adapted the traditional American humor of a Mark Twain to his own novelistic demands. There is, for example, the innocent American abroad, Sergeant Rossi of Castle Keep, who gives his clothes to a French laundry woman, and later throws her into the water. That night the captain had him in his office, giving him hell with the irate laundrywoman shrieking, and Sergeant Rossi just kept repeating dully, I caught her down there at the river beating the 4 shit out of my clothes with a rock. Or there is the literalist innocent, like Ben Helpnell in Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses, who had bought a Monkey Ward pump.
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The new pump was the latest thing, later even than the piston pump. It worked on the theory that it is easier to push water than it is to pull it. It is a hermetically sealed, self-contained unit, and without any fuss or bother or expensive plumbers or electricians, you just drop the whole thing in the well. Ben had done 5 that yesterday and since, he had been looking for it. There are absurd anachronisms, especially in Castle Keep, where soldiers during World War II go hunting deer with a crossbow; in The Long, Naked Descent into Boston there is a use of a hot-air balloon during the Revolutionary War. Startling incongruities, like the Indians watching the gun battle in The Bronc People, and commenting on it, or the use of the castle with its moat in modern warfare, are frequent in Eastlakes novels. Further, there are continual breaks in the pattern of expectation, where the boys in The Bronc People follow behind the trapper Charles Enright, picking up the supposedly poisoned meat that he drops for the coyotes, then cooking it and offering him some. He eats it and doesnt die, and when they find he has not been mixing poison with the meat, they accuse him of dishonesty. Eastlake is especially successful in pricking the bubble of mans pride, and especially in mans pride in his reason. In The Bronc People, not only do the young boys talk about the secret city where nationalistic scientists are creating bombs to blow up the world before somebody else does, but Big Sant explains to the Indians that he is shooting at the Gran Negrito to keep him from shooting at me. Eastlake consistently plays with language in puns and double-entendres, through humorous revisions of literary quotations, and through contrasts between languages or even between levels of usage in English. In dialogue between characters, he is especially successful as a humorist. In the badinage between Little Sant and Alistair Benjamin in The Bronc People, as only one example, there are elements of vaudeville or minstrel-show techniques in which each character takes turns becoming the straight man for the other. Eastlake is also a master of constructing the humorously satirical situation. Finally, his novels are replete with humorous characters, such as Doris Bellwether in Portrait, the Texas man-hating wife of a nuclear weapons expert. Seldom, however, is Eastlakes humor used for its own sake; the result finally is a satire on mankind and his foibles, and Eastlake finds much to satirize. Little seems sacred to Eastlake, leading, perhaps, to Miltons categorizing him as irreverent. Yet, Eastlake is hardly irreverent except to mankind. He treats the earth, sacrality, and the indomitable spirit of man with a good deal of reverence.
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In some ways, Eastlakes approach to the western experience is much like that of earlier western writers like Eugene Manlove Rhodes, who saw the bankers and the lawyers as the real villains in western development. Eastlakes villains are the go-getters in real estate development, the scientists and technologists who are intent on violating the earth and its creatures in the name of progress in weaponry and progress toward materialistic superficialities. He is almost as vehement in this position as Edward Abbey. Unfortunately for his western reputation, however, Eastlake is unable to treat mans problems simplistically, for he sees them in all their complexity. Eastlakes novels are extremely intellectual, reflecting his wide reading in literature, art, paleontology, biology, and a variety of other subjects. Further, Eastlake is not in the tradition of the historical novelist, which has been the major literary tradition in western American literature. He is a modernist in technique. As a modernist whose work shows the influence of such writers as Hemingway and Faulkner in his earlier works, and of Heller and the revisionist-historians like Berger and Barth in his later works, it would seem that Eastlake would be more popular with eastern critics. This has not, however, been the case. Eastlakes Castle Keep, for example, employs his very individualistic adaptations of some of the techniques Joseph Heller used in Catch 22, but neither the novel nor the film made from it was nearly as successful as Catch 22. Yet Castle Keep may be one of the finest novels to come out of World War II. However, it does not have a protagonist with a Saroyan-like sensitivity to the horrors of war, nor does it have a simplistic division between the bad guys in the system and the good guys victimized by the system. One of the major concerns in Castle Keep, for example, is whether or not the castle, full of art treasures and symbolic of mans culture and civilization, should be held by the American forces trying to stop the German attack. If the Americans attempt to hold the castle, the Germans will certainly destroy it. For Eastlake, there can be no easy answers, for man is not only the creator of beautyof music and art and literaturebut he is also the rapacious predator whose very nature has caused him to create organized warfare. It is Eastlakes unflinching, unblinking, satiric eye that allows him to examine the problem without sentimentality in a novel that successfully blends a surrealistic and mythic treatment of the castle and its environs, including the Red Queens bar, with a certain amount of realism, and some highly imaginary situations that fade in and out of realism into absurdity. It is a novel peopled by some at times amazingly realistic characters who drift from reality into the symbolic structures of the novel, characters who, as one of them admits, are all out of an undying past. They, and particularly Major Falconer, a western Ahab with both legs but only one eye, are archetypal characters who have found an author. 592
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There is something of the same in The Bamboo Bed, Eastlakes novel of the Vietnamese war. There is again the same mythologizing, although it is in some ways a more realistic novel. Once more, however, Eastlake produced a novel that would not be popular. It was not a novel that specifically attacked the war in Viet Nam; it was a novel that attacked war as a condition of manthe result of his follyand not as a piece of political propaganda. Unfortunately, Eastlakes last two novels have been his least satisfying artistically. In the first of these, Dancers in the Scalphouse, he returns to the Southwest. The plot, bizarre enough to match most of the novels characters, centers around attempts by the Navajo to blow up a dam built to provide recreational facilities for the whites in northern New Mexico. The Indians have sent one of their own children to the white mans school and then to the university in Albuquerque, where he learns how to make a nuclear weapon. At the last moment, however, the Indians are too sane to allow an atomic explosion, and their land and homes are covered by the rising waters behind the new dam. A concurrent theme concerns the killing of eagles, and a young white teacher named Mary-Forge is involved in both plots. The novel demonstrates Eastlakes humorous talents during various episodes, but the overall effectiveness is lessened in this novel by sentimentality, especially in the characterizations of Mary-Forge, and the oversimplification of all positions in the novel, both white and Indian. His most recent novel, The Long, Naked Descent into Boston, is an absurdist recreation of the Battle of Bunker Hill. It does not in any way enhance his reputation as a western writer, although it may be his most controlled satire to date. Unfortunately, it has not received much critical attention. William Eastlakes career has been marked by experimentation. Because of his experimentation, he has not yet received the attention he deserves, even from scholars of western American literature. Thus, his abilities as a humorist and satirist have not been adequately recognized. His first three novels, Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses, have been his most successful, at least from the western perspective, and they are enough to guarantee him a high place in the ranks of contemporary western writers.
D ELBERT E. WY L D E R ,
Murray State University
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Notes
William Kittredge and Steven M. Krauzer, Writers of the New West, TriQuarterly 48 (Spring 1980): 10. 2. Gerald Haslam, Introduction to William Eastlakes The Bronc People (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), p. 5. 3. John R. Milton, The Novel of the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 174. 4. William Eastlake, Castle Keep (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), p. 86. 5. William Eastlake, Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), p. 19. 1.
Primary Sources ( in chronological order ) Ishimotos Land. Essai 1 (Summer 1952): 918. Homecoming. Quarto 6 (Fall 1954): 1728. Little Joe. Accent 14 (Autumn 1954): 27383. Go in Beauty. New York: Harper, 1956. The Bandits. Harpers Magazine 213 (September 1956): 5662. The Bronc People. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958. Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Castle Keep. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965. Theres a Camel in My Cocktail. Harpers Magazine 232 (April 1966): 6368. Jack Armstrong in Tangier. Evergreen Review 10 (August 1966): 2427. The Last Frenchman in Fez. Evergreen Review 11 (December 1967): 4446, 9395. Now Lucifer Is Not Dead. Evergreen Review 12 (November 1968): 2225, 6971. The Hanging at Prettyfields. Evergreen Review 13 (February 1969): 6768. Dead Mans Guide to Mallorca. New Mexico Quarterly 38 (Winter-Spring 1969): 919. The Bamboo Bed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969. The Dancing Boy. Evergreen Review 14 (December 1970): 3437, 6869. Three by Eastlake (Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, Portrait of an Artist with TwentySix Horses). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. A Childs Garden of Verses for the Revolution. New York: Grove Press, 1970. Dancers in the Scalphouse. New York: The Viking Press, 1975. The Long, Naked Descent into Boston. New York: The Viking Press, 1977. Dont Be Afraid, the Clowns Afraid Too. South Shore: An International Review of the Arts 1 (1978): 6675.
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Secondary Sources Abbey, Edward. William Eastlake: Para Mi Amigo. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 1820. Comments on the qualities he finds in Eastlake and his writing, and finds the qualities add up to greatness. Angell, Richard C. Eastlake: At Home and Abroad. New Mexico Quarterly 34 (Summer 1964): 2049. The most complete biographical information on Eastlake through 1964. Barnes, Barbara E. Debunking the Myth of the West. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 6268. In The Bronc People, Eastlake destroys the typical myths of the old West, and perhaps creates his own. Bowering, George. Portrait of a Horse with Twenty-Six Artists. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 5562. Discusses art as a theme in Castle Keep, and considers the novel one of the great novels in U.S. literature. Sees Eastlake as an artistic humanist in this essay, one of the most successful discussions of Castle Keep. Creeley, Robert. Cowboys and Indians. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 5355. An appreciation of Eastlake as both man and writer. Graham, Don. William Eastlakes First Novel: An Account of the Making of Go in Beauty. Western American Literature 16 (Spring 1981): 2737. A genesisoriented study of the revisions of Go in Beauty, and the correspondence between Eastlake and his editor during the process. Haslam, Gerald. William Eastlake. Southwest Writers Series, No. 36. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1970. This well-done volume is still the most important analysis of the early novels. . William Eastlake. In Fifty Western Writers, edited by Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. This article includes a short biography, a discussion of major themes, and a survey of the criticism of a writer that Haslam believes most clearly, provocatively, and controversially bridges the gap between the modern western novel and contemporary revisionist expression. . William Eastlake: Portrait of the Artist as Shaman. Western Review 8 (Spring 1971): 213. Concentrates on the ability of Eastlake to merge time and space and land, along with people and their relationship to the land, shamanistically rather than intellectually, through feeling rather than reason. . The Southwestern Novels of William Eastlake. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 2026. Eastlakes major thematic concern in his Southwestern novels has been exposing of negative aspects of contemporary American civilization. Lindroth, James R. Poetry, Abstraction, and the Comedy of Dream: William Eastlakes Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 2731. Discusses Eastlake as an artist whose work is always a magic of linguistic transformation. Sees Portrait as the transformation of death, through form, into comedy.
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A Literary History of the American West McCaffery, Larry. Absurdity and Oppositions in William Eastlakes Southwestern Novels. Critique 19 (1977): 6276. A study in the structure of the southwestern novels. . Style in Eastlakes Southwestern Novels: Personal Visions and Digressions. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 3141. Believes that Eastlakes lack of success is a result of his stylistic peculiarities, which are discussed quite thoroughly, along with an interesting description of a dinner with Eastlake. McPheron, William. The Critical Reception of William Eastlake. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 8492. A carefully controlled discussion of critical reactions to Eastlakes work, plus some fine insight into the artistic problem created when Eastlakes distrust of society finally over-whelmed his confidence in arts redemptive powers. . William Eastlake: A Checklist. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 93105. So far, this is the most complete bibliography on Eastlake. Milton, John R. The Land as Form in Frank Waters and William Eastlake. Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring 1970): 1049. A comparison between Waterss and Eastlakes use of land, including valleys and mountains, secular and spiritual values. . The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. A short analysis of Eastlakes use of land, based on the article in Kansas Quarterly. Mottram, Eric. The Limits of Survival with the Weapons of Humor. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 6883. Believes that Eastlakes fiction deals with an important revision of Slotkins thesis in Regeneration Through Violence and a fulfillment of D. H. Lawrences vision of men giving up their absolute whiteness. OBrien, John. Interview with William Eastlake. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 417. An interview in 1978 in which Eastlake discusses influences on his writing, concepts of realism, and theories of writing. Wachtel, Albert. Eastlake: The Artist as Director of Revels. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 4953. Eastlake is essentially a moral writer-a fabulist rather than a mythological writer. Wylder, Delbert E. The Novels of William Eastlake. New Mexico Quarterly 34 (Summer 1964): 188203. The first full-length critical article on Eastlake. Limited to the first three novels. . William Eastlake: Satiric Voice Looking for a Form. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 4249. Presents the view that Eastlake is less a western writer than a satirist and an experimentalist in form.
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Benjamin Capps
ENJAMIN FRANKLIN CAPPS S first novel, Hanging at Comanche Wells (1962) only attempt to write the standard Western. The book, published in paperback, is not a complete success as a Western because it is too good for that genre, but it is not up to the standard of Cappss seven novels which followed. The later novels are among the best of their kind and establish Capps as one of the foremost historical novelists of the West writing today. Hanging is the compromise Capps made in order to get a book published. He has not compromised as a novelist since. Capps began writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where he went to major in English after having served as a navigator on bombers in the South Pacific during World War II. He received his B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, and his masters degree and left Austin in 1949 to become an instructor in English at Northeastern Oklahoma State College in Tahlequah. His M.A. thesis, directed by Mody C. Boatright, was a novel entitled Mesquite Country about Archer County, Texas, where Capps had grown up in the twenties and thirties. He was born in Dundee in the western part of the county on June 11, 1922, and he lived in various parts of the county until 1938, the year he graduated from Archer City High School. He entered Texas Tech at age sixteen and managed a year there before the economics of the depression caused him to leave school and join the Civilian Conservation Corps. Between 1939 and 1942, when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, he served in CCC, worked as an assistant engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, drove a truck for a company working on the construction of Lake Texoma, failed as a chicken farmer in Colorado, and got married. After Cappss four years at the University of Texas and two years of teaching in Oklahoma, he decided that academic life hampered his writing. He had saved enough money to live for a year, and in 1951 he moved his wife and two children to Paris, Texas and tried for a year to earn his living as a writer. Nothing he wrote was published, and when the money ran out and he knew a third child was on the way, he moved to Grand Prairie, Texas, and took a job as a tool-and-die maker at Chance-Vought Aircraft Company. He felt that a job involving manual labor would allow him to spend his free time writing, unencumbered by the academic overflow that plagues the after-hours of teachers. It did not work out as he expected, but he did manage some writing during ten years at Chance-Vought.
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In 1961, he resigned his job once again to devote his full time to writing. Selling Hanging at Comanche Wells to Ballantine gave him the impetus to continue and provided enough money to make professional writing seem a possibility. During the sixties he wrote six novels, thereby assuring his career as a full-time writer. Cappss second and third novelsThe Trail to Ogallala (1964) and Sam Chance (1965)won the Silver Spur Award of the Western Writers of America, and Trail won the Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award. Another novel written during the sixtiesThe White Mans Road (1969) won both the Silver Spur and the Wrangler Award of the Cowboy Hall of Fame. All his novels have been finalists for one or another of the awards he has won, and The Warren Wagontrain Raid (1974), a non-fiction work, won the Wrangler Award. Though Capps has written three books of non-fiction, he is likely to be remembered for his novels. Three of themA Woman of the People (1966), The White Mans Road (1969), and Woman Chief (1979)deal with Indian life in the nineteenth century, while the other five focus upon the whites who came onto the plains during the same period. Cappss novels are limited in time and in area to the Great Plains in the middle and late parts of the last century. All but Woman Chief, set in the Wyoming area, take place on the south plains, an area bounded roughly by Ft. Worth and Ft. Sill, Oklahoma on the east, the Llano Estacado on the west, the Concho River on the south, and the Canadian River on the north. This is the area of the Comanches and the Kiowas, the southern range of the buffalo, and the path of the great cattle drives. And it was here that the settlers moving west, the federal government, and the State of Texas broke the power and spirit of the south plains Indians and drove them onto reservations in Indian Territory. It is the country that Capps grew up in and knows, and the time period which he writes about was still fresh in the minds of the old settlers when he was a child. Cappss three novels about Indian life show him at his best. In all of them he manages the rare novelistic feat of portraying people of another race and culture without condescension or sentimentality. A Woman of the People, likely Cappss best, treats the familiar story of a white girl captured and raised by Indians. The story is well known in Texas because of the capture of Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanches in 1836, and the capture of Milly Durgan near Cappss home county about twenty years after the Parker episode. Both the real-life captives grew to womanhood as Indians, Cynthia Parker giving birth to Quanah, the last chief of the Comanches. There are other such cases, but in the novel Capps does not rely on any specific one; rather, he creates his own living character. In A Woman of the People, Helen Morrison, eleven, and her sister Katy, 598
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five, are captured by the Mutsani Comanches and their parents killed. Katy, separated from her sister when given to another family in the band, quickly adapts to Indian life, but Helen struggles for years to keep her identity as a white. Helen, called Tehanita (Little Girl Texan), keeps the dress she was captured in rolled up and hidden away in preparation for the day of her escape. Tehanita resists the efforts of the band to turn her into a girl of the People (the Comanches only name for themselves), but the passage of time and her growing acceptance of her life turn her into a woman of the People. The novels focus is completely on Helen-Tehanita, and the author and the reader know long before she does that she is no longer a white girl but has become an Indian woman. The subtlety of the transformation is the novels most impressive aspect, for we can see a real person grow and come to know herself as slowly as humans do. Almost equally impressive is Cappss depiction of the life and culture of the band. He makes the culture of the Comanches as natural to the reader as it becomes to the girl, though both Helen and the reader are shocked in the beginning by the alien culture. The two themes which run through all of Cappss works, though often implicit and secondary to the major themes, underlie A Woman of the People: cultures are not inferior or superior, they are different; and the culture which existed in the frontier West was as valid as the culture of the civilized East or of Europe. These themes are never openly stated in A Woman of the People, but much of the book is an exploration of them. Cappss second Indian novel, the sixth book he published, is The White Mans Road (1969), almost certainly his best-known work. While A Woman takes place from the middle 1850s to the middle 1870s and shows the south plains Indians first as a proud and free people and then as a conquered band moving toward the reservation, The White Mans Road deals with reservation Indians who are beginning to forget the days of glory and freedom. The time is the 1890s, and the Indians on the reservation have been thrown onto the white mans road, a steep and thorny path to most of them. The novel opens with one of Cappss most brilliant scenes, a degraded and abortive feast given by the drunken Great Eagle, who is trying to recapture the famous but almost forgotten hospitality of the plains people. Joe Cowbones, the central character, and two of his friends, Slow Tom Armstedt and Spike Chanakut, attend because they have nothing better to do. What they witness has a profound effect on Joe. The host has made no plans beyond his general and open invitation. He has a bottle of whiskey which he cant bear to share and a sheep which he plans to cook. In a stupor, he clubs the sheep to death and throws him, wool and all, onto a fire. The scene is painful but crucial to the novel, for it shows the reader and Joe where the white mans road can lead. When Joe sees, so suddenly and certainly, that the days of pride and 599
freedom are lost, he persuades Slow Tom and Spike to help him mount a last, symbolic horse raid. He gathers his pitiful band and performs the impossible: they steal the horses of a sleeping cavalry troop and head west. Joe is wounded but uncaptured when the horses are retaken. The stories which circulate about the feat and its unknown heroes bring pride to the reservation and give Joe a sense of having, for a time, lived as his ancestors had. The part which tells of the raid ends when Reverend Fairchild, who had been a sort of hostage during part of the escape, blackmails Joe into turning himself in. The novel has comic elements, but the humor does not mask the sadness which underlies the theme of the book. A way of life has ended, and the Indians are ill-adapted to the ways of the whites. Like Matthew Arnolds modern man, they are torn between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. Woman Chief (1979) is the first to be set outside the south plains. The Indians in the novel are the Crows and Gros Ventres of the Yellowstone River area, and the time is between about 1840 and 1854. The central character is a girl of the Gros Ventre tribe who at age ten is captured by the Crows. As she grows up she demonstrates her ability with horses and weapons. Slave Girl becomes Horse Tender, and later, as she leads raids and wins a reputation as a great warrior, Woman Chief or Sweet Thunder Woman. Her rise to fame as a warrior costs her the womanly pleasures of a husband and children that she often wishes for. She is torn between being a chief and being a mother, and just as it seems that she is about to choose the female way, she is killed by members of the Gros Ventres as she goes to visit them. Woman Chief is a good novel, though it lacks the subtlety of A Woman of the People or the pointed sadness of The White Mans Road. The book is neatly plotted, tells an interesting story of plains lifeit is based on a historical characterand develops the character the way only good fiction can. Like Cappss two other novels of Indian life, it demonstrates that the culture of the Indian was as valid as that of the new American. Woman Chief, though unlettered, speaks four or five languages and understands war and diplomacy as well as her European counterparts of the same era. Capps has three non-fiction works which also deal with Indian life. Two are volumes in the Time-Life series on the Old West, and one is a history of the Warren wagontrain raid of 1871. The Time-Life books The Indians (1973) and The Great Chiefs (1975)are informative and well written, but, as in most Time-Life productions, the text is overwhelmed by pictures and layout apparatus. The books, admirable in their way, demonstrate Cappss extensive knowledge of Indian life and culture, though he wrote seven times as much text as actually appears in the books.
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The Warren Wagontrain Raid (1974) is a historical account of a raid by Satanta, Tsantangya, Big Tree, and a band of Kiowas from the Ft. Sill reservation on a wagontrain in Texas. The attack occurred while General Sherman was touring the area, which caused the raid to generate national interest. The leaders were tricked into surrender, and Satanta and Big Tree were sentenced to deathdecrees later commuted to life sentencesby the State of Texas. Tsantangya, a hero among the Kiowas, attacked his guards as he was leaving Ft. Sill for trial in Texas and forced them to kill him in sight of hundreds of people. The other two were paroled in 1873, but Satanta, after further raiding, was returned to Huntsville, where he committed suicide in 1878. The book is one of Cappss besthe thinks the best. It combines historical detail with the novels freedom to build character. Capps accomplishes what Truman Capote was attempting in In Cold Blood, a book Capote called a non-fiction novel. Capps manages the difficult task of portraying all sides fairly, for he can see, as he shifts his focus, the problems faced by all the groups who were struggling to survive on the south plains during difficult times. As the Indian lost his home on the southern plains, the white man was establishing his, and five of Cappss novels detail the struggles he encountered there. One of the novels, Hanging at Comanche Wells, was mentioned earlier as not being Capps at his best. The other four are The Trail to Ogallala (1964), Sam Chance ( 1965), The Brothers of Uterica (1967), and The True Memoirs of Charley Blankenship (1972). Of the four, The Trail to Ogallala and Sam Chance are the best novels, though The Brothers and True Memoirs compare favorably with most recent southwestern fiction. The Trail to Ogallala does a much better job with the trail drive than Andy Adamss Log of a Cowboy. For one thing, Capps can make characters come to life in a way that Adams could not. For another, it seems that Capps knows the country better than Andy Adams did, even though Adams had been on a cattle drive. In any case, Capps describes the region better, and he knows enough about fiction to enhance his plot with conflict. The central character, Billy Scott, is interesting in a way that Adamss hero is not. Scott has been promised a trail herd of his own, but is shunted aside at the last minute in favor of an older man. When the trail boss, Colonel Kittredge, is killed, a struggle between Billy, who can boss a herd, and Blackie Blackburn, who cannot, develops. Like most real struggles, it does not end in a gunfight but in the subtle shifting of power to Billy. Sam Chance traces the familiar story of the ex-Confederate who comes to Texas, creates a ranch out of the open range, and lives to see the end of the free range era. The story has been told in scores of novels and movies,
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but Cappss ability to portray round characters, to depict the life of the region, and to let story and theme grow without obvious manipulation makes the book superior to other entries in the genre. It is only in the last quarter of the book that one can find fault: the arguments in favor of the old ways begin to dominate an otherwise excellent novel. But Cappss defense of the old-time cowman is a small price to pay for a novel such as Sam Chance. The Brothers of Uterica is Cappss fictionalization of one of the Utopian colonies established in America in the nineteenth century. The Brothers (and Sisters) come to the western edge of north central Texas, establish a colony, mismanage the farming, misunderstand the harsh reality of the land, and disappear. The events are seen through the eyes of a naive, puzzled true believer of forty named Langley. The Brothers and their paid workers constitute a microcosm. And that may be the trouble with the novel. The book becomes so clogged with its collection of idealists, cynics, and frustrated leaders that there is not space to develop its chief characters fully. The picture of a colony in turmoil and frustration may be compared to Hawthornes The Blithedale Romance. The True Memoirs of Charley Blankenship, which purports to be the manuscript of an old cowboys recollections between 1880 and 1890, is a picaresque tale of wanderings in the West. Charley is a young farm boy from Missouri who goes west to look for his brother Buck and to seek adventure, which he relates in a series of loosely connected episodes. He makes a cattle drive, loses his money in Dodge, falls among bandits, skins buffalo, works on a ranch in Arizona, and breaks off his narrative when he returns home for a visit in 1890. The novel lacks the serious purpose of some of Cappss others, but it is a good tale well told. It is perhaps more interesting than some books of recollectionsand possibly more authentic than some. It shows Cappss humor at its best. In a writing career which he has pursued full-time for about twenty years, Benjamin Capps has produced eight good novels, an excellent historical account, and two well-written books about Indian life in America. His novels on the American West, especially those treating Indian life, form as substantial a body of work as any written in the genre. Capps is the best novelist writing in Texas today, though the recent novels of Elmer Kelton are beginning to mark him as a serious challenger. Cappss interests are in man and his struggle for survival, in man and his attempt to establish a culture and maintain it, and in life as it was really lived under conditions of stress and hardship. The fact that he focuses his interest on a particular time and a place makes him a regionalist, but his probing of mans condition and his ability to understand mans plight make him a great deal more.
JAMES W. LEE , North
Texas State University
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Hanging at Comanche Wells. New York: Ballantine, 1962. The Trail to Ogallala. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1964. Sam Chance. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965. A Woman of the People. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1966. The Brothers of Uterica. New York: Meredith Press, 1967. The White Mans Road New York: Harper and Row, 1969. The Indians. New York: Time-Life Books, 1972. The True Memoirs of Charley Blankenship. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972. The Warren Wagontrain Raid. New York: Dial, 1974. The Great Chiefs. New York: Time-Life Books, 1975. Duncan Robinson: Texas Teacher and Humanist. (Edited with Thomas Sutherland). Arlington: University of Texas at Arlington, 1976. Woman Chief. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1979. Secondary Sources Crume, Paul. The West of Benjamin Capps. Southwest Scene (Dallas Morning News ), January 24, 1971, pp. 1822. This is a brief sketch of Cappss life and works in the usual Sunday supplement formphotographs, brief interview, superficial comments on Cappss books and his life. Graham, Don. Old and New Cowboy Classics. Southwest Review 65 (Summer 1980): 293303. Graham argues that Cappss Trail to Ogallala is not only a better novel than Andy Adamss Log of a Cowboy, but is a truer historical picture of a trail drive. Lee, James W. Benjamin Capps. In Fifty Western Writers, edited by Fred Erisman and Richard Etulain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. A general study of all Cappss works, along with a brief biographical sketch. . Benjamin Capps. In Twentieth-Century Western Writers, edited by James Vinson. Detroit: Gale, 1982. Very brief commentary on Cappss works; short comment by Capps. Poulson, Richard C. The Trail Drive Novel: A Matter of Balance. Southwestern American Literature 4 (1974): 5361. A general study of the trail-drive novel. The Trail to Ogallala is considered, along with Log of a Cowboy, The Trail Driver, Longhorns North, and The Long Way North, as the best of the genre. Smith, C. W. Novelist of the Frontier. Sunday (Dallas Times Herald), March 2, 1980, pp. 49. Another Sunday supplement piece with photographs. Smith, himself a novelist, makes interesting comments on Cappss work. Speck, Ernest B. Benjamin Capps. Western Writers Series. Boise: Boise State University, 1981. The first large study of Cappss life and works. In forty-eight pages, Speck manages to give a good introduction to the works, trace Cappss main themes, and comment on style and structure.
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Edward Abbey
CRUCIAL DILEMMA , both philosophical and real, accompanied Americas westward expansion and now plagues the author who chooses to write about the West. That dilemma concerns the land itself and can be characterized in many ways: preservation or utilization? conservation or development? primitivism or progress? ecology or economics? The options have never been simple; compromise has rarely been effective. Among contemporary writers most concerned with the issue is novelist and essayist Edward Abbey, a man mightily threatened by the encroachment of technocracy upon the individual and his environment. In his books and articles Abbey profiles the West the way it once was, the way it is today, the way he fears it will become unless the intrusions of civilization and industrialization are curbed. Even as he acknowledges the realities of twentieth-century progress, he offers suggestionsboth real and fancifulto halt it. Indeed, in his role as defender of the southwestern landscape, Abbey has become a modern-day folk hero for ecological subversives everywhere. Born an easterner (1927), Abbey first saw the West when he was seventeen, while hitch-hiking around the country. In an essay written years later, he characterizes the particular power and promise he felt when he glimpsed the arid desert landscape: for the first time I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginingsthe place where the tangible and the mythical become the same. Most of Abbeys writings, in fact, have been efforts to convey that West, the one of his deepest imaginings, the one he fears is facing destruction today. After World War II he returned there, to study philosophy at the University of New Mexico, to explore the desert as intimately as possible, and to write. His first book, however, is not set in the West: instead, Jonathan Troy (1954) recounts the painful Pennsylvania adolescence of a very egotistical young man. This unsuccessful early piece of fiction reveals few of Abbeys strengths, but deserves mention because its conclusion prefigures his subsequent and repeated emphasis on the psychological needs that are filled by the physical West and by the abstract notion of wilderness. Abbeys second novel, The Brave Cowboy (1956), restates this theme and introduces a key corollarythe impersonal devastation that society can cause in the name of righteous, legalistic progress. The Brave Cowboy
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(and Lonely Are the Brave, a first-rate movie based on its text) tells the story of Jack Burns, a modern Don Quixote bent on a quest for justice, to free his draft-resisting friend from jail. Failing because his friend refuses his aid, Jack then ironically finds himself alone pursued by the forces of the law across the landscape of New Mexico. He escapes, only to be struck down by a truck while crossing a highway on horseback. Both literally and metaphorically, the old tale in a new time expresses Abbeys fear that individual freedom is being constricted and destroyed by the corruptive onslaught of the twentieth century. Although Brave Cowboy is highly stylized, and at times its message is conveyed with a somewhat heavy hand, the narrative succeeds in its depiction of a man caught in the crossfire between wilderness and civilization, between the old West and the new. Modernity may win the skirmish, but Jack Burns, the spirit of the past, wins the war by capturing the readers imagination. This battle is reconstructed in Abbeys third novel, Fire on the Mountain (1962), when another anachronistic hero, John Vogelin, refuses to let his home be turned into a guided missile test site. Through a series of confrontations between the rancher and governmental representatives, Abbey again exposes the impossible situation of an individual attempting to thwart technocratic bureaucracy. The old man loses, of coursehe and his ranch are both condemnedbut the author strikes telling blows at officialdom along the way. Equally important, too, is the steady maturation of Vogelins young grandson who narrates the story. In the mode of so many Westerns from The Virginian to Shane, Fire on the Mountain teaches the meaning of manhood, although Billy Starr Vogelin learns a further lesson about the power and the futility of civil disobedience. His observations combine motifs found in Abbeys first two books with themes found in many novels of the Westlove of the land itself, a clash between the old ways and the new, violence, and initiation. Yet it is in Desert Solitaire (1968), the cornerstone of Abbeys reputation, that he gives his attitudes toward the southwestern landscape and his concerns about its fate complete and direct expression. Not a personal history, not a travelogue, not a nature book, Desert Solitaire is a nonfiction examination of selfhood, of wilderness, of progress, of desecration. Abbey shapes his book much as Thoreau shaped Walden, condensing three summers spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument into a single season in the wilderness. But the author ranges far beyond the perimeters of the park, to intimate canyons and comers of the slickrock country of southeast Utah, and far beneath the surface of problems that confront him, to ask exactly why the desert must be devoured. Abbey speaks up clearly and forcefully. He mourns the coming of technocracy, particularly when he
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describes the doomed Glen Canyon, before its transformation into an enormous silt trap and evaporation tank, a reservoir of stagnant water. On a lesser scale he laments the intrusion of commercialized tourism, and his list of specific cures for the ills of national parks makes good sense. Occasionally Abbey the anarchist lurks behind the prose of Desert Solitaire, emerging to pull up a few survey stakes and to cut down a few billboards. But basically the reader finds Abbey the environmentalist, whose chief end is to verbalize his ongoing romance with the desert landscape and to communicate our need for what is wild and free. Unforgettable are episodes like Abbey stalking the moon-eyed horse, Abbey rim-rocking himself near Havasu, Abbey exploring down the Colorado and up the Escalante, Abbey climbing to the heights of Tukuhnikivats, Abbey descending into the Maze, Abbey describing the eternal efficacy of the environment. In a rich, pictorial style, Desert Solitaire celebrates the potential its author imagined when first he saw the West. Three more non-fiction commemorations of wilderness quickly followed. The first, Appalachian Wilderness (1970), reminisces about the East, while the other two focus on Abbeys now-adopted West. Slickrock (1971), written as a Sierra Club publication to accompany Philip Hydes photog raphy, pleads for the preservation of the endangered canyons of the southwest. The landscape, closely observed and described in minute detail, dominates the prose, although Abbey reviews the human history of the area, includes a census of the animals who live there, and offers abundant scientific data as well. But if the landscape dominates the prose, the conservationist point of view dominates the landscape. Slickrock is a book with a message, designed to advocate crucial environmental needs. Cactus Country (1973), a Time-Life publication and ostensibly more balanced than its predecessor, serves the same purpose for the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Again Abbey stresses preservation while picturing isolated peaks and pockets of arid wilderness, communicating the lonely beauty of scenery unfamiliar to most people. The result, like Slickrock, is an effective piece of propaganda that has attracted widespread attention. In fact, it would be safe to say that more of Abbeys enthusiasts know him by his non-fiction than by his novels. This is unfortunate, because his fictional worlds more profoundly recreate mans fragile relationships with his environment and with himself. Black Sun (1971), which must be read allegorically, works with these relationships with particular sensitivity. Will Gatlin, a lonely anti-hero, has replaced his career as a college professor with a secluded job as a fire lookout. A young girl breaks his isolation by bringing him a joyous combination of the ties of human love and the freedom of the wilderness. Yet the dream is ethereal; it disintegrates when first the savagery of civilization in the shape of her fiance and then the indifference of the 606
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canyons in the form of the blistering summer sun destroy their idyllic relationship. Even though Will emerges from the final nightmare alone, however, and even though his grief dominates the novels close, he achieves a sober humanism that can combat nature red in tooth and claw and that can survive the jungle of society. Black Sun essentially argues an ecology of self derived from mans relationship to the world around him. One of Abbeys least-known books, at once less glib and more searching, it provides a key to its authors beliefs not found elsewhere. A different tactical approach to problems developing in the twentieth century between man and his environment surfaces when Abbey adds his energetic sense of humor to his frustration at the march of modernity. The result is a rollicking testimony to non-violent violence, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975). A merry band of ecological anarchists, the gang deliberately charges through Utah and Arizona on a self-ordained mission of destruction. They begin like Abbey himself, benignly enough, by felling billboards and destroying surveyors handiwork, but they soon graduate to wrecking heavy trucks and tractors, demolishing trains, and even blowing up bridges, all in the name of environmental protection. No one ever is injured, but the whole Southwest is turned topsy-turvy by their deeds. A true fantasy, The Monkey Wrench Gang ends on an upbeat, with the gang caught, convicted, put on probation, and still plotting . . . because somebody has to do it. Thats why. Even though defiance and demolition solve nothing permanently, the gang at least calls attention to the desecration that continues to plague the desert. Sometimes, however, the exaggerations detract from Abbeys point. Wildly improbable incidents like the foray against the Peabody Coal Company, in which the foursome manages extraordinary devastation without loss of human life, and certain caricature-like qualities of men like George Hayduke, the shell-shocked munitions maniac, and Bishop Love, Mormon par excellence, initially amuse but seem drawn out unnecessarily. Nevertheless, the novel systematically alerts the reader to recognize what so-called developers are doing to the western landscape. The flaws of The Monkey Wrench Gang are those of exuberance; its effectiveness lies in Abbeys conception, to express his serious commitment to save the wilderness from man for mankind through a light-hearted, entertaining tone. He repeats his commitment to the land of his deepest imaginings in his subsequent non-fiction, nowhere so angrily as in The Journey Home (1977). This volume of collected essays details its authors outrage at what he bluntly calls the rape of the West. He shapes his arguments carefully, alternating moments of appreciation with harsh exposes of the conglomerate greed that is destroying the wilderness as he knows it. Mountains, rivers, canyons, in Colorado, Arizona, Californiahe scrutinizes them as 607
they once were and as he fears they will become. In the brilliant prose style that has attracted readers since the days of Desert Solitaire, he highlights such scenes as the following: Superstition Mountain stands gaunt and grim above the desert floor, resembling a titanic altar, ancient, corroded, rotten with the blood of gods. Or like the crumbling ruin of a castle, a fortress, left over from some prehuman age of giants. No, this is all rhetoric. The mountain looks like what it is: the eroded remains of a volcanic pile, limestone sediments, igneous intrusions. Which is mystery enough. The truth always more difficult to imagine than fantasy. Abbeys visual imagination, at once effusive and concrete, is largely responsible for his present popularity. Not only is it pictorially satisfying, but it enables him to sugarcoat what otherwise might be a hard message to swallow. For example, as if his pleas for the land were destined to go unheard, he describes in the final chapter of The Journey Home a West which has consumed itself: a storm, a flood, a ghost town reduced to sunken stone walls and mounds of earth. One senses, when reading the books finale, that Abbey suspects he soon may have no home, as the physical West both literally and metaphorically dissipates into Dust. Abbeys Road (1979), another collection of pieces originally printed elsewhere and one that seems more hastily thrown together than its predecessor, continues the ironic journey home in new directions, toward horizons where the scene more resembles a West that used to be. Taking his reader first to Australia and then to isolated parts of Mexico, the author shows pristine environments which themselves may be endangered in the future. He then returns to his favorite desert country to continue his polemical attack on the forces that would level it. Abbeys Road is a quieter book than The Journey Home, but it carries the same messagewe cannot afford to lose what is wild and free. Abbey further eulogizes the wilderness in two other pieces of non-fiction published in the late 1970s. The Hidden Canyon: A River Journey (1977) outlines a boat trip down the Colorado with photographer John Blaustein, while Desert Images (1979) enhances the art of David Muench. Designed as coffee-table books, the two volumes simply restate that which is Abbeyhis love for the Southwest, his fears for its survival. His latest non-fiction, Down the River (1982), does the same. A third collection of essays and assays, Down the River propels Abbeys polemics into the decade of the 80s, with predictable results but with refreshing insights too. None of these books, however, suggests the horrific vision found in his most recent novel. Set sometime in the future, after self-destruction has be608
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come reality in the West, Good News (1980) resuscitates the brave cowboy, Jack Burns, and sends him into the dark towers of Phoenix on a nightmarish, and futile, quest. There he meets the survivorspower-hungry opportunists, renegade idealists, sadistic misfits, and placid automatonsand there he sees the scenes of their destruction. The book is unpleasant, and rightly so. Filled with violence and with naturalistic detail, it seems designed to shock, to jar the reader into an awareness of what progress could indeed bring. And it ends abruptly, as if in this world of the future there can be no resolution unless civilization stops its self-consuming march. Good News, like John Hawkess The Beetle-Leg, stretches T. S. Eliots wasteland across a southwestern backdrop in order to show how wilderness and cities alike are vulnerable to the machine. Not merely a polygeneric science fiction Western, Good News is a fable of the imagination that prophesies a fantasy world alarmingly like what is real. Abbey seems to be on the cutting edge, with his predictions for the future of the contemporary American West. In fact, his ability to project the consequences of past and present actions is what separates him from many western writers. Other observers of the desert scene, constricted by either the landscape or its history, have too rarely turned their eyes toward the future of the land. Abbey, by contrast, does so frequently and effectively. Because he so strongly believes in mans need for wilderness and because he so greatly fears the uncontrolled rampage of technocracy, he has put the two on a collision course in his writings. A pattern emergesone that begins with Brave Cowboy, develops through his non-fiction, and finds its fullest expression in Good News. This pattern articulates what Abbey sees as the result of endless development in the now-diminishing expanses of the West. The consequences for the individual, for the land, for civilization itself, are frightening. Envisioning a West in 1944 where the mythic and the real could come together in a tangible world, where the American dream might come true, Abbey in 1980 has moved to a projection of the American nightmare. His warning could not be clearer; his answer to the dilemma could not be more emphatic. Whenever a choice must be made between ecology or economics, between primitivism or progress, between conservation or development, between preservation or utilization, he affirms, in forthright terms, the efficacy of the land. This is not to say that he wishes to retreat to the past, but rather that he wants us to learn from past mistakes as we move into the future. Not always popular, often anarchistic, ever irascible, Edward Abbey defends the desert, the canyons, the rivers, the mountains, the wildernessbecause they are there, and need to be, if man and his environment are to cohabit and to survive together.
A NN R ONALD , University
of Nevada, Reno
609
Primary Sources Abbeys Road. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979. Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains. With Eliot Porter. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970. Beyond the Wall. New York: Holt, Rinehart &Winston, 1984. Black Sun. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971. The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956. Cactus Country. New York: Time-Life Books, 1973. Desert Images. With David Muench. New York: Chanticleer Press, 1979. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Down the River. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982. Fire on the Mountain. New York: Dial Press, 1962. Good News. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980. The Hidden Canyon: A River Journey. With John Blaustein. Introduction by Martin Litton. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Jonathan Troy. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954. The Journey Home. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975. Slickrock: Endangered Canyons of the Southwest. With Philip Hyde. New York: Sierra Club/Charles Scribners Sons, 1971. Slumgullion Stew: An Edward Abbey Reader. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984. Secondary Sources Benton, Robert M. Edward Abbeys Anti-Heroes. In The Westering Experience in American Literature, edited by Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee. Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1977. A generalized look at The Monkey Wrench Gang. Erisman, Fred. A Variant Text of The Monkey Wrench Gang. Western American Literature 14 (Fall 1979): 22728. A brief note about the inversion of two chapters. Haslam, Gerald. Introduction to Fire on the Mountain, by Edward Abbey. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. A solid explication of Abbeys treatment of innocence and experience. Herndon, Jerry A. Moderate Extremism: Edward Abbey and The Moon-Eyed Horse. Western American Literature 16 (August 1981): 97103. An important and provocative overview of Abbeys philosophical moderation. Lambert, Neal E. Introduction to The Brave Cowboy, by Edward Abbey. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977. A perceptive introduction to Abbeys writing, with a significant comparison between The Brave Cowboy and Desert Solitaire.
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McCann, Garth. Edward Abbey. Western Writers Series, No. 17. Boise: Boise State University, 1977. A general description and assessment of Abbeys writing, in pamphlet form. Pilkington, William T. Edward Abbey: Southwestern Anarchist. Western Review 3 (Winter 1966): 5862. An early examination of Abbeys philosophic and artistic radicalism. . Edward Abbey: Western Philosopher, or How to be a Happy Hopi Hippie. Western American Literature 9 (May 1974): 1731. A well-considered corrective to Pilkingtons earlier essay, from a perspective that considers later Abbey writings. Plummer, William. Edward Abbeys Desert Solecisms. TWA Ambassador (November 1982): 2936. A delightful introduction for the general reader and for the Abbey enthusiast. Ronald, Ann. Edward Abbey. In Fifty Western Writers, edited by Fred Erisman and Richard Etulain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. A biobibliographical consideration of Abbey as a western writer. . The New West of Edward Abbey. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. A book-length study of Abbeys fiction and non-fictionas romance, as environmental juxtapositions of the old West with the new, and as philosophic tests of man in his landscape. Standiford, Les. Desert Places: An Exchange with Edward Abbey. Western Humanities Review 24 (Autumn 1970): 39598. A transcription of an interview with a younger Edward Abbey. Wylder, Delbert E. Edward Abbey and the Power Elite. Western Review 6 (Winter 1969): 1822. An analysis of Fire on the Mountain and of Abbeys responses to military might.
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Larry McMurtry
N 1968, sensing that he was at a juncture in his career, Larry McMurtry paused from writing novels to publish a collection of essays entitled In a Narrow Grave. From 1961 to 1966 he had published three novels that comprise a rural trilogy. All are set in Thalia, a fictional town in Archer County, Texas, where McMurtry himself was born in 1936; all deal with the decreasing significance of such rural communities. Even though he confesses in In a Narrow Grave that he has no business setting a novel in a city, Texas or otherwise (p. 137), his next five books are city novels in which traditional cowboys and ranchers play only minor parts. In his essays, consequently, he not only eulogizes the passing of the cowboy and the god of the country; he also bids farewell to his fiction about the cowboy mythos (pp. xvixvii). A definite pattern emerges in these eight novels that reflects what McMurtry considers to be the significant feature of contemporary Texasand also the central fact of his own lifethe migration from homeplace to metropolis (p. xiv). In moving from the country to the city for his setting, McMurtry shifts from a frontier where the masculine ideals prevail to a suburbia that he considers to be female. As the frontier myth disappears from history into the celluloid of Hollywood films in his fiction, the new West becomes a womans place. In McMurtrys first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), the narrator Lonnie Bannon inherits from his grandfather Homer Bannon a love and respect for the homeplace and its rural values. To remind himself of the frontier days when these values were formed, Homer keeps on his ranch two longhorn steers and a Hereford bull. In the novel, Lonnie briefly experiences the frontier life that these animals symbolize on an early morning ride to Idiot Ridge. Exhilarated by the days beauty, Lonnie races his horse home and recovers unhurt from a hard fall at the corral, much to the admiration of the itinerant rodeo star Jesse, whom Lonnie idolizes. On this ride, Lonnie experiences the masculine ideals appropriate to a frontier that McMurtry describes in In a Narrow Grave: he has left the house to escape the sexual tensions of the household; on Idiot Ridge he experiences the Ride, and the sacramental relationship of man and horse; and he proves himself deserving of male admiration and friendship by enduring bone-grinding hardships (ING, xvii, 72, 27, 147). Lonnie also inherits the destructive aspects of the male mythos, em-
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bodied by his stepuncle, Hud. The traditional features of the cowboys culture become perverted in Huds modernized version: instead of escaping to the range on his horse, Hud escapes to the town in his Cadillac; instead of idealizing and then avoiding women, he exploits and rapes them. Huds rape of the black cook Halmea is a portentous scene for Lonnie. Horrified into inertness by the violence but also by the knowledge of his own sexual fantasies, Lonnie witnesses the ugly consequences of the cowboys creed. Symbolically, Hud also kills Homer soon after all the cattle on the ranch are killed to eradicate hoof and mouth disease. Losing the man he most admires, and unable to become Huds apprentice, Lonnie leaves the homeplace, apparently to become a homeless wanderer like Jesse. With this novel, McMurtry thus sets the theme that he finds characteristic of his fiction: the place where all my stories start is the heart faced suddenly with the loss of its country, its customary and legendary range (ING, 140). In McMurtrys second novel, Leaving Cheyenne (1963), the characters face this loss of their customary range from two perspectives: the male homeplace and the female household. The plot follows the lives of two cowboys and the woman they share in love, each of whom narrates a section of the story. Because Johnny McCloud remains the unencumbered cowboy his entire life, he plays a secondary role to Gid Fry and Molly Taylor, who experience both the love of home and the lonely homesickness that plague other McMurtry characters. Two storm scenes in this novel epitomize the differences between the male and female worlds of Gid and Molly. In the first section of the novel, Gid is caught in a severe hailstorm that he outlasts under his saddle. When he arrives home, his furious wife Mabel chides him for arriving late and for losing a Wards catalog. In the third part of the novel, when Gid retells this story to Johnny, he does not mention the quarrel. Instead, the event becomes a humorous and memorable recollection of the frontier mythos: leaving the house to escape his wife, Gid confronts physical danger and possible death alone with his horse. Thus, Gids story forms another bond between himself and Johnny; they represent the poles of frontier life, one as a hired cowboy and one as a respectable rancher. In the second section of the novel, Molly too must wait out a storm, but she has the comforts of a storm cellar where she snuggles in quilts and eats an apple. Isolated in the cellar, however, she is reminded how alone she is. As a nurturer, Molly has spent her entire life serving four men and two boys; she must now confront a future in which none of these men will need her as much as they needed her in the past. Although Gid experiences a loneliness similar to Mollys, he defines himself more by the work he does and his friendship to Johnny than by the women in his life. Molly has no other work than the domestic care of men and she has no female friendships. 613
By the time I wrote my second book, McMurtry says, I knew that to create memorable Texas women I would have to go well beyond what could be seen or sensed. The definition of themselves that Texas women had 1 agreed to live with was simply no good. Yet Mollys complete dependence on men makes her little different from the pioneer women who were victimized by their men in the rural Texas of McMurtrys youth. Although McMurtry liberates Molly from sexual conventions, she is physically and emotionally abused by the male characters. Recently McMurtry has acknowledged that Molly is not the strong Texas woman that he had thought her to be. He characterizes the love triangle between Gid, Molly, and Johnny as a male journalistic fancy, and he denounces Molly as easily the least legitimate of his Texas characters. As he confesses, Women dont 2 believe in her a minute. Of McMurtrys first three novels, The Last Picture Show (1966) contains the bleakest portrayal of the rural West. The central setting is now the town of Thalia rather than the countryside, Idiot Ridge becoming the site only for nostalgic picnics. Sam the Lion, the one character who maintains a primary love for the land akin to Homers and Gids, runs a pool hall that substitutes for the ranch homeplace. In this place where no women are allowed, Sam keeps a fatherly eye on the adolescent boys of the town who are otherwise homeless; but this place also becomes the setting of violence when the high school flirt Jacy Farrow is sexually victimized there. As in all of his novels, a combination of black humor and thankless sex evinces the dislocation and alienation of contemporary westerners. The concluding scenes of The Last Picture Show illustrate both the method by which McMurtry likes to write and the themes that he develops about Texas. He claims his stories begin in his imagination not with opening scenes but instead with culminating scenes. The closing of the movie house in Thalia symbolizes the dying of a homeplace. Not even the picture shows can salvage the old myth for the residents of rural Texas. A second culminating scene indicates the direction that McMurtrys fiction will take as he moves to urban settings in his next five novels. Sonny Crawford returns to Ruth Poppers kitchen, where they silently hold hands, facing an uncertain future. The wife of a latent homosexual who neglects her for the high school football team that he coaches, Ruth is the loneliest of McMurtrys domestic victims, lacking both the dignity and lucidity of Halmea and Molly. Yet her kitchen rather than Sams pool hall becomes a refuge for the adolescent who has lost his frontier myth. McMurtrys first three novels remain his most popular books, perhaps because all three have been produced as movies. Horseman, Pass By was produced as Hud in 1963, a movie McMurtry praises for correcting some of the faults of the story as he conceived it; The Last Picture Show was released 614
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in 1971, the screenplay written by McMurtry in collaboration with the director Peter Bogdanovich; and Leaving Cheyenne became Lovin Molly in 1973, a box office failure that McMurtry also dislikes. As a consequence of these movies, his first three novels have been reprinted several times and he has been praised for his realistic portrayals of rural Texas. Yet McMurtry himself disowns these novels, regarding them as products of an immature, adolescent vision. He particularly dislikes the adolescent male characters who form the centers of these novels. Instead, he prefers his female characters: One of my problems, he claims, is finding men worth having in the same book with my women. Women are always the most admirable charac3 ters in my novels. Finding his imagination to be no longer fed by the rural Texas of his boyhood, McMurtry paused for a final assessment of the frontier myth in In a Narrow Grave and then moved to a different setting in his next five novels. Moving On (1970) and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972) mark a significant change in theme and structure demanded by the new setting in the urban West. In contrast to the controlled narratives, the limited settings, and the small number of characters in the rural trilogy, these two novels are long and rambling, only loosely controlled through the points of view of the central characters who wander around the West looking for a home. In setting and character these novels often reflect McMurtrys own lifehis move from the country to the city; his graduate studies at Rice; his interest in rodeo; his fellowship year at Stanford; his early success as a writer; his fascination with movies. In Moving On McMurtry collects a bewildering set of charactersrodeo stars, Rice graduate students and faculty, California hippies and movie makerswho cross paths in an improbable dinner scene buried in the middle of the novel. All My Friends follows the same kaleidoscopic patterns, shifting in various bedroom scenes from Houston to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The differences in the novels arise primarily from the different genders of the main characters. In Moving On, the female wanderer Patsy Carpenter learns how to make a home in the city; in All My Friends, the male wanderer Danny Deck remains a homeless exile from both rural and urban Texas. Of Patsy, McMurtry says, She is selfish, snippy, and expectant, a mystery to herself and to her men; but when her men finally prove too stolid and inflexible, unable to respond when she tries to nudge their lives into 4 larger spiritual spaces, she does walk out. Although she handles adversity primarily through tearsMcMurtry describes her as snifflyshe develops a sense of value and stability that most of the other characters lack. Firmly rejecting Sonny Shanks, who is Hud reincarnated into a rodeo star, Patsy grows to love her husbands aging uncle Roger, the one Thalia rancher in the novel. When Roger dies, she inherits his ranch near Idiot Ridge but she 615
recognizes that Rogers rural life cannot be hers. Instead, she establishes a home in Houston for her son and a sister whom she has rescued from the San Francisco drug culture, a home that excludes all the men who have failed her. Unlike Halmea, Ruth, and Molly, whom McMurtry identifies as domestic victims, Patsy achieves independence from within the female world of the household. Danny Deck in All My Friends is happy only when he is sitting in the kitchen of Patsys best friend, Emma Horton, who is married to his best friend. This irony of fate characterizes all of Dannys experienceshe seems doomed to wander, excluded from both the male homeplace and the female household. Danny is a writer, and his career invites comparison to McMurtrys life: a Rice student, Danny publishes a novel entitled The Restless Grass that eventually becomes a movie as well. McMurtry claims to like Danny best of all his male characters because Danny is not a nave adolescent like Lonnie or Sonny. Nevertheless, Danny is no more successful at dealing with the loss of the rural male myth that he knows only through legend. In a second novel, not yet published, he idealizes the life of Granny Deck, a pioneer on Idiot Ridge whom he never knew. Uncle Laredo, his only living link to the mythic West, maintains a bizarre caricature of a ranch that Danny rejects. After wandering around California, Danny learns too late that he loves Houston and needs to make it his home. Made into a fugitive in this city by his in-laws, Danny drowns his second novel in the Rio Grande and disappears, ending his presence in McMurtrys novels with a legendary act that signals the end of the rural homeplace. In McMurtrys sixth novel, Terms of Endearment (1975), Houston becomes the central setting for an international cast of characters, a development McMurtry concludes was probably for the best because his imagi5 nation had been peopled exclusively by Texans for long enough. H e cannot resist including in this novel one Texas cowboy who expresses the western attitude toward women described in In a Narrow Grave: Women shook his confidence because it was a confidence based on knowing how to behave in a mans world, and even the West isnt entirely a mans world anymore (ING, 73). Though Vernon Dalhart effectively adapts a cowboys life to an urban setting by making his Cadillac a mobile headquarters for his oil empire, his failure to win Aurora Greenway causes him to long for the cowboys range. Vernons predicament capsulizes the problems of all the men in this novel. In the female world of Houston, McMurtry reverses the relationships of the sexes that he finds typical of rural Texasthe men are now mute dependents and like plants must be nurtured by their women. In the gallery of McMurtrys female characters, Aurora is Patsys successor. McMurtry likes her because she is wildly selfish, wildly irresponsible; crazy, demanding, kinky, arrogant, and yet, an extremely endearing 616
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and lovable woman. But she does not possess any of the virtues of a normal 6 wife and mother. Terms of Endearment begins where Moving On ends. Aurora has maintained a home for twenty-two years that consists of her house, her maid Rosie, and her daughter Emma. When her husband dies, leaving her with insufficient funds, she must face the loss of this household, an event as shattering to her identity as the loss of the rural homeplace is to the male identity. She eventually resolves the problem by choosing the least mute of her suitors for a permanent lover. Although she remains dependent on men, she is not the domestic victim that both Rosie and Emma become in their more conventional marriages. The final scene in this novel marks the ironic reversal of the frontier mythAurora and Patsy leave Emmas funeral to attend to the men and children. McMurtry is especially fond of Terms of Endearment and considers it to 7 be the most mature of his first seven novels. Hollywood also liked itthe highly successful film production was released in 198384 under the same title, starring Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine, and Debra Winger. McMurtrys long flirtation with the film industry led him to set his seventh novel in Hollywood. Both he and the critics now agree that Somebodys Darling (1978) is the weakest of his novels to that point. Although it is linked to McMurtrys urban novels by the California and Texas settings and by several major characters, McMurtry excludes it from his urban trilogy. In a review of his fiction, he identifies All My Friends and Terms of Endearment as books that an intelligent reader might want to read twice but 8 adds that he once again lost the knack by 1976. Returning to the threepart structure of Leaving Cheyenne, McMurtry succeeds best in Somebodys Darling in the part narrated by Joe Percy, an aging screenwriter who also appears in Moving On as a voice of irony and reason. Jill Peel, the woman whom Danny Deck came closest to loving and keeping, is another of McMurtrys strong female characters. But this novel lacks the depth of his Texas novels. McMurtry confesses that his characters do not speak authentically because he does not understand the California idiom. Moreover, none of these Hollywood characters faces the loss of a home that forms the emotional center of his previous novels. McMurtrys next novel, Cadillac Jack (1982), contains similar weaknesses, but this novel also proves his knack for storytelling. The setting this time is Washington, D.C., where McMurtry himself has been operating a bookstore since 1969; the political and social intrigues of some of his characters are, perhaps, no more convincing than the Hollywood scenes in Somebodys Darling. The strength of this novel lies in the main character, Jack, who narrates the entire story. Once a rodeo star, Jack has become what his friends think of as a self-made manhe is a scout for antique 617
collectors, traveling across America in a pearl-colored Cadillac to buy and sell a potpourri of the worlds antiques and collectibles, from Sung vases to Texas boots. The emotional core of the novel is his realization that he has no home. Like Danny Deck, he finds himself very comfortable in the kitchen of a thoroughly domestic woman, but she wisely parries his offers of marriage. In learning to accept himself as a perpetual wanderer, Jack becomes the most satisfying male character McMurtry had yet created, almost a match for his strong female characters. A brief comparison of this novel to his first two demonstrates the pattern of McMurtrys writing career thus far. Idiot Ridge and any corresponding nostalgia for the western landscape have disappeared from his novels in Cadillac Jack. Now the western past is represented by a cattle rancher who is a drug addict; the modern West is run by a network of female real estate agents who are directed by a powerful and dynamic woman living in the East. In his first two novels, lonely women are encircled and engulfed by men who both love and abuse them. Cadillac Jack is peopled largely by women, many of whom use and then discard the lonely men in their lives. Because of Jacks quiet acceptance of his fate, Cadillac Jack becomes the first McMurtry novel in which man and woman seem almost equal. McMurtrys two latest novels inspire me to use both limits of the superlative range to describe my responses. The Desert Rose (1983) is as bad a novel as he has written. Lonesome Dove (1985), on the other hand, is superb, a masterpiece in the genre of trail-driving novels. My faith in McMurtry through a score of years has certainly been justified by this promised book. I do like the premise of Desert Rose. Harmony, an aging chorus girl, hopes her talented daughter Pepper will choose a fuller, richer life for herself than the glamour of casino nights; but in adolescent rebellion, Pepper ignores her mothers advice. The flaw in Desert Rose reminds me of the weaknesses in Somebodys Darlingin both novels, the idioms of place and time somehow ring false. Like Hollywood, Las Vegas becomes nothing but the tinseltown it appears to be, and there is little to admire in either Harmonys naivete or Peppers greed. With little understanding of their fate, both women become victims of men who control womens lives. I like Lonesome Dove for a dozen reasons, one of which is the character Augustus McCrae. Gus views his world from an appealing perspective that is only hinted in previous novels by characters like Roger Waggoner and Sam the Lion. Gus is content, stable, confident, perceptive, sympathetic, ironican elder in the classic sense. It is important that the novel opens with his voice. At the other end of this massive book, a second voice of reason entersClara, the woman whom Gus has always wanted to marry, Clara, the head of a stable family. Other women in the novel, prostitutes 618
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mainly, often retreat into full silence in a victims attempt to preserve their lives. Together, Clara and Gus save them as much as they can; together, Clara and Gus are equal in their bringing perspective to the violence and loneliness of their world. McMurtrys fiction has been pointing to such equality for a long time. I also suspect that McMurtry has been able to create such powerfully attractive characters by lifting his setting out of the twentieth century into the past, where men and women can both be comfortable with the places they have created for themselves. Musing on the novelists craft in In a Narrow Grave, McMurtry offers his version of the metaphorical house of fiction, which suggests the pattern of his fiction. Home, he says, is the place where my characters live. I can never be quite sure whether home is a place or a form: The Novel, or Texas. In daily life the two become crucially but vaguely related, and it is difficult to say with precision where place stops supporting fiction and fiction starts embodying place (p. ix). In McMurtrys fiction, two places are embodied: the rural homeplace loved by the cowboy, and the household maintained by a maternal woman. The homeplace has mythic force in McMurtrys conception, but it is also a feature of the past. Without a myth by which to identify themselves, McMurtrys male characters have limited choices: they can disappear, like Danny Deck; they can invert the myth to violent and perverted ends, like Hud or Sonny Shanks; or they can learn to accept temporary homes, like Sonny Crawford and Cadillac Jack. In the modern, urban West, McMurtry suggests, women are the powerful characters because they have learned to create homes without the support of a myth.
JANE N ELSON , University
of Wyoming
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Notes
1. Unfinished Women, Texas Monthly 5 (May 1977): 106. 2. Approaching Cheyenne . . . Leaving Lumet. Oh, Pshaw! New York 7 (29 April 1974): 66; Unfinished Women, p. 166. 3. Patrick Bennett, Larry McMurtry: Thalia, Houston, and Hollywood, in Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980), p. 28. 4. Unfinished Women, p. 166. 5. The Texas Moon, and Elsewhere, Atlantic Monthly 235 (March 1975): 34. 6. Charles D. Peavy, Larry McMurtry (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), p. 74. 7. Bennett, p. 34. 8. Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature, The Texas Observer, 23 October 1981, p. 17.
Primary Sources All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. Cadillac Jack. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. The Desert Rose: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. Horseman, Pass By. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Austin: Encino Press, 1968. The Last Picture Show. New York: Dial Press, 1966. Leaving Cheyenne. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Moving On. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Somebodys Darling. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. Terms of Endearment. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. Secondary Sources Ahearn, Kerry. More DUrban: The Texas Novels of Larry McMurtry. Texas Quarterly 19 (Autumn 1976): 109129. Examining both style and theme, Ahearn concludes that Horseman, Pass By remains McMurtrys best novel, his fiction progressively degenerating since this first novel. Landess, Thomas. Larry McMurtry. Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn, 1969. A wellwritten, often unkind but not always unjust evaluation of the authors early career. Morrow, Patrick D. Larry McMurtry: The First Phase. In Louis Filler, ed., Seasoned Authors for a New Season: The Search for Standards in Popular Writing (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1980), pp. 7082. Morrow reviews the strengths of Hud and The Last Picture Show from the perspective of McMur-
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trys having written two trilogies. Morrow finds the second trilogy to be a firstrate group of serious novels. Neinstein, Raymond L. The Ghost Country: A Study of the Novels of Larry McMurtry. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts, 1976. Neinstein finds displacement to be a central concern of McMurtrys first five novels. In what Neinstein calls a neoregionalism, McMurtrys characters replace the actual land with a country of the heart, an imaginary, fictive place. Peavy, Charles D. Larry McMurtry. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Peavy identifies four major themes in McMurtrys novels: initiation, loneliness, ephemerality, and marriage. He finds the female characters to be stronger than the male characters, and concludes that McMurtrys urban Westerns represent his greatest contribution to contemporary Western literature. Phillips, Raymond C., Jr. The Ranch as Place and Symbol in the Novels of Larry McMurtry. South Dakota Review 13 (Summer 1975): 2745. The ranch represents a stationary vortex, a cluster of values, about which everything moves. It is home, the place to revere, the place to protect, to flee from, to return to. Stout, Janis P. Journeying as a Metaphor for Cultural Loss in the Novels of Larry McMurtry. Western American Literature 11 (Spring 1976): 3750. Stout identifies three stages in the development of journeying in McMurtrys novels: the journey as an adventure or an experience; the journey as an alternative to an unsatisfactory life; and the journey as a metaphor of modern life itself.
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The Southern Border

DUAL SPIRIT and a bilingual expression of that spirits responses to people, life and the land along both sides of the Rio Grande have created the significant literature of the borderlands of the Southwest. Those writers who possess such a spirit are those who have spent enough of their lifeoften most of itassimilating the Anglo-Mexican cultural blend which became inevitable when Spanish conquistadores marched onto Mexican soil and Anglo settlers came to Virginia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So unique and thorough is this cultural synthesis that a talented Ohioan educated at Kenyon College could come as a young man to El Paso to live and write, take his Mexican wifes name and designate his birthplace as Parral, Chihuahua, and ultimately have his work included in anthologies devoted to Chicano writing. Known as Amado Muro to those who admired 1 his short stories and sketches of Mexican life, Chester Seltzer established his credibility as a Mexican-American writer with critics through sensitive revelation of Mexican personality and culture. Only his close friends knew that Muro was Anglo until after his death in 1971. A complex people with an intricate culture, border Mexicans and Anglos share historically a love of open spaces, an attachment to the arid land along the great river and deserts forming that border, and the endurance required to survive in that isolated and often inhospitable country. Anglos and Mexicans along the Rio Grande and the southern border of the Southwest have been allies fighting common adversaries. They have battled each other. They have married each other. They have hated and loved, detested and admired each other. Loyal friendships between Mexican and Anglo have lasted lifetimes. But duality of understanding has all too often given way to duplicity of character, and traitors on both sides have not been uncommon. Both peoples have considered themselves to be rightful inheritors of the brushy ranchlands between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, and both have battled Native Americans who claimed that land first. Equally interesting to Anglo adventurers in the early nineteenth century was the Pacific end of the southern border, occupied by Spanish hidalgos, Franciscan mission fathers and subservient Indians. Human life was scarce along the borderlands stretching from the Rio Grande along arid desert lands, over rough mountain ranges and through formidable Apache territory to this western Spanish settlement of southern California. Neverthe-
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less, by ship around South America, Anglos came to trade with the Indians for sea otter hides and with the missions and Spanish cattle raisers for the hides and tallow of their longhorned cattle. Mountain men drifted west across the desert in search of beaver as they depleted their sources in the Rockies. Cattlemen began to encroach upon land the Spanish claimed as soon as America won the Mexican War. Merchants and farmers looking for a new start arrived. Here, too, between races, culture took on the coloring of both gringo and Mexican, who were connected by both place and their humanity, whether they wished to be or not. Paradoxes and ambiguities developed in racial relationships along the California southern border as they did along the Rio Grande. However, despite its remoteness and risks encountered by its explorers and would-be settlersor more likely, because of those realitiesthe border country of the Southwest has been a romantic land from the beginning to those who wrote about it. At first came the chroniclers of the first journeys across those spaces. The Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca, with three companions, traversed the Texas Big Bend area and crossed the Rio Grande some time between 1528 and 1536. Although his is a realistic account of the primitive Indians life, the wildlife and the terrain, in La Relacin (1542) Cabeza de Vaca also describes how the Indians considered him to be a healer and his apparently satisfactory fulfillment of the role. Consequently, this early narrative, invaluable to historians, has also fueled creative imaginations. Two notable works inspired by La Relacin are Morris Bishops Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca (1933), an imaginative retelling of the story, and Haniel Longs Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca (1936), an exploration of the mystery of the explorers healing powers. Several decades after Cabeza de Vacas narrative appeared, Don Juan de Oate crossed the borderlands from south to north in 1598 on his way from Chihuahua to colonize New Mexico. One of his lieutenants, Gaspar Perez de Villagr, a man of action who also fancied himself a poet, described in verse Oates career as a colonizer. Of little literary value as poetry, Villagrs History of New Mexico (1610) intrigues historians with its eyewitness reporting of initial Spanish-Indian confrontations and compromises along the Rio Grande. Coping with setbacks, including a major revolt of Pueblo Indians in 1680, Spanish pioneers continued to settle along the river for the next two centuries. When surviving Spaniards fled from the Santa Fe area during the uprising, they found refuge in the El Paso area where settlements had already been established. It was yet another century, however, before AngloAmericans began to chase mustangs across Texas and covet the territory. During the nineteenth century, the writers who responded to borderland experience most often recorded highlights of journeys across this land. 623
Often the chroniclers were participants in forced marches to Mexico, initiated by Spaniards who resented the Anglo incursion into land they claimed on both sides of the great river. Ellis Bean, a member of Philip Nolans illfated horse-huntingand probably filibusteringventure to the Brazos in 1800, wrote one of the first prisoner narratives. His Memoir was published in 1856. When Texas Republic president Mirabeau Lamar stubbornly commissioned the Texas-Santa Fe Expedition in 1841, an astute young journalist went along to report what he first believed to be a trading mission. George Wilkins Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune soon perceived that Lamar had grandiose plans to annex New Mexico to his republic. Kendall records with a sense of the newsworthy the hardships the imprisoned members of the party suffered on their march to Mexico in his Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition (1844). In 1842, one other ill-advised effort to invade Mexico resulted in Thomas Jefferson Greens Journal of the Texian Expedition Against Mier (1845), which relates the dramatic story of the drawing of black beans to determine which prisoners would be shot. To supplement these valuable historical sources, writers turn also to travelers and Texas Rangers accounts for knowledge of Rio Grande and other southern border settlement. Early California and southwestern life is recorded by James O. Pattie, a young Kentucky mountain man who wandered after much hardship into San Diego in 1827 with his father and a party of trappers. After six years as a traveler across southwestern borderlands, Pattie published an account of his adventures in 1831. Edited by Timothy Flint, The Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky describes in detail the border life he had observed. A young bride, Susan Shelby Magoffin, had the foresight to keep a diary on her trip down the Santa Fe Trail with her trader husband in 184647. For a month in early 1847, as the Mexican War heated up, the couple awaited word in El Paso from Doniphans and Taylors troops that passage down the river into Chihuahua was safe. Susan was impressed with her El Paso Spanish hosts learning and good manners. Of one family she said: The more I see of this family the more I like them, they are so kind and attentive, so desirous to make us at ease, so anxious for our welfare in the disturbances of the country. I cant help loving them. The old gentleman remarked at breakfast this morning, that he sympathized . . . much with me in the troubles, dangers, and difficulties I have been in, those I am now in, and those I may be in, but with all he says I am learning a lesson that not one 2 could have taught me but experience, the ways of the world.
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As she traveled down the river, Susans diary entries increasingly included Spanish words and phrases and she marveled at the friendliness of the El Paso inhabitants while just across the river their countrymen were in combat with U.S. troops. Her understanding broadened and she voiced emotional ambiguities that border people were to feel during U.S.-Mexican confronta3 tions at the border thereafter. What life was like for a woman at a desolate lower Colorado River army post and on other assignments across the Southwest between 1875 and 1890 was narrated by Martha Summerhayes in Vanished Arizona: Recollections of the Army Life of a New England Woman (1911). The author revealed herself to be a survivor, who conquered fear of spaces and of Indians and endured much physical hardship. She related graphically what she had seen and recorded in her diary of borderland life. Organized late in 1835 to protect the Texas frontiersman along the Trinity and Brazos Rivers from predatory Indians, the Texas Rangers moved westward with settlers, who were prey to outlaws as often as Indians. One of the best Ranger memoirs is Six Years with the Texas Rangers, 18751881 (1921), by James B. Gillett, who records with colorful detail the last battles with the Apaches along the border, as well as numerous confrontations with frontier badmen, both Anglo and Mexican. The legendary Big Foot Wallaces border experiences were recorded by fellow Texas Ranger John C. Duval and published in the biography, The Adventures of Big Foot Wallace (1871). Around the turn of the twentieth century, journalists flocked to southern California for adventure or for their health and developed a great affinity for the vast deserts of the Southwest. Life and lore of the Indians, natural life, the Colorado River and the colorful landscape furnished material for John C. Van Dykes The Desert (1904) and George Wharton Jamess The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (1906) and Arizona the Wonderland (1917). Both reporters tend to rhapsodize as they present the desert landscape from the romantics perspective; both, however, convey comprehensive information about desert Indian customs, nature and the Spanish California culture of their time. More realistic are the works of journalist and artist J. Ross Browne. Adventures in the Apache Country, published in 1869, is Brownes account of a four-month excursion into the Arizona territory with the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1863. First published in Harpers and illustrated by the author, this collection of articles is an astute observers portrayal of the home of the Apache in southern Arizona and in Sonora, Mexico. Perhaps the best-known journalist of this period in southern California was Charles F. Lummis, who, more than the others, consciously developed the duality of personality native borderlanders seemed to possess. He had
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lived with the Indians at Isleta, southernmost pueblo on the Rio Grande, and fancied himself more native than most other Anglo southwesterners. His most worthy contribution to border literature is The Land of Poco Tiempo (1893), in which he chronicles the life and lore of the New Mexico Indians, including a compassionate eye-witness account of the chilling rituals of Los Hermanos Penitentes. Perhaps Lummiss most worthy contribution to literary effort along the southern border was his diligent editorship of the southern California magazine, Land of Sunshine, first called Out West, for ten years at the turn of the century. Eugene Manlove Rhodes and Mary Austin were frequent contributors. It was Mary Austin who produced the book that critics often refer to as a classic treatment of the border desert land. In The Land of Little Rain (1903)and later in The Land of Journeys Ending (road)this transplanted midwesterner who had found southern California and New Mexico to be her natural habitat conveys the history, the native culture and a sense of the land. Because the nineteenth century was an era requiring action along the borderlands, there was little time for creative response to the conflicts ignited by the merging Indian-Mexican-Anglo cultures. But those who did write first-hand accounts of border life left rich materials for twentieth-century creative imaginations, particularly those of historians. Walter Prescott Webbs The Texas Rangers (1935) is a recreation of border life as well as the story of Texass famousand sometimes infamouspeace-keeping organization. In poetic prose, Paul Horgan traces the epic history of the Rio Grande and the people who depend upon that winding life-giving source in his Pulitzer Prize-winning study, Great River (1954). With equally serious intent and results, in The King Ranch (1957) Tom Lea narrates the history of the vast South Texas ranch, which spreads across the brushy southern tip of Texas from near Corpus Christi almost to Brownsville. The romance of early Texas ranching, the adventures of the Texas Rangers and border relationships are all captured in Leas narrative. The colorful history of the California ranchers from 1850 to 1880 when they drove cattle to the gold fields from southern California up the coast or the San Joaquin Valley, before Texans headed herds toward Kansas, is related by Robert Glass Cleland in The Cattle of a Thousand Hills (1951). Still another historian, C. L. Sonnichsen, recounts the violent and often tragic history of the Apache Indians. In The Mescalero Apaches (1958), Sonnichsen writes forcefully, from the Indians point of view, a history which echoes the saga of all Plains Indians. By the late 1800s, fiction writers also began to recognize the multiplicity of border materials available for creative shaping. Both O. Henry and Stephen Crane wrote short stories set in this land after brief encounters with it. A sojourn on a sheep ranch during his Texas years furnished 626
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O. Henry with setting and characters for stories like The Pimienta Pan4 cakes, but there is no sense of place in these stories with their tricky plots and humorous repartee. Cranes six-month trek across South Texas and into Mexico resulted in several stories with more serious themes but conveying as little sense of border life as O. Henrys. The climactic events of the much-anthologized The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky take place in sight of the Rio Grande, but place here is of little significance except that it is in the 5 West. Easterner Alfred Henry Lewis, who in his youth had cowboyed in the West, created the Old Cattleman, who in Wolfville (1897) and six subsequent volumes narrates tales of the people and the life in Wolfville, a town closely akin to Tombstone, Arizona. Wolfville emerges through the narrators eyes as a town where citizens and drifters alike observe the Gods of the Old West or perish. Humor tempers the violence and the racial bias in Lewiss fiction. Writers who finally began to convey the richness of border experience were those who knew the life because they lived there. The folklore and life of border people caught twentieth-century imaginations. Of the many books J. Frank Dobie left to inform and to entertain Texas aficionados, several focus particularly on borderland tales. His first book is based on reminiscences of an early cowboy, John Young. Biography, history and tall tale, A Vaquero of the Brush Country (1929) makes clear how much the Texas cowboy owes to his Mexican counterpart for techniques, equipment and colorful language. In 1930, Dobie collected tales of lost mines and buried treasures in Coronados Children. In its preface, Dobie says that the tales are an outgrowth; they embody the geniuses of divergent races and peoples who 6 even while fiercely opposing each other blended traditions. Dobie records more buried treasure tales in Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver (1939). In Tongues of the Monte (1935), Dobies observations and tales are an intimate introduction to folk life of the border. Other folklore collectors have found satisfaction enough in retelling 7 the tales they collect as Dobie did, but borderland life and vaqueros tales have also intrigued fiction writers. Certain themes are implicit in these materials: exploitation of the peon by both rich Mexicans and materialistic Anglos; racial prejudice and its tragic effect on Anglo-Mexican friendships and love affairs; the intestinal fortitude of the hardy, stubborn Anglo pioneers, who stuck it out until railroads brought technology to El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley and to southern California and rewarded visionaries with prosperity. Some of the best fiction explores the universal significance of ruins along the border which suggest the fates of all westering Americans who came to the frontier and could not or would not stay. Frank Goodwyn, who grew up cowboying in the South Texas brush country, is one of the best at translating the tales of the vaqueros into En627
glish while preserving the cadence and the idiom of their speech. Although his gifts as a fiction writer are limited, he bases two novels upon campfire and barroom story sessions. The Magic of Limping John (1944) expands the legend of the Mexican fiddler who cannot cope finally with his friends belief that he is a wizard. When he begins to believe in his own magic powers also, the trouble begins. In The Black Bull (1958), Goodwyn tells the tale of a poetic young Mexican cowboy, obsessed with catching the clever El Toro Moro. The vaquero cannot, after all, bring himself to hold the black bull captive after conquering him. Such gallantry leads to the vaqueros tragic end. Authentic conveyance of the border Mexicans superstitions and stories in the vaqueros idiom is Goodwyns accomplishment. It is another Anglo with a similar background who shapes these materials into a literary effort. John Houghton Allens Southwest (1952) gathers under one title essays and short stories, often poetic in rhythm and intent. The loosely connected chapters depict the land, the people, and the complicated relationships of Anglo-Mexicans through the eyes of a narrator who sees in the crumbling, degraded present the grandeur of times past. Allen lacks discipline in structuring his often powerful but uneven poetic prose. Paul Horgan treats the same theme more artistically in his series of short stories, The Return of the Weed (1936). Horgan does not succumb to nostalgia for old times as does Allen, but explores with sensitivity what life might have been in these abandoned places of human passage, which he says are monuments to audacities long-gone and poor judgments, the al8 most inscrutable remains of aspiration wedded to tragedy. It is this aspiration which often met with tragic setbacks in border pioneer life that inspired Cleo Dawson to plot a novel around the life of her gutsy mother, whose forceful personality and pragmatic acceptance of her hard life contributed largely to the settlement of Mission, Texas. She is Willy in Dawsons She Came to the Valley (1943). The early ranchers life along the Arizona-Sonora border furnished both Stewart Edward White and Ross Santee with material for fiction. White, who spent a relatively short while as a cowboy on an Arizona ranch, records tales and sketches inspired by the experience in Arizona Nights (1907) and The Killer (1919), Santee, an artist before he was a writer, punched cows and wrangled horses around Globe for several years. Of the more than a dozen books which he wrote and illustrated, among his betterknown works are Men and Horses (1926), a collection of stories and sketches about ranch life in Gila County, and Cowboy (1928), a narration of the evolution of a cowboy. One of the first novelists to explore border cultural conflicts in fiction was Helen Hunt Jackson. First published in 1884, Ramona, Jacksons ro628
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manticized tale of the tragic marriage of a half-breed girl raised as a Spaniard and the Indian Alessandro, became a best seller immediately. Whatever its value as a literary effortand some say it is more sermon than novelthe book aroused much interest in Anglo treatment of the Indian and exploitation of the Spanish in southern California. Social problems erupting in this century from river-border racial mixing are the themes of Claud Garners and Hart Stilwells fiction. Garner, himself a citrus grower, writes sympathetically of the illegal-alien problem in Wetback (1947). Presented from the point of view of Dionesio, a young peon with ambition for a better future, the novel presents with compassion a problem not yet solved along the southern border of the Southwest. Stilwells Border City (1945) reveals heartache and tragedy inevitable in an Anglo-Mexican love affair between an idealistic newspaperman and a Mexican girl whom he champions after she is assaulted by her employer, a Border City politician. Stilwells Uncovered Wagon (1947) is the story of a familys settlement in the Valley with emphasis on the enigmatic character of the protagonist Old Man. These lesser literary efforts contribute to an understanding of the complexities of Anglo-Mexican integration along the borderlands. It remains for another native son to synthesize lore, life and history of this spacious land into art. Tom Lea of El Paso depicts border life both in his paintings and his novels. Illustrator of southwestern booksoften in collaboration with fellow El Pasoan Carl Hertzog, master book designerand muralist of note, Lea became a novelist at age forty when his painting no longer seemed spacious enough to convey the dimensions and universal concerns of the border life he knew so well. Leas novels depict three eras of Anglo-Indian-Spanish interaction. The Hands of Cantu (1964), which resulted from the writers intensive digging into the history of the Spanish-Barbary horse, narrates a seventeenthcentury Spanish ranchers pursuit of a prized horse herd which has fallen into the hands of an Indian tribe in the Big Bend country. When The Brave Bulls was published (1949), Spaniards praised it for its powerful and sensitive examination of bull fighting. Published in nine languages finally, Leas knowledgeable explanation of the mystique of bull fighting develops the theme of the fear of death. The torero Luis Bello conquers this fear when he accepts death as inevitable. Leas best novel, and the best to date of all fiction created from materials of border life, is The Wonderful Country (1952). Carefully crafted and authentic in detail, the narrative embodies in the character of Martin Brady-Martn Bredi the dilemmas and the problems inherent in Tex-Mex culture, even today. It is the late 1800s, and Brady, born a Texan but reared by the Mexican peasant Mateo Casas, feels the pull of his Anglo roots al629
though he thinks in Spanish, looks Mexican, and loves his Mexican family. His search for who he really is takes him twice from the deserts and mountains of Chihuahua and Sonora to the Rio Grande and El Paso (Puerto in the novel). Cavalrymen, lawmen, Texas Rangers, capitalists, outlaws, Apaches, frontier women, and Mexican revolutionaries all play roles in the drama of Bradys quest astride his magnificent horse Lgrimas. Lea sums up the wisdom and insight he reveals in this novel when he says: It has always seemed to me that I was fortunate in being born on the border in a town where two nations and two peoples meet, where more than one mode of life and one mode of thought are in constant confrontation to test and to broaden and to deepen ones view of the world. At Paso del Norte I believe men are reminded daily that human beings do not all speak one tongue, all share in one fine set of aims and ideals, all conform to one established pattern of conduct, or all accept one definition of the good life or the 9 bad or the purpose of it. Leas novels, deservedly, were nationally appraised by critics when they appeared. Other border writers, however, have received scant attention. Since 1960, literary treatment of the borderland has been limited. Most readable contemporary works are the short stories of Amado Muro 10 and the sharply drawn El Paso vignettes of Elroy Bode. In the 1960s, when interest in Mexican-American creative writers accelerated, depictions of Mexican life by Amado Muro were often praised and anthologized in collections of Chicano literary efforts. Mexicans in Muros stories and sketches are seldom born in elegant diapers.Often in first person, Muro relates the lives and the lore of the Mexican peasant. The humor in the tale of the wily Pedro, the swineherd whom neither the Devil nor the Lord can handle; the compassion in the stories about Uncle Rodolfo, the burly Chihuahuan who cares about people; and the sensitive portrayal of young Amado, whose family laughs at his efforts to grow upthese and numerous other stories of Mexican life as well as those of hobos on the Southern Pacific line won Amado Muro publication in major journals and citations for distinction as a short story writer. However, Amado Muro, the man in the flesh, was invisible. It was another El Pasoan, Elroy Bode, also a writer of sketches and stories of border experience, whose admiration of Muro and curiosity led him to discover that a Chicano writer named Muro never existed. Amado Muro was really Chester Seltzer, Kenyon College educated and son of Louis B. Seltzer, editor of the Cleveland Press for a number of years. When Seltzer
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was not riding the rails, he lived in El Paso with his Mexican wife and his two sons, where he died suddenly in 1971. It was not until 1977 that The Collected Stories of Amado Muro was published. Elroy Bode, who uncovered Muros identity, is an El Paso schoolteacher who has had five volumes of his sketches, observations and stories published since 1967. His most recent book, To Be Alive (1979), won the C. L. Sonnichsen Publication Award. Describing the El Paso he has absorbed as pedestrian and observer on both sides of the river, Bodes sketches convey a feel for both the life and the people of modern border experience. Self-critical of his inability to write fiction, Bode at this point has abundant materials but not yet the inspiration to produce the structured, forceful story which would drive home the truths he so often explores in his sketchbook philosophical meandering. Both Muro and Bode more than any other Anglos reveal the bilingual understanding of the Tex-Mex life that border Chicano writers have begun to insist upon. In the last two decades, Mexican-American writers have begun to gain critical attention. Reared on the border listening to old men who sat around summer nights . . . smoking their cornhusk cigarettes and talking in low, gentle voices about violent things, as Amrico Paredes describes his childhood in the dedication to With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), these writers more than any before them exhibit the duality the border experience fosters. Those Chicanos who write best have been propelled steadily from their Mexican heritage into the world of the American educator. Most have doctorates; most are or have been professors in American schools. Liberated economically perhaps from their heritage but never in spirit, folklorist Paredes, fiction writers Rolando Hinojosa and Toms Rivera, and the poet Alurista convey what it is like to be a member of a Mexicano migrant worker family in an Anglo world. Paredess interest has been in the border Mexican ballads or corridos, the narrative folk songs border Mexicans have composed to relate border conflicts and migrant woes since the mid-nineteenth century. Mexican heroes in these songs often outwit Anglo lawmen, but with reason, because they have been victimized by the Anglo establishment. Often the protagonist finally meets an ignominious death, but he dies a hero, never to be forgotten. In Texas, epic-makers in Spanish verse sing of Gregorio Cortez, who avenges his brothers murder by a trigger-happy sheriff by in turn killing the lawman and eluding Texas Rangers as he runs for the border. Equally heroic and similar in character to the border corrido composer has been the southern Californian outlaw, Joaqun Murieta, who became legendary as a bandit rebel against Anglo exploitation in the California-Sonora border country.
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Texans Hinojosa and Rivera have each written of Mexican experience more in anecdotal and sketch form than in strongly structured stories, but both have produced critically acclaimed collections. Hinojosa, whose mother is Anglo, has written three books. Critics describe them as closely related narratives, but Hinojosa insists that these are novels, albeit somewhat experimental in form. His novels include Estampas del vale y otras obras (1973), Generaciones y semblanzas (1977), and Klail City y sus alrededores (1976). Riveras novel . . . y no se lo trag la tierra (1971) is a loosely structured collection of tales and vignettes which give insight into the Chicano farm workers life. The most competent Chicano novelist to date is Rudolfo Anaya, a New Mexican, whose first novel Bless Me, Ultima (1972), portrays Mexican families of southeastern New Mexico. Roots of these families are deep in the Llano Estacado. Anayas advantage over other Chicano writers is that he is the most able in separating his art from political and social concerns. The southern Californian Alurista is an innovative writer stylistically. His poetry, collected in three volumes, includes the critically praised Floricanto en Aztln (1971). Alurista conveys his artistic vision in a poetic version of the interlingual speech of border Mexicans, known along the Rio Grande as Tex-Mex. As with earlier writers, these observers and participants in border relationships possess the duality of personality that sensitive border inhabitants develop as their understanding of people and knowledge of languages grow. Nevertheless, the wealth of traditions and history of this region are as yet only surface-mined. The materials await another writer with Tom Leas insight into border character and the ability to explore the universals of human experience in the context of this rich territory.
L OU R ODENBERGER ,
McMurry College
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Notes
1. The Collected Stories of Amado Muro (Austin: Thorp Springs Press, 1979). 2. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926), p. 207. 3. Nineteenth-century border life from a womans point of view is narrated by Cora Montgomery (Mrs. W. L. Cazneau) in In Eagle Pass; or Life on the Border (New York: George Putnam, 1852), and Mrs. Egbert Viele in Following the Drums (Philadelphia: T. B. Putnam, 1864). 4. See Heart of the West in The Complete Works of O. Henry (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1937). Most of O. Henrys western stories are in this collection, although the story J. Frank Dobie nominates as the best range story in American fiction, The Last of the Troubadours, appears in Sixes and Sevens. 5. See The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1970), Vol. V, pp. 109120. 6. Coronado's Children (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930), p. v. 7. See Elton Miles, Tales of the Big Bend (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1976). 8. Argument, The Return of the Weed (New York: Harper, 1968), p. 3. 9. A Picture Gallery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. 137. 10. See Texas Sketch Book, 1967; Sketch Book II, 1972; Alone in the World Looking, 1973; Home and Other Moments, 1975; and To Be Alive, 1979; all published by Texas Western Press, El Paso. 11. See With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958).
Allen, John Houghton. Southwest. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1952. New edition, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977. Alurista. Floricanto en Aztln. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center of UCLA, 1971. Anaya, Rudolfo A. Bless Me, Ultima. Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1972. Austin, Mary. The Land of Journeys Ending. New York: Century, 1924. . The Land of Little Rain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. Bean, Ellis. Memoir. Dallas: Book Club of Texas, 1930. Originally published 1856. Bishop, Morris. Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca. New York: Century, 1933. Bode, Elroy, Alone in the World Looking. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1973. . Home and Other Moments. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1975. . Sketchbook II: Portraits in Nostalgia.. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1972. . Texas Sketchbook. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1967. . To Be Alive. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1979.
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A Literary History of the American West Browne, J. Ross. Adventures in the Apache Country: A Tour Through Arizona and Sonora. New York: Harper, 1869. Cabeza de Vaca, lvar Nez. The Narrative of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. Edited by F. W. Hodge. New York: Scribners, 1907. Cleland, Robert Glass. The Cattle on a Thousand Hills. San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1951. Crane, Stephen. The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane. Edited by Fredson Bowers. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1970. Dawson, Cleo. She Came to the Valley. New York: Morrow, 1943. New edition, Austin: Jenkins, 1972. Dobie, J. Frank. Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. New York: Little, Brown, 1939. . Coronados Children. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973. . Tongues of the Monte. New York: Little, Brown, 1947. . A Vaquero of the Brush Country. New York: Little, Brown, 1957. Duval, John C. The Adventures of Big Foot Wallace. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. Garner, Claud. Wetback. New York: Coward-McCann, 1947. Gillett, James B. Six Years with the Texas Rangers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. New edition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976. Goodwyn, Frank. The Black Bull. New York: Doubleday, 1958. . The Magic of Limping John. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944. Green, Thomas Jefferson. Journal of the Texian Expedition Against Mier. New York: Harper, 1845. Facsimile reproduction, Austin: Steck, 1935. Hinojosa, Rolando R. Estampas del valle y otras obras. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1973. Horgan, Paul. Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History. 2 volumes. New York: Rinehart, 1954. . The Return of the Weed. New York: Harper, 1936. Reprint, Flagstaff, Arizona: Northland Press, 1980. Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. James, George Wharton. Arizona the Wonderland. Boston: Page, 1917. . The Wonders of the Colorado Desert. Boston: Little, Brown, 1906. Kendell, George Wilkins. Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition. New York: Harper, 1884. Reprint, Austin: Steck, 1935. Lea, Tom. The Brave Bulls. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949. . The Hands of Cantu. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. . A Picture Gallery. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968. . The Wonderful Country. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952. Lewis, Alfred Henry. Wolfvile. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1897. Long, Haniel. Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca. Santa Fe: Writers Editions, 1936. Reprint, Pittsburgh: Frontier Press, 1969. Lummis, Charles F. The Land of Poco Tiempo. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1928.
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Magoffin, Susan Shelby. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, 18461847. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926. New edition, 1962. Facsimile reproduction, Santa Fe: William Gannon, 1975. Muro, Amado. The Collected Stories of Amado Muro. Austin: Thorp Springs Press, 1979. O. Henry. The Complete Works of O. Henry. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Co., 1937. Pattie, James O. The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky. Edited by Timothy Flint. Cincinnati: E. Flint, 1831. Rivera, Toms. . . . y no se lo trag la tierra. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1971. Santee, Ross. Cowboy. New York: Cosmopolitan, 1928. . Men and Horses. New York: Century, 1926. Sonnichsen, C. L. The Mescalero Apaches. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. Stilwell, Hart. Border City. New York: Doubleday, 1945. . Uncovered Wagon. New York: Doubleday, 1947. Summerhayes, Martha. Vanished Arizona: Recollections of the Army Life of a New England woman. Glorieta, New Mexico: Rio Grande Press, 1970. Originally published in 1911. Van Dyke, John C. The Desert. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1915. Villagr, Gaspar Prez de. History of New Mexico. 1610. Translated by Gilberto Espinoso. Los Angeles: The Quivera Society, 1933. Webb, Walter Prescott. The Texas Rangers. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974. White, Stewart Edward. Arizona Nights. New York: McClure and Outing, 1907. . The Killer. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1919.
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SECTION III
The Midwest
Introduction
The American mind will be brought to maturity along the chain of the great lakes, the banks of the Mississippi, the Missouri, and their tributaries in the far northwest. There on the rolling plains will be formed a republic of letters which, not governed like that on our seaboard by the great literary powers of Europe, shall be free indeed. J. Milton Mackie in Putnams Monthly 1 Magazine in 1854
CONFUSED ENGLISHMAN once reported after a tour of the United States that nobody quite knows what the Middle West is. Even geographers differ on which states should be designated as part of the region. To some, Ohio is in the Midwest; to others it is in the East. One problem is the lack of distinctive topographical boundaries. Another is demographic change. At one time the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains were considered the eastern and western limits of the central states, but as the heartland became settled its outline shrank so that western Pennsylvania and eastern Colorado could no longer be considered part of the Midwest. Of course ultimately the northern and western boundaries of the Midwest could be fixed with some ease, by the Canadian border and the 98th meridian, the point at which aridity increases markedly and the floor of the prairie changes from long to short grass. But even today the eastern and southern boundaries must be fixed arbitrarily. For purposes of this literary history, most of the emphasis will be on writings about Nebraska, Kansas, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Though there is topographical variety within them, these states share the most prominent feature of the inland empire: the broad, rolling plains, which before the coming of the white man were a vast, almost treeless grassland two million square miles in extent. This remarkable physical feature, the most eloquent symbol of space and unity in 2 America has had a profound effect on those who originally lived in it and
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their descendants and those who later came to it. And it is those writers who celebrated or deprecated the plains and the lives of the women and men who lived there that these chapters are concerned with. Determining which authors properly can be called midwestern is a formidable task. An impressive number of distinguished twentieth-century writers were born in the region but not all of them stayed nor did they write, to any important degree, about their native region. Representative examples are F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who wrote a few things about childhood experiences in Minnesota and Michigan, but the bulk of whose work is set elsewhere and deals with themes apart from the West. Similarly, the work of Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, authors sometimes associated with the Midwest, as a whole looks away from such distinctive themes as the coming of the pioneer and farm life. And then there are writers like John Dos Passos and T. S. Eliot, born in the Midwest, but with even less claim than Fitzgerald and Hemingway to the title midwestern. They are not dealt with here. Nor does this study include any discussion of Chicago as an important literary center. The so-called literary renaissance that took place in the midwestern metropolis in the late nineteenth century is certainly germane to the development of American literature in general, but not necessarily to that of the West. Though the editors did not consciously do so, they might well have followed the criteria used by John T. Flanagan in preparing his anthology of midwestern literature. The ideal middlewestern writer is either born in the north central section of the continent and by virtue of environment and education imbued with its spirit, or one who by long residence, especially in his formative years, has become an integral part of the land of his adoption and is particularly fitted to describe its people 3 and voice its point of view. For all of the authors treated in the following chapters were either born or raised in the region, and all were born just before or just after the closing of the frontier in 1890. All experienced either farm or small town life, and thus were well equipped to deal with the premier themes of the literature of the region. And all have made contributions to the most recent, and richest, period of midwest literature. Most especially these are writers who have been sensitive to two fundamental physical aspects of the Midwest: the land and the climate. Soil and weather have ever been the forces that have most powerfully shaped the culture and imaginations of the people of the region, and whether or not the writers here have been imbued with the spirit of the region, they at least have all responded to what Willa Cather 4 describes as the old pull of the earth . . . the solemn magic of the fields. 637
The development of the literature of the American Midwest divides conveniently into three periods: An early period from the time of the first explorers and missionaries in the sixteenth century up to 1783, the year of the Peace of Versailles which officially established the independence of the United States. A middle period, the first century of the literature of the new nation, which extends to 1882. And finally the recent period, the century from 1883 to the present. The date 1883 is significant as the year of the publication of Edgar Watson Howes The Story of a Country Town, a work which signaled a new era in midwest letters. From that time to the present, midwest literature has continued to flourish as works about the central states have increased in both quantity and quality. It is to this last period, a kind of Golden Century, that the most important midwest writers belong and to it most of the discussion of the following section is given.
THE EARLY PERIOD, 15421782
The first significant written descriptions of the interior of America were travel accounts of Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century. One, published in 1542, was by lvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, probably the first white man to see and write about the Mississippi River, bison, and the southern plains. Although Cabeza de Vaca did not get north of what is now Texas, his work had the distinction of inspiring Coronados search for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola. This journey, which reached as far as northcentral Kansas, enabled Pedro de Castaeda to describe bison, the prairie, and Plains Indians in a narrative that was copied out at least as early as 1596. Though some of the early Spanish observers noted their admiration for the beauty of the land and the noble appearance of the Indians, most of their accounts were fanciful ones, motivated by dreams of incalculable riches. Soon after the Spanish began their explorations of the southern part of the Mississippi valley, the French began establishing outposts in Canada; from there their emissaries-mostly, but not exclusively, Jesuit priestsbegan to push down around the Great Lakes and the Old Northwest. Their observations, since compiled in the massive Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (edited by Reuben Thwaites), were made in the middle and late seventeenth century, and are distinguished for precision and objectivity. At first their knowledge of the Middle West was second-hand, passed on to them by Indians, but it was not long until their zealous travels brought them in direct contact with the tribes and landscape of the upper Mississippi Valley. A list of these writers reads like a Pantheon of exploration: Marquette, Hennepin, La Salle, Nicolet. Of these, Jacques Marquette is worthy of special note. He descended the Mississippi as far as the present Arkansas City, Arkansas, and wrote excellent accounts of Indian customs, of bison, and of 5 the prairies, which stretched further than the eye can see. Father Louis 638
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Hennepin, too, is significant, for he was the first to describe in a published report the falls of St. Anthony, the site of present day St. Paul, Minnesota. Though Hennepin was a terrible braggart, given to exaggeration, prevarication, and plagiarism, he does seem to have been sincerely impressed by the land and its potential for agriculture, a feature the Spanish usually ignored. As he noted in A Description of Louisiana, the mid-countrys soil is capable of producing all kinds of fruits, herbs, and grain, and in greater abundance 6 than the best lands in Europe. Other Frenchmen waxed enthusiastic not only about the regions agricultural possibilities, but about its commercial prospects as well, as evidenced by La Salles typical analysis: As for the Mississippi, it could produce every year, 20,000 ecus worth of peltries, an abundance of land, and wood for shipbuilding; a silk trade might be established there, and a port for the protection of vessels and the maintenance of a communication 7 with the Gulf of Mexico. Pearls might be found there. The priests, of course, were primarily concerned with the conversion of the heathen, and thus a number of the early accounts of the Midwest gave detailed, and fairly accurate, descriptions of Indians and their ways. Unlike many early observers, the French were almost never condescending but conveyed a sympathy toward the Native American that was to be repaid when, in the eighteenth century, the French badly needed allies as they sought to keep and expand their North American holdings.
THE MIDDLE PERIOD, 17831882
A second period of midwest literature began with the establishment of the autonomy of the United States and the subsequent flow of immigration to the lands beyond the Alleghenies. The nations independence took on a new dimension, especially after the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, for those who lacked economic opportunity on the crowded eastern seaboard. There was a great outpouring of promotional literature portraying the interior of the nation as a place where humble folk could own land and become self-sufficient. Typical of this kind of tract was Manasseh Cutlers An Explanation of the Map of Federal Lands (1787), whose glowing language and optimistic tone would be repeated in thousands of similar pamphlets, books, and posters as the country moved westward: To the philosopher and the politician, on viewing this delightful part of the federal territory, under the prospect of an immediate and systematic settlement, the following observations will occur. First. The tils of agriculture will here be rewarded with a greater variety of valuable productions, than in any part of America. The 639
advantages of almost every climate are here blended together; every considerable commodity, that is cultivated in any part of the United States, is here produced in the greatest plenty and 8 perfection. Shortly after Cutlers work two books appeared, both by Gilbert Imlay and both representative of the many publications that dwelt on the fascinating possibilities of the interior country for settlement. One is a book of description, the other one of the very first novels published in America. A Topographical Description of the Western Territory (1792) gives a detailed and enthusiastic account of the western country. Transatlantic readers especially were impressed by Imlays prophecy that the Mississippi Valley would be completely settled by the end of the next century, a prediction based on the widely held eighteenth-century assurance that the destiny of a democratic, and essentially good, people was to fill up the free land to the West. Imlays novel The Emigrants (1793), which marks the beginning in American fiction of the immigration theme, is the story of an English family brought to ruin by the American Revolution and their resolve to mend their fortunes by heading West. Filled with paeans of praise for the pristine beauty of the frontier, the narrative presents the Ohio River basin and Illinois as perfect places to build an ideal society. The most important non-fictional writings of the early nineteenth century which pictured the interior as a habitable region were the Journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Though these monumental records of what has been aptly called our national epic of exploration are treated elsewhere in this volume, it should be noted here that the Journals are of considerable significance, not only because of what they contributed to geography but of what they did for the imagination as well. Not a few early writers about the American Midwest got their notions of what the landscape was like from the Journals. One writer especially who no doubt got some of his ideas about the trans-Mississippi region from Lewis and Clark was James Fenimore Cooper, whose classic The Prairie (1827) is one of the most durable of the early immigration novels which use the Midwest for their locale. The setting for this novel from the Leatherstocking Series is Iowa and Nebraska, an environment where Coopers ubiquitous aristocrats are out of place; and even Natty Bumppo, though he has voluntarily sought the freedom of the prairie, can find no beauty or potential for productivity there. Though the novel relies heavily on many of the stock ingredients of the romantic adventure tale, it establishes some of the most enduring of the images and motifs of western and midwestem literature. Moreover, Cooper perceived something that few of his contemporaries were able to see, that 640
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the settlement of the West was not wholly an heroic enterprise. For when one civilization collided with anotheror with the wildernessthe result was likely to be tragic, and thus the white mens encroachment on the frontier was and would continue to be a dirty, treacherous business. An illustration of this is to be found in the opening scene of The Prairie, which shows settlers wantonly destroying a grove of trees just to make shelter for the night. Cooper also knew something about social economics and class, and in The Prairie he makes use of a new type of individual, a type that would ultimately dominate the fiction of the Midwest. Paul Hover and Ellen Wade are not especially colorful, but they are decent and hard-working members of the middle class. Also representative of this new breed is the Bush family. Squatters or would-be settlers, they are dull, somewhat lawless, yet possessed of a strength and religious righteousness that Cooper seems to admire, in spite of his notions about the lower orders. These realistic characters are early examples in fiction of the native-born immigrants who would move into and help shape the destiny of the Midwest. Still, in spite of Coopers vivid evocation of a haunting prairie landscape and his prescient portrayal of the drama to be enacted there, the idea of an agricultural West was too remote for him to grasp. There is no permanent settling in the novel, and, at the end, all of the major characters, except for the Indians and Leatherstocking, who stays to die, backtrail to the East. Two other early nineteenth-century writers who made notable contributions to the development of midwest literature are Timothy Flint and James Hall, both of whom had much more direct experience than did Cooper with the lands west of the Alleghenies. Timothy Flint (17801840), a minister as well as novelist, established in Cincinnati the Western Monthly Review, one of the first truly regional periodicals dedicated to promoting the literature of the West. Two of Flints novels make significant, though not extensive, use of the Midwest as setting. Francis Berrian or the Mexican Patriot (1826) tells the story of Francis Berrian, a New Englander and Harvard graduate, who seeks adventure in the West. Though the main and most exciting part of the book takes place in the Southwest, there is extensive description of the plains region of the Mississippi Basin, as Berrians travels take him down the Ohio and Mississippi. The hero, like so many in early novels about the West, is totally out of place in such wild surroundings. His New England (and Harvard) bookish background leads him to quote Virgil and contemplate Byron as he moves through the West. But in spite of such incongruities Flint does provide some quite vivid details of prairie life and landscape. The Life and Adventures of Arthur Clenning (1828) is another Flint novel in which the hero travels widely but eventually settles in Illinois at 641
the Morris Birbeck settlement where his son and heir can have the utmost freedom and opportunity and thus develop into a true man of the Westor Buckeye as the novel puts it. James Hall (17931868), who had more direct contact with the area than most of the early writers of midwest fiction, lived about fifty years in the West, mainly in Ohio and Illinois. He wrote no novels but his work as a writer, collector, and publisher of short fiction and verse about the West has led to his being considered the central figure in a kind of school of experimenters in the materials of frontier life. Hall first authored Letters from the West (1828), The Soldiers Bride & Other Tales (1833), and Tales of the Border (1835). In his treatment of frontier themes Hall is inclined to be somewhat sentimental, but he had seen too much of what the country was really like not to provide some realistic detail of pioneer life, particularly as he depicts the widespread resentment of the English and hatred of the Indian. Because of this he was considered something of a rebel in his time and was censured by some of his contemporaries for using vulgar backwoods expressions and 10 for pointing out the less than idyllic living conditions of the pioneer west. Thus Hall became an early member of that clan which did not give unmitigated praise to the region, though his artificial and stilted prose style prevents him from being considered a thoroughgoing realist. Another novelist of this period who depicted midwestern community life in its embryonic stage was Caroline M. Kirkland, who was far from just another chronicler of frontier romance and adventure. Her portrayal of the new villages in Michigan in A New HomeWholl Follow? (1839) is blunt, direct, even satirical. This work, a remarkable amalgam of journal-like sketches, commentary, and narrative, takes a close and objective look at the unpolished manners of pioneers. Though some humor and sentiment is present, much of the book is a kind of catalog of the inconveniences of the environment and the crudeness of people in the settlements. Seldom heroic or noble, the villagers are ignorant, unclean, and impolite. The claim that Kirklands satirical approach destroyed the romantic conception of frontier 11 l i f e is no doubt an exaggeration. But certainly her sometimes caustic tone (she complained ten years after publishing the book that, if anything, she may have been too mild), makes her at the very least an important forerunner of the later regional realists. Enthusiasm for the western country and the prospects for settlers was not confined to fiction, of course. The established poets of the American Renaissance took their turn at the subject of the central plains. William Cullen Bryant in The Prairies, inspired no doubt by a visit to Illinois, tells of gazing at the broad, open landscape and reflecting with nostalgia on the colorful past when the redman and the bison roamed the plains. His mus-
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ings are shattered by the imagined sound of the advancing white settlers filling up the open spaces. John Greenleaf Whittier used the prairie as a setting for several poems, and one of them, The Kansas Emigrants, became a popular marching song of the pioneers. Even a Boston Brahmin not noted for his interest in the West, James Russell Lowell, wrote The Pioneer, in which the limitless-seeming space of the prairie is lauded as being the ideal home for those who would be free. Walt Whitman, the great poetic spokesman for democracy, wrote admiringly of the pioneer inhabitants of the Middle West as especially well qualified to achieve and enjoy freedom. They were the ones who would most likely put the past behind and produce a great central inland race . . . with the continental blood interveind, as Whitman put it in Pioneers! O Pioneers!, a poem that would provide a later writer with the title for her first novel about the midlands. Unlike some of the romantic writers of the time Whitman had no qualms about what the settlement of the middle states would produce. In his six-line verse The Prairie States he images a crowded and industrialized society, a crown and teeming paradise that justifies all the events leading up to it.
THE RECENT PERIOD, 1883 TO THE PRESENT
In 1902 the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce gave a lecture in Iowa City, Iowa, in which he called for a new movement in letters. The higher provincialism, as he termed it, would serve to counter the demoralizing effects of cultural homogenization, a by-product of the rapid growth of industrial monopolies. Convinced that such regionalism would be salutary for American society, Royce encouraged areas with distinctive cultural patterns to preserve and promote their individualities through literature and the arts. Actually such a movement was already underway in the Midwest, and in the decades that followed many more writers of the central states would follow Royces dictum: Serve faithfully your community that the nation 12 may be served. Though the several isms and movements that marked the overall growth of American literature were present to an extent in the literary development of the Midwest, the major writers of the region were sufficiently independent that it is not convenient to classify them as members of particular schools or groups, including the ubiquitous and not very helpful designation of regionalists. Moreover, most of the important twentiethcentury midwestern writers were so nearly contemporaneous with one another that it is difficult to discuss them in a chronological framework. Thus in order to avoid overlapping, the best way to trace the development of midwest literature since 1883 is to examine how various writers have
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dealt with certain recurring themes, or, more correctly, with variations of a single theme. The single theme is the land itself, and the variations reflect changes that have come to the land itself and to the drama of human life in the heartland. More than any other region the Midwest has seemingly been affected cursed or blessedby rapid change. In other regions, the South and New England, for example, there has always been a greater aura of permanence. In those sections of the country, traditions are older, change has taken place more slowly, and there have been concerted efforts to preserve certain features of the past. But in the midwestem states culture like local architecture has always been temporary and disposable. And because at the outset the Midlands consisted of so much empty space, with few outstanding landmarks, the transformation of the region has been dramatic; it has undergone a greater change of landscape in a shorter space of time, perhaps, than any area of comparable size. To have gone, in little more than a hundred years, from open prairie with only a few hundred thousand primitive inhabitants to a burgeoning inland empire crowded with farms and cities, crisscrossed with railroads and interstate highways and jet trails, bustling with millions of people working in factories, mines, schools, stockyards, colleges, theaters, and librariessuch change is epical. It is also the stuff of tragedy, for change inevitably assumes destruction, and the Midwest has been the scene, along with construction, of much destruction: white power replacing red power, the farmer replacing the free hunter and trapper, the town replacing the farm, and the city replacing the town. Thus around the end of the nineteenth century writers began to consider the radical cultural and environmental changes taking place in the Midwest, and a new awareness of the literary possibilities of the region began to emerge in a flood of fiction and poetry, starting with the surprisingly realistic treatment of rural life by Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin Garland. The resulting activity, eventually termed the New Regionalism, was marked by renewed interest in folklore, new and sophisticated use of local material, and the founding of periodicals like Midland: A Magazine of the Middle West in Iowa City in 1915 and the Prairie Schooner in Lincoln in 1927. The fertility of the central states was thus established once and for all, artistically as well as agriculturally. For the most part, the writers of the recent period of midwest literature have been concerned with four main themes, each a variation of the basic one of land and change. Each of the four represents a stage in the development of the Midwest: first, the pre-settlement Midwest; second, settling and farm life; third, small town life; and fourth, life in the urban, industrialized Midwest. Not surprisingly, these stages closely resemble the ones delin-
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eated by Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous essay on the significance of the frontier. Prior to the twentieth century most belletristic writing about the original inhabitants of the Midwest was at odds with reality. Longfellows Hiawatha, for example, which gave several generations of readers their principal notion of what Native American life was like in the Midlands, was the result of no direct contact with the Indians or even of very extensive research. Instead, the long poem is an amalgam of the many legends found in the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Longfellows treatment of the Indians is like that of Cooper and many other nineteenth-century white writers; he either exaggerated their cruelty and savagery or overstated their glamour and nobility. Seldom did a writer present a balanced view showing the unique richness of Indian culture and the pitiful results of its near-extermination. A needed corrective to this situation came in the twentieth century in the works of several Midwest authors who wrote of the pre-settlement period: Hamlin Garland, John G. Neihardt, Frederick Manfred, and Mari Sandoz. Each of these writers was born in the Midwest; each had direct contact with Indians or with Indian country. Each was meticulous in researching the early days of the Midwest, and each developed a comprehensive view of the evolution of the region. Although he did not write extensively on the subject, Hamlin Garland deserves mention as one of the early writers who perceived the Indian in a new way. His The Book of the Indian (1932) with its fourteen short stories plus a brief fictionalized biography of Sitting Bull has an element of authenticity absent from the narratives of eastern writers. There are flaws of course. His use of an Indian narrator in The Silent Eatersthe life of Sitting Bullis not very convincing, and Garlands position is still the old chauvinistic one which stressed the need for conversion to white mens ways. But he does convey the terrible contempt with which the Indians were regarded by the conquering whites and the brutal treatment they received at their hands. Thus Garland was one of the first to open the way for a more realistic and sympathetic treatment of plains Indians. The work of John G. Neihardt, much of it in verse, is almost exclusively devoted to the theme of the Native American and the trappers and explorers of the pre-settlement West. Neihardt had the advantage of being able to use authentic pioneer experiences in his writing, having been born on a farm in Illinois in 1881 and raised and educated in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, as an employee of the Indian Bureau, he talked to many Indians who had participated in the very events he found so important and about which he
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wished to write. Convinced that the most colorful events in his countrys history had taken place on the interior plains between 1822 and 1890, Neihardt set out to celebrate what he considered the heroic past of the West in a number of works. The most important of these is The Cycle of the West, which, with its five Songs, amounts to an epic overview of all the heroic phases of the West: conquest, courage, friendship, faith. Perhaps the most monumental poem ever written by an American, the Cycle of the West covers the key events in the Missouri River Valley region from 1822 to 1890, from the Ashley-Henry expedition to the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. Though Neihardt has not escaped criticism for his poetic style, which was much influenced by classical forms, there has been almost universal acclaim for his most popular book Black Elk Speaks (1932). The work, which recounts in prose the vision of a Sioux holy man who told it to Neihardt, is a tour de force, mixing mysticism and historical event. As a dramatic portrayal of Indian psyche, myth, and legend, as well as of the white mans destruction of the red mans culture, it is widely regarded as not only a powerful but an accurate contribution to literature about the Native American. Another work on this same subject is Neihardts last novel, When the Tree Flowered (1951). It too traces the life of a protagonist, Eagle Voice, and the decline of the Sioux nation from its days of glory to ignominious defeat. Here, as in all of Neihardts work, the midwestern landscape, sacred in the eyes of its original inhabitants, is carefully drawn and occupies an integral place in the narrative. The remarkable feature of Neihardts achievement is that he manages to dramatize the heroic qualities of red and white alike. Still, overall it is the spiritual dimension of the Indian that conquers, even though his material culture is destroyed. For the emphasis in the Cycle moves from the physical strength and daring exploits of the white trappers to the spiritual heroism of the Indians. Thus, the ultimate hero of the cycle is Crazy Horse, who embodies all of the finest aspects, both physical and spiritual, of Native American culture. In this way Neihardt depicts the truth of the red mans spiritual visions as more lasting than the truth of the white mans conquest, and thus the victory is reversed. Neihardts work, which has been the subject of increasing analysis in recent years as a result of renewed interest in western literature in general and Native American literature in particular, has done much to help Anglo America understand the importance of symbolism and ceremony in presettlement culture. More than anyone else, Neihardt has made the world aware of another side to the settlement story of the Midwest, the lamentable destruction and loss incurred in the epic conquest. In view of this, it is safe 646
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to say that the long-time Poet Laureate of Nebraska is the premier writer of the Midwest on the Native American theme. Though younger than Neihardt by fifteen years, Mari Sandoz had close contact with the life and lore of plains Indians, some of whom came and camped on her family homestead in northwest Nebraska. She played with their children and learned legends and history from elders like Old Cheyenne Woman. Using these resources along with vast amounts of research, Sandoz produced several significant volumes dealing with Indians, the Great Plains, and the early trappers. Her principal work is a six-volume non-fiction series entitled The Great Plains Series, consisting of Old Jules, Crazy Horse, Cheyenne Autumn, The Buffalo Hunters, The Cattlemen and The Beaver Men, in which she traces life on the plains from the stone age to her own time. Of this series, the outstanding parts are Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn. One is about the life and death of the mystical and courageous Sioux war chief. The other tells of the sad exodus of a band of Cheyenne Indians who were determined to leave the Oklahoma reservation they despised and return to their home in Montana. Sandozs scholarship is thorough, and she demonstrates a sensitive understanding of the history of the red man. She, like Neihardt before her and Manfred after, is sympathetic to the values and mind-set of the Indian and thus her stories are told as much as possible from the inside, with Indian voices and consequent use of appropriate metaphor and imagery. Through a similar series of books, Frederick Manfred, a native of Iowa, provides unique insights into the lives of those who lived in Siouxland (Manfreds name for the upper Midwest) before it was permanently settled by whites. In the novels which make up his five-volume Buckskin Man series he does this by carefully recreating Indian customs and thought patterns, and by vivifying their mystical relationship with nature. Manfreds best Indian books are unique in that they are not primarily concerned with the struggle between whites and Indians. Conquering Horse and Manly-Hearted Woman, in fact, are set in a time before the coming of the white man has made any impact upon prairie life. Conquering Horse (1965) is the tale of a young Sioux brave, No Name, and his search for personal identity. By blending epic and realistic elements (the father-son rivalry, for example) Manfred avoids the kind of superficial romance that for so long trivialized the Indian in fiction. He gives a clear picture, not only of the social structure and religious beliefs of Native American community life, but of the psychology of its individual members. In part, Manfreds success in doing this is due to his use of a rhythmical speech pattern that is a refreshing corrective to the stilted speech of many fictional Indian narratives. Deservedly, Conquering Horse and its companion piece Manly647
Hearted Woman, which also deals with the theme of the outsider or loner seeking identity, have been called a kind of bible explaining the mystical 1 3 religion practiced by the Plains Indians. Manfred deals with the violent white-Indian struggle in Silver Plume (1964). Based on an historical incident in Minnesota in which thirty-eight Indians were hanged by whites as punishment for an uprising, the novel develops another element also as Manfred recounts the story of love between a Sioux brave and a white woman. Thus the narrative dramatizes significant differences between the two cultures. The story of white men in the pre-settlement Midwest is the subject of Manfreds novel Lord Grizzly (1964). His account of the legendary Hugh Glasss epic struggle for survival and pursuit of revenge is widely considered the finest fictional telling of the story and a classic of western American literature. Here, as in much of his fiction, Manfred makes use of historical records, legends, and Greek and Judaic myth as well, thus developing themes that are clearly universal, not just western. In spite of the literary possibilities of the westward movement, few significant works on the overland trek itself have been written by midwesterners. The two best-known novels on the theme are The Covered Wagon by Emerson Hough and The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, but neither of these books properly belongs in a discussion of the midwest and they are treated elsewhere in this volume. The life of those who settled and cultivated the land, however, has been a fruitful topic for writers from the central states: novels about homesteading and farming began to proliferate early and continued to do so well into the middle of the twentieth century. The subject continued to be an attractive one partly because the drama of living close to the elements and trying to wrest a living from the soil was not seriously diminished even by modern mechanized farming. Moreover, the theme of farming has always been popular because of Americas devotion to the agrarian ideal, an ideal that for three centuries has helped to shape American attitudes and public policy and history. Briefly this concept holds that by working and owning land an individual will attain economic independence, social status, and personal dignity. Thus, it was assumed, the noble occupa14 tion of farming will almost certainly lead to virtue and happiness. For years agrarianism served as a kind of bench mark accepted by some writers of farm life and rejected by others. And since the modern farm novel had its greatest growth during the years when the important literary argument was between the proponents of romanticism and those of realism, it was inevitable that those who were inclined toward romanticism accepted the agrarian ideal and those who embraced realism rejected it. The former tended to view the rural experience in a favorable light, omitting or down648
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playing the less pleasant aspects of rural life, thus producing a modern version of the pastoral tradition. In contrast were those writers who felt it obligatory to represent farm life as they did all of life in all its various shadings 15 of good and bad, pleasant and painful, beautiful and ugly. This stance in its extreme form, of course, was that of the literary naturalists. In no section of the country has the agrarian ideal had a more powerful claim on the values of people and the imagination of artists than in the Midwest. For over a hundred years the lives of settlers and farmers in the interior region have been depicted in fiction in a variety of ways, resulting in social history as well as psychological drama. And because midwestern authors have recorded personal struggles so wellstruggles with the land and weather, with new and strange mores, and with the shock of changefarm literature constitutes a significant contribution to world literature. One of the first to write realistically about farm life was Hamlin Garland, whose Main-Travelled Roads (1891) gives a vivid portrayal of the Midwest during the homesteading years. In his writing Garland strove to do what he did in politics as a crusading Populist: to tell the truth about rural life, or as he declared to put in all there is in the scene, on the surface and beneath, . . .[For] golden butter and sunshine do not make up the whole of 16 farm life. This he did by contrasting the life of the financially strapped farmer with that of the comfortable city dweller. Stories like Up the Coolly and Under the Lions Paw emphasize the small farmers bondage to a life of drudgery and dirt. Farmers like Grant McLane are defeated by the economic system that rewards people with capital like Grants brother, with his yacht and fine clothes, and Jim Butler (in Under the Lions Paw), an unsympathetic money lender, with his high unearned profits. Garland was never a thoroughgoing naturalist; in much of his work elements of sentimentalism are apt to surface. Nevertheless the onetime Iowa farm boy was one of the first and most conspicuous of those who were intent on exposing 17 what he called the essential ugliness of farmers lives. On a more panoramic scale some of the finest writing about early farming experiences is that of Ole Rlvaag and Willa Cather, both of whom were particularly sensitive to the plight of immigrants, having themselves come to the Midwest from older and more settled cultures. Both viewed the settlement of the West as an epic episode in history. Rlvaags Giants in the Earth (1927), which has been described as the 1 8 greatest farm novel produced thus far, pictures homesteading as if it were the founding of a new kingdom. The kingdom is established but at great cost, by a protagonist who embodies some of the best and some of the worst qualities of the pioneer. Per Hansa is industrious, clever, and faithful to his vision of what land ownership can do for him and his family, but he is the 649
victim of what his wife calls American fever. The fever is the immigrants compulsive desire to own more land and the willingness to break moral law in the process. Pers death and Berets suffering are Rlvaags way of underscoring the difficulty of adjusting to the conditions of a new land. And the difficulties are not confined to the first generation of immigrant settlers either, as Rlvaag demonstrates in the two sequels to Giants: Peder Victorious and Our Fathers God. Still, the novel, by using a mythological framework, makes it clear that Rlvaag meant this work to be a kind of tribute to the achievement of the Norwegian immigrants. Although she does not completely overlook the tragic aspect of settling new land, Willa Cathers view of the pioneer experience is more positive than many. She portrays the pioneer experience as formidable but ennobling, leading to spiritual and quite possibly material enrichment. In O Pioneers ! and My ntonia, her protagonists are strong pioneer women from Europe who help settle the Nebraska prairies and live productive lives there. They make sacrifices, of course. Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! loses a brother and postpones marriage for years. But with faith and love of the land, she perseveres and ends up a successful farmer, a legendary agrarian hero, who even in death will enrich the earth. Similarly in My ntonia, ntonia Schimerda endures severe blows of fortune. Her father takes his own life. Her fianc abandons her, pregnant. But she is made of stern stuff, never retreating from adversity and remaining close to the land. Because of her steadfast loyalty to the soil and the elemental things of life, ntonia comes to symbolize the ideal pioneer woman, like the founders of early 1 9 races. In these two prairie novels Cather draws a generally favorable picture of the early history of the Midwest. Though in other works she shows that rural life can be stultifying because of its remoteness from centers of high culture, her superbly lyrical style usually softens any naturalistic tendencies so that, in the main, her treatment of the settlement experience is an elegiac one. Frederick Manfred relied on his own and his familys farm experiences in Siouxland to give a not always pretty picture of Midwest life in the first half of the twentieth century. In four of his novels in particular The Golden Bowl, This Is the Year, Green Earth, and Eden Prairie the elements of nature of the Midwest are the major forces to be reckoned with. But his works are not just novels of the soil; they are also novels of self and society. Each contains a central character struggling to come to terms with forces inside as well as outside himself. The Golden Bowl is a Depression story filled with the dryness and dust of the Thirties. Its protagonist, Maury Grant, has come to distrust the land for its barrenness and apparent hostility, and thus
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leaves the farm for the rootless life of the gold mines. But the homelessness of the hoboes and miners with whom he mingles is no substitute for the stability the land offers and he returns to it. Manfreds lesson is plain: closeness to the land is necessary for peace within. Another willful protagonist struggling to be independent from his parents and their European heritage is Pier Frixen of Manfreds exceedingly harsh farm novel This Is the Year. In it the problem of assimilation for Frisian immigrants is paramount, a theme accentuated by the authors use of Frisian folklore and language. But it is the stubborn Piers inner struggle played out against a backdrop of erratic economic conditions that gives the novel its main force. Though he is an unlikely agrarian hero, Pier does possess some pioneer virtues, energy in particular. Other novelists who, like Manfred, approach the immigrant farming theme in a realistic manner are Herbert Quick, Herbert Krause, Sophus Keith Winther, and Mari Sandoz, each of whom produced a series of books that focused on a particular rural region of their home state. Herbert Quicks best known work, Vandemarks Folly (1922), traces the career of a young Dutchman who moves to Iowa from New York state and develops an apparently worthless marsh into productive farm land. In spite of some melodramatic features, the book contains an abundance of realistic detail demonstrating the perseverance and ingenuity of the pioneers in overcoming obstacles. If for no other reason, Quicks novel should be remembered for its moving description of the pristine Iowa prairie and Jacobus Vandemarks insightful response to the first cultivation of it: Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the most epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in one way the most pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things 20 ever created began to come to its predestined end. The farming country of western Minnesota (Pockerbrush country) is the setting for Herbert Krauses two principal novels, Wind Without Rain (1939) and The Thresher ( 1946). Krauses view of the experience of German immigrants is not a cheery one, in spite of his sometimes poetical style. Not only is the daily toil of farming itself deadening, but the family of Johann Vildvogel is brutalized by their despotic father. In addition, the strict and lugubrious Lutheranism of the immigrants is repressive, especially for the younger generation. Economic conditions compound the obstacles to success: higher land prices, mortgages, and low crop prices. Thus, Wind Without Rain provides an explanation of why so many children of immigrants found little romance in farm life and frequently escaped to the city at the first opportunity.
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Yet another novelist who deals with the obstacles foreign-born settlers encountered in the new land is Sophus Keith Winther, who recorded the plight of the Danes who came to Nebraska at the turn of the century. His Grimsen trilogy, Take All to Nebraska, Mortgage Your Heart, and This Passion Never Dies, chronicles the settlement years from 1898 to 1922 by stressing the contrast between the hopes and dreams of the emigrants and realities of life as they found it in the promised land. Lacking capital and unable to speak English, the Danes suffer poverty and ridicule. Winthers essentially naturalistic treatment of the settlement theme is utterly devoid of sentiment, as his characters are felled by fatalistic forces beyond their control. Winther once commented that to tell the immigrants story is to add to our understanding of American culture. Fortunately the story has been told often and in a variety of ways. One of the many tellings of the settlement story is Mari Sandozs Old Jules. In it the author describes the life of her father, a Swiss immigrant trained in medicine, who came to the Niobrara Valley of northwest Nebraska in 1884. A brutal egocentric whose behavior at times bordered on the sadistic, Jules was nevertheless something of a pioneer hero. Intelligent and articulate, he promoted land for settlement and, as an early horticulturist, urged the pioneers to follow sound conservation practices. Old Jules and Sandozs other book set in the sandhill country, the fictional Slogum House, are blunt, tough, books that show the role of powerful personalities engaged in the business of building up a country. Not all of the numerous prairie authors who wrote about the settlement of the West and later farm life there, however, take such a harsh view of the subject. One who does not is Ruth Suckow who, as one of her 22 advocates put it, always presented the Midwest with essential fairness. Suckow, in several novels, Country People and The Folks to name but two, and a short story collection, Iowa Interiors, gives a detailed but somewhat bland account of ordinary rural people to whom nothing very sensational or romantic happens. Conflict comes from such ordinary things as the unrest country people feel when they have retired to town, after a life of farming. Hardly, as Suckow herself admitted, an indictment of a way of life, yet no doubt as valid for many readers as many of the more gloomy treatments of midwest farm life. Two novelists who depict rural life in a rather cheerful vein are Bess Streeter Aldrich and Phil Duffield Stong. Aldrichs A Lantern in Her Hand and Song of Years are fairly sentimental accounts of the settlement and growth of farming areas in Nebraska and Iowa before and after the Civil War. The use of historical detail adds an element of realism to the narratives, but in the main the lack of serious conflict makes the stories less than dramatic. One of the most famous of all novels about American farm 652
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life is Phil Stongs State Fair, a book made into at least two Hollywood films. The midwest ritual of the state fair is celebrated as the novel follows a farm family who take their prize hog to the fair in Des Moines. The Iowa depicted is a bucolic place, healthy, clean,and peacefulthe reverse image of the hostile prairie environment depicted in much other fiction. The literature of the small town is the most fecund of all the subjects of midwest writers. In part, this is because there have been relatively few large cities in the Midwest. But there are other reasons behind the villages popularity. From the beginning Americans seem to have been intrigued by their villages, an image central to the American Dream. For, though the city was the destination of upward-moving Americans, the stereotypical origin of future writers, artists, industrialists, and presidents was the small town. Primarily this was so because such a locale was considered the ideal place for developing good health, intelligence, decency, and talent. Moreover, the village atmosphere was supposed to be the epitome of democratic community life. In fact, as one critic has stated, The myth of the small town was 23 based on a set of ideal antitheses to the city. The small town was assumed by Americans to have the virtues of the farm but with the added advantage of business and professional community life plus small but well-intentioned cultural elements. These features along with the celebrated folksiness led many villagers to feel smug about their superior environmentand pity for the city dweller who had to endure the discomfort and malevolence of the metropolis. But whereas a great many Americans accepted this rosy picture of the midwest small town, the literary response to it has been, though varied, largely a rejection of the picture as essentially a myth, at odds with reality. And it is significant that the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature was from a small midwestern town and was awarded the honor largely because of his startling portrayal of a small town in Minnesota. The first important modern novel to treat the small town theme was printed, just a century ago, on the authors own press in Atchison, Kansas. The book, The Story of a Country Town (1883) by Edgar Watson Howe, in spite of its flawed structure and lack of unity, has long been recognized as one of the opening guns in the war against the sentimental treatment of village life. In it the citizens of Twin Mounds, the country town of the title, are exposed as futile, argumentative, boastful, discontented, envious, and 24 mean, to use Carl Van Dorens assessment of them. Howe gives a bleak picture of small town life which consists of much dreary and shallow activity enlivened only by mean gossip. In addition, village life is inhibited by a suffocating puritanism, a force which apparently Howe considered to be a major destructive element in midwestern life. Howe foresaw the artistic possibilities of his subject when he said: In 653
every town there is material for the great American novel. Though he himself did not write a great novel, The Story of a Country Town was praised by both William Dean Howells and Mark Twain, and has become widely regarded as an early example of naturalistic treatment of the village theme. Hamlin Garland did not devote any entire work to a small town, but occasionally in several of his early works villages appear. His attitude toward them is not very negative, certainly it is less ruthless than that of E. W. Howe. Two stories in Main-Travelled Roads in fact give an almost sentimental view of the town. It is in Belleplain in A Days Pleasure that the simple act of kindness occurs that gives the weary farm wife some brief pleasure. And the people of Bluff Siding, denounced at first by the protagonist in Gods Ravens as caricatures who warp everything they touch, befriend him during a serious illness and enable him to see their essential goodness. Similar views of town characters appear in works like Prairie Folks and A Son of the Middle Border, where the village comes across as a rather pleasant place. In contrast to the rigorous, filthy drudgery of the farm yard, the newly transplanted Garland found town an exciting place for play and carefree companionship. He once explained that his view of small town life tended to be favorable because the villager even when he suffers at least suffers with others. Also there is more apt to be love in town because, as he put it, youth and love are able to transform a bleak prairie town into a 26 poem, and to make of a barbed wire lane a highway of romance. It was through poetry rather than fiction that Americans first became aware of the movement eventually known as the Revolt from the Village. Edgar Lee Masterss The Spoon River Anthology (1915) depicts the life of the village of the title through the posthumous confessions of 242 of the towns citizens. Although there are a few noble souls and idealists among them, the overall picture of Spoon River is one of terrible spiritual isolation. Most of the characters, destroyed by a suffocating conformity, are victims of the prevailing values of the town, what Waldo Frank called the cruelty of 2 7 the driven herd. Masterss bold method of presenting the truth behind the surface of peoples lives influenced a number of Midwest writers who were to endeavor the same thing. Though Sherwood Anderson falls outside the limits of this history, no discussion of the literature of the midwest village would be complete without some mention of his Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Andersons treatment of the town is mainly tender, as he dramatizes the pathetic attempts of a number of townspeople, grotesques, to articulate their deepest feelings. But the town itself is clearly a major obstacle to self-expression and fulfillment; it, too, is struggling to find self-esteem and understanding in a time when the once dominant agrarian culture is declining. As in a number of village novels, one character distinguishes himself by intelligence and sensitivity, 654
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which enables him to see his plight somewhat clearly and to escape the town. Thus, George Willard, the newspaper reporter for the Winesburg Eagle and confidant of many of the grotesques, matures and leaves town with the possibility of future fulfillment, an accomplishment to be attained in the citynot in the village. Willa Cathers treatment of the midwest village is somewhat ambiguous. Sometimes the small town for her is a place of terrible smugness and hypocrisy, as, for example, in the short story The Sculptors Funeral, where the nobility of the sculptor is contrasted with the narrowness of the townspeople. Similarly, in My ntonia, the prairie town of Black Hawk has already developed a rigid caste system which segregates the foreign-born hired girls from the American children of local businessmen. But rarely does Cather denounce the small town with anything like the bitterness of Lewis or Masters. It would be inaccurate to place Cather in the revolt from the village movement; nevertheless in none of her works does she portray the small town as a place of beauty or joy. The most celebrated of all the books about small towns in America and the one by which all others are measured is Sinclair Lewiss Main Street. Published in 1920, it was a stunning success and put the world on notice that midwest writers were not simply apologists for the village. In spite of Lewiss disclaimer in the foreword to the book that the sins of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, are not confined to towns in the Midwest, the novel, because of its setting and the authors origins, has always encouraged stereotypes of hick towns in the Midwest. Lewis made this easy to do by cataloging the depressing personalities of some small town types and by drawing vivid and detailed pictures, not only of social dullness, but of the banal architecture, furnishings, and daily customs of the village as well. To illustrate the power of what the local philosopher cynically terms the village virus Lewis created an idealistic young rebel, Carol Milford, who, appalled by the ugliness and provinciality of the town, determines to transform it into Village Beautiful, and to enlighten its citizens. An essential part of Lewiss realistic treatment of this revolutionary is that Carol is not much better than the people she wishes to improve and her attempts at reform are ineffectual. In the end she returns from a trial escape to an uneasy compromise with the values of husband and town. To modern readers Lewiss attack on the standardization of American life as seen in a midwestern small town may seem heavy-handed. But Main Street so effectively evokes the ambience of cramped lives, spiritual deadness, and environmental ugliness that the book remains, and no doubt shall remain, a classic indictment. In contrast to Lewis was his contemporary, Zona Gale, a prolific Wisconsin writer, who in a series of eighty-three saccharine stories and several 655
novels about Friendship Village portrays the small town as a peaceful place inhabited by happy, sharing, loving folks. Gale was enough of a booster herself to have written a booklet which set forth a number of ways that citizens could improve the quality of the life in their communities. Eventually, however, Gale too joined the ranks of those who were in revolt against the village. With Birth (1918) and Miss Lulu Bett (1920), Gales treatment of the village became considerably more harsh. The town of Boarger in Birth is as desolate and ugly as Friendship Village was attractive. Warbleton in Miss Lulu Bett is a provincial place filled with tension, gossip, and meanness. The smug brother-in-law of the title character runs his household with meanness and intolerance. Here the picture drawn of the unemancipated life of the main character and the petty villagers is another subtle yet effective attack on small town mores. Interestingly, Gale was widely recognized in the 20s and 30s as both an advocate and a critic of village life. The fourth and final midwestern theme is that of the prairie urbanized and industrialized. Almost all of the major midwest writers who lived into the middle of the twentieth century, or who, like Wright Morris and Frederick Manfred, are still living, have examined this stage of the regions development. Some, in fact, like Morris, have dealt almost exclusively with the contemporary scene. The general mood of such works is somber. Though there may be some celebration of earlier times, they are increasingly in the background like a bench mark against which modern values and actions are measured. However, the looking back is seldom with nostalgia but with a somewhat mordant doubt. Therefore a recurring motif in literature about the later post-frontier era is that of diminishment. Some midwest authors seem to be asking, like Frosts oven bird, what to make of a diminished thing. For, in spite of physical conditions that seem superior to those of the pioneers, there is considerable concern about what is lacking. Particularly evident is emphasis on the decline of pioneer values. One of the early and eloquent expressions of this sense of loss is to be found in Cathers short novel A Lost Lady (1923), in which the real hero is Captain Forrester, the old railroad builder, who represents the pioneer virtues of courage, rectitude, and vision. Cather contrasts him with his wife, the Lost Lady, who, more concerned with style than substance, moves away from the foursquare values of the builders. She even consorts with Ivy Peters, a repulsive symbol of a corrupt new age which lacks respect for the past. The sensitive observer of this change, Neil Herbert, laments the end of the old days, the vestiges of which Cather admirably sums up in an image of the embers of the hunters fire on the prairie after the hunter was
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gone. In this work, and in others like The Professors House, Willa Cather dramatizes her complaint that the world broke in two somewhere around 1922. She was joined in this attitude by Mari Sandoz, who saw in the postfrontier development of the central region a threat to social harmony. Her Capital City (1934) was a study, allegorical in its critical approach, of a corrupt community, a midwest capital city, whose existence was almost exclusively justified by its being the seat of state government. The picture of the strike-torn Kanawa governed by insensitive men aided by fascistic goldshirts was Sandozs way of presenting twentieth-century totalitarianism, from which even the Midwest might not be immune. Frederick Manfred has written extensively of the impact modern industrialized society has on sensitive individuals. A fictional trilogy The Primitive (1945), The Brother (1950), and The Giant (1951) (published under one title in 1962 as Wanderlust) traces the development of a Siouxland orphan as he gets an education, seeks an occupation, becomes involved in politics, searches for a father, and, finally, becomes a composer. Along the way Thurs Wraldson encounters, in cities, a wide variety of human types and experiences. The fundamentalist beliefs of his college, the evil of New York City, the harshness of factory work, and the repressiveness of Communism all seem to violate the naturalness of life, and lead to disillusion. A significant symbol for the authors perception of the way things have changed is the wounded woodpecker Thurs finds in New York. Totally out of its proper environment and with its wings broken, the woodpecker appears to represent the plight of modern man, far from his roots, overwhelmed by a complex and hostile urban society. Thus, Manfreds account of this search for self seems to conclude that ultimate value is to be found in such things as creativity, rootedness, closeness to nature, and the peacefulness of rural lifethough these are qualities increasingly difficult to find. Similarly, Morning Red (1956) and Milk of Wolves (1976) emphasize the blunting effect of political and financial corruption, in the life of the city. The former work, in particular, dramatizes the problem of trying to live with integrity in a perplexing world. Its two protagonists, Kurt Faver and Jack Nagel, struggle to complete themselves, a struggle made more difficult because of the corrupt environment. Of the two men, the country-bred one appears to be more adaptable to life. Like Conquering Horse and Hugh Glass Kurt relies more on instinct than on intellect as he fights to survive. Another contemporary midwest writer who continues to explore the connection between the pioneer past and the contemporary scene is Wright Morris. Morris moved away from his native Nebraska and uses other settings for his fiction; frequently, however, his characters have inner conflicts
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which are the result of early years spent in the Midwest. His recurring use of the West as a theme would seem to indicate that he accepts the Turnerian idea that the frontier was the major determinant of the American character. Thus Morriss work as a whole comprises a serious attempt to define what it means to be an American. Like so many writers, Morris seeks to discover his own personal relationship to the past, especially the mythical pioneer past. Three novels illustrate this well: Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), and The World in the Attic (1949). In them, contemporary life is pictured as unpleasant, the modern West in particular containing much cheapness and violence. Morris appears to suggest, ironically, that the life of the pioneers, or at least the mythical version of it, was the cause of this modern wasteland. Moreover, these books point up Morriss determination to search for and use new and appropriate aesthetic techniques. This is necessary, he states in his book of criticism The Territory Ahead (1958), in order to properly capture and understand the pioneer past which by now has been 29 overprocessed. One notable technique Morris employs, whereby time and perspective themselves become a theme, is limiting the main action to a brief space of time, an afternoon for example, and focusing on the way that individual moment contains or reveals past and present coming together, a conjunction the author terms the prehistoric present. Another significant device Morris employs is his own photography. His stark photographs are usually of things with personal and cultural significance, mostly old and worn-out objects comprising a kind of commentary or silent narrative. The Inhabitants contains a series of such pictures, a visual account of Nebraska farms associated with the authors life. The Home Place uses photographs to illustrate the lives of those who lived on the farms; and The World in the Attic is a novel about a mans return to his home place in Nebraska. The character, who is the narrator, responds to old scenes with the conflicting emotions that Morris often juxtaposes when considering the midwestem experience: joy and horror, nostalgia and nausea. Thus Morris, like Cooper and Cather before him, deals with America in moments of transition. Indeed one critic has suggested that in order to understand twentieth-century America one should read two books, Cathers My ntonia and Morriss Ceremony at One Tree, for the two do nothing less 3 0 than embody in symbolic fashion the national experience. Another approach to the modern Midwest comes from an expatriate who, like others of that ilk, attempted to exorcise his pioneer ancestry. To do so, Glenway Wescott wrote The Grandmothers (1927), a looking-back novel in which the main character searches through memories of family history hoping to locate some meaning. The Towers, prototypical westwardmoving pioneers, went from England to New York to Wisconsin, where 658
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they settled in a place called, significantly, Hopes Corners. The central figure, Alwyn Tower, while living in Austria and Monte Carlo, tries to sort out the mythical from the real in a past that continues to haunt him, even though its conditions no longer exist. That wilderness of history and hearsay, that distorted landscape of a dream which had come true before it had been dreamed, was there where it had been, but buried, buried under the plowed 31 land, the feet of modern men, and the ripening crops. As he muses on his own memories, bits of gossip, tales, and imaginings of his family, he begins to understand that the pioneers lives were filled with frustration and failure as they repeatedly did not attain their hearts desire and thus had to seek fulfillment in heaven, as it had been in Europe, as it 3 2 had always been. Nevertheless the picture Tower draws of his ancestors, including all their weaknesses and failures, points up as well their great strengths such as imagination and vitality. Thus The Grandmothers, like so many novels which are intended to debunk the achievement of the pioneer, ends up more elegy than exorcism, a celebration of the regional ghost 3 3 dominating the present from the darkness of the past. As the twentieth century draws to a close, writers of the Midwest continue to express their feelings about the spirit of the region, its past and its present. They persist in celebrating its physical attributes while at the same time criticizing its moral climate, a process that sometimes leads to political analysis of the world beyond its borders. Two authors who represent this tendency are Thomas McGrath and Robert Bly, both poets and activists, who live in and write about their native region. McGraths major work is a long autobiographical poem-in-progress, Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Parts I and II published in 1962 and 1970). Part of the poem is a recapitulation of the authors childhood experiences in rural North Dakota, during the last years of the Agrarian City as he describes the period. It was a time of much cooperative effort: plowing, chopping, threshing, all part of the warm circle of work. But it was a hard and disheartening existence, too, as farmers struggled with grasshoppers, dust storms, mortgages and foreclosures. Any possible nostalgia for agrarian life is tempered by McGraths vivid awareness of injustice. An early friendship with a radical hired hand who proposed a strike during harvest and was beaten by the poets uncle is one of several incidents in the poem which account for the lifelong sympathy McGrath has had for radical causes, including, at one time, Communism. In viewing the past of the heartland, McGrath laments the corruptive element in Manifest Destiny, which, though it enabled white Americans to gain land and freedom, did so by depriving Native Americans of theirs, thus 659
causing a part of our souls [to be] scabbed over. But genocide was only one aspect of the dark side of settlement. Breaking land that should have been left to grass was another. The result, as McGrath depicts it, is a wasteland of abandoned farmhouses, roads leading nowhere, and the old neighborliness gone. The Midwest, here intended as a synecdoche for the whole of modern civilization, suffers not only from financial but moral bankruptcy, and the optimistic, though doomed, old farmers refrain of Well make her yet is replaced by the picture of the modern wheat farmer, who lives away from the land and winters in Acapulco. Robert Bly is another poet from the northern plains who makes powerful use of local material, but who is also known as a critic of national policy. Bly lives in the country in Minnesota, a state which figures prominently in a number of his poems. Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) in particular contains sharp images of the most elemental features of prairie landscape: barns, farmhouses, telegraph poles, and small towns. References to specific places abound as well as do the seasons, particularly winter. The images, though usually conveying a feeling of dryness or bleakness, are treated with awe and affection, indicating that the private universe of the poet finds joy, order, and peace in the outer world. Rarely is there an explicit reference to the frontier past of the region, but sometimes there are telling suggestions of its presence. An example appears in the poem Afternoon Sleep, when the poet, intrigued by a farm which an old bachelor sold, drove out to the place and found it deserted and Inside were old abandoned books And instructions to Norwegian immigrants. Much of Blys work after Silence in the Snowy Fields is political in nature and goes beyond the Midwest for its settings. But even when the poet is diagnosing the ills of society as a whole, he alludes to evil consequences of the westward movement. Bly links the tragedy of Vietnam and that of Wounded Knee because behind both was Americas obsessive hatred of non-white races. Thus his poem Hatred of Men with Black Hair tells of the perfidy of those who skinned Little Crow and overthrew Chief Joseph. Underneath all the cement of the Pentagon There is a drop of Indian blood preserved in snow: Preserved from a trail of blood that once led away From the stockade, over the snow the trail now lost. In addition to his reputation as a poet Bly is known as an editor (as founder and editor of the periodical The Fifties and its sequels) as well as a translator of European and South American verse. Both McGrath and Bly represent one dimension of a new and sophis660
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ticated literary regionalism. They, and many others including Meridel LeSueur, William Gass, Larry Woiwode, and the still active Frederick Manfred, continue to dramatize the psychological trauma that marks the industrialized post-pioneer era. For, in the mid-1980s, the character of the midwest seems to be swiftly changing. The rural population, already low, is dwindling; fewer and fewer farmers are capable of making an independent living on family-sized farms. Foreign and corporate ownership of the land is increasingly common. The big cities, once the pride of the region, have been transformed from centers that processed and distributed farm products to places that process money and real estate. But change is nothing new to the Midwest. For over a century the region has been the scene of what has been aptly described as one of the worlds great revolutions, a vast reordering of what men felt they knew about land, a discarding of old traditions and methods, and a painful learn3 4 ing process in which men adapted to a new system. From the outset writers have viewed the setting of this revolution from a number of sharply contrasting perspectives. Some have treated it as a Garden or Valley of Democracy. Others have considered it a bewildered em35 p i r e . And the need to describe and explain the bewilderment has always been of disproportionate concern. A large number of poets and novelists have pointed to the failure of the pioneers, as well as their successors, to respect and love the land as did the original inhabitants as a major cause of the spiritual confusion of the region. Similarly they have charged midwesterners as mistakenly regarding nature as the enemy, instead of seeing that, as Robert Scholes has suggested, the true enemy was mans power over nature, his ability to transform it and tear the heart out of it in the 3 6 process. Perhaps as the process of revolution continues, the next major theme of Royces higher provincialism will be the spiritual sickness that has resulted from technological progress and demographic change in the region. Future writers may concentrate on the conflict between separateness and oneness. Though the image of the lone individual confronting Indians and the elements has been at the heart of the myth of the West, the consequences of that confrontation have not been entirely happy. Hence it will be necessary to examine the role of the single self and its relationship to the universal whole. The result may be a new literary emphasis on the spiritual oneness of man and humanity, of man and the land.
GEORGE F. DAY, University
of Northern Iowa
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Notes
1. J. Milton Mackie, Forty Days in a Western Hotel, Putnams Monthly Magazine 4 (1854): 630, quoted in Edwin Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 11n. 2. Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore, American Regionalism (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), p. 463. 3. John T. Flanagan, America Is West (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1945), pp. ivv. 4. Willa Cather, My ntonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 322. 5. Quoted in Dorothy Anne Dondore, The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The Torch Press, 1926), p. 11. 6. Dondore, p. 16. 7. Dondore, p. 21. 8. Manasseh Cutler, An Explanation of the Map of Federal Lands (1787) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966), p. 14. 9. Ralph Leslie Rusk, The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, Vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 275. 10. Rusk, p. 282. 11. Rusk, p. 286. 12. Charles Allen, The Midland, American Prefaces 3, No. 9 (June 1938): 136. 13. Robert C. Wright, Frederick Manfred (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), p. 93. 14. Chester E. Eisinger, quoted and paraphrased in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 126. 15. Eugene Current-Garcia and Walton R. Patrick, Realism and Romanticism in Fiction: An Approach to the Novel (Chicago: Scott Foresman, 1962), p. 7. 16. Hamlin Garland, quoted in Donald Pizer, Hamlin Garlands Early Work and Career (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 164. 17. Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1962) p. 353. 18. Roy W. Meyer, The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 229. 19. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), p. 309. 20. Herbert Quick, Vandemarks Folly (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922), p. 228. 21. Sophus Keith Winther, The Immigrant Theme, Arizona Quarterly 34 (Spring 1978): 36. 22. John T. Frederick, Ruth Suckow and the Middle West Literary Movement, College English 20 (January 1931): 5. 23. Anthony Channell Hilfer, Revolt from the Village, 19151930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 5.
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24. Carl Van Doren, Many Minds (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), p. 37. 25. E. W. Howe, Plain People (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929), p. 184. 26. Hamlin Garland, Other Main-Travelled Roads (New York: Harper and Bros., 1910), pp. v, viii. 27. Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1949), p. 128. 28. Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), p. 168. 29. Wright Morris, The Territory Ahead (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), p.9 30. James E. Miller, Jr., The Nebraska Encounter: Willa Cather and Wright Morris, Prairie Schooner 41 (Summer 1967): 166. 31. Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950), p.30 32. Wescott, p. 29. 33. Dayton Kohler, Glenway Wescott: Legend-Maker, The Bookman 63 (April 1931): 145. 34. John Madson, Where the Sky Began (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 203. 35. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), p. 1. 36. Robert Scholes, The Fictional Heart of the Country: From Rolvaag to Gass, in Ole Rolvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader, ed. Gerald Thorson (Northfield, Minn.: St. Olaf College Press, 1975, p. 13.
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SECTION III
The Midwest
Introduction
The American mind will be brought to maturity along the chain of the great lakes, the banks of the Mississippi, the Missouri, and their tributaries in the far northwest. There on the rolling plains will be formed a republic of letters which, not governed like that on our seaboard by the great literary powers of Europe, shall be free indeed. J. Milton Mackie in Putnams Monthly 1 Magazine in 1854
CONFUSED ENGLISHMAN once reported after a tour of the United States that nobody quite knows what the Middle West is. Even geographers differ on which states should be designated as part of the region. To some, Ohio is in the Midwest; to others it is in the East. One problem is the lack of distinctive topographical boundaries. Another is demographic change. At one time the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains were considered the eastern and western limits of the central states, but as the heartland became settled its outline shrank so that western Pennsylvania and eastern Colorado could no longer be considered part of the Midwest. Of course ultimately the northern and western boundaries of the Midwest could be fixed with some ease, by the Canadian border and the 98th meridian, the point at which aridity increases markedly and the floor of the prairie changes from long to short grass. But even today the eastern and southern boundaries must be fixed arbitrarily. For purposes of this literary history, most of the emphasis will be on writings about Nebraska, Kansas, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Though there is topographical variety within them, these states share the most prominent feature of the inland empire: the broad, rolling plains, which before the coming of the white man were a vast, almost treeless grassland two million square miles in extent. This remarkable physical feature, the most eloquent symbol of space and unity in 2 America has had a profound effect on those who originally lived in it and
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their descendants and those who later came to it. And it is those writers who celebrated or deprecated the plains and the lives of the women and men who lived there that these chapters are concerned with. Determining which authors properly can be called midwestern is a formidable task. An impressive number of distinguished twentieth-century writers were born in the region but not all of them stayed nor did they write, to any important degree, about their native region. Representative examples are F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who wrote a few things about childhood experiences in Minnesota and Michigan, but the bulk of whose work is set elsewhere and deals with themes apart from the West. Similarly, the work of Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, authors sometimes associated with the Midwest, as a whole looks away from such distinctive themes as the coming of the pioneer and farm life. And then there are writers like John Dos Passos and T. S. Eliot, born in the Midwest, but with even less claim than Fitzgerald and Hemingway to the title midwestern. They are not dealt with here. Nor does this study include any discussion of Chicago as an important literary center. The so-called literary renaissance that took place in the midwestern metropolis in the late nineteenth century is certainly germane to the development of American literature in general, but not necessarily to that of the West. Though the editors did not consciously do so, they might well have followed the criteria used by John T. Flanagan in preparing his anthology of midwestern literature. The ideal middlewestern writer is either born in the north central section of the continent and by virtue of environment and education imbued with its spirit, or one who by long residence, especially in his formative years, has become an integral part of the land of his adoption and is particularly fitted to describe its people 3 and voice its point of view. For all of the authors treated in the following chapters were either born or raised in the region, and all were born just before or just after the closing of the frontier in 1890. All experienced either farm or small town life, and thus were well equipped to deal with the premier themes of the literature of the region. And all have made contributions to the most recent, and richest, period of midwest literature. Most especially these are writers who have been sensitive to two fundamental physical aspects of the Midwest: the land and the climate. Soil and weather have ever been the forces that have most powerfully shaped the culture and imaginations of the people of the region, and whether or not the writers here have been imbued with the spirit of the region, they at least have all responded to what Willa Cather 4 describes as the old pull of the earth . . . the solemn magic of the fields. 637
The development of the literature of the American Midwest divides conveniently into three periods: An early period from the time of the first explorers and missionaries in the sixteenth century up to 1783, the year of the Peace of Versailles which officially established the independence of the United States. A middle period, the first century of the literature of the new nation, which extends to 1882. And finally the recent period, the century from 1883 to the present. The date 1883 is significant as the year of the publication of Edgar Watson Howes The Story of a Country Town, a work which signaled a new era in midwest letters. From that time to the present, midwest literature has continued to flourish as works about the central states have increased in both quantity and quality. It is to this last period, a kind of Golden Century, that the most important midwest writers belong and to it most of the discussion of the following section is given.
THE EARLY PERIOD, 15421782
The first significant written descriptions of the interior of America were travel accounts of Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century. One, published in 1542, was by lvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, probably the first white man to see and write about the Mississippi River, bison, and the southern plains. Although Cabeza de Vaca did not get north of what is now Texas, his work had the distinction of inspiring Coronados search for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola. This journey, which reached as far as northcentral Kansas, enabled Pedro de Castaeda to describe bison, the prairie, and Plains Indians in a narrative that was copied out at least as early as 1596. Though some of the early Spanish observers noted their admiration for the beauty of the land and the noble appearance of the Indians, most of their accounts were fanciful ones, motivated by dreams of incalculable riches. Soon after the Spanish began their explorations of the southern part of the Mississippi valley, the French began establishing outposts in Canada; from there their emissaries-mostly, but not exclusively, Jesuit priestsbegan to push down around the Great Lakes and the Old Northwest. Their observations, since compiled in the massive Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (edited by Reuben Thwaites), were made in the middle and late seventeenth century, and are distinguished for precision and objectivity. At first their knowledge of the Middle West was second-hand, passed on to them by Indians, but it was not long until their zealous travels brought them in direct contact with the tribes and landscape of the upper Mississippi Valley. A list of these writers reads like a Pantheon of exploration: Marquette, Hennepin, La Salle, Nicolet. Of these, Jacques Marquette is worthy of special note. He descended the Mississippi as far as the present Arkansas City, Arkansas, and wrote excellent accounts of Indian customs, of bison, and of 5 the prairies, which stretched further than the eye can see. Father Louis 638
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Hennepin, too, is significant, for he was the first to describe in a published report the falls of St. Anthony, the site of present day St. Paul, Minnesota. Though Hennepin was a terrible braggart, given to exaggeration, prevarication, and plagiarism, he does seem to have been sincerely impressed by the land and its potential for agriculture, a feature the Spanish usually ignored. As he noted in A Description of Louisiana, the mid-countrys soil is capable of producing all kinds of fruits, herbs, and grain, and in greater abundance 6 than the best lands in Europe. Other Frenchmen waxed enthusiastic not only about the regions agricultural possibilities, but about its commercial prospects as well, as evidenced by La Salles typical analysis: As for the Mississippi, it could produce every year, 20,000 ecus worth of peltries, an abundance of land, and wood for shipbuilding; a silk trade might be established there, and a port for the protection of vessels and the maintenance of a communication 7 with the Gulf of Mexico. Pearls might be found there. The priests, of course, were primarily concerned with the conversion of the heathen, and thus a number of the early accounts of the Midwest gave detailed, and fairly accurate, descriptions of Indians and their ways. Unlike many early observers, the French were almost never condescending but conveyed a sympathy toward the Native American that was to be repaid when, in the eighteenth century, the French badly needed allies as they sought to keep and expand their North American holdings.
THE MIDDLE PERIOD, 17831882
A second period of midwest literature began with the establishment of the autonomy of the United States and the subsequent flow of immigration to the lands beyond the Alleghenies. The nations independence took on a new dimension, especially after the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, for those who lacked economic opportunity on the crowded eastern seaboard. There was a great outpouring of promotional literature portraying the interior of the nation as a place where humble folk could own land and become self-sufficient. Typical of this kind of tract was Manasseh Cutlers An Explanation of the Map of Federal Lands (1787), whose glowing language and optimistic tone would be repeated in thousands of similar pamphlets, books, and posters as the country moved westward: To the philosopher and the politician, on viewing this delightful part of the federal territory, under the prospect of an immediate and systematic settlement, the following observations will occur. First. The tils of agriculture will here be rewarded with a greater variety of valuable productions, than in any part of America. The 639
advantages of almost every climate are here blended together; every considerable commodity, that is cultivated in any part of the United States, is here produced in the greatest plenty and 8 perfection. Shortly after Cutlers work two books appeared, both by Gilbert Imlay and both representative of the many publications that dwelt on the fascinating possibilities of the interior country for settlement. One is a book of description, the other one of the very first novels published in America. A Topographical Description of the Western Territory (1792) gives a detailed and enthusiastic account of the western country. Transatlantic readers especially were impressed by Imlays prophecy that the Mississippi Valley would be completely settled by the end of the next century, a prediction based on the widely held eighteenth-century assurance that the destiny of a democratic, and essentially good, people was to fill up the free land to the West. Imlays novel The Emigrants (1793), which marks the beginning in American fiction of the immigration theme, is the story of an English family brought to ruin by the American Revolution and their resolve to mend their fortunes by heading West. Filled with paeans of praise for the pristine beauty of the frontier, the narrative presents the Ohio River basin and Illinois as perfect places to build an ideal society. The most important non-fictional writings of the early nineteenth century which pictured the interior as a habitable region were the Journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Though these monumental records of what has been aptly called our national epic of exploration are treated elsewhere in this volume, it should be noted here that the Journals are of considerable significance, not only because of what they contributed to geography but of what they did for the imagination as well. Not a few early writers about the American Midwest got their notions of what the landscape was like from the Journals. One writer especially who no doubt got some of his ideas about the trans-Mississippi region from Lewis and Clark was James Fenimore Cooper, whose classic The Prairie (1827) is one of the most durable of the early immigration novels which use the Midwest for their locale. The setting for this novel from the Leatherstocking Series is Iowa and Nebraska, an environment where Coopers ubiquitous aristocrats are out of place; and even Natty Bumppo, though he has voluntarily sought the freedom of the prairie, can find no beauty or potential for productivity there. Though the novel relies heavily on many of the stock ingredients of the romantic adventure tale, it establishes some of the most enduring of the images and motifs of western and midwestem literature. Moreover, Cooper perceived something that few of his contemporaries were able to see, that 640
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the settlement of the West was not wholly an heroic enterprise. For when one civilization collided with anotheror with the wildernessthe result was likely to be tragic, and thus the white mens encroachment on the frontier was and would continue to be a dirty, treacherous business. An illustration of this is to be found in the opening scene of The Prairie, which shows settlers wantonly destroying a grove of trees just to make shelter for the night. Cooper also knew something about social economics and class, and in The Prairie he makes use of a new type of individual, a type that would ultimately dominate the fiction of the Midwest. Paul Hover and Ellen Wade are not especially colorful, but they are decent and hard-working members of the middle class. Also representative of this new breed is the Bush family. Squatters or would-be settlers, they are dull, somewhat lawless, yet possessed of a strength and religious righteousness that Cooper seems to admire, in spite of his notions about the lower orders. These realistic characters are early examples in fiction of the native-born immigrants who would move into and help shape the destiny of the Midwest. Still, in spite of Coopers vivid evocation of a haunting prairie landscape and his prescient portrayal of the drama to be enacted there, the idea of an agricultural West was too remote for him to grasp. There is no permanent settling in the novel, and, at the end, all of the major characters, except for the Indians and Leatherstocking, who stays to die, backtrail to the East. Two other early nineteenth-century writers who made notable contributions to the development of midwest literature are Timothy Flint and James Hall, both of whom had much more direct experience than did Cooper with the lands west of the Alleghenies. Timothy Flint (17801840), a minister as well as novelist, established in Cincinnati the Western Monthly Review, one of the first truly regional periodicals dedicated to promoting the literature of the West. Two of Flints novels make significant, though not extensive, use of the Midwest as setting. Francis Berrian or the Mexican Patriot (1826) tells the story of Francis Berrian, a New Englander and Harvard graduate, who seeks adventure in the West. Though the main and most exciting part of the book takes place in the Southwest, there is extensive description of the plains region of the Mississippi Basin, as Berrians travels take him down the Ohio and Mississippi. The hero, like so many in early novels about the West, is totally out of place in such wild surroundings. His New England (and Harvard) bookish background leads him to quote Virgil and contemplate Byron as he moves through the West. But in spite of such incongruities Flint does provide some quite vivid details of prairie life and landscape. The Life and Adventures of Arthur Clenning (1828) is another Flint novel in which the hero travels widely but eventually settles in Illinois at 641
the Morris Birbeck settlement where his son and heir can have the utmost freedom and opportunity and thus develop into a true man of the Westor Buckeye as the novel puts it. James Hall (17931868), who had more direct contact with the area than most of the early writers of midwest fiction, lived about fifty years in the West, mainly in Ohio and Illinois. He wrote no novels but his work as a writer, collector, and publisher of short fiction and verse about the West has led to his being considered the central figure in a kind of school of experimenters in the materials of frontier life. Hall first authored Letters from the West (1828), The Soldiers Bride & Other Tales (1833), and Tales of the Border (1835). In his treatment of frontier themes Hall is inclined to be somewhat sentimental, but he had seen too much of what the country was really like not to provide some realistic detail of pioneer life, particularly as he depicts the widespread resentment of the English and hatred of the Indian. Because of this he was considered something of a rebel in his time and was censured by some of his contemporaries for using vulgar backwoods expressions and 10 for pointing out the less than idyllic living conditions of the pioneer west. Thus Hall became an early member of that clan which did not give unmitigated praise to the region, though his artificial and stilted prose style prevents him from being considered a thoroughgoing realist. Another novelist of this period who depicted midwestern community life in its embryonic stage was Caroline M. Kirkland, who was far from just another chronicler of frontier romance and adventure. Her portrayal of the new villages in Michigan in A New HomeWholl Follow? (1839) is blunt, direct, even satirical. This work, a remarkable amalgam of journal-like sketches, commentary, and narrative, takes a close and objective look at the unpolished manners of pioneers. Though some humor and sentiment is present, much of the book is a kind of catalog of the inconveniences of the environment and the crudeness of people in the settlements. Seldom heroic or noble, the villagers are ignorant, unclean, and impolite. The claim that Kirklands satirical approach destroyed the romantic conception of frontier 11 l i f e is no doubt an exaggeration. But certainly her sometimes caustic tone (she complained ten years after publishing the book that, if anything, she may have been too mild), makes her at the very least an important forerunner of the later regional realists. Enthusiasm for the western country and the prospects for settlers was not confined to fiction, of course. The established poets of the American Renaissance took their turn at the subject of the central plains. William Cullen Bryant in The Prairies, inspired no doubt by a visit to Illinois, tells of gazing at the broad, open landscape and reflecting with nostalgia on the colorful past when the redman and the bison roamed the plains. His mus-
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ings are shattered by the imagined sound of the advancing white settlers filling up the open spaces. John Greenleaf Whittier used the prairie as a setting for several poems, and one of them, The Kansas Emigrants, became a popular marching song of the pioneers. Even a Boston Brahmin not noted for his interest in the West, James Russell Lowell, wrote The Pioneer, in which the limitless-seeming space of the prairie is lauded as being the ideal home for those who would be free. Walt Whitman, the great poetic spokesman for democracy, wrote admiringly of the pioneer inhabitants of the Middle West as especially well qualified to achieve and enjoy freedom. They were the ones who would most likely put the past behind and produce a great central inland race . . . with the continental blood interveind, as Whitman put it in Pioneers! O Pioneers!, a poem that would provide a later writer with the title for her first novel about the midlands. Unlike some of the romantic writers of the time Whitman had no qualms about what the settlement of the middle states would produce. In his six-line verse The Prairie States he images a crowded and industrialized society, a crown and teeming paradise that justifies all the events leading up to it.
THE RECENT PERIOD, 1883 TO THE PRESENT
In 1902 the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce gave a lecture in Iowa City, Iowa, in which he called for a new movement in letters. The higher provincialism, as he termed it, would serve to counter the demoralizing effects of cultural homogenization, a by-product of the rapid growth of industrial monopolies. Convinced that such regionalism would be salutary for American society, Royce encouraged areas with distinctive cultural patterns to preserve and promote their individualities through literature and the arts. Actually such a movement was already underway in the Midwest, and in the decades that followed many more writers of the central states would follow Royces dictum: Serve faithfully your community that the nation 12 may be served. Though the several isms and movements that marked the overall growth of American literature were present to an extent in the literary development of the Midwest, the major writers of the region were sufficiently independent that it is not convenient to classify them as members of particular schools or groups, including the ubiquitous and not very helpful designation of regionalists. Moreover, most of the important twentiethcentury midwestern writers were so nearly contemporaneous with one another that it is difficult to discuss them in a chronological framework. Thus in order to avoid overlapping, the best way to trace the development of midwest literature since 1883 is to examine how various writers have
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dealt with certain recurring themes, or, more correctly, with variations of a single theme. The single theme is the land itself, and the variations reflect changes that have come to the land itself and to the drama of human life in the heartland. More than any other region the Midwest has seemingly been affected cursed or blessedby rapid change. In other regions, the South and New England, for example, there has always been a greater aura of permanence. In those sections of the country, traditions are older, change has taken place more slowly, and there have been concerted efforts to preserve certain features of the past. But in the midwestem states culture like local architecture has always been temporary and disposable. And because at the outset the Midlands consisted of so much empty space, with few outstanding landmarks, the transformation of the region has been dramatic; it has undergone a greater change of landscape in a shorter space of time, perhaps, than any area of comparable size. To have gone, in little more than a hundred years, from open prairie with only a few hundred thousand primitive inhabitants to a burgeoning inland empire crowded with farms and cities, crisscrossed with railroads and interstate highways and jet trails, bustling with millions of people working in factories, mines, schools, stockyards, colleges, theaters, and librariessuch change is epical. It is also the stuff of tragedy, for change inevitably assumes destruction, and the Midwest has been the scene, along with construction, of much destruction: white power replacing red power, the farmer replacing the free hunter and trapper, the town replacing the farm, and the city replacing the town. Thus around the end of the nineteenth century writers began to consider the radical cultural and environmental changes taking place in the Midwest, and a new awareness of the literary possibilities of the region began to emerge in a flood of fiction and poetry, starting with the surprisingly realistic treatment of rural life by Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin Garland. The resulting activity, eventually termed the New Regionalism, was marked by renewed interest in folklore, new and sophisticated use of local material, and the founding of periodicals like Midland: A Magazine of the Middle West in Iowa City in 1915 and the Prairie Schooner in Lincoln in 1927. The fertility of the central states was thus established once and for all, artistically as well as agriculturally. For the most part, the writers of the recent period of midwest literature have been concerned with four main themes, each a variation of the basic one of land and change. Each of the four represents a stage in the development of the Midwest: first, the pre-settlement Midwest; second, settling and farm life; third, small town life; and fourth, life in the urban, industrialized Midwest. Not surprisingly, these stages closely resemble the ones delin-
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eated by Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous essay on the significance of the frontier. Prior to the twentieth century most belletristic writing about the original inhabitants of the Midwest was at odds with reality. Longfellows Hiawatha, for example, which gave several generations of readers their principal notion of what Native American life was like in the Midlands, was the result of no direct contact with the Indians or even of very extensive research. Instead, the long poem is an amalgam of the many legends found in the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Longfellows treatment of the Indians is like that of Cooper and many other nineteenth-century white writers; he either exaggerated their cruelty and savagery or overstated their glamour and nobility. Seldom did a writer present a balanced view showing the unique richness of Indian culture and the pitiful results of its near-extermination. A needed corrective to this situation came in the twentieth century in the works of several Midwest authors who wrote of the pre-settlement period: Hamlin Garland, John G. Neihardt, Frederick Manfred, and Mari Sandoz. Each of these writers was born in the Midwest; each had direct contact with Indians or with Indian country. Each was meticulous in researching the early days of the Midwest, and each developed a comprehensive view of the evolution of the region. Although he did not write extensively on the subject, Hamlin Garland deserves mention as one of the early writers who perceived the Indian in a new way. His The Book of the Indian (1932) with its fourteen short stories plus a brief fictionalized biography of Sitting Bull has an element of authenticity absent from the narratives of eastern writers. There are flaws of course. His use of an Indian narrator in The Silent Eatersthe life of Sitting Bullis not very convincing, and Garlands position is still the old chauvinistic one which stressed the need for conversion to white mens ways. But he does convey the terrible contempt with which the Indians were regarded by the conquering whites and the brutal treatment they received at their hands. Thus Garland was one of the first to open the way for a more realistic and sympathetic treatment of plains Indians. The work of John G. Neihardt, much of it in verse, is almost exclusively devoted to the theme of the Native American and the trappers and explorers of the pre-settlement West. Neihardt had the advantage of being able to use authentic pioneer experiences in his writing, having been born on a farm in Illinois in 1881 and raised and educated in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, as an employee of the Indian Bureau, he talked to many Indians who had participated in the very events he found so important and about which he
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wished to write. Convinced that the most colorful events in his countrys history had taken place on the interior plains between 1822 and 1890, Neihardt set out to celebrate what he considered the heroic past of the West in a number of works. The most important of these is The Cycle of the West, which, with its five Songs, amounts to an epic overview of all the heroic phases of the West: conquest, courage, friendship, faith. Perhaps the most monumental poem ever written by an American, the Cycle of the West covers the key events in the Missouri River Valley region from 1822 to 1890, from the Ashley-Henry expedition to the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. Though Neihardt has not escaped criticism for his poetic style, which was much influenced by classical forms, there has been almost universal acclaim for his most popular book Black Elk Speaks (1932). The work, which recounts in prose the vision of a Sioux holy man who told it to Neihardt, is a tour de force, mixing mysticism and historical event. As a dramatic portrayal of Indian psyche, myth, and legend, as well as of the white mans destruction of the red mans culture, it is widely regarded as not only a powerful but an accurate contribution to literature about the Native American. Another work on this same subject is Neihardts last novel, When the Tree Flowered (1951). It too traces the life of a protagonist, Eagle Voice, and the decline of the Sioux nation from its days of glory to ignominious defeat. Here, as in all of Neihardts work, the midwestern landscape, sacred in the eyes of its original inhabitants, is carefully drawn and occupies an integral place in the narrative. The remarkable feature of Neihardts achievement is that he manages to dramatize the heroic qualities of red and white alike. Still, overall it is the spiritual dimension of the Indian that conquers, even though his material culture is destroyed. For the emphasis in the Cycle moves from the physical strength and daring exploits of the white trappers to the spiritual heroism of the Indians. Thus, the ultimate hero of the cycle is Crazy Horse, who embodies all of the finest aspects, both physical and spiritual, of Native American culture. In this way Neihardt depicts the truth of the red mans spiritual visions as more lasting than the truth of the white mans conquest, and thus the victory is reversed. Neihardts work, which has been the subject of increasing analysis in recent years as a result of renewed interest in western literature in general and Native American literature in particular, has done much to help Anglo America understand the importance of symbolism and ceremony in presettlement culture. More than anyone else, Neihardt has made the world aware of another side to the settlement story of the Midwest, the lamentable destruction and loss incurred in the epic conquest. In view of this, it is safe 646
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to say that the long-time Poet Laureate of Nebraska is the premier writer of the Midwest on the Native American theme. Though younger than Neihardt by fifteen years, Mari Sandoz had close contact with the life and lore of plains Indians, some of whom came and camped on her family homestead in northwest Nebraska. She played with their children and learned legends and history from elders like Old Cheyenne Woman. Using these resources along with vast amounts of research, Sandoz produced several significant volumes dealing with Indians, the Great Plains, and the early trappers. Her principal work is a six-volume non-fiction series entitled The Great Plains Series, consisting of Old Jules, Crazy Horse, Cheyenne Autumn, The Buffalo Hunters, The Cattlemen and The Beaver Men, in which she traces life on the plains from the stone age to her own time. Of this series, the outstanding parts are Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn. One is about the life and death of the mystical and courageous Sioux war chief. The other tells of the sad exodus of a band of Cheyenne Indians who were determined to leave the Oklahoma reservation they despised and return to their home in Montana. Sandozs scholarship is thorough, and she demonstrates a sensitive understanding of the history of the red man. She, like Neihardt before her and Manfred after, is sympathetic to the values and mind-set of the Indian and thus her stories are told as much as possible from the inside, with Indian voices and consequent use of appropriate metaphor and imagery. Through a similar series of books, Frederick Manfred, a native of Iowa, provides unique insights into the lives of those who lived in Siouxland (Manfreds name for the upper Midwest) before it was permanently settled by whites. In the novels which make up his five-volume Buckskin Man series he does this by carefully recreating Indian customs and thought patterns, and by vivifying their mystical relationship with nature. Manfreds best Indian books are unique in that they are not primarily concerned with the struggle between whites and Indians. Conquering Horse and Manly-Hearted Woman, in fact, are set in a time before the coming of the white man has made any impact upon prairie life. Conquering Horse (1965) is the tale of a young Sioux brave, No Name, and his search for personal identity. By blending epic and realistic elements (the father-son rivalry, for example) Manfred avoids the kind of superficial romance that for so long trivialized the Indian in fiction. He gives a clear picture, not only of the social structure and religious beliefs of Native American community life, but of the psychology of its individual members. In part, Manfreds success in doing this is due to his use of a rhythmical speech pattern that is a refreshing corrective to the stilted speech of many fictional Indian narratives. Deservedly, Conquering Horse and its companion piece Manly647
Hearted Woman, which also deals with the theme of the outsider or loner seeking identity, have been called a kind of bible explaining the mystical 1 3 religion practiced by the Plains Indians. Manfred deals with the violent white-Indian struggle in Silver Plume (1964). Based on an historical incident in Minnesota in which thirty-eight Indians were hanged by whites as punishment for an uprising, the novel develops another element also as Manfred recounts the story of love between a Sioux brave and a white woman. Thus the narrative dramatizes significant differences between the two cultures. The story of white men in the pre-settlement Midwest is the subject of Manfreds novel Lord Grizzly (1964). His account of the legendary Hugh Glasss epic struggle for survival and pursuit of revenge is widely considered the finest fictional telling of the story and a classic of western American literature. Here, as in much of his fiction, Manfred makes use of historical records, legends, and Greek and Judaic myth as well, thus developing themes that are clearly universal, not just western. In spite of the literary possibilities of the westward movement, few significant works on the overland trek itself have been written by midwesterners. The two best-known novels on the theme are The Covered Wagon by Emerson Hough and The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, but neither of these books properly belongs in a discussion of the midwest and they are treated elsewhere in this volume. The life of those who settled and cultivated the land, however, has been a fruitful topic for writers from the central states: novels about homesteading and farming began to proliferate early and continued to do so well into the middle of the twentieth century. The subject continued to be an attractive one partly because the drama of living close to the elements and trying to wrest a living from the soil was not seriously diminished even by modern mechanized farming. Moreover, the theme of farming has always been popular because of Americas devotion to the agrarian ideal, an ideal that for three centuries has helped to shape American attitudes and public policy and history. Briefly this concept holds that by working and owning land an individual will attain economic independence, social status, and personal dignity. Thus, it was assumed, the noble occupa14 tion of farming will almost certainly lead to virtue and happiness. For years agrarianism served as a kind of bench mark accepted by some writers of farm life and rejected by others. And since the modern farm novel had its greatest growth during the years when the important literary argument was between the proponents of romanticism and those of realism, it was inevitable that those who were inclined toward romanticism accepted the agrarian ideal and those who embraced realism rejected it. The former tended to view the rural experience in a favorable light, omitting or down648
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playing the less pleasant aspects of rural life, thus producing a modern version of the pastoral tradition. In contrast were those writers who felt it obligatory to represent farm life as they did all of life in all its various shadings 15 of good and bad, pleasant and painful, beautiful and ugly. This stance in its extreme form, of course, was that of the literary naturalists. In no section of the country has the agrarian ideal had a more powerful claim on the values of people and the imagination of artists than in the Midwest. For over a hundred years the lives of settlers and farmers in the interior region have been depicted in fiction in a variety of ways, resulting in social history as well as psychological drama. And because midwestern authors have recorded personal struggles so wellstruggles with the land and weather, with new and strange mores, and with the shock of changefarm literature constitutes a significant contribution to world literature. One of the first to write realistically about farm life was Hamlin Garland, whose Main-Travelled Roads (1891) gives a vivid portrayal of the Midwest during the homesteading years. In his writing Garland strove to do what he did in politics as a crusading Populist: to tell the truth about rural life, or as he declared to put in all there is in the scene, on the surface and beneath, . . .[For] golden butter and sunshine do not make up the whole of 16 farm life. This he did by contrasting the life of the financially strapped farmer with that of the comfortable city dweller. Stories like Up the Coolly and Under the Lions Paw emphasize the small farmers bondage to a life of drudgery and dirt. Farmers like Grant McLane are defeated by the economic system that rewards people with capital like Grants brother, with his yacht and fine clothes, and Jim Butler (in Under the Lions Paw), an unsympathetic money lender, with his high unearned profits. Garland was never a thoroughgoing naturalist; in much of his work elements of sentimentalism are apt to surface. Nevertheless the onetime Iowa farm boy was one of the first and most conspicuous of those who were intent on exposing 17 what he called the essential ugliness of farmers lives. On a more panoramic scale some of the finest writing about early farming experiences is that of Ole Rlvaag and Willa Cather, both of whom were particularly sensitive to the plight of immigrants, having themselves come to the Midwest from older and more settled cultures. Both viewed the settlement of the West as an epic episode in history. Rlvaags Giants in the Earth (1927), which has been described as the 1 8 greatest farm novel produced thus far, pictures homesteading as if it were the founding of a new kingdom. The kingdom is established but at great cost, by a protagonist who embodies some of the best and some of the worst qualities of the pioneer. Per Hansa is industrious, clever, and faithful to his vision of what land ownership can do for him and his family, but he is the 649
victim of what his wife calls American fever. The fever is the immigrants compulsive desire to own more land and the willingness to break moral law in the process. Pers death and Berets suffering are Rlvaags way of underscoring the difficulty of adjusting to the conditions of a new land. And the difficulties are not confined to the first generation of immigrant settlers either, as Rlvaag demonstrates in the two sequels to Giants: Peder Victorious and Our Fathers God. Still, the novel, by using a mythological framework, makes it clear that Rlvaag meant this work to be a kind of tribute to the achievement of the Norwegian immigrants. Although she does not completely overlook the tragic aspect of settling new land, Willa Cathers view of the pioneer experience is more positive than many. She portrays the pioneer experience as formidable but ennobling, leading to spiritual and quite possibly material enrichment. In O Pioneers ! and My ntonia, her protagonists are strong pioneer women from Europe who help settle the Nebraska prairies and live productive lives there. They make sacrifices, of course. Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! loses a brother and postpones marriage for years. But with faith and love of the land, she perseveres and ends up a successful farmer, a legendary agrarian hero, who even in death will enrich the earth. Similarly in My ntonia, ntonia Schimerda endures severe blows of fortune. Her father takes his own life. Her fianc abandons her, pregnant. But she is made of stern stuff, never retreating from adversity and remaining close to the land. Because of her steadfast loyalty to the soil and the elemental things of life, ntonia comes to symbolize the ideal pioneer woman, like the founders of early 1 9 races. In these two prairie novels Cather draws a generally favorable picture of the early history of the Midwest. Though in other works she shows that rural life can be stultifying because of its remoteness from centers of high culture, her superbly lyrical style usually softens any naturalistic tendencies so that, in the main, her treatment of the settlement experience is an elegiac one. Frederick Manfred relied on his own and his familys farm experiences in Siouxland to give a not always pretty picture of Midwest life in the first half of the twentieth century. In four of his novels in particular The Golden Bowl, This Is the Year, Green Earth, and Eden Prairie the elements of nature of the Midwest are the major forces to be reckoned with. But his works are not just novels of the soil; they are also novels of self and society. Each contains a central character struggling to come to terms with forces inside as well as outside himself. The Golden Bowl is a Depression story filled with the dryness and dust of the Thirties. Its protagonist, Maury Grant, has come to distrust the land for its barrenness and apparent hostility, and thus
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leaves the farm for the rootless life of the gold mines. But the homelessness of the hoboes and miners with whom he mingles is no substitute for the stability the land offers and he returns to it. Manfreds lesson is plain: closeness to the land is necessary for peace within. Another willful protagonist struggling to be independent from his parents and their European heritage is Pier Frixen of Manfreds exceedingly harsh farm novel This Is the Year. In it the problem of assimilation for Frisian immigrants is paramount, a theme accentuated by the authors use of Frisian folklore and language. But it is the stubborn Piers inner struggle played out against a backdrop of erratic economic conditions that gives the novel its main force. Though he is an unlikely agrarian hero, Pier does possess some pioneer virtues, energy in particular. Other novelists who, like Manfred, approach the immigrant farming theme in a realistic manner are Herbert Quick, Herbert Krause, Sophus Keith Winther, and Mari Sandoz, each of whom produced a series of books that focused on a particular rural region of their home state. Herbert Quicks best known work, Vandemarks Folly (1922), traces the career of a young Dutchman who moves to Iowa from New York state and develops an apparently worthless marsh into productive farm land. In spite of some melodramatic features, the book contains an abundance of realistic detail demonstrating the perseverance and ingenuity of the pioneers in overcoming obstacles. If for no other reason, Quicks novel should be remembered for its moving description of the pristine Iowa prairie and Jacobus Vandemarks insightful response to the first cultivation of it: Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the most epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in one way the most pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things 20 ever created began to come to its predestined end. The farming country of western Minnesota (Pockerbrush country) is the setting for Herbert Krauses two principal novels, Wind Without Rain (1939) and The Thresher ( 1946). Krauses view of the experience of German immigrants is not a cheery one, in spite of his sometimes poetical style. Not only is the daily toil of farming itself deadening, but the family of Johann Vildvogel is brutalized by their despotic father. In addition, the strict and lugubrious Lutheranism of the immigrants is repressive, especially for the younger generation. Economic conditions compound the obstacles to success: higher land prices, mortgages, and low crop prices. Thus, Wind Without Rain provides an explanation of why so many children of immigrants found little romance in farm life and frequently escaped to the city at the first opportunity.
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Yet another novelist who deals with the obstacles foreign-born settlers encountered in the new land is Sophus Keith Winther, who recorded the plight of the Danes who came to Nebraska at the turn of the century. His Grimsen trilogy, Take All to Nebraska, Mortgage Your Heart, and This Passion Never Dies, chronicles the settlement years from 1898 to 1922 by stressing the contrast between the hopes and dreams of the emigrants and realities of life as they found it in the promised land. Lacking capital and unable to speak English, the Danes suffer poverty and ridicule. Winthers essentially naturalistic treatment of the settlement theme is utterly devoid of sentiment, as his characters are felled by fatalistic forces beyond their control. Winther once commented that to tell the immigrants story is to add to our understanding of American culture. Fortunately the story has been told often and in a variety of ways. One of the many tellings of the settlement story is Mari Sandozs Old Jules. In it the author describes the life of her father, a Swiss immigrant trained in medicine, who came to the Niobrara Valley of northwest Nebraska in 1884. A brutal egocentric whose behavior at times bordered on the sadistic, Jules was nevertheless something of a pioneer hero. Intelligent and articulate, he promoted land for settlement and, as an early horticulturist, urged the pioneers to follow sound conservation practices. Old Jules and Sandozs other book set in the sandhill country, the fictional Slogum House, are blunt, tough, books that show the role of powerful personalities engaged in the business of building up a country. Not all of the numerous prairie authors who wrote about the settlement of the West and later farm life there, however, take such a harsh view of the subject. One who does not is Ruth Suckow who, as one of her 22 advocates put it, always presented the Midwest with essential fairness. Suckow, in several novels, Country People and The Folks to name but two, and a short story collection, Iowa Interiors, gives a detailed but somewhat bland account of ordinary rural people to whom nothing very sensational or romantic happens. Conflict comes from such ordinary things as the unrest country people feel when they have retired to town, after a life of farming. Hardly, as Suckow herself admitted, an indictment of a way of life, yet no doubt as valid for many readers as many of the more gloomy treatments of midwest farm life. Two novelists who depict rural life in a rather cheerful vein are Bess Streeter Aldrich and Phil Duffield Stong. Aldrichs A Lantern in Her Hand and Song of Years are fairly sentimental accounts of the settlement and growth of farming areas in Nebraska and Iowa before and after the Civil War. The use of historical detail adds an element of realism to the narratives, but in the main the lack of serious conflict makes the stories less than dramatic. One of the most famous of all novels about American farm 652
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life is Phil Stongs State Fair, a book made into at least two Hollywood films. The midwest ritual of the state fair is celebrated as the novel follows a farm family who take their prize hog to the fair in Des Moines. The Iowa depicted is a bucolic place, healthy, clean,and peacefulthe reverse image of the hostile prairie environment depicted in much other fiction. The literature of the small town is the most fecund of all the subjects of midwest writers. In part, this is because there have been relatively few large cities in the Midwest. But there are other reasons behind the villages popularity. From the beginning Americans seem to have been intrigued by their villages, an image central to the American Dream. For, though the city was the destination of upward-moving Americans, the stereotypical origin of future writers, artists, industrialists, and presidents was the small town. Primarily this was so because such a locale was considered the ideal place for developing good health, intelligence, decency, and talent. Moreover, the village atmosphere was supposed to be the epitome of democratic community life. In fact, as one critic has stated, The myth of the small town was 23 based on a set of ideal antitheses to the city. The small town was assumed by Americans to have the virtues of the farm but with the added advantage of business and professional community life plus small but well-intentioned cultural elements. These features along with the celebrated folksiness led many villagers to feel smug about their superior environmentand pity for the city dweller who had to endure the discomfort and malevolence of the metropolis. But whereas a great many Americans accepted this rosy picture of the midwest small town, the literary response to it has been, though varied, largely a rejection of the picture as essentially a myth, at odds with reality. And it is significant that the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature was from a small midwestern town and was awarded the honor largely because of his startling portrayal of a small town in Minnesota. The first important modern novel to treat the small town theme was printed, just a century ago, on the authors own press in Atchison, Kansas. The book, The Story of a Country Town (1883) by Edgar Watson Howe, in spite of its flawed structure and lack of unity, has long been recognized as one of the opening guns in the war against the sentimental treatment of village life. In it the citizens of Twin Mounds, the country town of the title, are exposed as futile, argumentative, boastful, discontented, envious, and 24 mean, to use Carl Van Dorens assessment of them. Howe gives a bleak picture of small town life which consists of much dreary and shallow activity enlivened only by mean gossip. In addition, village life is inhibited by a suffocating puritanism, a force which apparently Howe considered to be a major destructive element in midwestern life. Howe foresaw the artistic possibilities of his subject when he said: In 653
every town there is material for the great American novel. Though he himself did not write a great novel, The Story of a Country Town was praised by both William Dean Howells and Mark Twain, and has become widely regarded as an early example of naturalistic treatment of the village theme. Hamlin Garland did not devote any entire work to a small town, but occasionally in several of his early works villages appear. His attitude toward them is not very negative, certainly it is less ruthless than that of E. W. Howe. Two stories in Main-Travelled Roads in fact give an almost sentimental view of the town. It is in Belleplain in A Days Pleasure that the simple act of kindness occurs that gives the weary farm wife some brief pleasure. And the people of Bluff Siding, denounced at first by the protagonist in Gods Ravens as caricatures who warp everything they touch, befriend him during a serious illness and enable him to see their essential goodness. Similar views of town characters appear in works like Prairie Folks and A Son of the Middle Border, where the village comes across as a rather pleasant place. In contrast to the rigorous, filthy drudgery of the farm yard, the newly transplanted Garland found town an exciting place for play and carefree companionship. He once explained that his view of small town life tended to be favorable because the villager even when he suffers at least suffers with others. Also there is more apt to be love in town because, as he put it, youth and love are able to transform a bleak prairie town into a 26 poem, and to make of a barbed wire lane a highway of romance. It was through poetry rather than fiction that Americans first became aware of the movement eventually known as the Revolt from the Village. Edgar Lee Masterss The Spoon River Anthology (1915) depicts the life of the village of the title through the posthumous confessions of 242 of the towns citizens. Although there are a few noble souls and idealists among them, the overall picture of Spoon River is one of terrible spiritual isolation. Most of the characters, destroyed by a suffocating conformity, are victims of the prevailing values of the town, what Waldo Frank called the cruelty of 2 7 the driven herd. Masterss bold method of presenting the truth behind the surface of peoples lives influenced a number of Midwest writers who were to endeavor the same thing. Though Sherwood Anderson falls outside the limits of this history, no discussion of the literature of the midwest village would be complete without some mention of his Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Andersons treatment of the town is mainly tender, as he dramatizes the pathetic attempts of a number of townspeople, grotesques, to articulate their deepest feelings. But the town itself is clearly a major obstacle to self-expression and fulfillment; it, too, is struggling to find self-esteem and understanding in a time when the once dominant agrarian culture is declining. As in a number of village novels, one character distinguishes himself by intelligence and sensitivity, 654
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which enables him to see his plight somewhat clearly and to escape the town. Thus, George Willard, the newspaper reporter for the Winesburg Eagle and confidant of many of the grotesques, matures and leaves town with the possibility of future fulfillment, an accomplishment to be attained in the citynot in the village. Willa Cathers treatment of the midwest village is somewhat ambiguous. Sometimes the small town for her is a place of terrible smugness and hypocrisy, as, for example, in the short story The Sculptors Funeral, where the nobility of the sculptor is contrasted with the narrowness of the townspeople. Similarly, in My ntonia, the prairie town of Black Hawk has already developed a rigid caste system which segregates the foreign-born hired girls from the American children of local businessmen. But rarely does Cather denounce the small town with anything like the bitterness of Lewis or Masters. It would be inaccurate to place Cather in the revolt from the village movement; nevertheless in none of her works does she portray the small town as a place of beauty or joy. The most celebrated of all the books about small towns in America and the one by which all others are measured is Sinclair Lewiss Main Street. Published in 1920, it was a stunning success and put the world on notice that midwest writers were not simply apologists for the village. In spite of Lewiss disclaimer in the foreword to the book that the sins of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, are not confined to towns in the Midwest, the novel, because of its setting and the authors origins, has always encouraged stereotypes of hick towns in the Midwest. Lewis made this easy to do by cataloging the depressing personalities of some small town types and by drawing vivid and detailed pictures, not only of social dullness, but of the banal architecture, furnishings, and daily customs of the village as well. To illustrate the power of what the local philosopher cynically terms the village virus Lewis created an idealistic young rebel, Carol Milford, who, appalled by the ugliness and provinciality of the town, determines to transform it into Village Beautiful, and to enlighten its citizens. An essential part of Lewiss realistic treatment of this revolutionary is that Carol is not much better than the people she wishes to improve and her attempts at reform are ineffectual. In the end she returns from a trial escape to an uneasy compromise with the values of husband and town. To modern readers Lewiss attack on the standardization of American life as seen in a midwestern small town may seem heavy-handed. But Main Street so effectively evokes the ambience of cramped lives, spiritual deadness, and environmental ugliness that the book remains, and no doubt shall remain, a classic indictment. In contrast to Lewis was his contemporary, Zona Gale, a prolific Wisconsin writer, who in a series of eighty-three saccharine stories and several 655
novels about Friendship Village portrays the small town as a peaceful place inhabited by happy, sharing, loving folks. Gale was enough of a booster herself to have written a booklet which set forth a number of ways that citizens could improve the quality of the life in their communities. Eventually, however, Gale too joined the ranks of those who were in revolt against the village. With Birth (1918) and Miss Lulu Bett (1920), Gales treatment of the village became considerably more harsh. The town of Boarger in Birth is as desolate and ugly as Friendship Village was attractive. Warbleton in Miss Lulu Bett is a provincial place filled with tension, gossip, and meanness. The smug brother-in-law of the title character runs his household with meanness and intolerance. Here the picture drawn of the unemancipated life of the main character and the petty villagers is another subtle yet effective attack on small town mores. Interestingly, Gale was widely recognized in the 20s and 30s as both an advocate and a critic of village life. The fourth and final midwestern theme is that of the prairie urbanized and industrialized. Almost all of the major midwest writers who lived into the middle of the twentieth century, or who, like Wright Morris and Frederick Manfred, are still living, have examined this stage of the regions development. Some, in fact, like Morris, have dealt almost exclusively with the contemporary scene. The general mood of such works is somber. Though there may be some celebration of earlier times, they are increasingly in the background like a bench mark against which modern values and actions are measured. However, the looking back is seldom with nostalgia but with a somewhat mordant doubt. Therefore a recurring motif in literature about the later post-frontier era is that of diminishment. Some midwest authors seem to be asking, like Frosts oven bird, what to make of a diminished thing. For, in spite of physical conditions that seem superior to those of the pioneers, there is considerable concern about what is lacking. Particularly evident is emphasis on the decline of pioneer values. One of the early and eloquent expressions of this sense of loss is to be found in Cathers short novel A Lost Lady (1923), in which the real hero is Captain Forrester, the old railroad builder, who represents the pioneer virtues of courage, rectitude, and vision. Cather contrasts him with his wife, the Lost Lady, who, more concerned with style than substance, moves away from the foursquare values of the builders. She even consorts with Ivy Peters, a repulsive symbol of a corrupt new age which lacks respect for the past. The sensitive observer of this change, Neil Herbert, laments the end of the old days, the vestiges of which Cather admirably sums up in an image of the embers of the hunters fire on the prairie after the hunter was
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gone. In this work, and in others like The Professors House, Willa Cather dramatizes her complaint that the world broke in two somewhere around 1922. She was joined in this attitude by Mari Sandoz, who saw in the postfrontier development of the central region a threat to social harmony. Her Capital City (1934) was a study, allegorical in its critical approach, of a corrupt community, a midwest capital city, whose existence was almost exclusively justified by its being the seat of state government. The picture of the strike-torn Kanawa governed by insensitive men aided by fascistic goldshirts was Sandozs way of presenting twentieth-century totalitarianism, from which even the Midwest might not be immune. Frederick Manfred has written extensively of the impact modern industrialized society has on sensitive individuals. A fictional trilogy The Primitive (1945), The Brother (1950), and The Giant (1951) (published under one title in 1962 as Wanderlust) traces the development of a Siouxland orphan as he gets an education, seeks an occupation, becomes involved in politics, searches for a father, and, finally, becomes a composer. Along the way Thurs Wraldson encounters, in cities, a wide variety of human types and experiences. The fundamentalist beliefs of his college, the evil of New York City, the harshness of factory work, and the repressiveness of Communism all seem to violate the naturalness of life, and lead to disillusion. A significant symbol for the authors perception of the way things have changed is the wounded woodpecker Thurs finds in New York. Totally out of its proper environment and with its wings broken, the woodpecker appears to represent the plight of modern man, far from his roots, overwhelmed by a complex and hostile urban society. Thus, Manfreds account of this search for self seems to conclude that ultimate value is to be found in such things as creativity, rootedness, closeness to nature, and the peacefulness of rural lifethough these are qualities increasingly difficult to find. Similarly, Morning Red (1956) and Milk of Wolves (1976) emphasize the blunting effect of political and financial corruption, in the life of the city. The former work, in particular, dramatizes the problem of trying to live with integrity in a perplexing world. Its two protagonists, Kurt Faver and Jack Nagel, struggle to complete themselves, a struggle made more difficult because of the corrupt environment. Of the two men, the country-bred one appears to be more adaptable to life. Like Conquering Horse and Hugh Glass Kurt relies more on instinct than on intellect as he fights to survive. Another contemporary midwest writer who continues to explore the connection between the pioneer past and the contemporary scene is Wright Morris. Morris moved away from his native Nebraska and uses other settings for his fiction; frequently, however, his characters have inner conflicts
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which are the result of early years spent in the Midwest. His recurring use of the West as a theme would seem to indicate that he accepts the Turnerian idea that the frontier was the major determinant of the American character. Thus Morriss work as a whole comprises a serious attempt to define what it means to be an American. Like so many writers, Morris seeks to discover his own personal relationship to the past, especially the mythical pioneer past. Three novels illustrate this well: Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), and The World in the Attic (1949). In them, contemporary life is pictured as unpleasant, the modern West in particular containing much cheapness and violence. Morris appears to suggest, ironically, that the life of the pioneers, or at least the mythical version of it, was the cause of this modern wasteland. Moreover, these books point up Morriss determination to search for and use new and appropriate aesthetic techniques. This is necessary, he states in his book of criticism The Territory Ahead (1958), in order to properly capture and understand the pioneer past which by now has been 29 overprocessed. One notable technique Morris employs, whereby time and perspective themselves become a theme, is limiting the main action to a brief space of time, an afternoon for example, and focusing on the way that individual moment contains or reveals past and present coming together, a conjunction the author terms the prehistoric present. Another significant device Morris employs is his own photography. His stark photographs are usually of things with personal and cultural significance, mostly old and worn-out objects comprising a kind of commentary or silent narrative. The Inhabitants contains a series of such pictures, a visual account of Nebraska farms associated with the authors life. The Home Place uses photographs to illustrate the lives of those who lived on the farms; and The World in the Attic is a novel about a mans return to his home place in Nebraska. The character, who is the narrator, responds to old scenes with the conflicting emotions that Morris often juxtaposes when considering the midwestem experience: joy and horror, nostalgia and nausea. Thus Morris, like Cooper and Cather before him, deals with America in moments of transition. Indeed one critic has suggested that in order to understand twentieth-century America one should read two books, Cathers My ntonia and Morriss Ceremony at One Tree, for the two do nothing less 3 0 than embody in symbolic fashion the national experience. Another approach to the modern Midwest comes from an expatriate who, like others of that ilk, attempted to exorcise his pioneer ancestry. To do so, Glenway Wescott wrote The Grandmothers (1927), a looking-back novel in which the main character searches through memories of family history hoping to locate some meaning. The Towers, prototypical westwardmoving pioneers, went from England to New York to Wisconsin, where 658
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they settled in a place called, significantly, Hopes Corners. The central figure, Alwyn Tower, while living in Austria and Monte Carlo, tries to sort out the mythical from the real in a past that continues to haunt him, even though its conditions no longer exist. That wilderness of history and hearsay, that distorted landscape of a dream which had come true before it had been dreamed, was there where it had been, but buried, buried under the plowed 31 land, the feet of modern men, and the ripening crops. As he muses on his own memories, bits of gossip, tales, and imaginings of his family, he begins to understand that the pioneers lives were filled with frustration and failure as they repeatedly did not attain their hearts desire and thus had to seek fulfillment in heaven, as it had been in Europe, as it 3 2 had always been. Nevertheless the picture Tower draws of his ancestors, including all their weaknesses and failures, points up as well their great strengths such as imagination and vitality. Thus The Grandmothers, like so many novels which are intended to debunk the achievement of the pioneer, ends up more elegy than exorcism, a celebration of the regional ghost 3 3 dominating the present from the darkness of the past. As the twentieth century draws to a close, writers of the Midwest continue to express their feelings about the spirit of the region, its past and its present. They persist in celebrating its physical attributes while at the same time criticizing its moral climate, a process that sometimes leads to political analysis of the world beyond its borders. Two authors who represent this tendency are Thomas McGrath and Robert Bly, both poets and activists, who live in and write about their native region. McGraths major work is a long autobiographical poem-in-progress, Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Parts I and II published in 1962 and 1970). Part of the poem is a recapitulation of the authors childhood experiences in rural North Dakota, during the last years of the Agrarian City as he describes the period. It was a time of much cooperative effort: plowing, chopping, threshing, all part of the warm circle of work. But it was a hard and disheartening existence, too, as farmers struggled with grasshoppers, dust storms, mortgages and foreclosures. Any possible nostalgia for agrarian life is tempered by McGraths vivid awareness of injustice. An early friendship with a radical hired hand who proposed a strike during harvest and was beaten by the poets uncle is one of several incidents in the poem which account for the lifelong sympathy McGrath has had for radical causes, including, at one time, Communism. In viewing the past of the heartland, McGrath laments the corruptive element in Manifest Destiny, which, though it enabled white Americans to gain land and freedom, did so by depriving Native Americans of theirs, thus 659
causing a part of our souls [to be] scabbed over. But genocide was only one aspect of the dark side of settlement. Breaking land that should have been left to grass was another. The result, as McGrath depicts it, is a wasteland of abandoned farmhouses, roads leading nowhere, and the old neighborliness gone. The Midwest, here intended as a synecdoche for the whole of modern civilization, suffers not only from financial but moral bankruptcy, and the optimistic, though doomed, old farmers refrain of Well make her yet is replaced by the picture of the modern wheat farmer, who lives away from the land and winters in Acapulco. Robert Bly is another poet from the northern plains who makes powerful use of local material, but who is also known as a critic of national policy. Bly lives in the country in Minnesota, a state which figures prominently in a number of his poems. Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) in particular contains sharp images of the most elemental features of prairie landscape: barns, farmhouses, telegraph poles, and small towns. References to specific places abound as well as do the seasons, particularly winter. The images, though usually conveying a feeling of dryness or bleakness, are treated with awe and affection, indicating that the private universe of the poet finds joy, order, and peace in the outer world. Rarely is there an explicit reference to the frontier past of the region, but sometimes there are telling suggestions of its presence. An example appears in the poem Afternoon Sleep, when the poet, intrigued by a farm which an old bachelor sold, drove out to the place and found it deserted and Inside were old abandoned books And instructions to Norwegian immigrants. Much of Blys work after Silence in the Snowy Fields is political in nature and goes beyond the Midwest for its settings. But even when the poet is diagnosing the ills of society as a whole, he alludes to evil consequences of the westward movement. Bly links the tragedy of Vietnam and that of Wounded Knee because behind both was Americas obsessive hatred of non-white races. Thus his poem Hatred of Men with Black Hair tells of the perfidy of those who skinned Little Crow and overthrew Chief Joseph. Underneath all the cement of the Pentagon There is a drop of Indian blood preserved in snow: Preserved from a trail of blood that once led away From the stockade, over the snow the trail now lost. In addition to his reputation as a poet Bly is known as an editor (as founder and editor of the periodical The Fifties and its sequels) as well as a translator of European and South American verse. Both McGrath and Bly represent one dimension of a new and sophis660
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ticated literary regionalism. They, and many others including Meridel LeSueur, William Gass, Larry Woiwode, and the still active Frederick Manfred, continue to dramatize the psychological trauma that marks the industrialized post-pioneer era. For, in the mid-1980s, the character of the midwest seems to be swiftly changing. The rural population, already low, is dwindling; fewer and fewer farmers are capable of making an independent living on family-sized farms. Foreign and corporate ownership of the land is increasingly common. The big cities, once the pride of the region, have been transformed from centers that processed and distributed farm products to places that process money and real estate. But change is nothing new to the Midwest. For over a century the region has been the scene of what has been aptly described as one of the worlds great revolutions, a vast reordering of what men felt they knew about land, a discarding of old traditions and methods, and a painful learn3 4 ing process in which men adapted to a new system. From the outset writers have viewed the setting of this revolution from a number of sharply contrasting perspectives. Some have treated it as a Garden or Valley of Democracy. Others have considered it a bewildered em35 p i r e . And the need to describe and explain the bewilderment has always been of disproportionate concern. A large number of poets and novelists have pointed to the failure of the pioneers, as well as their successors, to respect and love the land as did the original inhabitants as a major cause of the spiritual confusion of the region. Similarly they have charged midwesterners as mistakenly regarding nature as the enemy, instead of seeing that, as Robert Scholes has suggested, the true enemy was mans power over nature, his ability to transform it and tear the heart out of it in the 3 6 process. Perhaps as the process of revolution continues, the next major theme of Royces higher provincialism will be the spiritual sickness that has resulted from technological progress and demographic change in the region. Future writers may concentrate on the conflict between separateness and oneness. Though the image of the lone individual confronting Indians and the elements has been at the heart of the myth of the West, the consequences of that confrontation have not been entirely happy. Hence it will be necessary to examine the role of the single self and its relationship to the universal whole. The result may be a new literary emphasis on the spiritual oneness of man and humanity, of man and the land.
GEORGE F. DAY, University
of Northern Iowa
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Notes
1. J. Milton Mackie, Forty Days in a Western Hotel, Putnams Monthly Magazine 4 (1854): 630, quoted in Edwin Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 11n. 2. Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore, American Regionalism (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), p. 463. 3. John T. Flanagan, America Is West (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1945), pp. ivv. 4. Willa Cather, My ntonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 322. 5. Quoted in Dorothy Anne Dondore, The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The Torch Press, 1926), p. 11. 6. Dondore, p. 16. 7. Dondore, p. 21. 8. Manasseh Cutler, An Explanation of the Map of Federal Lands (1787) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966), p. 14. 9. Ralph Leslie Rusk, The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, Vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 275. 10. Rusk, p. 282. 11. Rusk, p. 286. 12. Charles Allen, The Midland, American Prefaces 3, No. 9 (June 1938): 136. 13. Robert C. Wright, Frederick Manfred (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), p. 93. 14. Chester E. Eisinger, quoted and paraphrased in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 126. 15. Eugene Current-Garcia and Walton R. Patrick, Realism and Romanticism in Fiction: An Approach to the Novel (Chicago: Scott Foresman, 1962), p. 7. 16. Hamlin Garland, quoted in Donald Pizer, Hamlin Garlands Early Work and Career (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 164. 17. Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1962) p. 353. 18. Roy W. Meyer, The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 229. 19. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), p. 309. 20. Herbert Quick, Vandemarks Folly (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922), p. 228. 21. Sophus Keith Winther, The Immigrant Theme, Arizona Quarterly 34 (Spring 1978): 36. 22. John T. Frederick, Ruth Suckow and the Middle West Literary Movement, College English 20 (January 1931): 5. 23. Anthony Channell Hilfer, Revolt from the Village, 19151930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 5.
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THE MIDWEST
24. Carl Van Doren, Many Minds (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), p. 37. 25. E. W. Howe, Plain People (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929), p. 184. 26. Hamlin Garland, Other Main-Travelled Roads (New York: Harper and Bros., 1910), pp. v, viii. 27. Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1949), p. 128. 28. Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), p. 168. 29. Wright Morris, The Territory Ahead (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), p.9 30. James E. Miller, Jr., The Nebraska Encounter: Willa Cather and Wright Morris, Prairie Schooner 41 (Summer 1967): 166. 31. Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950), p.30 32. Wescott, p. 29. 33. Dayton Kohler, Glenway Wescott: Legend-Maker, The Bookman 63 (April 1931): 145. 34. John Madson, Where the Sky Began (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 203. 35. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), p. 1. 36. Robert Scholes, The Fictional Heart of the Country: From Rolvaag to Gass, in Ole Rolvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader, ed. Gerald Thorson (Northfield, Minn.: St. Olaf College Press, 1975, p. 13.
663
Hamlin Garland and Midwest Farm Fiction
NTIL LATE in the nineteenth century most Americans lived on farms. Yet it was only when the balance shifted and we became a predominantly urban nation that farm life began to be treated seriously in fiction. True, novelists and short story writers had used the farm as a setting for their compositions, but it was conventionalized, a convenient locale for a plot that had little to do with farm life, for characters who did little actual farm workor, quite often, who were city people temporarily domiciled in the country. Such fiction was only incidentally about the farm, and its setting was the only feature that distinguished it from other fiction. Thus writers like Alice Carey and Bayard Taylor sentimentalized the virtues of rural life, which brought all manner of benefits to the stereotyped characters who acted out their parts on an artificially pastoral stage. The occasional book, like Caroline Matilda Kirklands A New HomeWholl Follow? (1839), that portrayed farm life with a measure of realism did so in the condescending manner of an urban, educated person who had little sympathy for the rustics she described, little comprehension of the social and economic forces that made them what they were. In the twenty years that followed the Civil War several writers of fiction, influenced by the vogue of local color, dealt with rural lifethough not necessarily with farm lifewith something like the attention to detail that marked realistic fiction as it was being practiced by urban writers such as William Dean Howells. Edward Egglestons The Hoosier School-Master (1871), Maurice Thompsons Hoosier Mosaics (1875), and Edgar Watson Howes The Story of a Country Town (1884) are the best known of these transitional works. Eggleston and Thompson, like the other local colorists, tried to represent the speech of their characters with some fidelity, and all three sought to express characteristic rural attitudesthe parochialism and anti-intellectualism of rural people, for example. But they did not write about farm life, except incidentally, and their central characters were not farmers. The first novelists to deal primarily with farmers and to treat them realistically were Harold Frederic, whose Seths Brothers Wife appeared in 1886, and Joseph Kirkland, whose Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County was published the following year. Since Frederic set his novel in upstate New York, he can be accorded only passing mention in a literary history of the
664
GARLAND AND MIDWEST FARM FICTION
American West. Kirkland, however, warrants more attention. Appropriately, he was a son of Caroline Kirkland, and thus he had the double advantage of rural experience at an early age and a childhood environment in which writing was taken seriously. Although only part of Zury takes place on a farm, it is the most important part, for it is on an Illinois frontier farm that the boy Zury learns the lessons of survival that make him the meanest man in later life. Thus not only does Kirkland carefullytoo carefully for modern tastesreproduce the dialect of the locale, but he makes the farm environment a force in the story. Zury, who could so easily have become a caricature, emerges as a believable human being, at least until he undergoes a transformation under the influence of Anne Sparrow, the eastern school teacher whom he eventually marries after the death of his first wife. Among the people who read the novels just discussed and felt their influence was Hamlin Garland, a midwestern farm boy who had gone east to make his way in the very citadel of the eastern literary establishment, Boston. Hannibal Hamlin Garland was born September 16, 1860, on a farm in Greens Coulee, just northeast of Onalaska, Wisconsin. His father, Richard Garland, had come from Maine and was to move several more times. During the boys childhood the family migrated to Iowa and lived successively on three farms in the northern tier of counties. They stayed longest in Mitchell County, and it was there, near Osage, that Garland did most of his growing up. From his experience on the farm he acquired a distaste for farm work and a vague sense that the farmer was getting less than his due share of prosperity for the labor he expended. From his schooling, much of it at the Cedar Valley Seminary at Osage, he derived a hint of a world beyond the confines of Mitchell County and, probably, the rudiments of the intellectual tools that enabled him to find explanations for the low estate in which the farmer found himself. After the Garlands had moved once more, to Dakota Territory, and Hamlin had indulged in a brief fling at homesteading, he reversed the direction of movement, went to Boston, and continued his educationnot, as he had hoped, at Harvard, but in the Boston Public Library. Here he discovered, among others, Walt Whitman, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. In an astonishingly short time, considering where he started, Garland became a lecturer and writer. Although some of his lectures were on subjects about which he really knew very little, he presently began writing about midwestern farm life, a topic on which he was an authority. When he wrote the stories later collected in Main-Travelled Roads (1891), he deliberately set out to correct the picture of farm life offered in the romantic tales that had predominated up to then. When editors asked him for charming love stories, he replied, according to his later reconstruction of the episode, No, weve had enough of lies. . . . Other writers are 665
telling the truth about the city . . . and it appears to me that the time has 1 come to tell the truth about the barn yards daily grind. In stories like Up the Coul he gave his readers the dirt and drudgery of farming. But he did not emphasize the hardships that were inseparable from the contest with nature. Believing as he did that most of the farmers misfortunes were manmade, he concentrated on the evils of the existing economic system. Such a story as Under the Lions Paw can be read as a fictionalized tract on the evils of unearned incrementa doctrine he had learned from Henry George. The point needs to be made, however, that Garlands early stories were not simply tracts; the six original stories in Main-Travelled Roads can stand on their own merits as literature. The irony is that when Garlands moral fervor waned, so did the quality of his writing. This is not to say that all his ventures into social criticism were successful as works of art. Some of the early short novels, such as A Spoil of Office and Jason Edwards: An Average Man, both published in 1892, are markedly inferior to the short stories written about the same time. And some of his later writings, such as A Son of the Middle Border (1917), written long after his abandonment of the brand of realism that he called veritism, have their own virtues. Generally speaking, however, there is substance to the critical view that Garlands career divided itself into a brief, early period of realism and a long period of romanticism. The main difficulty with this assumption is that Garland was writing romantic stories and realistic stories at essentially the same time, though after Rose of Dutchers Coolly (1895) the former came to dominate. His defiant words about telling the truth about the barnyard, like those in his literary manifesto Crumbling Idols (1894), represent one side of Garland, the side also reflected in Main-Travelled Roads. The other side, which became more visible after he had achieved a measure of success, produced such novels as Her Mountain Lover (1901), The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop (1902), and Hesper (1903) and the volumes of autobiography that followed A Son of the Middle Border. Although Garland will no doubt be remembered chiefly for his treatment of midwestern farm life, the indignation that led to the composition of Main-Travelled Roads manifested itself also in works in which he commented on Indian policy and the conservation theme. The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop and several short stories (mostly written early but published later in his career) contain pleas for a more humane and realistic treatment of the Indians, and Cavanagh: Forest Ranger (1910) deals with the conflict between the newly established Forest Service and westerners, especially cattlemen, who resent the locking up of natural resources that they 2 wish to exploit. The writing of propaganda seems to have come naturally to 666
Garland, but only the plight of the farmer was close enough to his own experience to produce the fusion of theme and form that made the early stories both effective propaganda and effective art. Except in some of the Indian stories, Garlands incorrigible romanticism gets in the way of his effort to embody his convictions in memorable fiction. Whether Garland is a western writer depends on how broadly we define West. When he titles one of the chapters in Crumbling Idols Literary Emancipation of the West, he has in mind primarily the Midwest. Chicago, not Denver, is to be the literary metropolis of the future. This strident, rather Whitmanesque call to arms is chiefly an attack on the critical monopoly of the Eastthe part of the country over which what Hawthorne called the damned shadow of Europe had fallen most darkly. The Midwest is the setting for Garlands best writing, in both fiction and autobiography. Not only are his novels about the mountain West flawed by romantic overtones, but the author persists in apologizing for the crudities of local people and contrasting them unfavorably with the more cultured easterners who often occupy center stage. In Cavanagh, for example, the heroine has been educated in the East and finds the raw western town of Roaring Fork and its people thoroughly disagreeable, except for a few exotics whose manners and values were formed elsewhere. So although Garland enjoyed vacationing in the West and riding the high trails, he remained, at most, a midwesterner and in some respects an adoptive easterner. In his stories of farm life Garland anticipated all of the major types of farm fiction that appeared in the twentieth century. His early novels and short stories that plead the farmers case foreshadow the novels of social criticism others published in the twenties and thirties, though by that time Garlands own views had changed so much that it is doubtful he had much sympathy for the goals expressed in these novels. The theme of the country versus the city as a place to carve out ones destiny is anticipated in Rose of Dutchers Coolly, in which the heroine renounces the prospect of a life spent on the farm in favor of marriage to an urban newspaperman and a career as a city-dweller. The pioneering venture, which was to occupy the talents of many novelists, receives Garlands attention in Moccasin Ranch (1909), based on his homesteading experiences and originally published in 18945 under the title The Land of the Straddle-Bug. In most cases, Garlands handling of these themes was superficial when compared to their later treatment by more skilled writers, but he at least established the precedents that others were to develop. Not only does Garland have some claim to being called the originator of the midwestem farm novel, but for the first couple of decades after MainTravelled Roads he was its chief practitioner. Out of ten works of farm fiction published between 1891 and 1910, he was the author of six; none of the 667
others are in any way memorable. A few more books appeared in the decade from 1911 to 1920, but the only ones not negligible were two of Willa Cathers early novels and Dell Mungers The Wind Before the Dawn (1912). Cather will be treated in another chapter; all that need be said here is that O Pioneers ! (1913) and My ntonia (1918) raised farm fiction to an artistic level that it had not previously reached. The Wind Before the Dawn is not in the same class with these books, but its theme of the domination of women by their husbands has a certain contemporary relevance. Although its feminism is pallid and its artistry slight, it largely avoids the stereotyped characters and plots that mar the bulk of the other farm novels published in the same period. About 1920 midwestern farm novels began to appear in greater numbers, and from that time until the late 1940s the genre flourished as never before or since. It can be seen as one evidence of the heightened regional consciousness of the Midwest (and other regions) during that period, a consciousness that took a variety of forms from the Benton-Wood-Curry school of painting to the WPA guides. In literature it was encouraged by the Midland, a regional journal founded in 1915 by John T. Frederick, himself the author of two farm novels in the 1920s. Several farm novelists found an outlet for their early work, either fiction or poetry, in the Midland, and its critical essays called for the use of rural materials in literature and art. Twenty years after the founding of the Midland, the painter Grant Wood issued a manifesto titled Revolt Against the City, in which he echoed, in more sophisticated form, some of the anti-eastern sentiments Garland had uttered in Crumbling Idols and specifically called for greater emphasis on the farmer and farm life as subjects for artistic treatment. That midwestern regionalism was accomplishing something, at least quantitatively, by 1924 was evidenced in an article by Weare Holbrook titled The Corn Belt Renaissance. There is feverish literary activity in the region of the Mississippi Valley, he noted. Countless novels are being published, magazines founded, prizes awarded, in an attempt to establish 3 a distinctive genre. And a stupendous monotony has been achieved. Disregarding Holbrooks exaggeration (the number of novels was scarcely countless), one can infer something about the accomplishments of midwestern regionalism by the middle 1920s. The farm novel of that decade had affinities with historical fiction, a genre that waxes and wanes in popularity but never wholly disappears from the American literary scene. Pioneering, which had already been touched on by Garland and Cather, became perhaps the dominant theme in novels of the twenties. Early in the decade, Herbert Quick, who had previously written some childrens books, dealt with the topic in his first significant novel, Vandemarks Folly (1922). Jacob Vandemark, orphaned at an early 668
GARLAND AND MlDWEST FARM FlCTlON
age, comes west from New York and settles on the Iowa prairie. He is the owner of an unpromising tract of land, mostly swamp, that has been wished onto him by a stepfather eager to free himself from all obligation to the boy. The most memorable passages in the book are the descriptions of the Old Ridge Road leading west from Dubuque and of the Iowa prairie before settlement, but Quick also provides a good account of the growth of a pioneer community. Jacob Vandemark, well portrayed as a complex personality, overshadows the rest of the characters and emerges as one of the few really notable figures in farm fiction. Some of the others, such as the heroine, Virginia Royall, and the principal villain, J. Buckner Gowdy, seem to have been drawn from Quicks reading of popular novels rather than from his experience. The love plot, which of course ends happily, is a concession to the tastes of his potential readers. These faults notwithstanding, the book has distinct merits and makes an important contribution to the literature of pioneering in the Midwest. Quick wrote two sequels to Vandemarks Folly: The Hawkeye (1923) and The Invisible Woman (1924). Perhaps for the same reason that O. E. Rlvaags sequels to Giants in the Earth are inferior to that novelthe pioneering experience was uniquethese novels are less interesting and less significant than the first one. For one thing, they have little to say about farming; they concern later phases of settlement, and most of the action takes place in town. Although a few characters, notably Roswell Upright, the epitome of political corruption, stand out, none measure up to Jacob Vandemark. Moreover, Quick, a lawyer by profession, lets his penchant for the law take over in long and (for most readers) tedious accounts of litigation. Several other Iowa authors contributed to the development of the farm novel in the 1920s. Besides Margaret Wilson, whose The Able McLaughlins (1923) is at least on the fringes of historical fiction, there was Walter J. Muilenburg, who dealt with the pioneering venture in a book titled Prairie (1925). An expansion of a short story published in the Midland during its first year, Prairie tells how Elias Vaughn, restive under his fathers stern regimen, elopes with a neighbor girl and runs off to Nebraska, the frontier of the moment. There he and his wife contend with the usual hardships of settlement on the Great Plains, he to come through the ordeal victorious in economic terms, she to die of sheer exhaustion after suffering mental collapse. Although Muilenburgs handling of the theme of a man and woman unequal in stamina and in their response to the empty land does not approach Rlvaags in Giants in the Earth in perception, it does offer a comment on the cost of pioneering, a side of the experience that even Willa Cather had largely neglected. It also introduces the theme of the conflict 669
between generations. Elias, whose own experience should have given him an insight into this problem, alienates his son, who leaves the farm and unsuccessfully tries his hand at working in town. When he returns to the farm in defeat, Elias refuses to allow him back. The generation gap is by no means an exclusively rural phenomenon, but in farm novels it often appears, usually in the form of a violent reaction to parental discipline. The inability of a farm to sustain two or more generations on the same land provided a ready-made opportunity for dissatisfied sons and daughters to clear out, either for the West while unoccupied land was still available or to the city, where more attractive jobs beckoned. The farm-versus-city conflict was the principal theme of several farm novels during the 1920s. In 1925, for example, two novels, John T. Fredericks Green Bush and Geoffrey Dell Eatons Backfurrow, were published, taking opposite positions on this issue. Frederick, who had already said a good word for farming in an earlier book, Druida (1923), defends the virtues of rural life, whereas Eaton condemns the farm in extreme terms. Writers as early as Harold Frederic and Kirkland had debunked the romantic notion of the farm as the repository of virtue, and Garland had shown the unlovely side of farming. In Rose of Dutchers Coolly he had placed his heroine in the position of having to decide between the farm and the city. Her choice, which Garland makes as difficult as possible, is in favor of the city. John T. Frederick set up a parallel situation for Druida Horsfall, but she renounces the attractions of an urban career, marries a farm boy, and settles for homesteading in Montana. The case for the farm, implicit in Druida, is made explicit in Green Bush. Frank Thompson, the central character, tries both farm life and city life and finally opts for the former, despite the temptation of an academic career in the city and a crippling injury that makes farming especially difficult for him. Why does he decide as he does? The farm has an almost mystical attraction for him: Earth and the plough; an exultant sense of kinship with elemental things. . . . Instead of the artificial trappings of the city, the farm brings him into touch with the ultimate realities. He is convinced that prolonged contact with the earth, has enabled him to confront him4 self and his fate with clearness of vision and with peace of mind. Frederick himself had experienced a rural childhood and had tried farming in the Michigan setting of Green Bush. So, although he finally chose an academic career, he knew enough about the farm to write with authority. Not everyone with a comparable background saw things as he did, however. Eatons Backfurrow, published within a few months of Fredericks novel, arrives at an opposite conclusion. His Ralph Dutton grows up on a farm, handicapped by illegitimacy, escapes to the city, and finally returns to the farm, not because he wants to but because he must. His rural back670
ground has failed to prepare him for a city job, and inability to find work drives him back to the country. Trapped by marriage, he finds himself cut off from any hope of another try at city life and resigns himself to a life sentence on the farm. Like Edgar Lee Masters, Sinclair Lewis, and others of the revolt-fromthe-village school, Eaton lays heavy emphasis on the intellectual and spiritual starvation of rural life. The farmers Ralph works for and their wives are characterized by religious hypocrisy, vindictiveness toward members of their own families, and just plain stupidity. The whole picture of farm life presented in this book, strongly naturalistic in tone, is one of unrelieved hopelessness. Apart from certain weaknesses in characterization and the presence of unassimilated masses of philosophical material, the novels chief failing is this monotony of tone. Whereas Frederick tempers his affirmative view of farm life by including its bleaker aspects in his portrayal, Eaton offers a uniformly hostile view, devoid of any suggestion of possible compensations. Another writer who looks upon the rural world with a jaundiced eye is Glenway Wescott, author of two farm novels, The Apple of the Eye (1924) and The Grandmothers (1927), and a short story collection, Good-Bye Wisconsin (1928). Wescotts bte noir is the rural evangelical tradition, which he blames for most of the faults of the society that he depicts. Together with ambition, their religious heritage twists and thwarts the people of this society and makes of them grotesques like the characters in Sherwood Andersons Winesburg, Ohio. The Grandmothers, the best of Wescotts three books, is subtitled A Family Portrait and consists of a series of biographies of the people whose pictures Alwyn Tower, the central intelligence, finds in an old family album. To Alwyn, brought up on stories of and by these people, the past and future seem years of misconstrued events, and unrea5 sonable aversions, and useless ambitions, and nightmares. . . . Although Wescott gives some attention to the physical details of farm life and to characteristically rural attitudes, his condemnation of American values extends beyond any occupation or region. In fact, in the introduction to Good-Bye Wisconsin he denies being a regionalist and asserts that there is no Middle West. It is a certain climate, a certain landscape; and 6 beyond that, a state of mind of people born where they do not like to live. He is familiar with midwestem farm life, so he uses it as his setting; but his attack is not restricted to the farm. The unflattering picture of rural life presented by Eaton and Wescott places them in a small minority among farm novelists. Most of those writing in the 1920s either took an upbeat approach, like Frederick, or blamed the faults of modern farm life on the intrusion of urban values, in turn the result of the failure of the younger generation to adhere to the moral principles of their parents. The latter approach is exemplified by Frederick Philip Groves 671
Our Daily Bread (1928). Although Grove was a Canadian and the locale of this novel is Saskatchewan, the moral decay he sees is equally wellGrove would say betterillustrated in the United States. The ten children of John and Martha Elliot, pioneers on the Saskatchewan prairie, have all failed to inherit their parents qualities of character and intelligence. Some try farming but do it badly; others migrate to the city, where they either fail economically or achieve a measure of financial success but at a disastrous cost in personal maladjustment. The value system that the parents endorse and the children repudiate rests on the conviction that farming is the only truly legitimate occupation for human beings. Old John Elliot believes that cities and the activities that go on there are merely bubbles on the sea of life; underneath these surface manifestations the real business of the human race, the production of food, goes on. And this life, he says, the life of the vast majority of men on earth, [is] the essential 7 life of all mankind. This somewhat narrow economic view (which Groves autobiography makes clear he endorses) may not have been held in such uncompromising form by any significant number of farm novelists, but there were others who shared his convictions that farming was the most fundamental of occupations and that the virtues of the pioneer generation were sadly diluted if not wholly lost in their children. Some writers, however, saw the economic problems of farming not in terms of individual weakness but rather as the consequence of evils in the systema system designed for the convenience of the non-farm population, especially those who dealt in the commodities produced by the farmer. Such writers turned out novels of social criticism, in which the characters and plot often exist mainly as the vehicle for the communication of a message calling for economic and political changes that would benefit the farmer. Although works of social criticism constitute only a small proportion of farm novels, two, both dealing with the rise of the Nonpartisan League, appeared in 1925: Lorna Doone Beerss Prairie Fires and Lynn Montrosss East of Eden. The former deals with conditions in North Dakota early in the second decade of the twentieth century, when the farmers felt oppressed and exploited by the small town merchants and bankers, who were themselves the tools of powerful milling and railroad interests based in St. Paul and Minneapolis. When Tom Everly, once a highly successful flax-grower, is ruined by a drop in price caused by speculation, he goes about organizing his fellow victims of the system. Betrayed by the men they have elected to office and ridiculed by these very legislators when they hold a meeting in the state capital, they follow Everlys lead and establish the League, which is moderately successful.
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Prairie Fires suffers from the awkward grafting onto this historically accurate story of a love affair between a small town banker and the daughter of one of the farmers involved in the formation of the League. This plot is rather implausible, and the characterization generally is less than convincing. The novel is significant, however, because it portrays with considerable fidelity the hostility between farmers and small town people, not all of which is the product of the immediate economic situation. The narrowmindedness, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism of the businessmen are contrasted with the willingness to experiment and the respect for education displayed by at least some of the farmers. The author does not oversimplify the issue, however, or represent all the farmers as paragons of wisdom and virtue. She includes the incompetents and shows the difficulties encountered by Everly and his supporters when they try to organize people unused to such cooperative endeavors. The negative side of the Nonpartisan movement predominates in the other novel on this theme. East of Eden is set in Illinois, and it describes an unsuccessful attempt to import political activism from North Dakota. Jack Rothermel was in Bismarck when the farmers were told to go home and slop the hogs, and he abandoned farming to become a League organizer in other states. Like Everly in Prairie Fires, he shares center stage with a basically conservative farmer who becomes convinced that political organization represents the only hope. There are other parallels, too, including a romance between the farmers daughter and an unworthy town boy, who is not, however, identified with the merchant-banker group that the farmers are fighting. The characterization is generally ineffective, and the novel contains a great deal of melodrama, especially in the ending. In one sense it is more prophetic than the Beers novel, to which it is in most respects inferior: the farmers attempt to organize ends in defeat. In numerical terms farm fiction reached a peak in the 1930s. From 1931 through 1940 at least forty-nine novels about midwestern farm life were published, as compared to thirty-one in the previous decade. The burgeoning of farm fiction may have been caused partly by the Depression and the impact it had on agriculture, but part of it was probably due simply to the momentum generated in the 1920sa case of supply producing demand. The social and economic factors presumably had something to do with the proliferation of novels of social criticism, but in the thirties, as earlier, the bulk of farm fiction carried no overt or covert message but contented itself with telling a story in a rural setting. Most of these novels, both good and bad, can be classified as romantic, in that they center on a conventional love story involving somewhat idealized characters; some of them are written in a heightened, poetic style.
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Among the contributors to this kind of fiction were Bess Streeter Aldrich, Dora Aydelotte, Eleanor Blake, Grace Stone Coates, Josephine Donovan, Mae Foster Jay, Harry Kemp, Rose Wilder Lane, Martha Ostenso, Phil Stong, and Isabel Stewart Way. Even within this restricted group qualitative differences are evident, from the valuable stories of pioneer life by Donovan and Lane, through the well-crafted but melodramatic novels of Ostenso, to the trivial work of Aydelotte, Jay, and Stong. Martha Ostenso is more or less representative of this group. Like several of the others, she started writing in the twenties but achieved her greatest output in the next decade. A prize-winning first novel, Wild Geese (1925s), started her on a career that led to the writing of eight novels in nine years and more later, none as successful as the first. Her technique improved with the passage of time, but her novels are flawed by a highly colored style, overdramatization of materials, and a repetitiousness of situation. Moreover, though a farm setting is used in many of her books, the central characters are usually outsiders, and the authentic farm figures are often treated condescendingly. Together with her failure to reflect characteristic farm attitudes or to deal with the problems of rural America, these features of Ostensos work make it farm fiction only incidentally. On a distinctly higher artistic level, yet still emphatically within the romantic tradition, is Josephine Johnsons Now in November (1934). The Arnold Haldmarne family struggles to make a living farming, in the face of the twin handicaps of debt and drought, on rocky, sterile land that under the best of circumstances would yield but a scanty livelihood. Although some attention is given to these external causes of the Haldmarnes troubles, more is bestowed on the psychological problems of the characters. Most serious are the neuroses of the eldest of three daughters, Kerrin, who finally goes insane and kills herself. Such a conclusion, immediately preceded by fire and the death of the mother, might seem inevitably to add up to melodrama, but the author manages to avoid that pitfall and creates a generally convincing, if uniformly grim, piece of fiction. Stylistically, Now in November represents something of an experiment. The highly impressionistic language employed is the most striking feature of the novel, not entirely without precedent but more extreme than in any previous example of farm fiction. It often displays itself in such passages as this description of the endless round of farm work: The hope worn on indefinitely . . . the desire never fulfilled . . . four oclock and the ice-grey mornings . . . the cows and dark . . . the cans enormous in the foggy lamplight . . . day come up
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cold and windy . . . the endless cooking . . . the sour rim of pails. . . . There seemed no answer, and the answer lay only in 8 forgetting. Although there are risks in such a style, Johnson handles it skillfully and makes it serve her purpose and not get out of control. In sharp contrast to Now in November, in which a great deal happens in relatively small compass, are the massive, two- and three-volume works of several other farm novelists of the thirties, who sought to achieve a convincing picture of farm life by means of heavy documentation. Some of these writers (though not all) used their novels as vehicles for comments on the social and economic plight of the farmer. Structurally, such novels often took the form of family chronicles like those Glenway Wescott and others had already done. The rural environment, at least in earlier times, lent itself better to this device than did the city, where a family would be quite unlikely to occupy the same house for several generations. Early in the decade Leroy MacLeod published two long novels, The Years of Peace (1932) and The Crowded Hill (1934), that together cover a thirteen-year period immediately after the Civil War in the lives of Tyler Peck and his family and friends, farmers in southern Indiana. Although MacLeod uses a device similar to John Dos Passoss Newsreels to give a sense of what is going on elsewhere in the nation and the world, the dominant impression conveyed by the books is one of isolation from the crosscurrents of history. Attention is centered on the characters personal problems, which seldom have any connection with events in the outside world. In the first novel, the main concern is the relationship between Tyler and his wife Evaline, neither of whom has married for love, and in The Crowded Hill the main plot revolves about the conflict between Evaline and Tylers Aunt Mary, who has come to live with them. MacLeod effectively recreates the lifestyles of a certain time and place by the piling up of enormous masses of detail on the way people lived, how they talked (though he does not go overboard in his handling of dialect), how they felt and thought about their lives. The reader can learn a great deal about the amusements and recreations of the people, the importance of religion and politics to them, and nearly everything else that the imaginative use of diaries, letters, and historical records can recover from an era so long past. Such massive documentation sometimes threatens to overshadow the story line but never quite does so. The characters are real, their conflicts believable, and the resolutions of these conflicts acceptable. Yet the reader may be left with the feeling that not much really happens in
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these books. The round of the seasons and the gradual changes that take place in the community collectively dwarf the lives of the central characters and leave the reader with the feeling that the background looms larger than the characters and plot. Arthur Pound has made similar use of the Michigan countryside to tell the Mark family saga in Once a Wilderness (1934) and Second Growth (1935). More in the family chronicle tradition than MacLeods novels and covering a longer span of time, these books give less the impression of historical fiction. The earlier novel is superior to its successor, chiefly because it is dominated by old John Mark, widowed patriarch of the family and one of the most completely individualized characters in modern farm fiction. When he sinks into senility and dies in the second book, there is a falling-off of narrative power and reader interest. In both novels there are a great many Marks, including several named John, and the reader must have frequent recourse to the genealogical chart at the end in order to keep them straight. Pounds novels make much less use of background material than MacLeods do, and there is greater stress on the doings of the characters, some quite lurid. Hence the reader has less knowledge of the society that shaped the characters and less comprehension of why they are as they are. The main virtue of the books is the characterization of old John Mark. By contrast, his descendants are less interesting as well as less praiseworthy. Nonetheless, Pound does as well as many other farm novelists and better than most at chronicling the changes that occur in a community by emphasizing how these changes affect a single family group. A more significant figure than either MacLeod or Pound in the development of the midwestern farm novel was Sophus Keith Winther, author of three novels known collectively as the Grimsen trilogy: Take All to Nebraska (1936), Mortgage Your Heart (1937), and This Passion Never Dies (1938). In this series he traces the experiences of Peter and Meta Grimsen, Danish immigrants to the Nebraska prairie, and their sons. Their attempts to farm successfully in the new environment are largely failures. Besides the natural hindrancesdrought, grasshoppers, blizzardsthey are handicapped by their status as foreigners, unable even to speak English, and by the greed of landlords and a grasping moneylender, their countryman Jacob Paulsen. After enduring more than the usual spate of misfortunes and losing their first farm, the Grimsens are taken pity on and are able to start over again on a new and better farm at the end of the first novel. Moreover, they finally decide to take out American citizenship, having intended through most of the book to go back to Denmark after making their fortune in America. But this happy ending is deceptive when seen from the perspective of the trilogy as a whole, for further misfortunes bring them down to final defeat in the postWorld War I agricultural depression. Peter dies just be676
fore he is to leave the farm on which he has lavished his attention over a period of nearly twenty years. Meanwhile, the sons, not handicapped by their parents immigrant status, achieve, in varying degrees, a modest measure of temporary success. Hans, the youngest, who serves as the central intelligence, goes to the university and is attracted to socialism and pacifism about the time of World War I. All three sons marry, and all three experience more or less of marital difficulty; the wives of both Hans and Alfred die, and Hans remarries, his new wife the daughter of the man who is buying up farms at mortgage sales. The third book ends in total defeat for the older generation and with only the feeblest ray of hope for their children. More than either MacLeod or Pound, Winther writes realistically, even naturalistically. Neither character nor setting is idealized in the least. Unlike the Norwegians of O. E. Rlvaag, Winthers Danes have little contact with religion, and the boys learn to swear (in both Danish and English) and to chew tobacco at an early age. The conflict of this immigrant group with the Americans is scarcely more ruthless than the clashes among the Danes themselves. As an adherent to the naturalistic philosophy of determinism, Winther tries to hew to the cause-and-effect line. He does not always succeed, however, and at times elements of melodrama enter the story. His style, especially in the first novel, is unpolished and hence undistinguished. Despite these faults, the Grimsen trilogy is an important milestone in the development of midwestern farm fiction. At the end of the decade came an even more important contribution to the farm novel in the Mantz family trilogy of Paul Corey: Three Miles Square (1939), The Road Returns (1940), and County Seat (1941). Left a widow at the beginning of her first book, Mrs. Mantz sets about planning her four childrens futures. Because she perceives success in urban terms, she determines that each child will manage the farm until the age of twentyone, then go away to college as the next in line takes over the job. The plan never works out, however, for Andrew, the eldest, is forced to leave college and is drafted into the army in World War I. When he returns, he is no longer interested in further education, and the next two have no wish to stay on the farm. Since the remaining son, Otto, is too young to run the farm, his mother sells it. Otto dutifully goes off to college when it is his turn and takes a job with a telephone company upon graduation. But what really attracts him is farming. So when the buyer is unable to make payments on the farm and it comes back to the Mantzes, Otto, who has lost his job in the Depression, willingly returns home to begin the only career that interests him. Although Coreys novels have a good deal to say about the economic problems that beset farming in the years from 1910 to 1930, their chief message is that farming is a legitimate occupation, fully as much so as the 677
white-collar jobs that Mrs. Mantz hopes to see her children enter. Like John Frederick in the previous decade, Corey makes a strong case for the farm as a place to live and for farming as a way to make a living. He concedes, however, that it is not for everyone. Otto is the only member of the family who responds to the beauty of a cornfield; the others look upon the farm with feelings that range from unenthusiastic acceptance to positive loathing. Otto has seen enough of city life to have become skeptical of its supposed advantages. City jobs usually involve exploiting someone else. By contrast, as he tells his mother, Theres a chance for honor and success and respectability in making it into a good farm. . . . I dont see why the production of food isnt as respectable as sitting in an office with my name on 9 the door, producing nothing. Corey does not hit the reader over the head with this moral, however. It takes him three books to say it because he is determined to let the message speak for itself through the action of the novels, rather than impose it on the reader. The pace of these novels is slow compared to the work of Frederick and Eaton in the 1920s. They amount to a social and economic history of Iowa during the decades covered, though attention remains focused on the Mantzes throughout. They are not unusual people in any way. In fact, none of the major characters, with the possible exception of Ed Crosby, could be described as exceptional in either intelligence or character. One reviewer of County Seat commented that the novel achieves distinction through virtue of its accent on mediocrity; through Coreys deep1 0 rooted respect for the dignity and endeavors of ordinary men. In his emphasis on average rather than exceptional people and in his use of incremental detail to build up his case, Corey resembles such naturalistic writers as James T. Farrell. He is thoroughly familiar with farm life as it was lived during the period covered by the trilogy and gives much attention to the everyday activities of his people, who act and speak like Iowa farmers of that time. Matters only touched on in other farm novels, such as the conflict between old and new methods of farming and between the old individualism and the new interdependence, are given the prominence they deserve in a realistic portrait of farming in the first third of the twentieth century. If the trilogy has a weakness, it is a lack of emotional intensity, resulting from the superabundance of detail, which at times obscures the plot line. But in most respects Corey brings the farm novel to a level it had not previously reached. In the 1940s Corey published one more novel, Acres of Antaeus (1946), which represented something of a falling-off from his performance in the Mantz trilogy. In those books he had allowed a farmer named Ed Crosby to speak out in favor of collective action among farmers, instead of the individualism that had so often handicapped them in their dealings with more 678
highly organized forces. In Acres of Antaeus this theme is developed further, but the organization and direction are provided, not by small farmers, but by a corporation called Mid-West Farms, Inc. The main character, Jim Buckly, takes a job with Mid-West, though his sympathies are with the farmers, including his father-in-law, who is one of the victims of Mid-Wests expansionist policies. The resolution is not likely to be satisfying to readers who share Bucklys (and Coreys) sympathies, for, although a change in management at Mid-West modifies some of the companys exploitative policies, it still exists, and Buckly is still working for it at the end of the novel. Shorter than any of the Mantz books, Acres of Antaeus tries to do too much and largely fails to accomplish what it sets out to do. Coreys last novel came out at a time when the great era of farm fiction was ending. Fewer than half as many novels were published in the years from 1941 to 1950 as in the previous decade, and the number published in the last half of the decade of the forties was less than half the number published in the first five years. The distraction of World War II may account in some degree for this diminution, but it does not explain the continuing decline in the years after the war. Since the decline continued in the following decades, it is evident that deeper underlying factors were at work. One may speculate that the rapid changes in farming after World War II, together with the dwindling of farmers into an ever-smaller minority of the population, has had some impact on the potential audience for farm fiction. The novel of pioneering diminished sharply as the age of settlement receded into the past beyond the actual experience of any considerable body of readers, and something of the same sort may have happened to the farm novel in general. Ironically, farm fiction reached new heights qualitatively just as it was slipping quantitatively. Besides the work of Paul Corey, the late thirties and the forties saw the entrance on the scene of such writers as Herbert Krause and Frederick Manfred, both discussed elsewhere in this book. Krauses Wind Without Rain (1939) and The Thresher (1946) and Manfreds This Is the Year (1947) represent in many ways the culmination of the farm novel. In the 1950s came other notable works, such as Jonathan Fieldss The Memoirs of Dunstan Barr and Gordon Webbers What End but Love, both published in 1959. In 1962 came Curtis Harnacks Love and Be Silent and Lois Phillips Hudsons The Bones of Plenty, and in 1975 there was Larry Woiwodes Beyond the Bedroom Wall, which, though a village and small town story for the most part, does include some farm sequences. Interestingly, all of the last three are set, in part, in North Dakota, a state largely neglected by earlier farm novelists. The first two of these novels fall into the category of family chronicles. Dunstan Barr, who inherits a seven-hundred-acre Illinois farm, has a yen for 679
farming but winds up spending most of his life as a banker. His memoirs concern not only his own life but those of his brothers, sisters, children, and other relatives. It is a slow-moving narrative, and, though the characters suffer a certain amount of tragedy, there is little that could be called dramatic about the novel. The setting of What End but Love is the Michigan farm of Holly Hobart, on Memorial Day, 1934. Most of the action consists of flashbacks recounting the lives of Hollys numerous relatives, who have come together for what turns out to be the last family reunion on the old place, about to be sold to an auto company in nearby Flint. All seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere and to be living lives of unfulfilled expectations. This theme of comparative failure among people, many of whose external aspects suggest success, together with the theme of the displacement of rural values by urban ones, unifies a somewhat sprawling novel. The style is polished, and the characters, varied though they are, achieve credibility. The relationships among members of a family are explored, on a smaller scale, by Curtis Harnack in Love and Be Silent. The protagonists are a brother and sister, Robert and Alma Schneider, each of whom marries rather unwisely. Each claims to understand the others marital problems, but neither is able to help the other to any significant degree. There is more about farming, in Iowa and North Dakota, than in the two novels just discussed, but attention is focused on the characters emotional problems, not on the difficulties of farming except in so far as these aggravate the personal maladjustments. The Bones of Plenty is another treatment of farm life in the 1930s, on the prairies of North Dakota. Besides the twin evils of drought and depression, George Armstrong Custer is handicapped by some of the personality traits associated with his famous namesake: he is rash, impulsive, and overly optimistic. Equally scornful of government programs and collective action by farmers, he tries to rely on his own abilities, takes long chances, and fails. Although the novel is about the farm problem, no solution is offered. The author reminds her readers that for many farmers the depression has never ended. Like Mrs. Hudsons short stories, the novel is skillfully written. It consists of a series of episodes, many of them drawn from her own experience. One is reminded of the Saskatchewan prairie sequences in Wallace Stegners The Big Rock Candy Mountain. George Custer has much in common with Bo Mason, and his family suffers the consequences. Those portions of Larry Woiwodes Beyond the Bedroom Wall that qualify as farm fiction deserve at least passing mention as showing what can be done with rural material by a talented contemporary writer. The books subtitle, A Family Album, suggests that it belongs in the same class as Wescotts
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The Grandmothers, and there are similarities between the two. Only the first few chapters of a long book have much to do with farming. The story begins in 1935, when Charles Neumiller returns to the North Dakota farm where he grew up. His father has just died, and Charles has come back to bury him and to comfort his spinster sister, who has passed up marriage to keep house for her father. The story then shifts to Charless son Martin, who has grown up on the farm but who goes away to college and becomes a high school teacher and administrator, first in North Dakota, later in Illinois. Like several other recent examples of farm fiction, Beyond the Bedroom Wall employs some of the experimental techniques that novelists in the second half of the twentieth century have evolved. In this respect it illustrates the willingness of farm novelists to adopt literary modes that have already become established in other fiction, together with their reluctance to take the lead in innovation. In general, the farm novel has tended to follow other fiction at a distance of a decade or more in matters of technique, perhaps because of a belief that its potential audience would not respond well to innovation. The farm novel is not dead, in the Midwest or elsewhere. So long as people continue to live on farms and so long as farm life differs perceptibly from life in town, it will continue to be reflected in fiction. But it is probably safe to say that the great days of the farm novel are over. It flourished in the two decades between world wars and has been declining, quantitatively, ever since. One might hazard the guess that the farm novel of the future will be less distinctive than in the past, as farm life comes to resemble ever more closely life elsewhere. In the future, as in the past, however, farm fiction should serve the function that Paul Corey (speaking through Otto Mantz) assigned to it at the end of his trilogy: to enable the people of different sections of the country to know one another more intimately.
R OY W. MEYER , Mankato State University
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Notes
1. Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1944) p. 376. 2. Garland also wrote several essays on the Indians. The best have been edited, with a useful introduction, by Lonnie E. Underhill and Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., in Hamlin Garlands Observations on the American Indian, 18951905 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976). 3. Weare Holbrook, The Corn Belt Renaissance, Forum 72 (July 1924): 118. 4. John T. Frederick, Green Bush (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), pp. 237, 301. 5. Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), p. 15 6. Glenway Wescott, Good-Bye Wisconsin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), p. 39. 7. Frederick Philip Grove, Our Daily Bread (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 78. 8. Josephine Johnson, Now in November (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1934), p. 38. 9. Paul Corey, County Seat (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941) p. 377. 10. Rose Feld, Iowa Town, New York Times Book Review, September 7, 1941, p. 22.
Fiction by Hamlin Garland The Book of the American Indian. New York: Harper, 1923. The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop. New York: Harper, 1902. Cavanagh: Forest Ranger. New York: Harper, 1910. Her Mountain Lover. New York: Century, 1901. Hesper. New York: Harper, 1903. Jason Edwards: An Average Man. Boston: Arena, 1892. Main-Travelled Roads. Boston: Arena, 1891. Moccasin Ranch: A Story of Dakota. New York: Harper, 1909. Prairie Folks. Chicago: Schulte, 1893. Rose of Dutchers Coolly. Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895. A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West. Boston: Arena, 1892. Autobiography by Hamlin Garland Boy Life on the Prairie. New York: Macmillan, 1899. A Daughter of the Middle Border. New York: Macmillan, 1921. Roadside Meetings. New York: Macmillan, 1930. A Son of the Middle Border. New York: Macmillan, 1917.
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Other Significant Farm Fiction Beers, Lorna Doone [Mrs. C. R. Chambers]. Prairie Fires. New York: Dutton, 1925. Corey, Paul. Acres of Antaeus. New York: Holt, 1946. . County Seat. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941. . The Road Returns. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940. . Three Miles Square. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939. Eaton, Geoffrey Dell. Backfurrow. New York: Putnams, 1925. Fields, Jonathan. The Memoirs of Dunstan Barr. New York: Coward-McCann, 1959. Frederick, John T. Druida. New York: Knopf, 1923. . Green Bush. New York: Knopf, 1925. Grove, Frederick Philip. Our Daily Bread. New York: Macmillan, 1928. Harnack, Curtis. Love and Be Silent. New York: Harcourt, 1962. Hudson, Lois Phillips. The Bones of Plenty. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. Johnson, Josephine. Now in November. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1934. Kirkland, Joseph. Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887. MacLeod, Leroy. The Crowded Hill. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934. . The Years of Peace. New York: Century, 1932. Montross, Lynn. East of Eden. New York: Harper, 1925. Muilenburg, Walter J. Prairie. New York: Viking, 1925. Munger, Dell H. The Wind Before the Dawn. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1912. Ostenso, Martha. Wild Geese. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925. Pound, Arthur. Once a Wilderness. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934. . Second Growth. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935. Quick, Herbert. Vandemarks Folly. New York: A. L. Burt, 1922. Suckow, Ruth. Country People. New York: Knopf, 1924. Webber, Gordon. What End but Love. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959. Wescott, Glenway. The Grandmothers. New York: Harper, 1927. Wilson, Margaret. The Able McLaughlins. New York: Harper, 1923. Winther, Sophus Keith. Mortgage Your Heart. New York: Macmillan, 1937. . Take All to Nebraska. New York: Macmillan, 1936. . This Passion Never Dies. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Woiwode, Larry A. Beyond the Bedroom Wall. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1975. Critical and Historical Studies Andrews, Clarence A. A Literary History of Iowa. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972. Treats Corey, Frederick, Garland, Harnack, Muilenburg, Quick, Suckow, Wilson, and other writers of Iowa farm fiction. Atherton, Lewis. Main Street on the Middle Border. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954. General cultural history, with emphasis on the small town. Bailey, L. H. Can Agriculture Function in Literature? Midland 4 (May-June 1918): 103105. Predicts a bold artistic literature that shall express the marrow of rural civilization when the sociological analysis of farm life has been completed.
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A Literary History of the American West Baker, Joseph E. Regionalism in the Middle West. American Review 4 (March 1935): 603614. Observations primarily on Ruth Suckow. Clark, John Abbot. The Middle WestThere It Lies. Southern Review 2 (Winter 1937): 462472. The Midwest cried for more Rlvaags and Cathers but was visited instead by a plague of photographers. Commager, Henry Steele. The Literature of the Pioneer West. Minnesota History 8 (December 1927): 319328. Traces literary treatment of pioneering, sees Giants in the Earth as first time a novelist has measured the westward movement with a psychological yardstick and found it wanting. Crawford, Nelson Antrim. The American Farmer in Fact and Fiction. Literary Digest International Book Review 4 (December 1925 and January 1926): 2526, 28; 100101. Sees farm fiction as less sentimental and more realistic in early 1920s; praises Fredericks Green Bush as example of recent trends. Dondore, Dorothy. The Prairie and the Making of Middle America. Cedar Rapids: Torch Press, 1926. Touches on fiction of the midwestern frontier. Dougherty, Charles T. Novels of the Middle Border: A Critical Bibliography for Historians. Historical Bulletin 25 (May 1947): 7778, 8588. Broader than the title suggests, offers critical comment on several novels of pioneer life. Duffey, Bernard I. Hamlin Garlands Decline from Realism. American Literature 25 (March 1953): 6974. Garland wrote what magazines would publish: realism and reform for Arena, romance for Century, et al. Flanagan, John T. A Bibliography of Middle Western Farm Novels. Minnesota History 23 (June 1942): 156158. Accompanies article listed below. . The Middle Western Farm Novel. Minnesota History 23 (June 1942): 113147. Important ground-breaking article, sets up criteria and categories used by subsequent critics. Frederick, John T. The Farm in Iowa Fiction. Palimpsest 32 (March 1931): 121152. Discusses Suckow, Garland, and other novelists of Iowa farm life. .Ruth Suckow and the Middle Western Literary Movement. English Journal 20 (January 1931): 18. Primarily about Suckow, whom he finds reacting against earlier romanticism in rural fiction. Garland, Hamlin. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting and the Drama. Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1894. Manifesto of Garlands form of realism, which he called veritism. Grove, Frederick Philip. A Search for America. New York: Louis Carrier, 1928. Autobiography, provides background for Groves novel Our Daily Bread (q.v.). Henson, Clyde E. Joseph Kirkland. New York: Twayne, 1962. Useful for information on background of Zury (q. v. ). Holbrook, Weare. The Corn Belt Renaissance. Forum 72 (July 1924): 118120. Unsympathetic view of recent midwestern literature. Holloway, Jean. Hamlin Garland: A Biography. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960. Based heavily on Garlands correspondence with his publishers. Hutton, Graham. Midwest at Noon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946. The Midwest as seen by an English visitor.
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McAvoy, Thomas T., ed. The Midwest: Myth or Reality? Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961. Collection of essays, including contributions by John T. Flanagan and John T. Frederick. Meyer, Roy W. The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Standard survey of the subject. . Naturalism in American Farm Fiction. Journal of the Central Mississippi Valley American Studies Association 2 (Spring 1961): 2737. Discusses Corey, Eaton, Winther, and others. . The Scandinavian Immigrant in American Farm Fiction. American Saundinavian Review 47 (September 1959): 243249. Discusses Cather, Rlvaag, Winther, and others. Miller, Charles T. Hamlin Garlands Retreat from Realism. Western American Literature 1 (Summer 1966): 119129. Attributes Garlands flirtation with romance to public taste and his own need for an income. Morlan, Robert L. Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League 19151922. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955. Historical background for novels by Beers and Montross (qq.v.). Pizer, Donald. Hamlin Garlands Early Work and Career. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. Best treatment to date of the portion of Garlands career in which most of his farm fiction was written. Powell, Desmond. Sophus Winther: The Grimsen Trilogy. American Scandinavian Review 36 (June 1948): 144147. Survey of Winthers chief novels of farm life. Quick, Herbert. One Mans Life. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925. Autobiography, providing background for Vandemarks Folly (q. v. ) and other novels. Sherman, Caroline B. The Development of American Rural Fiction. Agricultural History 12 (January 1938): 6776. Chronological survey, starting with Edward Eggleston and Edgar Watson Howe, continuing with Garland and the early novels of pioneering, and concluding with regional studies of the 1920s and 1930s. Sees two major types: family chronicle and problem novel. . Rural Literature Faces Peace. South Atlantic Quarterly 42 (January 1943): 5971. Predicts that after fallow period during World War II the farm novel will revive, better than ever. Smith, Henry Nash. The Western Farmer in Imaginative Literature. Mississippi Valley Historical Review 36 (December 1949): 479490. Despite cult of western yeoman, serious fiction rarely gave him much attention. Suckow, Ruth. Carry-Over. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. Suckows introduction to this collection of stories denies that her farm fiction was intended as either indictment [or] celebration or that social criticism was her primary motive.
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Willa Cather
N APRIL 1883, when she was nine years old, Willa Cather was uprooted from everything she knew and loved at her birthplace near Winchester, Virginia, and taken to the prairies near the embryonic town of Red Cloud, Nebraska. The familiar, green, closed-in Virginia countryside was replaced by a seemingly endless undulating landscape of shaggy red grass, I not a country at all, says Jim Burden in My ntonia, but the material out of which countries are made. This uprooting was the cultural shock of Cathers life, one that shaped her attitudes and marked her fiction. The historically rich and complex Souththe fruitful burden of William Faulkners characters, which provides a context for their tragedywas for Cather abruptly swept away. The tragic context for her characters, in contrast to Faulkners, is that they were always from someplace else, defining themselves by making a country and attempting to connect to a lost past. Their shaping burden is the remembered gods they carry with them, like Aeneas, into remote and savage places. In Cathers portrayal, the result of such uprooting is simplistic attitudes that alienate the sensitive and creative, causing them to suffer adjustment problems. For Cather, growing up in Red Cloud proved both fruitful and suffocating. Red Cloud provided her with a setting (Black Hawk in My ntonia, Moonstone in The Song of the Lark, and all the small towns she wrote about are versions of her hometown) and inspiration for characters, which she 3 said were all composites of three or four persons. A Bohemian friend, Annie Sadilek Pavelka, was a prototype for ntonia Shimerda Cuzak, and the Miner family of Red Cloud was the basis for the Harlings of Black Hawk. But as fruitful of material as it was, Red Cloud could not be survived without scars, and sanity demanded access to the larger world. In that world, Cathers activities and accomplishments were notable: she worked at everything from schoolteaching to book and drama reviewing, from serving as managing editor of McClures Magazine to being a prizewinning author. The land itself provided Cather with a basic theme and defined her as a western writer. The land was the great fact in Nebraska; it was wild and barren and awesome. As a girl from Virginia, Cather was homesick, lonely, and culturally starved. To overcome the heartache of alienation, she had it out with the country, and by the end of the first autumn, she wrote,
NEBRASKA AND THE CIVILIZATION THEME1
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WILLA CATHER
that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been 4 able to shake. It has been the happiness and the curse of my life. After an apprenticeship in Pittsburgh and New York writing short stories (many of them about artists) and her first novel, Alexanders Bridge, set in London and Boston, she turned to her Nebraska experience for material and wrote a 5 novel of the soil before it became fashionable. A long vacation she happened to take in the West in 1912 had influenced the direction of her work. Her brother Douglass was working for the Southern Pacific at Winslow, Arizona, and during a visit with him she toured Indian missions, cliff dwellings of the Anasazi, and the Grand Canyon. Her experience of a western setting with more than a geologic past, with historical treasures like those of Greece and Rome, enabled her to see her own prairie country with new eyes when she stopped there on her way back East. A year later, in 1913, she published O Pioneers!, which she considered her first original work, the first time I 6 walked off on my own feet. . . .
THE FIRST DAYS: EPIC HEROINES OF THE WEST
This first Nebraska novel tells the story of taming the prairie land. The dominating figure is Alexandra Bergson, a young Swedish immigrant who inherits the management of the family farm from her father, John. She has the task of convincing her resentful brothers, Lou and Oscar, to acquire more land and to improve the farm by trying new methods and following the advice of Crazy Ivar, an eccentric hermit they ridicule. Alexandra is a lonely figure. After the boy she is fond of, Carl Linstrum, leaves with his family for St. Louis, her life begins to center on her youngest brother, Emil, whom she showers with the benefits of the familys eventual material success. As time passes and the land proves fruitful and provides a good life, Alexandra develops a close friendship with Marie, the unhappy young wife of a neighboring farmer, Frank Shabata. Marie falls in love with Emil when he comes home from college, and Alexandra, who fails to understand matters of love because of the responsibilities thrust upon her during her formative years, encourages their relationship without recognizing its nature. Frank Shabata discovers the lovers and shoots them in a fit of rage, thus destroying Alexandras hopes for Emils bright future. The subsequent period of suffering and adjustment develops Alexandras character and prepares her for marriage and travel with Carl, who has had some success in the Klondike. The dominance of the land itself is evident throughout the novel, from the early description of the wild land resisting the plow to the eventual milk-and-honey cultivated land, a vast checker-board, marked off in squares 7 of wheat and corn. . . , before which the main drama develops. Rather than merely providing a backdrop, the land is an active force in character. 687
Alexandra is the only Bergson with imagination enough to detect the lands potential, which is why her father left her in charge of his land. As she returns home from her survey of the river valley farms, for instance, she is convinced of the future productivity of the high, stubborn land of the Divide: For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning . . . Then the genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman (65). The history of this prairie country begins in the heart of Alexandra, who sacrificed her personal life to cultivate the land. She put so much of herself into her farming that her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence, like an underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals under her own fields (203). In the ordinary sense, she had never been in love, she had never indulged in sentimental reveries. Even as a girl she had looked upon men as work-fellows (205). The responsibilities thrust upon her early and the lack of friends her own age in this sparsely settled area contribute to her delayed sexual awakening and sublimation of sexual vitality. Alexandra is shown purging herself of the recurring sexual fantasy of being carried away in the arms of a giant man with the smell of ripe cornfields about him by pouring buckets of cold well-water over her gleaming white body which no man on the Divide could have carried very far (206). This fantasy and her attempt to suppress it suggest the extension of her sexual self to the land, which at times represents her lover and at times is associated with her own body. During her happiest days she feels close to the flat, fallow world about her, and [feels], as it were, in her own body the joyous germination in the soil (204). This sensation is obviously connected to the description of the responsive land at the opening of the Neighboring Fields section: The brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness (76). Although Alexandra does develop personal dimension through her relationship with Carl and her suffering after the deaths of Marie and Emil, she remains sexually reticent, mistrusts passion, and favors safe love between friends. Her insights remain directed toward the land and complement her strength of will, her direct way of thinking things out (24), and her slow, truthful and steadfast nature (61). Her visit to the family burying ground during a storm carries her back into the dark (281) before birth and enables her to identify the giant man in her sexual fantasy as Death, the mightiest of all lovers (283). Thus love and death are 688
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joined as they are in the poetry of Walt Whitman, from whose Pioneers! O Pioneers! Cather took her title, and whose inspiration is obvious in passages like the one at the beginning of Neighboring Fields: The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other (77). Alexandras final view of the land as a universal and eternal factor resembles Whitmans view in Song of Myself: I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles. She realizes that her efforts were not confined to Emil, that the land she believed in and helped tame belongs to a wider future than her familys: How many of the names on the county clerks plat will be there in fifty years? . . . . We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own itfor a little while (30408). Cathers first significant heroine might be said to be created by the prairie land itself, land which would perpetuate her pioneer virtues and the heart that first loved it: Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandras into its bosom, to give them away again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth! (309) In The Song of the Lark (1915) Cather again used the western land to develop a Swedish-American heroine. Thea Kronborg, like Alexandra, is a self-conscious, even backward, girl, until she discovers her purpose in life to absorb and express the people and bring them happiness through her singing. She senses early her difference from her family and most of the people in her Colorado prairie town, Moonstone, and discovers that she harbors a second self, primitive and fierce, defined by vocal training and emotional and physical development, appearing, at one point, to be struggling to break out of her shrunken white organdy dress. When she is finally a successful opera singer, the demands on Theas personal life lead to emptiness in her relationships with men. When she discovers too late that the man to whom she is attracted, Fred Ottenburg, a St. Louis beer prince, is trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage, she becomes convinced that her bed is her Waterloo, and learns of her vulnerability to a need hardly suspected 8 when her father branded her not the marrying kind. Although Thea eventually marries Fred, it is too late to prevent the damage of having a career substitute for personal life. When her sympathetic confidant, Dr. Archie, expresses concern at this, Thea explains, Your work becomes your personal life. You are not much good until it does. It is like being woven into a big web. You cant pull away, because all your little tendrils are woven into the picture. It takes you up and uses you, and spins you out, and that is your life. Not much else can happen to you (546). The situation is similar to the sacrifice of personal life demanded of Alexandra when she devoted herself to the Bergson farm. 689
As in O Pioneers!, the western land is linked to both the heroines career, to which sexual fulfillment is sacrificed, and the recognition of sexual desire. Cather repeatedly links Theas artistic calling to the landscape. The sandhills near Moonstone tantalize her and make her restless, and the greater hills beyond them, the Turquoise Hills, represent the desire that piano teacher Wunsch tells her is the only one big thing in life (95). The singing lessons and introduction to the arts in Chicago enable her to recognize her intrinsic need for the country beyond the Platte. Returning to Moonstone for the last time, Theas response to the landscape is like Alexandras to the Genius of the Divide: She had the sense of going back to a friendly soil, whose friendship was somehow going to strengthen her, a naive, generous country that gave one its joyous force, its large-hearted, childlike power to love, just as it gave one its coarse, brilliant flowers (277). Cather fuses frontier and artistic elements as Thea listens to Dvoraks New World Symphony and visualizes the grass-grown wagon trails that brought tears to her eyes the day she visited the high tableland above Laramie. Finally, Theas sojourn in Panther Canyon, Arizona, releases her from the enslaving desire to get on in the world (369), and makes her, like Alexandra during her fatigue, sexually vulnerable. She becomes curiously passive in the canyon, capable of converting the tactic of art into sustained sensation, and to become a mere receptacle for heat, or become a colour . . . or . . . a continuous repetition of sound . . . (373). Walking the trail of the Indian women and examining fragments of their pottery, Thea recognizes obligations toward a long chain of human endeavour (380), and she links the Indian womens attempt to hold life-giving water in aesthetically pleasing jars to her own singing. Despite her tendency to compete with men and her fear of losing her independence, Thea now admits her need for Fred, that she wants him for everything (403). As in O Pioneers!, the heroine must develop personal dimension, become dependent and exhibit sexual need. Fulfillment is withheld in both novels, however. The self-sufficiency of such heroines was obviously difficult for Cather to relinquish. Both novels focus on heroines larger than life, personally incomplete, linked to western soil, primarily representative of western potential, but suggestive too of Cathers growing pessimism. The optimism of Alexandras accomplishment is evident in her friend Carl Linstrums vision of her coming from the milking at sunrise, as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself (126). Fred Ottenburgs vision of Thea in the canyon is also associated with beginning and optimism: he saw her and between the sky and the gulf, with that great wash of air and the morning light about her. . . . Even at this distance one got the impression of muscular energy
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and audacitya kind of brilliancy of motionof a personality that carried across big spaces and expanded among big things (397). However, the personal incompleteness of both heroines relates to western limitation. In O Pioneers!, for example, a decline in social values contrasts with material prosperity; success breeds pettiness, jealousy, distrust, class pride, fear of what people will say, and dependence upon machines. When Alexandra entertains her brothers families, the talk (in English because they have grown ashamed of their Swedish origins) concerns bathtubs and pianos and what neighbors are saying about Alexandras keeping Crazy Ivar on her farm. More emphatically, The Song of the Lark depicts the town of Moonstone as hypocritical and small-minded, a place one has to escape in order to keep from being buried alive. Chicago becomes the supreme example of what has replaced heroic pioneer struggle: its chief concern is its digestion and its little game of hide and seek with the undertaker. Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence. Fortune . . . [f]licks her whip upon flesh that is more alive, upon that stream of hungry boys and girls . . . who are the Future, and who possess the treasure of creative power (33233). Cather leaves no doubt about where her own sympathies lie, departing from characterization and dialogue to include diatribes like these. Her pessimism about the decline of the West will grow, but in her best fiction it will fuse with characterization. The significant achievement of her next novel, My ntonia (1918), is her ability to make narrator Jim Burden a symptom of the society he condemns, unwittingly condemning himself in the process. Like O Pioneers!, the first section of My ntonia concerns settling and farming. The friendship between narrator Jim Burden, an orphaned boy from Virginia, and ntonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl, is developed as Jim records the trials and tribulations of the poor Shimerda family: their exploitation by an unscrupulous landowner, their struggles for food and warmth, and the suicide of the father. In the second section, Jim goes to live in the town of Black Hawk, and ntonia soon follows as the hired girl of the Harlings, a comfortable mercantile family. Jim, ntonia, her friend Lena Lingard, and other hired girls participate in the simple diversions of town lifepicnics, dances, and so onuntil social distinctions between newly arrived immigrant peoples and more traditionally American settlers separate Jim from his hired-girl friends. Later, while Jim is away at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Lena is now living and working as a dressmaker, a pregnant ntonia is abandoned in Denver by Larry Donovan, her railroad-conductor sweetheart. Jim briefly visits Black Hawk before entering Harvard Law School, and reveals to ntonia, who is now living at home with her baby, that she is the most important woman in his
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life. He promises to return to her, but twenty years pass before he fulfills his promise. He then finds ntonia married to a poor Bohemian farmer and the mother of many children. He views her as a founder of races, a maternal figure who has turned adversity into a particular kind of triumph. This novel represents Cathers attempt, through Jim Burden, to make an immigrant girl with an illegitimate baby into a symbol of the pioneer West, an alternative to the typical Westerns celebration of mountain man, cowboy, and gunfighter. In the first chapter, while on the train to Nebraska, Jim is reading a life of Jesse James when he is informed of the immigrant family in the car ahead, but he is too bashful to follow the friendly conductors suggestion that he visit them and instead returns to his reading. Later, after seeing ntonia at the railway station, he is greeted by Otto Fuchs, his grandfathers hired man, who has come to meet him. Fuchs is the typical citizen of the Wild West, who might have stepped out of the pages of Jesse James. He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his moustache were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history (6). But Fuchs is not developed as a character, and it is the immigrant girl Jim sees huddled with her family on the platform of the station who will become the central figure that will mean the country, the conditions (ii) of his western experience. As the epitome of spiritual wealth by way of cultural reversion and dedication to the land, ntonia is every good thing the new western society is not. Jim condemns the town of Black Hawk for bridling every natural appetite, lapsing in domestic refinement through shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, and for preoccupation with social climbing and gossip (219). Against the town stands ntonia, unconcerned about gossip and social standing, not dependent upon accomplishments associated with worldly prestige. Jim develops her character chronologically; she is shown during childhood, adolescence, young womanhood, and middle age. During childhood she is distinguished among the Shimerdas as the favorite of her father, who is an aristocratic man degraded by circumstances. While old Shimerda survives, ntonia has the luxury of discovering with Jim the prairie country she will eventually symbolize for him, of enjoying autumn foliage, fields transformed by snow, and spectacular sunsets. But old Shimerdas suicide ends ntonias childhood days. In the last scene of this period, she is dressed in hand-me-downs and hugging her baby sister while the neighbors nail down the coffin lid in the icy snow. What follows is a period of brutalization for ntonia, but it is also the beginning of her farming experience. Her fatherher constant reminder of better daysis replaced by her brother Ambrosch, who is ambitious to improve the family materially.
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ntonia refuses to attend country school and even gives up her reading lessons: I aint got time to learn, she tells Jim. I can work like mans now. . . . I help make this land one good farm (123). To save ntonia from the cruel effects of labor in the fields, Grandmother Burden and Mrs. Harling move her to the town of Black Hawk. Although the Black Hawk experience will lead to her disgrace, in retrospect she can appreciate her move: Id never have known anything about cooking or housekeeping if I hadnt come to town. I learned nice ways at the Harlings, and Ive been able to bring my children up so much better. . . . If it hadnt been for what Mrs. Harling taught me, I expect Id have brought them up like wild rabbits (34344). At the Harlings ntonia excels in the maternal and domestic activities that eventually delineate her mythic stature; indeed, her only fault is that she interrupts her work to prepare sweets for the children and to play with them. To emphasize her heroines qualities, Cather introduces a foil in the character of Lena Lingard, a hiredgirl companion who has rejected marriage and motherhood and domestic and farm drudgery for a career in dressmaking. Although sympathetically drawn, Lena is disruptive and dangerously sexual and helps cause ntonias dissatisfaction with the restrictions of life at the Harlings. ntonia leaves the Harlings to work for the Cutters, who pay more and have no children. During this rebellious phase, she becomes part of the group of hired girls who challenge the social order maintained by settlers of established American stock. These daughters of Bohemian and Scandinavian farmers are forced into service because they are too deficient in English to teach school and are considered inferior regardless of their backgrounds. In actuality, however, they are superior sexually and in ambition and energy. Under Lenas direction, ntonia acquires a cheap, stylish wardrobe, parades about town in high heels and feathered bonnets, and is soon the outstanding member of a free-and-easy set that provides the local high-school boys with something to watch. Costumed and enticing, ntonia proves vulnerable to the dangers of Black Hawk. Her employer, Wick Cutter, schemes to rape her, and she gets involved with Larry Donovan, a conceited womanizer with an inferior position with the railroad company. ntonias darkest period, her most difficult test of character, is her abandonment by Donovan. Cather distances the reader from the jilting in order to minimize ntonias disgrace and to concentrate on her admirable dedication to the baby. When Jim returns to Nebraska after two years of study at Harvard, he hears the story from Widow Steavens, in whom ntonia confided: Donovan had promised marriage but left ntonia when the baby was on the way. She then farmed the family fields, as she had after her fathers death. This time, however, she was not boastful of her mannish
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labors, but so crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble her (314). She suffered painful tooth ulcerations, thought of death, and told Mrs. Steavens that she was not going to live very long (316). The climax of the widows account is the birth of the baby one winter night, after a day full of chores. A new sense of purpose then replaced ntonias thoughts of death: Everybodys put into this world for something, she tells Jim before he departs for law school, and I know what Ive got to do. Im going to see that my little girl has a better chance than ever I had. Im going to take care of that girl, Jim (32021). Twenty years later, on his next visit to ntonia, Jim fully appreciates the unique quality of her maternal mission. She stands before him flatchested and missing teeth, but possessed of something which fires the imagination, could still stop ones breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things (353). Details of former hired-girl Tiny Soderballs fortunes and of Lenas glamor are examples of worldly success meant to contrast with scenes of ntonia on her farm: at the dinner table, with two long rows of restless heads in the lamplight, and so many eyes fastened excitedly upon [her] as she sat at the head of the table, filling the plates and starting the dishes on their way (347), and at the fruit cave, when her children came running up the steps together, big and little, tow heads and gold heads and brown, and flashing little naked legs; a veritable explosion of life out of the dark cave into the sunlight (33839). She has b een rescued not by an established American but by a fellow Bohemian immigrant, Anton Cuzak, a cousin of the Black Hawk saloon-keeper. This crumpled little man, with . . . one shoulder higher than the other (356), works the soil beside her; they are yokefellows more than romantic partners. ntonia has reverted from the Americanizing Black Hawk years; she has difficulty speaking English because her family speaks Bohemian at home. She is enthroned in her orchard like a maternal goddess, a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races (353). The character Jim creates in ntonia is the maternal counterpart of Alexandra and Thea, complementing their spouseless achievements on the archetypal level; taken together, these three fulfill Cathers early dictum (concerning actress Mary Anderson) on womans fulfillment: Having won the best the world has to give, then to quietly put away all the glamour and brightness and intoxication of it because there is still a higher life unfulfilled, to have been a queen and then to be merely a woman, that is in9 deed greatness.
WESTERN DECLINE: A COMPANY OF LESSER MEN
The condition of Jim Burden and Cathers male characters is hardly as noteworthy. Jim is sexually reluctant and confused; he seems as spiritually 694
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blind throughout the novel as the black piano player Blind dArnault is physically. After bitterly condemning the town of Black Hawk for bridling every natural appetite (219) in the young men of established American stock, because respect for respectability was stronger than any desire (202) and prevented their marrying the hired girls, he agrees to stop dancing with these girls because Disapprobation hurt me, I foundeven that of people whom I did not admire (228). His account of ntonia emphasizes his own failings and those of his society. Through his recollections of the formative experiences he shared with her, he is made whole, in the way that dArnault substituted piano playing for personal deficiencies by coupling himself to this highly artificial instrument . . . as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of him (188). Initially confused in his feelings toward ntonia and Lena, and finally by his own unsuccessful and childless marriage to a frigid woman, Jims tendency is to withdraw from adult life and mix with the land. When he meets ntonia in the fields after she has been disgraced and before he goes off to Harvard Law School, he feels the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there (322). Early in the novel, while sitting in his grandmothers womb-like garden, he has similar feelings: The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep (18). His desire for the maternal earth becomes clear, and explains much in his depiction of ntonia, who is a manifestation of the earth itself: her eyes are warm and full of light, like the sun shining on dry pools in the wood (23); and her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like the bole of a tree out of the turf, (122); and, of course, she herself slept in a hole in the earth as a child, and her children explode from the fruit cave. In the end Jim would be numbered among her children, having chosen from among the possible relationships to her he enumerated earliersweetheart, wife, mother, sister. Cathers next two novels examine sensitive western men like Jim Burden struggling to define themselves against the social and cultural flux of the post-pioneer period. The second of these novels, A Lost Lady (1923), resembles My ntonia in several ways. Its narrative perspective is that of a 695
young man in his formative years; its focus is on a woman important to him during these years, and its social criticism is manipulated through the consciousness of the young man, reflecting his character as much as the society he criticizes. Niel Herbert, like Jim Burden, is a motherless boy of southern background; he idealizes the beautiful young wife of the town of Sweet Waters outstanding citizen, Captain Forrester, now an invalid. Marian Forrester is both a romantic and maternal figure to Niel, and the most important influence of his boyhood, mostly because of her faithfulness to her railroad pioneer husband, who represents the pioneer age, when men were supposedly larger than life and faced epic challenges in opening up the West. However, Niel discovers that Marian has a lover among her husbands associates and concludes, naturally enough, that she has broken faith with her husband, unaware that the Forrester marriage is an accommodation of mutual service to which Marian is scrupulously faithful. As the Captains health deteriorates, she turns for help to Ivy Peters, who represents the new breed of western materialists, and who drains and turns into a wheatfield the beautiful marshland the Captain valued aesthetically. After the Captain dies, Marians apparent surrender to Peters causes Niel to leave Sweet Water with contempt for her in his heart and pursue a career in the East. Eventually she sells the Captains place to Peters, who brings a wife from Wyoming to live there. The novel, then, is essentially an allegory of the West, and is seen from the perspective of a young man who views life through the books he reads and prefers women on pedestals as personifications of chastity and constancy, a young man who, like Jim Burden, is himself symptomatic of western decline, the effete counterpart of the aggressive Ivy Peters type. Niel views himself as a natural enemy of the new breed Peters represents: He and Ivy had disliked each other from childhood, blindly, instinctively, 10 recognizing each other through antipathy, as hostile insects do. He then applies the Forrester domestic drama to the West in general: The Old West had been settled by dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were unpractical to the point of magnificence; a courteous brotherhood, strong in attack but weak in defense, who could conquer but could not hold. Now all the vast territory they had won was to be at the mercy of men like Ivy Peters, who had never dared anything, never risked anything. They would drink up the mirage, dispel the morning freshness, root out the great brooding spirit of freedom, the generous, easy life of the great land-holders. The space, the colour, the princely carelessness of the pioneer they would destroy and cut up into profitable bits, as the match factory splinters the primeval forest. All the way from the Missouri to the mountains this generation of shrewd young men, trained to petty economies by hard times, would do exactly
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what Ivy Peters had done when he drained the Forrester marsh (10607). The period subsequent to pioneering provides the crisis of the novel Cather published a year prior to A Lost Lady. One of Ours (1922), which brought Cather the Pulitzer Prize, details the plight of a sensitive young farmer, Claude Wheeler, who feels alienated from most of his family and the people around the town of Frankfort, Nebraska, because they had never dared anything, never risked anythinganything, that is, beyond the realm of financial investment. Claudes brother Bayliss is an Ivy Peters type, a natural enemy of romantic dreamers like his brother. Claude himself botches and dreams away chances at successful farming, successful marriage, and college education. He is a curious combination of physical strength, temper, and dandyism, and unsuited to the mundane goals of twentiethcentury living: a secure job, a comfortable home, and a nice wife. Claude cannot, in effect, tolerate life without splendor; as he tells a Bohemian friend, Well, if weve only got once to live, it seems like there ought to be 11 somethingwell, something splendid about life, sometimes. Claudes situation is that of an adventurer with no adventure, and his frustration is so great at times that the reader begins to suspect death as the only solution. The claustrophobia he feels is obvious when, during a trip to Denver, he sits on the State House steps contemplating the mountains and the statue of Kit Carson and realizes that the romantic West is gone: The statue . . . pointed westward; but there was no West, in that sense, any more. . . . Here the sky was like a lid shut down over the world . . . (104). Using the Great War as an outlet was hardly original, yet Cather brought personal experiences to the working out of her version of it. During her first visit to Europe twenty years before, she became a Francophile, and France was a filter for many of her Nebraska experiences. In the travel notes she sent back to the Nebraska State Journal, she noted peasant huts, prairies of wheat, Millet-type women of battered beauty who had raised large families and still worked in the field. The influence on her fiction of this and later visits to France is obvious, especially in Claudes adventures in that country and in the portrait of ntonia. France became for Cather (as for many others of her generation) a beautiful country of beautiful people, and when it was threatened, the instinct for martyrdom ran high. French critic Michel Gervaud notes that Cather found in French life a reassuring sense of the past, a devotion to lasting values, a leisurely pace of life which the brutal growth of commercialism and machine-made materialism in America 12 had destroyed in her lifetime, much to her distress. While Gervaud admits that this view was essentially selective and subjective, saving this ideal France is, nevertheless, Claudes opportunity to be heroic; the war becomes the removal of the lid, the opening of the window. Although Claudes view
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of the war is hopelessly romantic, equated with football games, big shows, sophisticated friends, music and cathedrals, he succeeds in becoming a leader among men, and has his men in hand (385) before he is shot during a suicidal cavort on the parapet of a fox hole. The idea of this war as a valve for American energies after the closing of the frontier, when the globe replaced the West, was popular long before Cathers novel. It was a familiar part of Frederick Jackson Turners western jingoism in 1918, when he addressed the State Historical Society of Minnesota: We are at war that the history of the United States . . . may not become a lost and tragic story of 13 a futile dream. But, as Cather suggests at the end of One of Ours, this kind of dreaming was an exercise in futility. The old values were not salvaged by the war, nor could the romance of the West be retrieved. Solutions had to be found, and these would expand Cathers work toward new dimensions. The Professors House (1925) is the keystone novel of her career. In it, the story of an historians disillusionment with his materialistic wife and married daughters, with university education deteriorating into business and vocational programs, and with modern life in general, encloses a central story about a western adventurers discovery of cliff dweller ruins in the Southwest. Professor Godfrey St. Peter is, in a way, what Tom Outland, the young adventurer, would have been had he not, like Claude, died in the war. The Professor is being choked to death, as Claude would have been, by the rootless and mundane post-war world. The years the Professor spent writing his history of Spanish adventurers in North America, especially his summer on the Mediterranean when the design of his work clarified, were his happiest and most fulfilling. The cash prize the work brought, however, contributed to the jealousy, creature comforts, and vulgarly conspicuous consumption preoccupying his family. This chronic condition develops crisis proportions when he is pressured to move from the old jerry-built house where his history had been written and his girls raised, into a modern house built with the prize money. He stubbornly occupies the study in the old house for reasons of survival, long after the rooms below are abandoned. The study has a window with a view of Lake Michigan, the lake of his childhood, the great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness . . . , a 1 4 part of consciousness itself. As sole opening for light and air (16), this window enables him to survive in a world upon which a lid has shut down. Alienated more and more from his wife and daughters and preoccupied with his own survival, he reflects on his experiences with former student Tom Outland, who had stepped into his life from an earlier West. The central part of the novel, Tom Outlands Story, the novella Cather inserted into the novel, is the Professors recollection of Toms account of his discovery of cliff dweller ruins at Blue Mesa. This story is a
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fictionalized version of the discovery of such ruins in Mesa Verde, Colorado, by cowboy-explorer Dick Wetherill. Cather acknowledged her debt for the details to one of the Wetherill brothers she met while visiting Mesa Verde in 1915: Dick Wetherell [sic] as a young boy forded Mancos River and rode into the mesa after lost cattle. I followed the real story very closely 15 in Tom Outlands narrative. When Tom follows the steer into the mesa he notices that the air is intoxicating, which makes the mesa an obvious parallel to the window in the Professors study: It seemed to me that I had never breathed in anything that tasted so pure as the air in that valley. It made my mouth and nostrils smart like charged water, seemed to go to my head a little and produce a kind of exaltation (200). An orphan like Jim Burden, Tom feels possessive at his first sight of Cliff Palace ruin; later this feeling develops into filial piety, but at first he wants to keep the Cliff Palace secret even from Roddy Blake, the cowboy companion who has been caring for him. As Tom looks up at the sleeping stone city from the floor of the canyon he recognizes its otherworldly quality: That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity. The falling snow flakes sprinkling the pinons, gave it a special kind of solemnity (202). After Blake and a priest friend help him unearth, catalog, and store the jars, bowls, stone implements, and mummified bodies found on the mesa, Tom makes an unsuccessful trip to Washington to interest the Smithsonian in what he considers a national treasure. Meanwhile, Blake, with whom Tom never shared his feelings about these artifacts, sells out to an enterprising German collector to finance a college education for Tom. Tom returns, reveals his feelings for the collection, and in his fury breaks with his close friend and dismisses him. Alone on the mesa, Tom experiences the high tide of his life and forgets all about Blake. Lying on a solitary rock on the canyon floor and contemplating the stone city in the golden haze of sunlight, something happened to him, enabling him to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in [his] mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. . . . for [him] the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion (251). But after this ecstasy, Tom began to feel guilty about his treatment of Blake and tried unsuccessfully to locate him. A year later he entered the Professors life, coming to the university for the formal education Blake envisioned for him. Details of this phase of Toms life are scattered throughout the first part of the novel: his majoring in physics, his development of an engine and fuel for aircraft, his engagement to the Professors elder daughter, Rosamond (an unlikely choice), and his going off to die in the war. Tom never had Claudes opportunity to botch marriage or career; he had merely lived a life of splendor. He had avoided the trap of
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worldly success, responsibility and profession, wife and community: He had escaped all that. He had made something new in the worldand the rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures he had left to others (261). In a way, he never really survived his adventure. Godfrey St. Peter is left to contend with the meaningless conventional gestures, and to the jeopardy of his soul. Like Tom, he had sought a private ecstasy, sought the isolation of his walled-in garden and his study, and later, his friendship with Tom, who enabled him to delay facing the consequences of a family lapsing away from him, adjusting to contemporary life. But Tom died, and was replaced by Louie Marsellus, Rosamonds enterprising Jewish husband, who is now realizing the profits from Toms invention. The Professor feels he is nearing the end of his life, and considers death as release from career and family involvements. Late one afternoon he awakens from a nap in his study to discover that his gas stove has gone out, but he hesitates to save himself. Augusta, the family seamstress who stores her work in the old house, finds him and drags him to safety. A rather dreary German woman and devout Catholic who has a habit of caring for people and chiding the Professor for being ignorant about the religion of his French ancestors, Augusta now begins to appeal to him: he would rather have Augusta with him just now than anyone he could think of. Seasoned and sound and on the solid earth she surely was, and, for all her matter-offactness and hard-headedness, kind and loyal (281). Augusta, her faith, and Toms mesa enable the Professor to feel the ground under his feet (283), to survive a fallen world, and relinquish the old house. The adventure over, the ecstasy gone, there were still the land itself and its ancient past and the eternal verities against which one could gauge existence. He could face his family now, and the future, with fortitude. Jim, Niel, Claude, Tom and Godfrey St. Peter, each sensitive, alienated, romantic and somewhat effete, self-centered and anti-social, are portraits of men who have difficulty adjusting to the realities of ordinary living. It took Cather a long time to arrive at a mature male who could find strength in the land, as her early heroines had done instinctively. The Professors insight that He was earth, and would return to earth (265) is profound. Wilderness country like Outlands provides an image of the eternal dwelling against which temporal concerns pale, enabling one to pick up the pieces, survive in time, and become outgoing: There was a world full of Augustas, with whom one was outward bound (281). In her next novel of the West, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Cather would transform the regressive male and the qualities defeating him into a unique western hero.
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EXPLORING HISTORY: A GREAT WESTERN HERO
In 1925, while visiting Santa Fe, Cather discovered an obscure biography of Joseph Machebeuf, first Bishop of Denver, by W. J. Howlett, a priest in his diocese. This work increased the interest she already had in Jean Lamy, first Bishop of Santa Fe, who had been Machebeufs lifelong friend from their seminary days in France to their missionary work in Ohio and the Southwest. What intrigued her was the reaction of these French priests to the people and country of New Mexico, the western experience as filtered through the hero she would fabricate from this and other sources, a hero she described as fearless and fine and very, very well bred. . . . What I felt curious about, she wrote in a letter to Commonweal, was the daily life of 16 such a man in a crude frontier society. This hero, Jean Marie Latour, and his western adventures represented a happy combination for her. The hero was a Frenchman; the setting, that part of North America so instrumental in developing the consciousnesses of Tom Outland, Godfrey St. Peter, and Thea Kronborg; the task was one of civilizing, of bringing order to a vast diocese where the Church was in decay and its shepherd had to deal with 17 savagery and ignorance, with dissolute priests and political intrigue. Like Aeneas, whose destiny was to shape a new culture in Italy by transplanting the home gods of Troy, Latour carries the gods of Rome into the remote and savage American West. As a celibate priest he avoids the domestic difficulties and failures of Godfrey St. Peter and Claude Wheeler, and the passivity of Jim Burden and Niel Herbert are in him transformed into understanding of and sensitivity to people and places. Latour, it is true, cannot be garrulous and immediately popular like his companion Joseph Vaillant (loosely based on Bishop Machebeuf), yet his Indian guide Jacinto appreciates his sincerity, his unwillingness to assume a false face when he addresses Indians, like most white men do, even Vaillant, whose face is kindly but too vehement (94). The Catholic theme of Death Comes for the Archbishop was appropriate during this period of Cathers life, and it allowed her to approach setting as symbol, as she had in Tom Outlands Story. Catholic ritual and customs had been increasingly apparent throughout her fiction, and somewhat reflective of her religious concern. In 1922, she took a step toward Catholicism by being confirmed in the Episcopal Church (she had been reared a Baptist); however, she never became a Catholic, and was perhaps referring to this fact when she wrote to Wilbur Cross that the kind of feeling about life and human fate [she experienced among the nuns in Quebec] . . . [she] 18 could not accept, wholly, but . . . could not but admire. Nevertheless,
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she compared writing Archbishop to a happy vacation from life, a return to 1 9 childhood, to early memories. Catholicism colors the consciousness of her hero, who is perceptive enough to relate the western landscape to the journey of his soul. The mesa country gives substance to his spiritual development, from the opening pages, when he wanders among red hills and contemplates the thirst of the crucified Christ, to his discovery on a ridge over the Rio Grande of the golden stone, from which will be built a cathedral to symbolize his work in the West. He is constantly alive to the mysteries of this land, and spends an unsettling night in a dank cave in the Pecos mountains, where his guide Jacinto exposes him to challenging Indian mysteries. He recognizes Acoma mesa as the expression of human need, and associates it with the Church and its idea of God. He travels to the Navajo desert during a period of spiritual aridity, and he recognizes his discovery of the oasis Agua Secreta as an answered prayer, a gift of grace, when he is thirsting in the desert. In no other novel was Cather as able to integrate setting and character, to delineate consciousness through landscape. Cathers career came together in Archbishop, a work which approached perfection. It is her most western and historically embracing novel, and its importance is that it increases the dimensions of western literature by introducing alternatives to heroic traditions (as My ntonia does to a lesser extent). Her western hero shares experiences with Coopers Natty Bumppo, Wisters Virginian, even Twains Huck Finn, yet responds to these experiences with cultivated sensibilities. He is introduced wearing buckskin like Natty Bumppo, although the far western setting demands an equestrian hero like the Virginian. Cather opens with a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, . . . pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico (17). This horseman is atypical, however: Under his buckskin riding coat he wore a black vest and the cravat and collar of a churchman (19). Even aside from his calling, he is unusual: His bowed head was not that of an ordinary man,it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence. . . . There was a singular elegance about the hands below the fringed cuffs of the buckskin jacket. Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birthbrave, sensitive, courteous. His manners . . . were distinguished. Cather presents us with the cultivated counterpart of the naturally attractive hero described by Wisters narrator at the beginning of The Virginian: In his eye, in his face, in the whole man, there dominated a 20 something potent to be felt . . . by man or woman. Wisters tall stranger and Cathers young priest are knights-errant in the wilderness, rescuing those in need and righting wrongs. New Mexico is in a bad way, and Latour, like the Virginian, whose exploits range from pranks to gun duels and lynchings, has to contend with 702
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lawlessness. The Lonely Road to Mora episode combines a typical rescue of a female in distress and a situation of self-defense. After the terrified Magdalena warns the priests about the murderous Buck Scales, Latour draws his pistol on the outlaw. When Magdalena escapes, Latour watches over her until the buckskin-clad, conventional western hero, Kit Carson, takes her home to his wife. Latours confrontations with the wayward native clergy make him a kind of frontier lawman forced to compromise in imperfect situations until the appropriate time for action. Rather than lose the parish of Taos in order to punish its priest (157), he allows the excesses of Father Martinez to continue until he can get a strong replacement. Martinez, Gallegos and Lucero, a trio of clergymen as lawless as any company of cattle rustlers, challenge the new bishops authority by practices as varied as political intrigue, gambling, hoarding money and siring children. Patiently but firmly Latour replaces them, although Lucero and Martinez organize a rival church of their own. Cathers hero shares with Coopers Natty Bumppo concern over the exploitation and destruction of the land by new settlers. Natty complains 21 that white mens explorations always foretell waste and destruction and demonstrates less wasteful Indian methods of hunting and fishing. Latour is sensitive to the Indian respect for nature: it was the Indians way to pass through a country without disturbing anything. . . . It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. . . . They seemed to have none of the Europeans desire to master nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves (23334). Just as Natty laments the sacrificing of New York forests for the ugly, jerry-built structures of Templeton, Latour is disturbed by the proliferation in Santa Fe of flimsy wooden buildings with double porches, scrollwork and jack-straw posts and banisters painted white (271), which destroy the setting of his golden Romanesque cathedral. He is forced to contend with the confusions of life brought about by the discovery of gold in Colorado, where wandering prospectors and their followers crowd into the mountains, pollute the water and succumb to fever. Latour assigns these Colorado problems to Father Vaillant, who eventually becomes Bishop of Denver. Latours Indian companionships also associate him with Coopers hero. Nattys lifelong friendship with Chingachgook and his relationship with Uncas and Hist have their parallels in Latours dealings with Jacinto and especially the Navajo leader Eusabio. Like Natty, Latour is able to communicate with Indians. At Laguna, he discusses Indian names and legends with Jacinto. The Navajo Eusabio becomes Latours friend for life, and his desert home the place Latour visits during a period of spiritual aridity. The 703
two friends share Christianity, concern for the welfare of the Navajos, and a respect for each other reminiscent of Natty and Chingachgook. The nobility of both relationships and the silent intercourse characterizing them are suggested in a meeting between Eusabio and Latour after the death of Eusabios son: At first he did not open his lips, merely stood holding Father Latours very fine white hand in his very fine dark one, and looked into his face with a message of sorrow and resignation in his deep-set, eagle eyes (221). The scene recalls Nattys attempt to comfort Chingachgook at the grave of Uncas, when he declares, Sagamore, you are not alone, and 22 Chingachgook grasps his hand with warmth of feeling. Celibacy and perpetual boyhood also characterize the western hero. Huck Finn constantly tries to avoid the complexities of society by moving on, by lighting out for new territory to escape that cramped up and smothery feeling in conflict with the easy freedom of the raft, where one floated wherever the current wanted, where one could throw off the restraints of 23 civilization and go naked, day and night. When the elderly Latour grows homesick for New Mexico while visiting Clermont, France, the youthful preferences impelling his missionary activities are clarified: In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made ones body feel light and ones heart cry To-day, to-day, like a childs (275). The Old World could not bestow this youth, but the wind of the lighthearted mornings of the desert, . . . that wind . . . made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by men and made to bear harvests. (This resembles the Virginians hankering after an undomesticated territory without schools while actually becoming a force in domesticating it.) The atmosphere of freedom becomes necessary for Latour: he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning! (27576). Despite (and perhaps because of) Latours refinement and breeding, the difficulty he has making immediate friends and his obvious lack of passion strike some readers as coldness and lack of personality. But Cather is aware of what she omits in her hero; she embodies in subordinate characters the qualities he seems to lack. Martinez rather than Latour is her passionate character; however, Martinez was like something picturesque and impressive, but really impotent, left over from the past (141). Next to Latour,
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the buckskin-clad Kit Carson is the typical adventurer, the more legendary hero of the frontier, but Carson proves brutal in his treatment of the Navajos and is dismissed as misguided (293). Vaillant is warmer, more popular and more active than Latour, who in his humility feels inferior to his vicar. This is obvious when he requests Vaillants blessing before one of their separations: Blanchet, . . . you are a better man than I. You have been a great harvester of souls without pride and without shameand I am always a little coldun pedant, as you used to say. If hereafter we have stars in our crowns, yours will be a constellation. Give me your blessing (26162). Latour feels that his somewhat quieter work in Santa Fe pales beside the more aggressive and celebrated mission in Colorado. However, Vaillants work depends upon Latour, for he was responsible for Vaillant coming to the New World, had to forge a new will in that devout and exhausted priest (299), and directed his missionary work, including Colorado. No Cather male character but Latour approaches or surpasses the accomplishments of her early heroines.
MINGLING WITH THE EARTH
In Obscure Destinies (1932), a collection of three western stories, Cather began to look at the world and life from the perspective of a senior citizen. Her use of the land is particularly interesting in one of these stories, Neighbour Rosicky, which was based, like My ntonia on the family of Annie Sadilek Pavelka. The story concerns a dying farmers anxiety over the future of his children, his successful solution of a family problem, and the attraction of the nearby prairie graveyard, sort of snug and homelike. . . . where a man could lie down in the long grass and see the complete arch of the sky over him, hear the wagons go by; in summer the 2 4 mowing-machine rattled right up to the wire fence. Rosicky is convinced that life close to the soil is the best life; it offers protection from the ugliness and depravity of human nature, from the poisonous specimens of man he had experienced in his early struggles with poverty as a Bohemian immigrant in London. Although he had escaped to a much easier, very satisfactory life in New York, even there he grew restless, realizing one spring, while he watched the grass turn green in Park Place, what the trouble was with big cities: they built you in from the earth itself, cemented you away from any contact with the ground. You lived in an unnatural world, like the fish in an aquarium . . . (31). He was always haunted by boyhood memories of farm life with his grandparents in Bohemia, where he formed [his] ties with the earth and the farm animals and growing things. . . . He was a very simple man, Cather concludes. He was like a tree that has not many roots, but one tap-root that goes down deep (32).
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While depressed over his separation from the earth, he met a delegation of Nebraska Bohemians visiting New York and returned home with them to invest in land. The final effort of Rosickys life is to draw into his family his son Rudys wife Polly, a town girl who considers the Rosickys foreigners. He is afraid that Polly will add to Rudys discouragement over a bad farming season and cause him to leave. To Rosicky, his childrens self-respect is the factor: on the farm, what you had was your own. You didnt have to choose between bosses and strikes, and go wrong either way. You didnt have to do with dishonest and cruel people (59). In an effort to help Rudy and Polly, Rosicky sets out to clear their alfalfa field of thistle, has an attack and is tended by Polly. As she holds his warm broad, flexible brown hand, she is awakened to his love, is brought to herself, and receives from him some direct and intranslatable message (6667). Rosicky is then assured that Polly, who reveals to him that she is with child, will support his son on the farm. He dies the following day and is buried in the country graveyard. Nothing could be more fitting than this completion of the earthward movement begun by Rosicky years before in Europe; no resting place could be more appropriate, nothing could be more right for a man who had helped to do the work of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had got to it at last (71). When death came for Willa Cather herself in 1947, after a long career of accomplishment acknowledged by prizes and medals and honorary degrees, she was not brought back to Nebraska land. She was buried in the New Hampshire graveyard near the country inn where she frequently summered and did much of her writing. The grave she had selected looked westward toward Mount Monadnock, and the inscription on the stone was taken from Jim Burdens early response to the great fact of the land in Nebraska: that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great (18). The geographical sweep of her career is impressive, from New Mexico and Arizona to Quebec and France; and her vision ranged from pessimism and despair to constant delight in nature and the arts, and faith in the survival of humanity.
JOHN J. MURPHY , Brigham
Young University
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Notes
1. This section and portions of the sections on O Pioneers! and My ntonia have been taken from my pamphlet A Teachers Guide to O Pioneers! and M y ntonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980). 2. My ntonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition, 1961), p. 7. Subsequent references will be included in the text. This method will be followed for each novel and for Neighbour Rosicky. 3. As quoted by Mildred R. Bennett, The World of Willa Cather, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 22. 4. The World of Willa Cather, p. 140. 5. Willa Cather on Writing (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 93. 6. The World of Willa Cather, p. 200. 7. O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition, 1962), p. 75. 8. The Song of the Lark, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition, 1963), p. 129. 9. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cathers First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893 1896, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 155. 10. A Lost Lady (New York: Random House Vintage Book, 1972), p. 106. 11. One of Ours (New York: Random House Vintage Book, 1971), p. 48. 12. Willa Cather and France: Elective Affinities, in The Art of Willa Cather, ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), p. 80. 13. Middle Western Pioneer Democracy, in The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), p. 336. 14. The Professors House (New York: Random House Vintage Book, 1973), p. 30. 15. Willa Cather on Writing, p. 32. 16. Willa Cather on Writing, pp. 78. 17. Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Random House Vintage Book, 1971), p. 8. 18. Willa Cather on Writing, p. 15. 19. Willa Cather on Writing, p. 11. 20. Owen Wister, The Virginian, a Horseman of the Plains (New York: Pocket Books, 1956), p. 6. 21. James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer; or, The First War-Path: A Tale (New York: D. Appleton, 1892), p. 44. 22. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (New York: D. Appleton, 1892), p. 442. 23. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Scully Bradley, Richard C. Beatty, and E. Hudson Long (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1962), pp. 9697. 24. Obscure Destinies (New York: Random House Vintage Book, 1974), p. 18.
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1. Fiction Collected Short Fiction, 18921912. Rev. ed. Edited by Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Includes The Troll Garden (1905) stories. Alexanders Bridge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. O Pioneers! Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913; Sentry edition, 1962. The Song of the Lark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915; Sentry revised (1932) edition, 1963; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (1915 edition), 1978. Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cathers Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915 1929. Edited by Bernice Slate. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. My ntonia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918; Sentry edition, 1961. Youth and the Bright Medusa. New York: Knopf, 1920; New York: Vintage, 1976. Seven stories of artistic temperaments. One of Ours. New York: Knopf, 1922; New York: Vintage, 1971. A Lost Lady. New York: Knopf, 1923; New York: Vintage, 1972. The Professors House. New York: Knopf, 1925; New York: Vintage, 1973. My Mortal Enemy. New York: Knopf, 1926; New York: Vintage, 1961. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Knopf, 1927; New York: Vintage, 1971. Shadows on the Rock. New York: Knopf, 1931; New York: Vintage, 1971. Obscure Destinies. New York: Knopf, 1932, New York: Vintage, 1974. Three long short stories. Lucy Gayheart. New York: Knopf, 1935; New York: Vintage, 1976. Sapphira and the Slave Girl. New York: Knopf, 1940; New York: Vintage, 1975. The Old Beauty and Others. New York: Knopf, 1948; New York: Vintage, 1976. The last three stories. 2. Poetry April Twilights (1903). Rev. ed. edited by Bernice Slote. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968. 3. Non-Fiction The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cathers First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893 1896. Edited by Bernice Slote. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. Cathers dramatic and literary criticism. The World and the Parish: Willa Cathers Articles and Reviews, 18931902. Edited by William M. Curtin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Not Under Forty. New York: Knopf, 1936. Essays on writing and literature. Willa Cather on Writing. New York: Knopf, 1949. Essays on writing and literature.
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Secondary Sources 1. Biographical Studies Bennett, Mildred R. The World of Willa Cather. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. Of primary value in understanding the influence of childhood associations in the fiction. Brown, E. K., and Leon Edel. Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. New York: Knopf, 1953. Combines the biography with critical introduction to major works, clarifying the autobiographical nature of much of the fiction and concern for fiction as a fine art. Brown, Marion M., and Ruth Crone. Only One Point of the Compass: Willa Cather in the Northeast. Danbury, Conn.: Archer, 1980. Focuses primarily on authors summers on Grand Manan Island, and reprints three presumably lost letters to her from Isabelle McClung. . Willa Cather: The Woman and Her Works. New York: Scribners, 1970. Introduction of some value for the general reader but lacks scholarly and critical depth and solidity of other studies. Byrne, Kathleen D., and Richard C. Snyder. Chrysalis: Willa Cather in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh: Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, 1980. Focuses on authors ten years in Pittsburgh as teacher and journalist and her relationship to the McClung family. Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York: Knopf, 1953. Companion volume to Brown/Edel, generous with glimpses into the authors life provided by the woman who shared that life. Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley. Willa Cather: A Memoir. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963. Valuable, but as one writers remembrances of another the focus is often blurred. Woodress, James. Willa Cather: Her Life and Art. New York: Western, 1970; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. Updates Brown/Edel biography through incorporation of information from Cathers correspondence. 2. Book-Length Studies, Collections, Special Issues Bloom, Edward A. and Lillian D. Willa Cathers Gift of Sympathy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. Especially valuable for Cathers literary theories and practices, and for analysis of her use of Howletts obscure biography of Denvers Bishop Machebeuf as source for Death Comes for the Archbishop. Colby Library Quarterly 8 (June 1968): 3596. Homage to Willa Sibert Cather. Lucy Schneider on O Pioneers!, Isabel Charles on The Professors House, William M. Curtin on style, and a bibliographical essay by Richard Cary. . 10 (Sept. 1973): 11978. For the 100th Anniversary of Willa S. Cather. Harry B. Eichorn and Theodore S. Adams on My Mortal Enemy, John J. Murphy
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A Literary History of the American West on My ntonia, Richard Cary on The Sculptors Funeral, and James R. Bash on materialism. Daiches, David. Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951. Concerns aesthetics, effects managed in landscapes and interiors, etc. Edel, Leon. Willa Cather: The Paradox of Success. Washington: Library of Congress, 1960. Pamphlet of lecture theorizing that authors unshakable faith in the old true things enabled her to confront painful changes in life. Gerber, Philip L. Willa Cather. Twayne United States Authors Series. Boston: Hall, 1975. Valuable for placing Cather in her literary milieu, although disappointing in treating individual novels. Giannone, Richard. Music in Willa Cathers Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. Examines the novels from the perspective of musical references and structural dimensions. Great Plains Quarterly 2 (Fall 1982): 193248. Willa Cather and Nebraska. Papers from University of Nebraska national seminar; general essays by Mildred R. Bennett, Bernice Slote and James Woodress; essays on Nebraska novels by Bruce P. Baker II, John J. Murphy, Susan J. Rosowski, and David Stouck. Jones, Howard Mumford. The Bright Medusa. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952. Reveals as a central theme the accommodation the artist must make in an alien world. McFarland, Dorothy T. Willa Cather. New York: Unger, 1972. A sound, helpful Modern Literature Monograph for the beginning reader. Murphy, John J., ed. Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Boston: Hall, 1984. Includes a survey of Cathers critical reception, reprints significant essays and reviews from 1912 to the present, and contains original essays by James Woodress, David Stouck, John J. Murphy, and Paul Comeau. , ed. Five Essays on Willa Cather. North Andover, Mass.: Merrimack College, 1974. Centennial papers; includes Willa Cather: The Secret Web by Bernice Slote and a helpful bibliography. Prairie Schooner 55 (Spring/Summer 1981): 1285. Issue in Celebration of Bernice Slote. Reprints a Cather review of Richard Strauss and original essays on Cather by Susan J. Rosowski, John J. Murphy, Judith Fryer, Paul Comeau, and Paul Olson. Randall, John H., III. The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cathers Search for Value. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Somewhat blurred but exhaustive attempt to scrutinize the authors attitudes in relation to her time. Rapin, Ren. Willa Cather. New York: McBride, 1930. Highly original first booklength study of the works, prefers One of Ours to My ntonia, contains valuable insights on effects of the Jamesian apprenticeship. Renascence 27 (Spring 1975): 11375. Special Issue: Willa Cather. Essays on morals and religion in Cathers fiction by William M. Curtin, Catherine M. McLay, and Paul Borgman; John J. Murphy on Cather and Hawthorne.
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Schroeter, James, ed. Willa Cather and Her Critics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. A helpful if uneven gathering of general estimates by big-name critics from Mencken to Edel. Slote, Bernice, and Virginia Faulkner, eds. The Art of Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. Centennial papers; includes Miss Cather by Alfred Knopf, Willa Cather: The Classic Voice by Donald Sutherland, and The House of Willa Cather by Eudora Welty. Stouck, David. Willa Cathers Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. Considers the various modes, from pastoral to satiric, through which the fiction moves. Van Ghent, Dorothy. Willa Cather. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964. Assesses work in terms of the lost self and recovery of ancestors. Western American Literature 7 (Spring 1972): 164. A Willa Cather Issue. Patricia L. Yongue on A Lost Lady, David Stouck on The Professors House, James M. Dinn on Death Comes for the Archbishop, and general essays by Patrick J. Sullivan and Evelyn J. Hinz. Western American Literature 17 (Spring 1982): 160. A Willa Cather Issue. David Stouck on Death Comes for the Archbishop, L. Brent Bohlke and Missy Dehn Kubitschek on The Professors House, and general essays by Mildred R. Bennett and John J. Murphy. 3. Critical Essays through 1947 Blankenship, William R. American Literature as an Expression of the National Mind, pp. 67379. Rev. ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1931, 1949. Recognizes essay The Novel Dmeubl (in Not Under Forty and On Writing ) as key to appreciating authors achievement. Bogan, Louise. American Classic. New Yorker 7 (Aug. 8, 1931): 1922. Notes solid crafting of novels, counterpointed prose, and depiction of indestructible human qualities. Boynton, Percy H. America in Contemporary Fiction, pp. 15063. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940. Sees in work an undue zest for studio life violating verisimilitude. Fadiman, Clifton. Willa Cather: The Past Recaptured. Nation 135 (Dec. 7, 1932): 56365. Argues author has no report to make to us on the America of her time. Footman, Robert H. The Genius of Willa Cather. American Literature 10 (May 1938): 12341. Analyzes authors genius in terms of individualism, meaningful living, and style. Geismar, Maxwell. The Last of the Provincials;, pp. 153222. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. Offers the first comprehensive assessment of the fiction and delineates the shape of the career. Hicks, Granville. The Case Against Willa Cather. English ]ournal 22 (Nov.
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A Literary History of the American West 1933): 70310. Charges author with exploiting the idealized frontier in order to escape contemporary problems. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds, pp. 24757. New York: Reynall and Hitchcock, 1942. Includes perceptive distinctions between authors use of elegy as emotion and as theme. Lewis, Sinclair. The Greatest American Novelist. Newsweek 11 (Jan. 3, 1938): 29. The boys have roared and fought . . . ; but quiet and alone, Willa Cather has greatly pictured the great life. Michaud, Regis. The American Novel To-Day, pp. 23848. Boston: Little, Brown, 1928. Stresses the suppressed and limited lives of the characters, and notes authors sympathy for their tragic situations. Morris, Lloyd. Willa Cather. North American Review 219 (Apr. 1924): 64152. Explains authors turning from pioneers to artists in struggle to dominate space. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. American Fiction, pp. 68397. New York: Appleton, 1936. Cautions against confining author to the West, and examines recurrent themes and connections between novels and short stories. Trilling, Lionel. Willa Cather. New Republic 90 (Feb. 10, 1937): 1013. Notes complexity and realism of pioneer characters while noting that adverse reaction to modern life had directed author to spiritual concerns and the unfurnished novel. Van Doren, Carl. The American Novel, 17891939, pp. 28193. New York: Macmillan, 1940. Selects A Lost Lady as greatest success and affirms the general durability of the work. West, Rebecca. The Strange Necessity, pp. 23348. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. Groups author with Proust rather than with Lawrence and Joyce because she paves our journey with grace rather than extends frontiers of humanity. White, George L. Willa Cather. S ewanee Review 50 (Jan. 1942): 1825. An Emersonian artist, whose faith rests on the essential truth that man has a spiritual responsibility to himself and to his world . . . to create . . . the greatest good he can. Zabel, Morton Dauwen. Willa Cather. Nation 164 (June 14, 1947): 71316. Considers the pathos of distance of time and place in the work. 4. Critical Essays since 1947 Baum, Bernard. Willa Cathers Waste Land. South Atlantic Quarterly 48 (Oct. 1949): 589601. Makes some revealing parallels before collapsing into a complaint about anti-Semitism. Charles, Isabel. Love and Death in Willa Cathers O Pioneers! College Language Association Journal 9 (Dec. 1965): 14050. Shows how the tragedy of the lovers contributes to the development of heroine Alexandra Bergson. Connolly, Francis X. Willa Cather: Memory as Muse. In Fifty Years of the American Novel, edited by Harold C. Gardiner, pp. 6987. New York: Scribners, 1951. Applauds author for producing in her best work a record of progress from nature, through mind, to spirit.
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Cooperman, Stanley. World War I and the American Novel, pp. 12937. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Sees One of Ours as a study of sexual frustration relieved through the violence of war. Dahl, Curtis. An American Georgic: Willa Cathers My ntonia. Comparative Literature 7 (Winter 1955): 4351. Anticipates several recent studies involving classical literature by assessing the Virgilian quality of the novel. Edel, Leon. Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology, pp. 21640. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Discusses the psychological complexity of Godfrey St. Peter in The Professors House in terms of Cathers personal crisis. Gelfant, Blanche H. The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My ntonia. American Literature 43 (Mar. 1971): 6082. Breakthrough article on novel, so simple and clear yet resonating to themes of ultimate importanceidentity, time, deathsubsumed in the more immediate issue of physical love. George, Benjamin. The French-Canadian Connection: Willa Cather as a Canadian Writer. Western American Literature 11 (Fall 1976): 24961. Analyzes Shadows on the Rock in terms of cultural values attractive to the author, particularly tradition and societal involvement. Gerber, Philip L. Willa Cather and the Big Red Rock. College English 19 (Jan. 1958) : 15257. Authors cognizance of values examined in terms of the rock as refuge, affirmative virtues of characters, . . . culture, religion, ethics, and order. . . . Greene, George. Willa Cather at Mid-Century. Thought 32 (Winter 1957): 57792. Appreciates authors artistic integrity, particularly her ideal of the artist as a bringer of truth. Hart, Clive. The Professors House: A Shapely Story. Modern Language Review 67 (Apr. 1972): 27181. Deals with the moral and psychological implications of patterns of imagery, concluding that the novel concerns fallen mans failure to integrate his vision of harmony with the realities of his emotional nature. Helmick, Evelyn Thomas. The Broken World: Medievalism in A Lost Lady. Renascence 28 (Autumn 1975): 3946. Illustrates the courtly romance characteristics of the novel. Hinz, John. A Lost Lady and The Professors House. Virginia Quarterly Review 29 (Winter 1953): 7085. The lady is the author, and this autobiographical novel retells the story attempted in Alexanders Bridge. Hoffman, Frederick. The Twenties, pp. 18190. Rev. ed. New York: Free Press, 1962. Considers conflicts between values past and present in The Professors House. Keeler, Clinton. Narrative Without Accent: Willa Cather and Puvis de Chavannes. American Quarterly 17 (Spring 1965): 11926. Considers the monumental style of Death Comes for the Archbishop and the painting that inspired it as running counter to subjectivity of modern art. Lambert, Deborah. The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in My ntonia. American Literature 53 (Jan. 1982): 67690. Sees author in her fiction as transforming her lesbianism into acceptable, heterosexual forms and guises.
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A Literary History of the American West Martin, Terence. The Drama of Memory in My ntonia PMLA 84 (Mar. 1969): 30411. Explores structural coherence of novel as narrators drama of memory, a conflict between remembering and forgetfulness. Miller, James E., Jr. My ntonia: A Frontier Drama of Time. American Quarterly 10 (Winter 1958): 47684. Notes the time cycles around which the book is structured (seasons, human lives, cultural phases) and ntonia as symbolic of the undeviating cyclic nature of all life. . . . Moers, Ellen. Literary Women, pp. 23042, 25563. Garden City: Doubleday, 1976. Discussing author in company with Colette, Woolf and Stein, sees her heroines modeled on Electra. Murphy, John J. Euripides Hippolytus and Cathers A Lost Lady. American Literature 53 (March 1981): 7286. Examines the play as a source for the novel and Niel Herbert, like his Greek prototype, tom between chastity and eroticism. . Willa Cathers Archbishop: A Western and Classical Perspective. Western American Literature 13 (Summer 1978): 14150. Compares Bishop Latour to the American Western hero and to Aeneas as champion of civilization and order. OBrien, Sharon. The Unity of Willa Cathers Two-Part Pastoral: Passion in O Pioneers! Studies in American Fiction 6 (Autumn 1978): 15770. Sees novel as parable about passion, dangerous sexual passion opposing passion deflected from the personal to the impersonal object. Rosowski, Susan J. Narrative Technique in Cathers My Mortal Enemy. Journal of Narrative Technique 8 (Spring 1978): 14149. Sees as central the narrators consciousness moving from romantic to realistic attitudes. . Willa Cathers Women. Studies in American Fiction 9 (Autumn 1981): 26175. Explores the two selves pattern of the heroines, specifically tensions involving cultural myths. Rule, Jane. Lesbian Images, pp. 7487. Garden City: Doubleday, 1975. Sensibly warns against reading fiction as autobiography and notes Cathers capacity in characterization to transcend the conventions of what is masculine and . . . feminine. . . . Schneider, Lucy. Artistry and Instinct: Willa Cathers Land-Philosophy. College Language Association Journal 16 (June 1973): 485504. Enumerates seven basic tenets critic applies elsewhere to specific texts, ranging from land as a force working directly on man to land as source of transcendence. Stegner, Wallace. Willa Cather, My ntonia. In The American Novel, pp. 14453. New York: Basic Books, 1965. Views the novel as an Americans reconciliation of the two halves of himself. Stewart, D. H. Cathers Mortal Comedy. Queens Quarterly 73 (Summer 1966): 24459. Views Death Comes for the Archbishop as a truncated Divine Comedy involving the Seven Deadly Sins, etc. Stouck, David. Willa Cather and the Indian Heritage. Twentieth Century Literature 22 (Dec. 1976): 43343. Points out feeling in authors fiction which turns away from the American dream of selfhood toward the richness and complexity of the perceptual world. . . .
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5. Bibliographies Lathrop, Jo Anna. Willa Cather: A Checklist of Her Published Writings. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. OConnor, Margaret A. A Guide to the Letters of Willa Cather. Resources for American Literary Study 4 (Autumn 1974): 14572. Identifies and briefly comments on forty-three collections of Cather correspondence scattered throughout the country. Slate, Bernice. Willa Cather.In Sitxteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, pp. 2973. New York: Norton, 1973.
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Rlvaag and Krause Two Novelists of the Northwest Prairie Frontier

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HE STORY
of the settlement of the northwestern prairie states in America has been told most powerfully and successfully by Ole E. Rlvaag, the Norwegian-American author of Giants in the Earth and six other novels about the immigrant experience on the frontier. While novelists like Herbert Krauseoften labelled as Rlvaags successor might win literary prizes and earn a degree of popularity, Rlvaag was the only novelist among the Scandinavians and the Germans in the region to gain a significant measure of success with the American public. He had the good fortune to be brilliantly translated and to have chosen as grand a theme as that of any epic or saga: the struggle of a tenacious and daring pioneer to found his own kingdom in the wilderness. Moreover, although the Norwegians made up a relatively small proportion of the North Europeans who came to the prairies, in Rlvaag they had a spokesman who not only depicted the part that his own group had played in the land-taking but so lifted the adventure to the level of the universal that it described in large measure the experience of millions of other immigrants and Americans who in the second half of the nineteenth century pushed the farming frontier westward from Illinois and Wisconsin into Iowa, Minnesota, and Dakota Territory. It can be argued that the Norwegian immigrants were as representative of this northern farming frontier as any national group, including the more numerous Germans and Swedes, in that more of them turned to agriculture than did immigrants from other countries and in that eighty percent of the 800,000 Norwegians who eventually came to America were concentrated in the six-state area from Illinois to the Dakotas. They established themselves in a series of flourishing settlements: along the Fox River southwest of Chicago in the early 1830s, at Muskego and Koshkonong in Wisconsin in 1840, and along the Mississippi and into Iowa and Minnesota in the years that followed. As these settlements grew and prospered, burgeoning with churches and schools and helping to attract more and more Norse immigrants, they served increasingly as halfway houses where newcomers could pause for a whileto learn the English language and American ways of doing things
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and to equip themselves, as often happened, for land-taking farther west. Rlvaags characters Per Hansa and Beret spent some years in Minnesota, for example, before launching out into the great desolation of Dakota Territory. But no amount of acclimatizing could eliminate the terrible cost of pioneering paid by many in homesickness, mental illness, and disease, especially on the prairie frontier, for which few immigrants could be fully prepared. The settlements were also the centers for a lively Norwegian-American intellectual life. From the mid-nineteenth century on, more than eight hundred newspapers sprang up, written in Norwegian and directed to Det norske Amerika, Norwegian America. The greater number had a brief life span, as was true of most foreign-language papers, and even the longestlived had a very limited circulation. Yet they represented the immigrants desire to keep abreast of events in the Old World and the New, and they served more practical purposes as well. In their pages were printed poems, stories, essays, andlater onserialized novels, oftentimes about pioneering and thus useful to those contemplating a move westward. From the 1870s until Rlvaags time over a hundred novels appeared in newspapers and as separate publications, many of them marked by realistic attention to detail regarding life in America, particularly in relation to the pioneering experience. Rlvaag thus had a surprising number of Norwegian-American predecessors who wrote novels in their native language about America, even though only a little of what was written had an impact outside Det norske Amerika. The same lack of impact was generally true among the other Scandinavians who wrote. Few readers of any one national group, as a matter of fact, were even aware of the leading writers in the other groups; and American readers knew virtually nothing of any of them. Among the earliest of the Norwegian-American novelists to write realistically about the immigrant experience in the West were Nicolai Severin Hassel and Tellef Grundysen. In 1874 Hassel published a long narrative set in Minnesota, entitled Alf Brage, and followed it with a sequel about the 1862 Indian uprising in Minnesota, Days of Terror. Grundysens From Both Sides of the Sea (1877), set partly in Norway and partly in America, is notable for the stark realism of its picture of immigrant life in southern Minnesota. Others who contributed novels about the western experience were Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, whose 1879 novel Falconberg (in English) first presented Norwegian immigrant life to American readers, and H. A. Foss, author of the phenomenally successful The Cotter Boy (1889). Fosss best frontier novel is Valborg (1927), an account of a journey from Wisconsin into the Red River
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valley of North Dakota. The Cotter Boy stimulated Peer Olson Strmme to write an artistically superior novel of settlement life in Wisconsin (Halvor: A Story of Pioneer Life). First printed in 1892 as a serial in Strmmes own newspaper Superior Posten, Halvor increased circulation for that paper just as Fosss novel had done for Decorah-Posten. In 1906 Strmme published a sequel, Young Helgeson, a realistic and sometimes comic story of Norwegian pioneer life along the Red River. In the twentieth century, although Waldemar Ager, author of Christ Before Pilate (1910), could be said to have earned the second-highest place artistically among Norwegian-language novelists (behind Rlvaag), the best novels of the pioneering experience were written by Ole A. Buslett, in such psychological works as The Road to the Golden Gate (1916); by Simon Johnson, in From Fjord to Prairie (1914) and The Home of Freedom (1925); and by Johannes B. Wist, in the trilogy Immigrant Scenes (1920), The Home on the Prairie (1921) and Jonasville (1922). The most successful and prolific of the Norwegian-American novelists since Rlvaag has been Martha Ostenso, who emigrated from near Bergen at an early age. Unlike nearly all of her predecessors and unlike Rlvaag himself, she wrote her popular novels of prairie farm life in English. Although rural settings play an important part in most of them, beginning with Wild Geese (1925), and while Norwegian immigrants and their descendants appear occasionally as characters, as in The Mandrake Root (1938), and O River, Remember! (1943), there is little about immigrant pioneering, and the farm background of most of the works is subordinated to plot. Other recent writers of ScandinavianAmerican origin have given more attention to their own people. The most notable farm novelist among them has been Sophus Keith Winther. His trilogy about Danish immigrants in Nebraska (19361938), also written in English, comes much closer to Rlvaag in its depth of understanding and in its conclusion that the cost of immigration to those who came has been greater than its benefits. But Winther, like his contemporary, Herbert Krause, is a novelist of transition in the literary tradition of immigrants writing about the West. His trilogy chronicles the last phases of settlement life and the struggle of the second and third generations to escape their narrowly ethnic backgrounds and become assimilated Americans. The man who was to bring the Scandinavian immigrant experience to world prominence, Ole Edvart Rlvaag, was born on April 22, 1876 on an island off the Helgeland coast of Norway close to the Arctic Circle. The spectacular scenery of that northern landthe mountains, the barren islands, the perpetually changing sea, and the extravagant colors of summercontributed its share to the peculiar blend of the romantic and the
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realistic in his character and in his novels. The second son in a family of eight children, Rlvaag early had literary ambitions even though he felt himself always to be inferior in intellect to his older brother, Johan. As a child Rlvaag wanted to be a writer of songs, and when he was only ten he started a novel, writing out as many as five pages in longhand before destroying them in a quarrel with Johan. While he was still in school on Dnna Island, Rlvaag first contracted America fever by reading a Norwegian translation of James Fenimore Coopers The Last of the Mohicans. The serious decision to emigrate, however, was made later, when he was sixteen, after a particularly severe storm at sea destroyed the fishing fleet he had joined. The shock of watching many of his friends die was a strong motivating factor in Rlvaags decision, and soon after he wrote to his uncle Jakob Jakobsen at Elk Point, South Dakota, asking to borrow the money to go to America. But when the ticket finally arrived three years later, he found himself faced with the most difficult decision of his life: his boss Kristian Andersen offered to make him the skipper of a fine fishing boat, with the chance to own it outright in a year if only he would remain in Norway. Rlvaag was stunned at the prospect and asked time to consider what to do. But despite the fact that he had no reasonable excuse for turning down Andersens proposal, he finally responded that he was leaving for America, his land of promise. In the first entries of his diary he wrote: Im going out into the world, to seek my fortune and happiness. . . . Some day, I believe, I shall reach the goal, far, far beyond the high mountains. The romantic yearnings expressed so frequently in the diary and in the letters that make up The Third Life of Per Smevik (Amerika-Breve, 1912), Rlvaags autobiographical novel, quickly came up against the hard realities of life in what Wallace Stegner has called the Homestead West. Although the pioneering phase in South Dakota had been over for many years, with clapboard houses and barns now replacing the dugouts and soddies of the first-comers, Rlvaag found labor on Sivert Eidems farm terribly strenuous, especially for a newly arrived immigrant like himself. If on occasion his seamans skills gave him a momentary advantage over his fellow laborersas when he rescued a haying operation with a timely splice on a severed ropefor the first months he ran an almost desperate race to keep up with his uncle and the other workers. America may be the promised land, he had Per Smevik say, but it will be some time before I admit it. And if it continues to be as hard on me as it has been up to now, Ill never live long enough to admit it either. By contrast, Rlvaag wrote to his brother, people in Norway dont work; they only putter. The great majority of the
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people there have no understanding of the true value of really economical intensive work. From the very beginning of his life in America Rlvaag was aware of the great gap that existed between life in the new country and that in Norway, and almost immediately he determined to seek ways in which the heritage of Norwegians in America could be preserved, as he believed, to the greater strengthening of the new fatherland. When he arrived in 1896 he was already a mature man, deeply imbued with a sense of his own culture and toughened in body and mind by the hard life of a Nordland fisherman. His love of the ballads and legends of his childhood and his later reading in classic Norwegian literature had already stimulated in him an almost passionate commitment to things Norse. He had come, moreover, during a period when his own people, after two generations in America, had developed a sense of their cultural identity as Norwegian-Americans. At the same time he was acutely aware of both the cost of emigration and the advantages. Among the gains, as Per Smevik recorded them, were prosperity, magnificent farms and beautifully kept houses, and with prosperity the development among the immigrant farmers of a new ability to farm and live efficiently, to make the best use of time and productive power. Added to these were the possibility of personal growth, the result of mingling with people of other cultures, and a new freedomcivil, religious, and economic more abundant than that to be found anywhere else in the world. There had also been losses: the mighty and magnificent nature of Norway, with its power to uplift the soul; the love of beauty and the cleanliness so characteristic of the Norwegians; and the spiritual strength that comes from living with ones own people. After two years on the Eidem farm, Rlvaag enrolled in the secondary department of Augustana College at Canton, South Dakota. His primary purpose was to learn English, but almost immediately he discovered the joys of studying in a warm and supportive atmosphere and decided that it was the wisest move he could have made. How glorious it is to mingle with a hundred students! he wrote in his diary. That alone develops and sharpens ones mind. A young man, surrounded by a hundred companions, will naturally try to be the best one. During the summers for the next three years he travelled about the West as a harvest hand and seller of books and stereopticons. The diary and his first novel record his close observations of the life of the inhabitants of the midlands, rural folk mostly, and most of them Norwegian. Again and again (in The Third Life of Per Smevik) he sets down his disappointment at the lack of ideals among them, at their total commitment to hogs and cattle. And yet Rlvaags lively classmates at Augustana were the teen-age sons and daughters of these same money-grubbing farmers. This was another disparity in America, between the ideals of youth 720
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and the achievement of maturity, one that would also fascinate him and that he would probe in his prairie novels. Among the many friends whom Rlvaag made at Augustana was Jennie Marie Berdahl, the third daughter of a pioneering family from northeast of Sioux Falls and the girl he would later marry. It was Rlvaags good fortune to become acquainted with this family, because over the next several years he would hear from Jennies father and uncles countless details about pioneer life on the sod-house frontier, details of events and persons that would make their way into Giants in the Earth and the second and third novels of the Beret Holm trilogy. It was the adventure of their settlement that especially attracted Rlvaag, for his romantic soul was drawn to the greatness of their achievement. But it would be a quarter of a century before he would turn that material into novel form in the work that would be his masterpiece. In the meantime, following graduation from Augustana in 1901, Rlvaag went to St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota, with thoughts of studying for the ministry. Two other interests, however, were stronger: his intense dedication to preserving Norwegian heritage in America and his love of literature, particularly the works of Bjrnson and Ibsen. During his junior year he began a novel, Nils and Astri, an idyllic tale in which an important issue for a group of Norwegian settlers in North Dakota is how much of their native culture should or could be preserved in the new land. Although he hoped to see the work in print before graduation, it was rejected and remains unpublished. In 19051906 Rlvaag finished his formal college work with a year of study at the University of Christiania (Oslo), and then returned to St. Olaf as a teacher in the academy. The year in Norway was especially rewarding, for he completed his courses with the highest grades attainable and in the process proved to himself that he was now more American than Norwegian. He wrote to Jennie Berdahl that he took deep pride in his high grades because I was an American, and the big fellows in Christiania have not much faith in us. When he landed in New York on his return, the rush of the city overwhelmed him: I liked it, I liked it, he later told Lincoln Colcord. Tears came to my eyes. This was America, my country. I had come home. For the next twenty-five years Rlvaag taught at St. Olaf, the leading college of Norwegian-Lutheran background, continued his crusade for biculturalism, and wrote a series of essays and novels that explored the dilemma of the Norwegian in an American environment. In 1910 he began to write The Third Life of Per Smevik ( Amerika-Breve ) , the first of his published works and the first to have a western locale and theme. Set in eastern South Dakota between 1896 and 1901, the novel appeared under a pen name be721
cause of the highly personal nature of the adventures described. The Third Life of Per Smevik is a disguised account, in epistolary form, of Rlvaags first years in America, of the hard physical labor, of the struggle of the immigrant to master the language and a host of new ways, of the power that greed had over many on the prairie, and of his own fight to rise above the poverty and ignorance of his station in life. When the novel was published in Minneapolis in 1912, it received a number of favorable reviews, with particular praise being given to the accuracy of the picture of farm life on the prairies. About the accuracy at least there seems little doubt. As Rlvaags brother Johan wrote to him, As far as subject matter goesthese are merely the letters you have written home to Father and me. The next two novels continued the theme of the power of the prairie to seduce the immigrant away from his cultural roots into an America fever for material wealth. On Forgotten Paths (1914) is the story of such an immigrant, Chris Larsen, who sells his soul for the rich farmland around Elk Point, where Rlvaag had lived and worked. Although it is a melodramatic exaggeration of a man obsessed with the prairie, the novel is important for its picture of immigrant life in South Dakota and on the plains of Canada, as well as for its foreshadowing of the two main characters of Giants in the Earth: Chris, like Per Hansa in Giants, is the aggressive, even arrogant, land-taker, a metaphor of naked human will; and Magdalene, like Beret, is the troubled pioneer wife, haunted by memories of her homeland and certain that her greatest sin was her immigration. In Pure Gold, first published as To Tullinger ( Two Fools) in 1920, Rlvaag intensified the theme of material wealth as the fatal temptation for the immigrant farmer. A second-generation Norwegian couple, Lars and Lizzie Houglum, wring from the soil every dollar they can and increase their hoard by means of sharp dealings with their neighbors. Although they survive bank failures, confidence men, and the anti-foreigner hysteria of World War I, they succumb at last to their own greed and fear, virtually committing suicide as they try to protect their savings. In an ironic ending that crystallizes Rlvaags disdain for the poor exchange many immigrants had made in trading their cultural heritage for prosperity, the undertaker burns their clothes and their money beltsbecause of his fear of disease, and so the tens of thousands in bank notes that they have cherished and guarded as if they were children turn into slender columns of blue smoke that dissipate in the prairie sky. The last of the novels to be written before Rlvaags prairie masterpiece Giants in the Earth was The Boat of Longing, published in Norwegian in 1921. The main character is the idealist Nils Vaag, who hopes to find goodness and beauty before he has lived long enough in the real world to experi-
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ence its disillusions. Once again Rlvaag is interested in the immigrants attempt to transplant himself to America. But America is not the ideal land for many, especially for the sensitive dreamer who seeks spiritual growth in a country that nourishes a hearty materialism instead. And so Nils is increasingly disillusioned, first in Minneapolis, where men live like beasts, then in a logging camp in northern Minnesota. In the final section, Rlvaag turns from Nilss story to that of his heartbroken father, who travels from Norway to America in a hopeless effort to find his son. Two of the themes that were to concern Rlvaag in the prairie trilogy are central here: the struggle of the immigrant to retain his identity in an alien land and the cost in human suffering both to those who emigrated and to those who remained behind. When, in early 1923, he read that the well-known Norwegian writer Johan Bojer was planning a novel about the settling of America, Rlvaag was spurred to take on the task himself, one that he had been contemplating for some time. He was convinced that he was the man for the job even though he had come long after the West had been settledbecause he had devoted his life to a study of the dilemma of the Norwegian-American and because he himself had worked the land, had wandered over the last frontier in the Dakotas, and had married into a pioneer family whose memory was rich in settlement lore. He immediately requested a leave of absence from St. Olaf College and spent the next twelve months writing at top speed, first at his retreat at Big Island Lake in northern Minnesota, then briefly in Sioux Falls at his fatherin-laws house, even more briefly in London, and finally in Oslo, where Aschehougs Forlag, Norways largest publishing firm, finally accepted the new novel for publication. In itself the acceptance was a remarkable testimony to Rlvaags genius, for he was only the second Norwegian-American writer ever to be published by a Norwegian firm, the first being Waldemar Ager in 1910 with Christ Before Pilate. Rlvaags novel appeared in 1924 and 1925 in two parts, I de Dage: Fortaelling om Norske Nykommere i Amerika (In Those Days: A Story of Norwegian lmmigrants in America ) and I de Dage: Riket Grundlaegges (In Those Days: The Founding of the Kingdom ), and he was immediately hailed by Norwegian critics as a major writer and a master of the language, accomplishments he had scarcely dreamed were possible. In America, however, recognition came more slowly; two years were to pass before an English version was published, translated by Rlvaag and Lincoln Colcord and called Giants in the Earth (1927). The novel was an even greater success in America, for it was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and went into its thirty-third printing by the end of the year. The reviewers were quick to place it at the forefront of the pioneering novels;
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Carl Sandburg, himself the son of Swedish immigrants, ranked it among the six most important American novels, past and present, and it has remained in print ever since, assuming the position of a classic in American fiction and vindicating the judgment of the first enthusiastic reviewers. The story of the novel is that of Per Hansa and his wife Beret and their settlement in the early 1870s on the South Dakota prairie frontier, on the high ground west of the Big Sioux River where Per can establish the kingdom he has been seeking ever since coming to America years before. Here is his chance to experience adventures, to own land, to become wealthy, in short, to act out the career of the Ash Lad of Norse fairy tales who rises from the humblest origins to win the princess and half the kingdom. Per moves from one victorious adventure to another, subduing the virgin prairie, building an ingenious sod house and supplying his familys needs with a cleverness and a dedication that arouse the envious admiration of his neighbors. It seems to them that there is nothing he cannot do. But Pers plan for winning his West is seriously flawed: he will not gain the happiness he seeks without a loving and supportive wife. And while he confidently overcomes one obstacle after another, he ignores the deep psychological distress that is slowly growing in her. The Dakota prairie for her is an alien and demonic force in mortal combat with the settlers, quite the opposite of the beautiful and spiritually nourishing mountains and valleys of her homeland. Although the first indications of Berets impending insanity appear during the lonely hours when Per is away from home, it is his destruction of the Irishmens claim stakes that leads to the first break between husband and wife and a deepening of her emotional suffering. In Berets mind the explanation for his crime is clear: This desolation out here called forth all that was evil in human nature. . . . What would become of children who had to grow up in such an atmosphere? . . . Her soul shuddered. Berets agony increases until she loses her sanity, and only after the first minister comes to the Spring Creek settlement is her emotional health restored. While Beret personifies the immigrant pioneers fear of external and internal dangers, Per personifies courage and stubborn will. He commits himself to denying the power of his Norwegian past and to constructing upon its ashes his own fabulous kingdom. His is that indomitable, conquering mood which seemed to give him the right of way, wherever he went, whatever he did. Beret, on the other hand, clings to the past and to her homeland as the sources of her emotional and spiritual strength. It is this diametrical opposition in outlook, a duality like that in his own character, that Rlvaag places at the center of the meaning of Giants in the Earth. When, toward the end of the novel, the first Norwegian Lutheran minister appears in the settlement, he brings wonderful comfort to Beret, for he
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avers that the immigrant pioneers seated before him are truly founding a kingdom, albeit one that will be a blessing in the future only in so far as they remained steadfast to the truths implanted in them as children by their fathers. The message, however, is a bitter blow to Per Hansa, for he is constructing his kingdom alone, he believes, and to accept Gods supremacy anew is to give up his independence and indeed his very manhood. In the end Per maintains his will intact, but it is a hollow victory. His final mission, to brave a blizzard in order to bring a minister for his dying friend Hans Olsa, is almost a reflex action: Per will again prove to his neighbors that he is the invincible one, but he will also hurl defiance once more at the God of his fathers, who demands faith and obedience. This time he fails. After Per Hansas death, by an ironic turn of fate Beret herself accepts the challenge of the prairie and fulfills her dead husbands dream of establishing the kingdom. But in the process she loses many of the qualities that at times had made her an endearing figure in Giants in the Earth. The two sequels that complete the prairie trilogy, Peder Victorious (1929) and Their Fathers God (1931), tell the contrasting stories of Beret, the traditionalist, and her son Peder, the representative of the Americanized second generation. In Peder Victorious Beret devotes herself to the twin tasks of managing her prosperous farm and of preserving the heritage of Norwegian language, custom, and faith that she sees rapidly disappearing from the community. Her son Peder, however, is caught in the conflicting pulls of loyalty to home and eagerness to become assimilated. In the process, Beret and tradition lose out; Peder discards everything that she treasures and seals the rejection of his Norwegianness by marrying Susie Doheny, his Irish-Catholic sweetheart. In Their Fathers God Beret remains the most strongly delineated character, but she becomes an increasingly unsympathetic one, relentlessly clinging to her old values and unfairly critical of her daughter-in-law Susie. Peder and Susie, by contrast, hardly come to life as real characters, so obviously do they represent each side of the conflict between Norwegian Lutherans and Irish Catholics in Spring Creek. It is Peders grudging admission at the last that he is American and Norwegian which holds the only hope for the future, because his heritage is essential to his happiness. But the admission comes only after his mothers death and the breakup of his marriage. When Rlvaag died in 1931, his concept of a rich and vital America composed of hyphenated immigrant groups in healthy touch with their national heritages seemed to be passing with him. Fewer and fewer of his own people, certainly, were able to read Norwegian, and many of those who did resented the harsh realism in Rlvaags portrayal of the pioneering experi-
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ence and its aftermath. But today, with a widespread new interest in roots among all American groups, it appears that something at least of Rlvaags dream is still alive. More important, as the attention of scholars is increasingly directed to the phenomenon of immigration, it is as clear as it has ever been that the history of the country will not be written until each nationality has completed its own story, and that the history of the American West will not be complete until each group has defined its part in creating that geographical and psychological entity. The literary history of the American West, in turn, can be perfected only when the western work of immigrant authors, written in their native languages, is made accessible in translation. More than half the people who settled the West, after all, were immigrants, and much of the story of their adventuring and suffering on the American frontier still lies hidden in the obscurity of foreign-language novels, stories, newspapers and magazines, and masses of letters and diaries. The question of whether Ole E. Rlvaag is an American author is easier to decide today than it was half a century ago. As Rlvaag himself argued, two chapters in American history stand out above the rest: the Westward Movement and Immigration. He was fully a part of both. Moreover, in large measure the two are inseparable and can be defined only in terms of one another. Lincoln Colcord, Rlvaags translator, opened his Introduction to Giants in the Earth with these words: It is a unique experience, all things considered, to have this novel by O. E. Rlvaag, so palpably European in its art and atmosphere, so distinctly American in everything it deals with . . . ; in Rlvaag we have a European author of our ownone who writes in America, about America, whose only aim is to tell of the contributions of his people to American life; and who yet must be translated for us out of a foreign tongue. Rlvaag himself devoted his life to the effort to teach his Norwegian countrymen that they could be good Americans and good Norwegians, couldin factbe better citizens of the new country by preserving their cultural heritage from the old. That meant for him language, customs, folk-ways, and the rich cultural and religious heritage of the fatherland. And yet, while his masterpiece is the most authentic and most powerful depiction ever written about the Norwegian immigrant experience on the western prairies, it is also one of the most successful portrayals of the sod-house frontier as it was experienced by immigrants of every stripe, and Americans, too. Rlvaag thought of Giants in the Earth as a document humaine, one that should be true for all racial groups, more or less, and endure the acid test of time; and so far he seems to have been right.
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II
It is appropriate that the novelist who has been most often compared to Ole Rlvaag should be Herbert Krause, author of Wind Without Rain (1939) and two other western novels and, like Rlvaag, a spokesman for his own ethnic group, the Germans of western Minnesota. Upon the appearance of Wind Without Rain, no lesser critics than John Gould Fletcher and Lincoln Colcord, among many, praised Krause as a successor to Rlvaag in the realistic treatment of life on the northern prairies; and the comparison was made again by critics and reviewers after the appearance of The Thresher in 1947, when Krauses earlier promise seemed to have been confirmed. The comparison is appropriate, certainly, because of the similarities in subject matter and treatment in their novels, but it takes on an added interest in that Krauses admiration for Rlvaag led him to set out consciously to tell the story of his people as Rlvaag had told the story of the Norwegians. Because of Rlvaag, St. Olaf College (Northfield, Minnesota) was sacred ground to Krause, literarily speaking, although the two men never met. Rlvaag died shortly after Krause arrived on campus, but his influence continued strong during Krauses three years there. In an unpublished student essay on his own Lutheran heritage, Krause asked: Is it not time for the appearance of writers imbued with Lutheran idealism but possessing the artistic eye and the warm sympathy of a Rlvaag to interpret our heritage accurately yet sympathetically? In a few years Krause would begin to answer that question. Unlike Rlvaag, however, who had absorbed the Norwegian classics as a youth and admired them all his life, Krause was very little affected by novelists of his own national group, whether writing in America or in Europe. Brought up in the narrow valleys of western Minnesota (Pockerbrush, as he called the region), he had little contact with the mainstream of GermanAmerican intellectual life. While most German immigrants elsewhere in the Middle West, like those depicted in August Derleths novels about the Wisconsin River Valley settlements, were more prosperous than their Scandinavian neighbors because they brought more capital with them to America, the Germans in Pockerbrush had little material wealth and fewer cultural possessions; they knew virtually nothing of the German-American literary heritage, even of so popular a writer as Charles Sealsfield, whose early nineteenth-century adventure novels of the southern and southwestern frontiers were widely read in America and Europe. Instead, apart from the influence of German folkways in Pockerbrush, the chief literary influ-
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ences on the youthful Krause were the American magazine stories and the novels of the 1920s and, as he insisted in later years, the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare. Herbert Krause was born on May 25, 1905, on a small farm ten miles north-northeast of Fergus Falls. The township of his birth is called Friberg, a name given it in 1874 by the German settlers there. His parents were poor farmers, descendants of some of those settlers who had immigrated from Saxony and Mecklenburg. Herberts childhood in the hills of Friberg was like all childhoods, a mixture of pleasure and pain, of failure and success, but for him the beauty and the hurt of growing up burned more deeply into the heart and mind than was true for most youngsters. He was small for his age, a runt he called himself later, with a good-sized chip on his shoulder. And he stood out as different among the children of the neighborhood because of his intellectual precocity and his love of literature. As early as age ten he determined to become a writer and started keeping a notebook in which he recorded those events, observations, and impressions that most affected him. Although his friends and a few favorite relatives encouraged him in his choice, his parents thought otherwise. Once an eldest son had been confirmed and had finished school, they believed, his duty lay in helping to support his family, in this case five younger brothers and sisters. If there were to be more education for Herbert, they insisted, it would have to be preparation for the ministry, and it could not happen soon. His efforts to teach himself to write fiction and poetry, consequently, were viewed with suspicion. The money he spent in 1922 in enrolling in the Short Story Department of the Hoosier Institute they considered a waste, and they discouraged even the purchase of magazines. Instead, Herberts parents argued, he should consider educating himself for the Missouri Synod Lutheran ministry, but only when he had earned the necessary money himself and only when his younger brother Julius was old enough to be able to manage the farm on his own while the father ran the blacksmith shop. This seems to have been an idea which Herbert shared to some degree, for he was devout as a youth, convinced of the rightness of his churchs doctrinealthough not of some of its excesses. In a letter to Wallace Stegner in 1939 Krause looked back with less than total sympathy at the more rigorous aspects of his own religious training: Ive had a solidly pious up-bringing in a Lutheran homewhich means endless hours of Bible reading and catechism; which means parochial school, more Bible, catechism and doctrine by the yard; which means church on Sunday and fire and brimstone from the pulpit, the worthlessness of man and the glory of heavenIm but a stranger here, Heaven is my home. Ive never had an opportunity to forget that. 728
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In October 1926, despite his desire to attend a German Lutheran school, Krause enrolled in the academy division of Park Region Luther College, a small co-educational Norwegian Lutheran Synod school in Fergus Falls. After three years he went on to Concordia Teachers College (River Forest, Illinois), a school of his own synod, in order to prepare to be a parochial school teacher. But because of the severe hazing he underwent there, he left after only three days and enrolled at Concordia Theological Seminary in Springfield. That experience was no better. As had been the case at River Forest, Krause was placed below where he had hoped, in the latter instance two full years away from beginning the four-year seminary program, and so his frustration continued to mount. In a few days he returned to Fergus Falls and the welcoming arms of President Einar Wulfsberg and the Norwegians at Park Region, there to complete his first two years of college. In the fall of 1931 he enrolled at St. Olaf College, hoping to come under the influence of Ole Rlvaag. Instead he became the protege of Professor George Weida Spohn, and for him wrote out the first sixty-one pages of a story about a domineering father and a rebellious son; it was the outline of what would become Wind Without Rain. Krause carried the pages with him to the University of Iowa in 1934, where he earned the M.A. with a small collection of poems called Pockerbrush as his thesis. That spring, too, he received word that he had been awarded a six-weeks scholarship for the summer of 1935 to the Bread Loaf School of English. The best part of Bread Loaf was meeting such writers as Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Theodore Morrison, Stephen Vincent Bent, and Robert Frost. The latter two in particular impressed Krause, both poets and Pulitzer Prize winners and both warmly supportive of his verses. Krause wrote to his mother: Met Frost, the greatest poet in America today, and he likes Pockerbrush. In his turn, Frost kept track of Krause through their mutual friend Charles Foster, and in early 1937 wrote cheerfully of Krause as one of his great hopes and asked him to bring something to read the next summer. At Iowa in the fall of 1935 Krause began his struggle toward the Ph.D. degree and at the same time tried to come up with an idea for a creative project that could serve as a doctoral dissertation. Late in 1935 there arrived an odd but timely inquiry from Simon and Schuster. One of the editors, Maria Leiper, had seen Krauses short poem Hillside Burial in American Prefaces, had admired it, and wrote: Is there any chance that youre at work on a novel? If so, and your commitments permit, wed like very much to hear from you. Burdened as he was with coursework, Krause delayed any further contact until the following fall when he sent thirty pages of Wind Without Rain to Leiper. With her encouragement and that of Professors Wilbur Schramm, Edwin Ford Piper, and Norman Foerster, Krause con729
tinued to write, submitting the material to other publishers as well, until Bobbs-Merrill accepted the novel in October 1937, on the basis of 150 typed pages. The completed work was published on February 13, 1939. The main threads of the narrative in Wind Without Rain are threefold: the complicated relationship within the Vildvogel family, in which Father Johans brutal mistreatment of his four sons leads to their hatred and rebellion; equally complicated relations between the family and their neighbors in the hills; and the story of Franzs love for two girls and his virtual destruction because of them. Despite the efforts of the gentle mother to stand between her sons and the fathers wrath, two of them run away and one, Franz, is left an emotional cripple by the end of the novel. The fourth, Jeppy, the narrator, is injured in a sledding accident and remains an all-buthelpless observer. It is his voice that speaks the whole of Wind Without Rain, the words of an invalid recalling from a distant hospital their impoverished life in Pockerbrush, a sort of hen-fight to snatch from life a moldy rind of happiness. . . . Critics and reviewers were impressed with the novel on its appearance, particularly with the dark mood sustained throughout and with the beauty of Krauses poetry. Nature is portrayed as pitiless but lovely, they noted: pain begets pain, and goodness and gentleness are crushed more often than nourished. The New York Times reviewer found it impossible to say anything temperate about Wind Without Rain: almost all of its qualities are in excess, she wrote. The world he presents is not so much a real corner of Minnesota as it is some peculiarly joyless and tortured realm of the mind. Wallace Stegner, in The Saturday Review, found its realism to be its strength, in combination with its richly rewarding prose. We have waited a long time, he said, for a writer who could, without compromising in the least the integrity of his observation, or softening his picture of the world, still transmute that real world into beauty. On March 16, 1939, in Chicago, with fellow Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis looking on, Krause was awarded the $1000 Friends of American Writers Award for the years best novel of midwestern life. Following the success of Wind Without Rain, Krause delayed his second novel for eight years, teaching at Augustana College (Sioux Falls, South Dakota) and paying off debts, and enjoying the turn of Fortunes wheel that had flung him up from poverty into literal fame and fortune. As early as October 9, 1933, to be sure, he had recorded in his diary the passing of Bill Welbrock, the last of the picturesque threshers in the Hills, and had noted that threshing was worthy of a story. And in the summer of 1937, when he was laboring on Wind Without Rain, he wrote to Norman Foerster, Director
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of the Iowa School of Letters, that among the projects to follow was a novel about the threshers and another of young and old farmers in conflict. He was to combine the two in The Thresher, begun in earnest in late 1943 and published finally in January 1947. Once again the scene is Pockerbrush and once again the central character is a young man, struggling against a variety of human and natural forces as he attempts to realize his potential. In this novel, however, a single character dominates the action, Johnny Black, a figure like Rlvaags Per Hansa or Chris Larsenwho is driven by a dream of power to exploit his neighbors and to seek revenge for a series of real and imagined injuries. As the owner of first one and finally three threshing machines, he extracts tribute from the wheat farmers of the region as if he were a king and they his subjects. In the process he loses his best friend Snoose in a threshing accident and watches his unchurched wife Lilicemuch like Pers wife Beret go mad with the fear of Gods wrath and retribution. He cannot, however, prevent the sweep of change in the valley: just as his steam-powered rigs drove the old horse-power out of business, so the new gasoline tractors begin to replace steam. Johnnys ending is doubly ironic: he dies attempting to rescue his obsolescent rig from a fire, on the very day that his wife Lilice regains her sanity and looks for his return. Once again Krause received extensive and largely favorable reviews, with many critics acclaiming The Thresher as superior in plot and poetic style to Wind Without Rain and most agreeing that Krause belonged among the important writers of American fiction. Nevertheless, despite book club sales that approached 400,000, Krause was depressed by the fact that by March the novel had fallen from the best seller lists and that only 15,000 copies were sold through regular outlets. It was a discouraging turn of events, a foreshadowing of his eventual decision to give up novel writing. The last of Krauses novels to see print was The Oxcart Trail (1954), a deeply researched adventure tale about old St. Paul and white and Indian relations on the forest frontier in Minnesota. As his most western novel, it includes the familiar motifs: the flight west to escape the law, the roughand-tumble life of a frontier village, the overland trek through hostile country, skirmishes with the Chippewa and Sioux, and even the love affair between the frontiersman and the school teacher. The central character of the novel, Shawnie Dark, is less fully realized than either Franz Vildvogel or Johnny Black. Although some of the same themes are therea haunting fear that pursues him, love for a seemingly unattainable woman, and the hard and often brutal life on the frontierthe story ends happily after many arduous adventures, with the hero and heroine contemplating their future
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as settlers in the Ottertail River country, the country that later would be called Pockerbrush. Many critics were hard on The Oxcart Trail for its leisurely narrative, its banal love story and the occasional lapses in continuity. Their objections and the novels relatively poor sales were irritating, to be sure, because of the exhaustive research that Krause had done in order to create a fictional treatment both fresh and authentic of a time and a place that were of great significance in the winning of the West. Even more galling was the knowledge that during the writing the editorial staff at Bobbs-Merrill had encouraged Krause to curb over-gloomy introspection and to make this new book a warm novel full of laughter and triumph. They had called it his best work while he was writing it, and had hurried him into publication to boot. Although it sold better than most novels that season, its total sales were fewer than 10,000, well below Wind Without Rain and far below The Thresher. Krause considered it a failure. The last twenty-two years of his life until his death in 1976 Krause devoted largely to teaching and to a new love that he had acquired in the late 1940s, ornithology. Most of his later research and writing was done in that field, and while he still nourished the hope of producing more novels, he eventually scrapped the plans for two Pockerbrush tales, one a psychological study to be called Emma-August and the other the story of a war veteran who tries to bring his Japanese bride back to the narrow confines of the hills above Fergus Falls. Krauses last full-length works were Crazy Horse (1960), an elaborate outdoor pageant (unpublished), and Prelude to Glory, an edition of the newspaper accounts of Lt. Col. George Custers invasion in 1874 of the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota. While competent and important in their own ways, neither approached the significance of his first two novels; these last books lay too far in the distance from those powerful experiences that had shaped Krauses youth, the mud and dust and sweat of German-American immigrant life in the Pockerbrush hills.
A RTHUR R. HUSEBOE , Augustana
College
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OLE E. RLVAAG
Published Books The Boat of Longing. Translated by Nora Solum. 1933; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974. English version of Laengselens Baat (1921). Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie. Translated by Lincoln Colcord and Rlvaag. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927. Translated from I de Dage: Fortaelling om Norske Nykommere i Amerika (1924) and I de Dage: Riket Grandlaegges (1925). [Paal Mrck, pseud.] Paa Glemte Veie ( On Forgotten Paths). Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1914. Peder Victorious. Translated by Nora Solum and Rlvaag. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929. English version of Peder Seier (1928). Pure Gold. Translated by Sivert Erdahl and Rlvaag. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930. English version of To Tullinger ( Two Fools, 1920). Their Fathers God. Translated by Trygve M. Ager. 1931; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. English version of Den Signede Dag (The Blessed Day, 1931). [Paal Mrck, pseud.] The Third Life of Per Smevik. Translated by Ella Valborg Tweet and Solveig Zempel. Minneapolis: Dillon Press, 1971. Translated from AmerikaBreve ( Letters from America, 1912) by his daughter and granddaughter. Valuable introduction. Critical and Biographical Studies Andersen, Arlow W. The Norwegian-Americans. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Places immigration in the perspective of general American history; includes a chapter on literature. Blegen, Theodore. Norwegian Migration to America: The American Transition. Northfield, Minn.: The Norwegian-American Historical Association, Vol. 2, 1940. Tracks the immigrant from Norway to America, including the pioneering experience and social, economic and cultural transitions. Includes a chapter on Norwegian-American fiction. Colcord, Lincoln. Rlvaag the Fisherman Shook His Fist at Fate. American Magazine 105 (March 1928): 3637, 188192. Includes personal reminiscences by Rlvaag. Commager, Henry Steele, ed. Immigration and American History: Essays in Honor of Theodore C. Blegen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961. Includes an essay by John T. Flanagan on the immigrant in western fiction. Flanagan, John T. The Middle Western Farm Novel. Minnesota History 23 (June 1942): 113125. On the contributions of Garland, Cather, Rlvaag and others.
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A Literary History of the American West Gvaale, Gudrun Hovde. Introduction to Peder Victorious. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. The Introduction is translated by Einar Haugen from Gvaales Nordmann og Amerikanar. . O. E. Rlvaag: Nordmann og Amerikanar. Oslo: Aschehoug og Co., 1962. In Norwegian. Haugen, Einar. Norway in America: The Hidden Heritage. In Makers of an American Immigrant Legacy, edited by Odd S. Lovoll, pp. 1528. Northfield, Minn. : The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1980. Includes an account of Norwegian-American novelists. . O. E. Rlvaag: Norwegian American. Norwegian-American Studies and Records 7 (1933): 5373. Informed essay by a close friend and former student. . Ole Edvart Rlvaag. Twayne United States Authors Series, no. 455. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Based on personal knowledge, a close reading of all of Rlvaags writings and on much new material; emphasizes Rlvaag as ethnic leader and as literary interpreter for the immigrant. . Rlvaag and South Dakota: Materials for Literary History. In Siouxland Heritage, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe, pp. 2331. Sioux Falls: The Nordland Heritage Foundation, 1982. Rlvaags life in South Dakota supplied rich details for his novels. Jorgenson, Theodore, and Nora Solum. Ole Edvart Rlvaag: A Biography. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939. The standard life, more detailed than Reigstad, with much primary material. Meldrum, Barbara. Fate, Sex, and Naturalism in RlvaagsTrilogy. In Ole Rlvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader, edited by Gerald Thorson, pp. 4149. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1975. A groundbreaking essay on Rlvaag as a naturalist, comparable to Hemingway and Faulkner. Meyer, Roy W. The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Giants is the most satisfying treatment of the pioneering theme that has thus far appeared in the literature of the Middle West. Mossberg, Christer Lennart. Scandinavian Immigrant Literature. Western Writers Series, no. 47. Boise: Boise State University, 1981. Gives special attention to novelists Simon Johnson, Ole Rlvaag, and Sophus Winther. . Shucking the Pastoral Ideal: Sources and Meaning of Realism in Scandinavian Immigrant Fiction About the Pioneer Farm Experience. In Where the West Begins, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer, pp. 4250. Sioux Falls, S.D.: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978. Immigrant writing, much overlooked in studies of western literature, avoids sentimentality and is essentially realistic. Norwegian American Studies. Northfield, Minn. Begun in 1926 with Volume I and published by the Norwegian-American Historical Association, these collections are an invaluable source of articles about Rlvaag and other Norwegian-
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American authors, Norwegian immigration, the Westward Movement, and other topics related to Norwegians in America. Volume 28 was issued in 1979. Parrington, Vernon Louis. Editors Introduction. In Giants in the Earth. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929. Reprinted in Main Currents in American Thought. Three vols. in one. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. Vol. 3, pp. 387396. The essay helped to place Rlvaag in the mainstream of American literature. Paulson, Kristoffer F. Berdahl Family History and Rlvaags Immigrant Trilogy. In Norwegian American Studies 27 (1977): 5576. Provides specific evidence of Rlvaags reliance on his wifes family for accurate information about pioneering. Reigstad, Paul. Rlvaag: His Life and Art. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. The most recent critical biography. Includes a bibliography. Rlvaag, Ole E. Contemporary Writers and Their Works: Giants in the Earth The Editor 17 (August 6, 1927): 8185. Giants is about the glory as well as the cost of settling the frontier. Ruud, Curtis. Rlvaag, the Ash Lad, and New and Old World Values. In Big Sioux Pioneers, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe, pp. 6378. Sioux Falls: The Nordland Heritage Foundation, 1980. Per Hansas sacrifice for Hans Olsa lifts him above the mere materialism of the Ash Lads quest. Semmingsen, Ingrid. Norway to America. Translated by Einar Haugen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. Definitive study of emigration from the Norwegian perspective. Simonson, Harold P. The Closed Frontier: Studies in American Literary Tragedy. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Essays on Twain, Rlvaag, and Nathanael West as illustrating the tragedy implicit in the end of the pioneering era in America. Skrdal, Dorothy Burton. The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Through Literary Sources. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. Uses fiction and poetry by immigrant authors to create a social history of ScandinavianAmericans from 1870 to the mid twentieth century. Bibliographies Reigstad, Paul. Bibliography in Rlvaag: His Life and Art. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Checklist: Articles and Books on Rlvaag. In Ole Rlvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader, edited by Gerald Thorson. Northfield, Minn.: St. Olaf College Press, 1975. Unpublished Sources The Rlvaag Collection. Letters, diary, autobiography, manuscripts, Robert Bjerkes bibliography, etc. in 50 document cases in the Archives of The NorwegianAmerican Historical Society. St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.
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HERBERT KRAUSE
Published Books Neighbor Boy. Iowa City, Iowa: Midland House, 1939. Thirty-nine lyric and narrative poems with Pockerbrush themes. The Oxcart Trail. 1954; rpt. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brevet Press, 1976. Prelude to Glory: A newspaper accounting of Custers 1874 expedition to the Black Hills. Edited with Gary Olson. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brevet Press, 1974. The Thresher. 1946; rpt. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brevet Press, 1976. Wind Without Rain. 1939; rpt. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brevet Press, 1976. Krauses work has appeared in many periodicals and collections: poetry, short stories, lectures and essays (most of these latter on ornithological subjects), and book reviews. Critical and Biographical Studies Baldwin, Carl R. What Custer Was After. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 25, 1974, p. 4B. Calls Prelude to Glory a masterpiece of sorts because of its use of original newspaper accounts. Borgenicht, Miriam. Wind Without Rain. The New Republic 98 (March 8, 1939): 144. An impressive effort, despite its sustained grimness. Chaikin, Nancy Groberg . A Mans Drive for Power. Saturday Review of Literature 30 (February 8, 1947): 12. Praise for the poetic language of The Thresher. Connole, John M. The Oxcart Trail. America, National Catholic Weekly Review 91 (June 5, 1954): 282. Characters and their frontier idiom are well handled, although the story occasionally drags. Fadiman, Clifton. Books. The New Yorker 14 (February 11, 1939): 7273. The two themes of Wind Without Rain are frustrated talent and the dissolution of a family. Flanagan, John T. Frontier in Fiction. Minnesota History 34 (Autumn 1954): 123124. Less successful than the first two novels, The Oxcart Trail is harmed by too much concern for accuracy and authenticity. . Thirty Years of American Fiction. Minnesota History 31 (September 1950): 129147. Krauses first two novels are rich in detail and vigorous in narrative. Frederick, John T. When a Poet Writes About a Farmer. Chicago Sun Book Week, January 19, 1947, p. 4. Praises The Thresher for its spontaneous poetry, lavish use of details and lavish characters. Gray, James. Liquor, Love and Brawling on the Long Road Westward. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, April 4, 1954, p. 5. A new design for the historical novel, The Oxcart Trail is based on painstaking research. Havighurst, Walter. Driving Force on the Prairie. New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review 23 (January 12, 1947): 4. The Thresher is a solidly constructed and skillfully unified novel.
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Janssen, Judith M. Black Frost in Summer: Central Themes in the Novels of Herbert Krause. South Dakota Review 5 (Spring 1967): 5565. Armed with a sound knowledge of his region and period, Krause explores the tragic effects of hardship and cruelty on sensitive and talented youths. [Klausler, Alfred]. Dostoevsky in Minnesota. The Cresset 2 (March 1939): 4749. The picture of the hell-breathing Lutheran pastor, Sunnenbaum, is almost a caricature. Krause, Herbert. Herbert Krause. In Minnesota Writers, edited by Carmen Nelson Richards, pp. 1927. Minneapolis: T. S. Denison, 1961. A valuable autobiographical sketch. Meyer, Roy W. The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Krause and Paul Corey represent the highest development of the farm novel. Nute, Grace Lee. A History of Minnesota Books and Authors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958. Krauses farm novels combine realism with folklore and poetic imagery. Paulson, Kristoffer, F. Ole Rlvaag, Herbert Krause, and the Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. In Where the West Begins, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer, pp. 2433. Sioux Falls: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978. Both Giants and The Thresher demonstrate Turners warning against excessive individual liberty. Steensma, Robert C. Our Comings and Our Goings: Herbert Krauses Wind Without Rain. In Where the West Begins, pp. 1322. Music, dances, and Masons Resort symbolically trace the spiritual destruction of Franz Vildvogel. Stegner, Wallace. A Strong Novel of the Minnesota Land. Saturday Review of Literature 19 (February 11, 1939): 5. Krause combines rich poetic expression with tragic realism. Wallace, Margaret. Wind Without Rain and Other Recent Works of Fiction. New York Times Book Review, February 12, 1939, p. 6. Krause is comparable to Thomas Wolfe as realist and poet. Bibliography Dunmire, Raymond V., compiler. The Herbert Krause Collection Bibliography. Vol. 1 (1975), Vol. 2 (1976). Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Augustana College Mikkelsen Library and Learning Resources Center. Theses Baylor, Leslie M. The Functions of Nature in Herbert Krauses Pockerbrush Novels. M.A. Thesis, Idaho State University, 1965. Krause depicts nature as an orderly and ongoing process; he uses metaphors, similes, and description as clarification rather than ornamentation. Christensen, Vi Ann Sattre. The German Immigrant as Portrayed in the Novels of Herbert Krause. M.A. Thesis, Mankato State College, 1968. As a second-
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A Literary History of the American West generation German, Krause recalls much that is authentic in German language and lore. Solovskoy, Valborg Berge. The World of Nature in the Writings of Herbert Krause. M.S. Thesis, Mankato State College, 1973. Nature plays a highly significant role in Krauses novels, both as an antagonist to man and as a source of beauty and hope; his later scientific writing is almost exclusively ornithological. Includes two long interviews. Upton, Barbara Roberts. A Study of the Works of Herbert Krause with Special Emphasis on The Thresher. M.S. Thesis, Mankato State College, 1963. Based on a number of interviews with Krause. Evaluates his theology. Unpublished Sources The Herbert Krause Papers. Letters, manuscripts, galley proofs, photos, notes, class lectures, and the Krause Collection of Western Americana are in the Center for Western Studies, Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
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John G. Neihardt
the prairie-born Nebraska poet, found his direction early and never abandoned it. The rugged spirit of the West invigorates all his work, for Neihardt believed in the ultimate validity of the western myth, the possibility in a land of vast resources of achieving a wiser society willing to scrap old corruptions and start fresh. He wrote about the West not because regional literature was in fashion, but because he saw in the western fur trappers, Indians, soldiers, and settlers the essence of the human experience. He believed firmly that in the westering movement America had found its identity through open-hearted courage and faith in the future. Forgoing the advantages of moving to a literary center in the East for the contact with publishers and other writers that might have furthered his career, he chose to live in the West, and all of his work bears its imprint and authentic flavor. Born in Illinois (1881) of an Irish mother and a German father, both of pioneer stock, Neihardt lived his early childhood years on his grandfathers farm in Kansas, where he heard the reminiscences of old frontiersmen, settlers, and Indian fighters, and began to stock his mind with oral western lore. His mother, Alice Culler Neihardt, a primary influence in his life, engendered in him a fierce independence of spirit, respect for hard work, and a deep appreciation of beauty. Although in early years the family lived on the edge of poverty and never enjoyed great wealth, her courage and resourcefulness kept Neihardt and his two sisters from any sense of deprivation and focused their energies on attacking problems with vigor and confidence. Neihardts father, Nicholas Neihardt, left the family when Neihardt was ten, but he had profoundly affected his sons life by taking him to the top of a bluff in Kansas City to look down on the Missouri River in flood. Neihardt never forgot the exhilaration of that moment; it marked the beginning of his fascination with the river and the men who traveled it. The exploits of the trappers and explorers inspired his masterwork, the epic Cycle of the West. Early in life Neihardt made the decision to live in the West, and whenever possiblein the country, close to the real things. He never liked cities; during the years when he was obliged to live in Minneapolis or St. Louis or Chicago, he grew restive and increasingly depressed; he was happiest when he could see wide horizons, grow fresh vegetables, and have room for dogs and horses. He believed also that a writer should not depend on writing as a means of support; he should earn his living by the kind of
OHN G. NEIHARDT ,
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work most people do, or he had nothing of value to say to the ordinary man. He himself had a solid background of hoeing and weeding fields, teaching country school, carrying hod, chopping wood, and digging cellars. His small staturehe was exactly five feet talldistressed him, but he compensated by developing physical strength through a severe regimen of tramping country roads in all weathers, swimming, wrestling, and camping in the wild. In the early 1890s Neihardts mother moved the family to Wayne, Nebraska, where Neihardt finished elementary school and attended the newly founded college in the town. It offered a limited curriculum, but he was able to study Latin, and his enthusiasm for Homer and Virgil kindled his ardor for epics. He devoured the Volsung sagas, Lady Gregorys tales of Finn and Cuchulain, the Niebelungen Ring stories, and Tennysons Arthurian cycle. The beginnings of his literary philosophy were established by his reading of Taine. His real education, however, came from his voluminous independent reading and his passion for accuracy of knowledge. In 1900 Neihardt and his mother settled in Bancroft, Nebraska, where Neihardt edited the local newspaper for several years and as assistant to an agent on the Indian reservation nearby came to know the Omahas. He developed a rapport with them that strongly influenced his writings; his sympathies were engaged by their poverty and helplessness against outrageous defrauding. In 1908, financed by the Outing Publishing Company, he traveled down the Missouri River from its headwaters in Montana to Sioux City in a hand-crafted boat, for a series of articles later published in Putnam s Magazine and in book form as The River and I. In the same year he married Mona Martinsen, a sculptor, student of Rodin, after a romantic courtship by letter; they met for the first time when Mona, arriving from New York, stepped from the train in Omaha. Their happy marriage produced four children: Enid, Sigurd, Hilda, and Alice. From 1912 to 1920 Neihardt served as literary editor of the Minneapolis Journal, but after several months in the city, he persuaded the editor to let him live in Bancroft and mail in his copy. From 1926 to 1938 he edited a literary page for the St. Louis PostDispatch, with a hiatus in 19321935, when he concentrated on the epic and the lecture-recital tours that augmented his income. In 1943 he shifted to Chicago and held several jobs before affiliating with the Office of Indian Affairs, where he served for two years ( 19441946) as Director of the Division of Information, and remained on call for two years for special duties. Several field trips to Indian reservations in the course of duty gave him materials for later works. From 1948 until his death in 1973 he lived in Columbia, Missouri, gave lecture-recitals, for several years taught courses at the University of Missouri, appeared on television and recorded programs in both Missouri and Nebraska. He was working on the second volume of his autobiography when he died. 740
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Neihardts writing follows discernible patterns. He seemed to concentrate his major energies on one primary genre at a time and write concurrently in a secondary genre that helped to support him financially. The primary genre was always poetry, the secondary, prose, for poetry was always his major concern. Each genre served a purpose in his master plan and wove itself into his central theme. In the first period, 18921912, he wrote a long mystic poem and three volumes of lyrics, also two verse plays in the primary genre; in the secondary he composed short stories, two novels, and the account of his Missouri River trip. Neihardts dedication to poetry began with a mystic experience during an illness when he was eleven; he awoke from a fever dream of flying, impelled by a mysterious force, with a sense of obligation to write poetry that never entirely left him. He crystallized the experience in the lyric The Ghostly Brother as a spirit force like Socrates daemon, prodding him to write. Later he called this force the Otherness or It, and set his work habits to make himself receptive to it. He saw some similarity to the induced vision dreams of young Sioux boys who at the age of ten performed the rite of fasting alone on a hill, awaiting a vision to guide their lives. After the dream Neihardt accepted the obligation to serve his muse creditably. The Otherness worked only for poetry, not for prose. The first long poem, The Divine Enchantment (1900), an ambitious work based on Hindu mysticism, described the vision of Devanaguy, the mother of Krishna, in an elaborated myth. Neihardts interest in Hindu scriptures had been stimulated by discussions with a sculptor in whose monument shop he worked, and was developed further by his reading of the Upanishads and the Vedantas, Max Mllers Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy, and Jacolliots The Bible in India. Despite obvious imperfections, the poem is a respectable first entry in Neihardts canon; it develops a cosmology and a creation myth, and forecasts many of the poets later themes. The verse is not so deplorable as might have been expected from a seventeenyear-old. Only a few copies survived Neihardts determined destruction of work he considered outgrown; he burned all the copies he could locate. The lyric poems, all composed in this period except for a few written for special occasions, were gathered in three collections: A Bundle of Myrrh (1907), Man-Song (1909), and The Stranger at the Gate (1912). A later collection, The Quest (1928), included a few lyrics not in the former books but written before 1912. Neihardts poetry, as he himself said, was outside of the time-mood; in fact, he was ahead of his time. Under the temporary spell of Whitman he had written free verse well before the movement struck around 1912, and his unrhymed love poems, with their irregular rhythm and their mention of fevered finger-tips and strange mad fever in the veins, were quite daring for their day, although they seem sedate against the explicit 741
phrases of current literature. They drew lavish praise from critics for sounding fresh notes counter to the mannered Edwardian poetry of the time. The love lyrics in the first volume follow an original pattern in tracing the poets search for enduring love through adolescent groping, sexual delights, and the disillusionment of a confining relationship to the discovery of a spiritinfused love. In the second volume the lyrics dwell on the delights of love and the fulfillment of marriage; in the third the pattern comes full circle with the birth of a child. The lyrics are strongly masculine; a prominent theme is the sacrifice of the maiden on the altar of love. Themes of other lyrics reveal Neihardts mystic sense of the unity of man, nature, and spirit, his optimistic reaching for faith, and his delight in the ineffable privilege of being. The lyrics now and then have hints of Baudelaire, and the nature imagery is frequently Virgilian. Poems that touch on social issues such as poverty, injustice, and the undue power of the mighty, as in Cry of the People and The Red Wind Comes are interesting, but not among Neihardts best; they were composed for possible use in a poetic drama about the French Revolution. Some few lyrics convey Neihardts loneliness and alienation from his neighbors; seeking his identity in a world often unsympathetic tinges a number of poems with self-pity or sentimentality, but they reflect moods of a moment, not a settled gloom. Most of them rally, as in A Prayer for Pain and Battle Cry, where the poet summons his courage in the final lines. Several lyrics voicing his need to break out of a suffocating time clearly forecast the epic, particularly Across the Sea of Centuries, where he laments his imprisonment in the effete present and yearns for the smoke-tang of vanished camp-fires and the feasts of bigger men. In the lyrics Neihardt worked out his prosody and established his techniques for sound and rhythm to augment the sense. He derived his theories from F. W. H. Myerss discussion of vowel and consonant sound patterns in combination with rhythm, pause, and stress to control the tone and reinforce the moods of poetry. He developed what he called a sound mosaic that enabled him to suggest sharp, rapid action with combinations of highpitched vowels and unvoiced consonants, plosives, and adjusted pauses. He could also blend low-pitched vowels with heavy, voiced plosives to sober or dignify the mood, and he had learned from Poe and Swinburne the hazards of overdoing sound effects. For some of the lyrics he invented a braid rhythm achieved by repeated rhyme and pauses adjusted from stanza to stanza; in one lyric he used this rhythm with repeated consonants to create an effect of humming. In another he invented a circular rhythm in dactyls, doubling back with internal rhyme to suggest a sphere and thus emphasize the interrelation of all nature. In some of the early poems he experimented with a chant form learned from the Omahas. 742
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In the secondary prose genres of this early period Neihardt wrote more than thirty short stories and two novels. The short stories allowed him to test narrative techniques, and like the lyrics they carry seeds of his future work. He learned the value of using a narrator to comment on the action, emphasize points, or answer questions raised by a listener and thus inform the reader without tedium. He experimented to good effect with conversation to suggest events and meanings without having to spell them out, and he became adept with frame structures. Despite their having clear marks of the amateur, the stories make a valid contribution to literature of the West; they also anticipate Neihardts later themes. The Indian Messiah figure that Neihardt used in his epic appears in several stories, as does the FinkCarpenter feud, and the prairie fire that makes a ghastly setting for the end of The Song of Three Friends. All the stories but one are set in the West and concern fur trappers, prospectors, soldiers, or Omaha Indians. The Omaha stories create realistic, often charming scenes of Indian lifethe daily work of squaws cooking, softening hides for garments, making their braves comfortable; and the activities of the menhunting buffalo, riding to battle, telling stories around the fire, deciding in council when to hunt or move the village or take the war path. The affectionate tone of the stories, often gently ironic, reveals Neihardts sympathy for the Longhairs in times of vanished glory. Some of the best stories, for example The Last Thunder Song and The Heart of a Woman, deal with the impossibility of real understanding between two different cultures. The trapper and miner stories present a rough picture of brutal wilderness life in a heavily masculine atmosphere; women appear briefly, usually as motives for lust, greed, or revenge. Themes in the Indian stories include power struggles between rival medicine men, heroism in battle, the bumpy course of true love, and recurrently the problems of the misfit in a society that demanded physical prowess. The trapper-prospector stories recreate the tough life of mountain men out to make a fortune, no holds barred. Dominant themes include the savagery of the fur-trade competition, betrayal and revenge, the endless, agonizing struggle against the elements and other enemies, the folly and destructiveness of greed. A few of the stories treat of psychic or mystic experiences that always interested Neihardt. The best story is The Alien, about the impossibility of transferring the values of civilization to the savage world; it has been compared to Balzacs A Passion in the Desert. The two novels written at this time, The Dawn Builder and Lifes Lure, are not among Neihardts outstanding works, possibly because each is a compilation of two or more of the short stories, and the combinations did not prove entirely satisfactory. The best prose of these years is The River and I, the joyous account of his journey down the Missouri River to see the country his heroes had traveled. Like Thoreaus account of his river jour743
ney, Neihardts records his meditations on scenery, history, and literature, but in a more rollicking spirit than Thoreaus. The later epic is clearly forecast in this work; the stories of Carpenter and Fink, Hugh Glass, and Jed Smith are all sketched out and their epic quality exuberantly noted. But to Neihardt the important genre of this period was the lyric poetry; short stories and other prose were secondary, if more remunerative. At the age of thirty Neihardt ceased to write lyrics; he considered them too subjective for a mature poets attention. At thirty he should begin to widen his horizons and view the world more objectively. Casting about for a new genre, Neihardt wrote two verse plays, 800 Rubles, based on a Russian folk tale, and The Death of Agrippina, derived from Suetonius and Cassius Dio. Both plays were good poetry but not great theatre, and he recognized that drama was not his metier. Between 1912 and 1941, his period of major accomplishment, he wrote his most massive work in the primary genre, A Cycle of the West, and his most widely known prose work, Black Elk Speaks, the story of a Sioux holy man. In the same period he wrote a prose biography, The Splendid Wayfaring, about the trapper Jedediah Smith, two books of literary theory, and a steady output of critical articles for his literary pages, interspersed with book reviews. But his main concern was the epic Cycle. He considered it his masterwork, and wrote it with an almost mystic sense of mission, as he said, to remind men that they were finer than they thought themselves. He believed that all people carry the potential for heroism, and he saw in the adventurous fur traders who explored and opened the West the courage and capacity for accomplishment worthy of Homeric and Virgilian heroes. The West itself, with its spacious grandeur, he considered a symbol of the unending promise for man to gather his powers and make a better world. When he began the Cycle, epic had long been considered an extinct genre by literary pundits, but a poet who had written frankly sensuous free verse in a period of pink and gray poetry was not likely to be deflected from an epic purpose. In preparation for the writing Neihardt had done exhausting research in western documents, biographies, and histories. He hunted out records and diariesJed Smiths, for example, and the Harrison Rogers journals, among others. He worked in state historical society collections in several western states and in university libraries. He had visited most of the locales of the epic and studied both the contour of the settings and the details of vegetation. He interviewed Indians, old Indian fighters and survivors of the Indian wars, including General Godfrey and Major Lemly, who had witnessed the death of Crazy Horse. Among his major sources were H.M. Chittendens The American Fur Trade of the Far West, Harrison Clifford Dales The Ashley-Henry Explorations, Jacob P. Dunns Massacres of the
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Mountains: History of the Indian Wars of the Far West: 18151875, and The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, edited by T. D. Bonner. He also read accounts of western travels by Rufus Sage and George Frederick Ruxton, and later historians Edward Hyde, Grace Hebard, and others. The writing of the Cycle occupied Neihardt for twenty-eight years, with interruptions for periods of literary editing and lecturing, or for prose works importuned by his publisher. He dated his manuscripts, noting interruptions, sometimes with astringent comments. He worked only in the morning, and began by rereading finished lines in deep concentration to work himself into the mood, then waited for his Otherness to operate. Three lines were a respectable days work, but sometimes if the power persisted he could produce eight or ten; his record was seventeen. For his meter he developed a basic iambic pentameter line varied with dactyls, anapests, and spondees, and manipulated the caesura to avoid monotony, speed or retard the pace, and build special effects in the rhythm. He called this meter rhymed blank verse and protested its being labeled heroic couplet, for although he used two-line rhyme, the meaning ran over the ends of lines, sometimes from one section to another. He chose pentameter instead of the standard epic hexameter because pentameter was sonorous and dignified enough for epic and fitted more gracefully into English cadences. Neihardts epic theory derived from Jane Harrison and H. M. Chadwick, who defined an epic period as a time when a civilization, cut from its roots, had to strike out anew. Neihardts democratic heroes, although unorthodox by classical standards, suited his purpose to demonstrate that all people carry the seeds of heroism and can create a finer world by their own vision and labor, without gods and goddesses to interfere. The Cycle, set entirely in the West and based on real men and events, followed a timespace progression from the departure of the first hundred Ashley-Henry men up the Missouri River in 1822 to engage in the fur trade, through the exploration of the country to and beyond Salt Lake, over the South Pass to the Pacific, and through the Indian wars fought to advance the white mans control of the West. The Cycle ends with the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, which marked the end of organized Indian resistance. Neihardt also was building a value scale beginning at the lowest level of physical courage in The Song of Three Friends, the opening Song about the murder of Bill Carpenter by Mike Fink over an Indian girl. The Song develops the theme that physical courage, however indispensable, cannot solve problems that demand moral courage. The Song of Hugh Glass, the second in the cycle, recounts Glasss heroic hundred-mile crawl across desert country after being wounded by a grizzly and deserted by two companions detailed to await his death and bury him. Hughs overcoming of his rage at
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betrayal raises the value level to magnanimity as he discovers the miracle of being loved at all and the privilege of loving to the end that enables him to forgive. The Song of Jed Smith lifts the level to the power of spirit operating in the individual life. Neihardt used a frame structure in The Song of Jed Smith to recreate the character and exploits of Smith through the reminiscences of three of his former comrades as they sit around a campfire some years after Jeds death. Two of the characters are based on real men; the third, the young Squire, is fictitious, to add a point of view. The story that emerges follows Smiths actual path across unknown country, the discovery of Salt Lake, the crossing of South Pass, the Indian attacks en routethe memorable events that Neihardt had meticulously researched. The theme grows through the portrayal of Bible-reading Jed, Neihardts Cosmic Man, secure in the universe because he recognizes the integration of man, nature, and spirit. Through him and his faith the others have moments of the same sense of mystic affinity, and they see Jed bring the power of faith to the problems of the fur traders gruelling life. The three men suggest the impact of such a man on his fellows. In a sense, he is like the artist, whose obligation is to illuminate major truths. The last two Songs, set in the period between the Civil War and the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, concern the final struggle of Indians and white men for the western country and the inevitable defeat of the Indians. The Song of the Indian Wars paints colorful pictures of the major battles, Indians in council over policy, white men and Indians suffering or exulting over the turn of events, the color, sound, and fury of war. The reader is led to empathize with men on both sides, fighting heroically for the same endsglory, security, and ones own space. The essential value Neihardt stresses is self-sacrifice for the good of allthe Virgilian social ideal. In this work it is given full respect, tinged with rueful irony that such great sacrifices on both sides should seem necessary. The vigor of the conflict inherent in western history flashes and booms in the action, with undertone stress on the labor and suffering inescapable on frontiers. The Song of the Messiah, final section of the Cycle, was originally intended to be the last section of the Wars, but as Neihardt researched the story, he saw that it was important enough for a separate Song. It concerns the Messiah movement of the 1880s, when the Piute Wovoka was believed by the Indians to be Christ, rejected by white men and returning to restore the Indians to their former state. Again Neihardt used three voices to give credibility to the Wovoka figure. The three men are based on actual Indians sent by the Sioux to investigate the rumors of a Savior for Indians. The reports of all three agreed about the vision of Wovoka, who described a world where all living things were illuminated from within and a many-
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colored herb healed and united all creatures. Deceived by their need for some kind of hope, the Indians allowed the vision to lead them into war, and they met their final defeat at Wounded Knee. Neihardt described this epic as picturing the whole human race on the cross; its theme is the Christian ethic at the highest value level of universal love and understanding. He dramatized it in the last scene when Sitanka (Big Foot) struggles to say Brother to the white soldier clubbing him with a gun butt. Neihardt intended his epic to revive a hopeful vigor in Americans by reminding them of who they were and what limitless possibilities lay open to descendants of men and women who had set up a new kind of freedom across a nation and civilized a wilderness by their own hard labor. As a preenvironmentalist he had harsh words for the stupidity of white men who did not try to learn from Indians how to develop the land without ruining it. His descriptions do justice to the spectacular sceneryits shining mountains, lordly forests, life-giving streams, and tumbling rivers. Much of the metaphor infuses nature with mystic forces in the procreative cycles of nature, the continuous miracle, and the wonder of moments of expanded awareness like his own Otherness. He recreates the outdoors not just as backdrop but as participant in the action for a nation of city dwellers who need to rethink their place in nature. Although the Cycle absorbed Neihardts most devoted attention, he interrupted it for secondary prose genrestwo biographies, two books of literary criticism, and an impressive body of critical writing in his literary pages. The first biography, The Splendid Wayfaring (1920), a life of Jed Smith, he wrote for the school trade at his publishers request; he needed money, and realized also that the research would enhance his preparation for the Song about Smith, who was at the time an undiscovered hero. Reviewers acclaimed the book as a prose epic, and Dale Morgan, author of the definitive biography of Jed Smith, praised it for alerting historians to a forgotten hero. The second biography, Black Elk Speaks (1932) about a Sioux holy man, is Neihardts most widely acclaimed book. He met Black Elk in 1930 on his first visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation to gather material for The Song of the Messiah. Black Elk surprised him at their first meeting by seeming to expect him; he said Neihardt had been sent to hear sacred matters of the Sioux and give them to the world. He adopted Neihardt as his spiritual son and to him described the power vision he had been given to help his people. For a holy man to disclose his power vision to a white man was unusual if not unique, and Neihardt accepted the obligation to give it to the world. He considered Black Elk the strongest single influence on his life. The book received little critical attention when it first appeared, but Jung thought it an important contribution, and by the sixties it had
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been published in more than twelve languages. In the preface to the 1979 edition, Vine Deloria pronounced it a religious classic that may become the central core of a new theological canon. All of Neihardts critical writing was produced in this period. His critical theories had been influenced, aside from Taine, by F. W. H. Myers and Irving Babbitt, particularly the latters theory of the ethical integrating imagination. To an extent he was affected by Whitman and Shelley, and markedly by George Edward Woodberrys Dionysian concept of poetic madness that expressed deep truths of the race mind, or collective consciousness. Neihardts views ran counter to the fashionable New Criticism; he thought it wrong-headed and self-serving, and the literature he considered largely ugly and dispiriting. In his philosophy the function of literature was to show people how to live together decently on this planet, and it should not present life as worthless or inconsequential. His first statement of literary theory was the Laureate Address, delivered at his formal notification of appointment as Poet Laureate of Nebraska. He described poetry as the highest form of human expression, detailed his poetic techniques, and defended his use of rhyme in the epic. The second volume of theory, Poetic Values: Their Reality and Our Need of Them, was composed of the two lectures delivered at the University of Nebraska in 1925 after he was appointed to a Chair of Poetry. They are rhetorical lectures, Neihardts defense of poetry in a period preoccupied with science and materialism. He had read Boodin, Korzybsky, Eddington, and Planck on the need for evidence beyond that of the physical senses to arrive at truth, and his argument also rested on theories of F. W. H. Myers, Ouspensky, and Coomaraswamy that the states of mind to trust were the states of expanded consciousnesstheories today respected by scientists and psychologists. His major theme was that poetry, by widening vision and touching the deep strains of universal human experience, draws mankind together in understanding and kindness. He urged the value not of poetry itself, but of the poetic experience, the state of heightened perception in which poetry is composed by the poet and appreciated by the reader. His literary pages reveal his respect for sincere work intended to deepen the readers understanding, but he could be caustic about irresponsibility in literature, as well as showoffmanship in criticism. His columns were commended by his editors, and one grateful reader praised them for luminous sanity. In his last period, 19421973, Neihardt wrote no poetry, and devoted his main efforts to teaching, lecture-recitals, and television appearances. His last novel, When the Tree Flowered, was written in this period, as were the two volumes of autobiography: All Is But a Beginning, and the incomplete Patterns and Coincidences. The novel, Neihardts best prose work, was
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drawn from materials gathered at Pine Ridge in the forties from Eagle Elk and other Indians. It draws delightful pictures of Sioux life, weaves in charming Indian folk tales and legends, and describes an enlightened society wherein generosity was the way to status, young men chosen to hunt for the poor were honored, and lying after smoking the peace pipe was unthinkable. The gently humorous wisdom that pervades the old culture comes warmly to life. The two volumes of autobiography that marked the end of Neihardts writing cover only his childhood and youth, but they convey the unquenchable spirit and appreciation of life that enliven all his work. Except for the early burst of enthusiasm over Neihardts lyrics, his writings have received little attention from major critics, partly because of his remoteness from literary centers. Western writers who stay in the West have much the same experience, and Neihardts unfortunate quarrel with Harriet Monroe in 1913 alienated the Chicago group, the strongest critical force west of New York. In 1927 William Rose Bent in the New York Times called Neihardt a Homer of the West, and Frank Luther Mott in The Midland championed him for shedding much of the traditional epic machinery to use real men in ordinary experience. But epic in our time has not been a popular genre; it fares badly in an era when all poetry is judged by standards appropriate to the short lyric, and literature is dominated by the disaffected man, the non-hero, and the sickness of society. Western writing in general suffers when most literature is urban and centered on men trapped in technology. Still, Neihardt always had an audience, even when his books were out of print, and scholarly articles appeared now and then. Among them were Nelson Adkinss assessment of The Song of Three Friends as a genuine epic with a commendable fusion of facts and interpretation. Roger Sergel predicted that Hugh Glass would find a place in world literature, and Mott praised Neihardts innovation in writing an epic about ordinary men and producing a workable modern epic prosody. In recent years when serious attention has been given to western writing, Neihardts books have reappeared in print, and articles and dissertations are multiplying. Three biographies of Neihardt have been published, the first in 1920 by Neihardts close friend Julius T. House, a professor of classics. The book is valuable for the details it presents of Neihardts life, thoughts, and working methods; many of the documents and letters House used were later destroyed in a moving-van accident. Unfortunately the sources are not documented and the critical view is more rhapsodic than judicious, but the wealth of detail and Houses perceptions are extremely valuable, drawn as they were from hours of companionable discussion. A second biography by Blair Whitney, published in the Twayne series, fulfills the writers intention
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to offer a first step in reappraisal of Neihardts work. The book contains a few factual errors, but the appraisal of Neihardts writings is competent and discerning. The third biography, by Lucile Aly, based on discussions and interviews with Neihardt and his family, as well as documents and letters, is a rhetorical study of his writings, his intentions, and his methods. Doctoral dissertations on Neihardt began to appear in the late fifties, with George Paul Grants study of the development of Neihardts prosody; the appendix includes the text of The Divine Enchantment and the unpublished Preface to Hugh Glass. Dian de Pisa makes a contribution to the understanding of language and symbol in Black Elk Speaks, and Linda DeLowrys analysis of themes and structures in Neihardts works is specially astute on the short stories. The best of the dissertations completed is Billie Wahlstroms study of the history and poetry in A Cycle of the West. Many of the recent scholarly articles center on Black Elk Speaks. Outstanding among them are Sally McCluskeys, based on interviews with Neihardt, that deals with the confusion of some critics about the actual authorship, and Paul Olsons discussion of the work as epic and ritual aimed at revising history. Robert F. Sayre explains the vision as social and tribal; Lynne OBrien sees Black Elk as a tragic hero unable to fulfill the mission assigned to him in his vision because of the deteriorated circumstances. Articles about the Cycle take several directions in questioning whether it qualifies as an or the American epic. John T. Flanagan thought it a worthy effort that presents heroes of not quite classical stature, but describes impressively the grandeur of the western setting. Edgeley Todd, measuring by Frank Norriss definition of a western epic, thought it a worthy attempt but not a complete success. Kenneth Rothwell called it an Astoriad, uneven in style and insufficiently unified in plot with its multiple heroes, but a step on the way to an American epic. David C. Young traced classical parallels to Homer in the treatment of Indians. The most arbitrary criticism came from Lucy Lockwood Hazard for Neihardts refusal to take sides in his description of battles in the Indian wars, which Young commended as notable frankness and fairness to his subject. Hazard objected further to Neihardts style, in particular to the use of Homeric metaphor, and astonishingly to the use of frontier material merely to furnish a problem of the individual soul. Paul Olsen summarized the Cycle as an attempt at epic that does not quite come off. Two articles by Lucile Aly considered first Neihardts preparation for and qualifications as an epic poet, as well as his degree of success, and second, the adjustment of facts for the epic purpose; she also argued that whether or not the Cycle endures as an American epic will be decided by time, not by contemporary critics. Articles on the Hugh Glass Song frequently compare Neihardts handling of the story with Frederick Manfreds
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in Lord Grizzly. Anthony Arthur, clearly preferring Manfreds version, criticized Neihardt for putting the story into poetic form and presenting the environment as Hughs enemy, not as a means of attainment. Actually, such criticism may arise from confusion of the intent and method of epic and of novel. The unity of all Neihardts writing was noted in W. E. Blacks analysis of The Divine Enchantment, where the themes of the lyrics, Black Elks vision, and the story of the Messiah are all forecast. The state of expanded awareness of Devanaguys vision when the meek souls see that all is one recur in Black Elks vision and in The Song of the Messiah. Helen Stauffers article on The River and I notes the same sense of unity and the forecasting of later works. In his lifetime Neihardt received numerous honors, including three honorary doctoral degrees, an American Poetry Society award, and membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Some evidence suggests that he should have received the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. If he had received it he might have been more widely known, but he was not distressed at the relative neglect of his work; he thought time might be on his side.
LUCILE A LY , University
of Oregon
Primary Sources ( in chronological order) The Divine Enchantment. New York: James T. White, 1900. A Bundle of Myrrh. New York: The Outing Publishing Company, 1907. The Lonesome Trail. New York: John Lane, 1907. Man-Song. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1909. The River and I. New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1910. The Stranger at the Gate. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912. The Song of Hugh Glass. New York: Macmillan, 1915.
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A Literary History of the American West The Song of Three Friends. New York: Macmillan, 1919. The Splendid Wayfaring. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Laureate Address of John G. Neihardt. Chicago: The Bookfellows, 1921. The Song of the Indian Wars. New York: Macmillan, 1925. Poetic Values: Their Reality and Our Need of Them. New York: Macmillan, 1925. lndian Tales and Others. New York: Macmillan, 1926. The Quest. New York: Macmillan, 1928. Black Elk Speaks. New York: William Morrow, 1932. The Song of the Messiah. New York: Macmillan, 1935. The Song of Jed Smith. New York: Macmillan, 1941. A Cycle of the West. New York: Macmillan, 1949. When the Tree Flowered. New York: Macmillan, 1952. All Is But a Beginning. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972. Patterns and Coincidences. Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Secondary Sources Adkins, Nelson F. A Study of John G. Neihardts A Song of Three Friends. American Speech 4 (April 1928): 276290. Aly, Lucile F. John G. Neihardt as Speaker and Reader. Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1959. . John G. Neihardt: A Critical Biography. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1959. . John G. Neihardt and the American Epic. Western American Literature 13 (February 1979): 309325. . Poetry and History in Neihardts Cycle of the West. Western American Literature 16 (Spring 1981): 318. Arthur, Anthony. Manfred, Neihardt, and Hugh Glass. In Where the West Begins, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer, pp. 99109. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978. Black, William E. [William Patterson-Black] Ethic and Metaphysic: A Study of John G. Neihardt. Western American Literature 2 (Fall 1967): 205212. Bloodworth, William. Neihardt, Momaday, and the Art of Indian Autobiography. In Where the West Begins, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer, pp. 152160. Sioux Falls, S.D.: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978. DeLowry, Linda. Dynamic Patterns: A Thematic Study of the Works of John G. Neihardt. Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1975. Deloria, Vine. Introduction to Black Elk Speaks. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Flanagan, John T. John G. Neihardt, Chronicler of the West. Arizona Quarterly 21 (Spring 1965): 220. Grant, George Paul. The Poetic Development of John G. Neihardt. Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1957. Hazard, Lucy Lockwood. The Frontier in American Literature. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1941. House, Julius T. John G. Neihardt, Man and Poet. Wayne, Nebraska: F. H. Jones and Son, 1920.
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McCluskey, Sally. Black Elk Speaks and So Does John Neihardt. Western American Literature 6 (Winter 1972): 231242. . Images and Ideas in the Poetry of John G. Neihardt. Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois University, 1974. Mott, Frank Luther. John G. Neihardt and His Work. The Midland 8 (November 1922): 315324. . Resurgence of Neihardt. Quarterly Journal of Speech 48 (April 1962): 198201. Olson, Paul. The Epic and Great Plains Literature: Rlvaag, Cather and Neihardt. Prairie Schooner 55 (Spring/Summer 1981). Rothwell, Kenneth. In Search of a Western Epic: Neihardt, Sandburg, and Jaffe as Regionalists and Astoriads. Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring 1970): 5363. Sayre, Robert F. Vision and Experience in Black Elk Speaks.College English 3 2 (February 1971): 509535. Stauffer, Helen. Neihardts Journey on the Missouri: The Beginning of an Epic. Paper presented at the Western Literature Association, October 1981. Todd, Edgeley W. The Frontier Epic: Frank Norris and John G. Neihardt. Western Humanities Review 13 (Winter 1959): 4045. Wahlstrom, Billie Joyce. Transforming Fact: The Poetics of History in John G. Neihardts Cycle of the West. Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1975. Whitney, Blair. John G. Neihardt. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Young, David. Crazy Horse on the Trojan Plain: A Comment on the Classicism of John G. Neihardt. Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 5 (Fall 1982): 4553.
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The Western Writings of Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis (18851951), the scourge and tormentor of Americas villages and cities, its businessmen, preach1 ers, and doctors, also proudly called himself a fanatic American. The same sense of blighted national expectations that fueled Lewiss outrageous satires also inspired him to create fictional characters and situations which express explicitly his ideals for a maturing America. These ideals are inseparable from Lewiss conception of himself as a westerner, and of the American West as the site, one day, of a newer and better civilization. The words of Cass Timberlane, one of Lewiss fictional heroes from the novel of the same name, express Lewiss own western aspirations:
URIOUSLY ENOUGH,
Its just that I have some kind of an unformulated idea that I want to be identified with Grand Republichelp in setting up a few stones in what may be a new Athens. Its this northern countryyou know, stark and cleanand the brilliant lakes and the tremendous prairies to the westwardit may be a new kind of land for a new kind of people, and its scarcely started yet. Lewis was born in Sauk Center, Minnesota, his childhood only a few years removed from the sod shanties and log cabins of the upper midwestern frontier. His fascination with his homelands swift conversion from wilderness to rough farming and trading outposts to modern cities became a central article of his novelistic beliefs. As he wrote of his country, There is a miracle in the story of how all this has happened in two or three generations. Yet, after this period, which is scarcely a second in historic time, we have a settled civilization with traditions and virtues and foolishness as fixed as those of the oldest tribe of Europe. I merely submit that such a scheme is a challenge to all 2 the resources a novelist can summon. Lewiss development of his western themes and characters may be seen emerging strongly in two of his early novels, The Trail of the Hawk (1915) and Free Air (1919), both written before the phenomenal success of Main Street in 1920 thrust him into national fame. The heroes of these early romantically conceived but realistically detailed novels, Carl Ericson of The Trail of the Hawk and Milt Daggett of Free Air, are examples of Lewiss new
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western pioneers. Both are depicted as authentic new Americans, cleareyed midwesterners who love their land and who have grown up possessing some of its strength and vitality. Such qualities will continue to be the means by which Lewis legitimizes the ambitions of his later and more wellknown fictional figures like Carol Kennicott, Martin Arrowsmith, Sam Dodsworth, Cass Timberlane, and Neil Kingsblood. But Carl Ericson and Milt Daggett are more than just a pair of pastoral westerners. They are both creative technologists. Carl as aviator and inventor and Milt as mechanic and engineer-to-be are both seminal heroes for Lewis, figures whose alliance both to their western land and to the scientific and technological future qualifies them as appropriate figures to carry on Lewiss conception of a continuing process of pioneering in America. If America was to extend the limits of its destiny, as Lewis fervently hoped, it would be through the efforts of native westerners who had grasped the tools of the new science. As novels, however, The Trail of the Hawk and Free Air are less than compelling, their seriousness undercut by the conventions of popular romance. It is in Main Street, published in the year following Free Air, that Lewiss controlling ideas about the emerging America are first shaped into powerful coherence. Main Street opened a decade in which new pioneers would occupy a central position in most of Lewiss big novels. Carol Milford Kennicott of Main Street, like her predecessors in the two earlier novels, is a representative young American who sees great work to be done in her western homeland and eagerly anticipates her own part in it. Like Carl and Milt, too, she is closely identified with the regions natural landscape, as the books opening makes clear. She is first attracted to her future husband, Doctor Will Kennicott, by those qualities of his personality closest to her own: his fondness for tramping and the outdoors, his sense of the heroic midwestern past, and his occasional awareness of the possibilities for its future. His proposal of marriage to Carol is presented in the only terms which she would have accepted: Its a good country, and Im proud of it. Lets make it all that those old boys dreamed about. Doc Kennicotts failure to recognize the appeal of this vow for Carol lies at the base of their later misunderstandings. Carols dream for the unlikely town of Gopher Prairie, in which the couple set up housekeeping, is to convert it to a place of beauty, a project in town planning spawned by Carols sociology reading in college, and perhaps by such influential works of the time as Ebenezer Howards Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Carols ideas for social reform extend beyond rebuilding prairie towns. Will complains that she is always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world, an idea straight out of Thorstein Veblen, and she
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espouses other progressivist concerns. But it is primarily as a thwarted builder that she is presented to the reader. Looking over the town upon her arrival, she sees with the eye of the planner and the architect. Carol is a compelling figure because of the extraordinary tension between the eager expectancy of her hopes and the forces of dullness and smugness which oppose her. Shut off from any meaningful chance to carry out her plans by her position as woman and wife, by her shallow education, by her own sentimentalism and flightiness, and by her sense of inadequacy to her monumental task, she can bring her dreams to no real accomplishment. At the end, no longer the potential creator, she remains a frustrated figure living under a self-imposed truce in a community which she might have transformed into something distinctive and beautiful, had she the technical skill and the nerve to match her idealism. Technical skill and nerve are the attributes of her doctor-husband, Will, but without vision he remains merely the severed half of her incomplete self. What is called for in the wider design of Main Street is a sublime architect, a figure whose pragmatic skills and courage to innovate are equal to the force of that creators dream. If Main Street shows us the incipient builder deprived of the realization of her goala new town on the prairieBabbitt (1922) reverses this to reveal the shining midwestern city achieved, but without an appropriate creator to shape or interpret its destiny. Both novels are concerned with defining humane life for the citizens of a community. Both ask at what point in the process of development this humane life can best be realized. Babbitts Zenith has clearly gone beyond that point, as Gopher Prairie has failed to reach it. Instead of Main Street s heroic natural landscape blighted by human incompetence and pettiness, Babbitt presents us with a human-created world of immense technological dazzlement, but finally devoid of meaningful relationships between its human inhabitants and between them and their landscape or the products of their technology. Babbitt is a kind of upside-down Walden, wherein the buildings, houses, porcelain and tile bathrooms, and electric cigarette-lighters overwhelm the human figures and reduce their actions to insignificance. As he did in Main Street, Lewis dramatizes in Babbitt Lewis Mumfords contemporaneous observation that architecture and civilization develop hand in hand: the characteristic buildings of each period 3 are the memorials to their dearest institutions. Whereas in Main Street we are shown the dream of a new western civilization without the reality, in Babbitt we have the reality without the dream, a humming dynamo of a modern city whose external intimations of heroic accomplishment mock the soft-bellied underachievers who inhabit it.
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The city seems to offer great freedom and myriad opportunities for human achievement. At several points in Babbitt Lewis holds up his narrative flow to scan the entire city of Zenith, giving us a montage of simultaneous events, vignettes of character and scene underscoring the potentialities of the new city. Thus, Lewiss satire in Babbitt is placed against an urban landscape of great hope, a metropolis of boundless possibilities for accomplishment. George F. Babbitt instinctively responds to these visionary intimations as one who loved his city with passionate wonder. He palpitates in sympathetic response to its complex systems. Driving through its downtown streets he feels like a shuttle of polished steel in some vast machine. In his speeches to the Boosters Club he loftily portrays the realtor as a farsighted visionary, functioning as a seer of the future and a heroic engineer, clearing the way for great changes. But of course Babbitt is unable to translate this vision beyond its grossest private meaning, as Lewis underscores it for us, that a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. Lewis puts Babbitts ill-defined reverence for his metropolis into perspective by detailing his ignorance of its civic life, its social needs, its architecture, and his inability to do anything of a constructive or purposeful nature on its behalf. Nimble only in the petty business of buying and selling houses, Babbitt, with his monumental incompetence, is a perversion of Lewiss progressive dream. In a city built for giants, the midget Babbitt, its representative man, can only barter its structures; he cannot create them. Lewis clearly expects something more from his main figure. For George F. Babbitt is more than just the typical American businessman. He is also a westerner, and the distinction, as the earlier works have demonstrated, is an important one for Lewis. As he explained it elsewhere, the westerners may look like easterners; both groups are chiefly reverent toward banking, sound Republicanism, the playing of golf and bridge, and the possession of large motors. But whereas the Easterner is content with these symbols and smugly desires nothing else, the Westerner, however golfocentric he may be, is not altogether satisfied. . . . secretly, wistfully he desires a beauty that 4 he does not understand. Hence Babbitts vague but insistent yearnings: Wish Id been a pioneer, same as my grand-dad, he muses at one point. As a westerner, his desire for beauty frequently draws him back to nature. Even his romantic fantasies with the faery child of his dreams occur in a series of natural settingsgroves, gardens, moors, the sea. But more striking are those occasions when, seeking the balm of the wilderness and male camaraderie, Babbitt heads off to the Maine woods to repeat the familiar American gesture of nonurban renewal. Even in Maine, of course, he can-
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not shake off the city which claims him. Babbitts retreat into nature fails, as do his escapes into bohemianism and liberalism, because his Zenith preoccupations have drained him of the values of hope and freedom which are his western birthright. The call of the wild is indubitably real to Babbitt, as it has perhaps always been to Americans, but his fragmentary and shallow conception of it (moccasinssix-gunfrontier towngamblerssleep under the starsbe a regular man) renders him vulnerable to confusion and failure. The novel ends, as did Main Street, with a chastened rebel, but Babbitt remains at last a more pathetic figure than Carol Kennicott, for unlike her he is never able to formulate coherently the dream which he is finally forced to deny. Still, Babbitts son Ted, Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt, whose name resonates with his fathers not quite forgotten aspirations toward progressive action and the manly western virtues, emerges at the end as an intimation of the hopeful future. Ted, the rebellious would-be inventor, a natural mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines, who lisped in blueprints, is the potential new technocrat who may rise out of Babbitts ashes. In Arrowsmith (1925) Lewis for the first time in a major novel presents a main character whose consequence as an agent of cultural progress matches his technical mastery and his dedication to his goals. Martin Arrowsmith, the doctor turned researcher, is an amalgam of the earlier Doc Kennicott and the visionary Carol. I desired, Lewis recalled later, to portray a more significant medico than Kennicottone who could get beneath routine practice into the scientific foundations of medicine; one who should im5 mensely affect all life. Thats what I want to do! says Martin Arrowsmith as a young country doctor listening to Gustaf Sondelius, the great epidemic fighter: Not just tinker with a lot of worn-out bodies but make a new world! Although Arrowsmith exposes a great many charlatans and hypocrites within the medical profession, there are many competent and admirable doctors in the novel. Indeed, it is one of the books ironies that an Olympian scientist like Max Gottlieb, an M.D. as well as a renowned pathologist, is incapable of diagnosing or treating his own wifes illness and must helplessly call upon Dad Silva, the despised medical school dean, for an accurate assessment of her condition. Still, Lewis most admires those like Gottlieb whose personal failures are rendered insignificant by the magnitude of their scientific achievements. Along with his scientific credentials, Arrowsmith possesses in his midwestern roots the requisite reverberations of nature and the frontier. The book opens with the scene of a wagon carrying his pioneer forebears through the Ohio wilderness, and with his great-grandmother-to-be saying portentously, Nobody aint going to take us in. . . . Were going on jus long as
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we can. Going West! Theys a whole lot of new things I aim to be seeing! Heavy-handed as it sometimes is, the novels underlying pioneering theme is appropriate to Lewiss continuing search for the possibilities for creative achievement on the scientific frontiers. In the central episode of the novel, wherein Martin and a team of scientists and health workers fight an epidemic of plague in the Caribbean, nature seems not the characteristic and familiar American restorative but the mask of a cosmic malevolence. The tropics, says Sondelius, dying of the plague, are the jest of God, with their surface beauty concealing such horrors as malaria and plague. But the overriding view of the novel is that these diseases are not Gods jests but natural calamities capable of eradication through rational thought and action. The scientist-hero, then, is the ultimate humanist, working to reorder those conflicting aspects of the natural world to harmonize with human needs. By the end of the novel, Martin is headed for a laboratory in the Vermont woods, where he will join other pioneers in new adventures in pure science. Martin Arrowsmiths final destination of the cabin-laboratory is an unmistakable projection of Lewiss linked themes of scientific progress, creative individualism, and nature. Elmer Gantry (1927) stands as a kind of negative pole for all of Lewiss motivations toward social progress and creative individualism. Without even the vague yearnings and abortive bolts toward freedom of a Babbitt to touch his life with meaning, Gantry is Lewiss ultimate scoundrel and parasite, and the satire directed at him is correspondingly relentless. The books only Christian antithesis to Gantry is a backwoods cleric who finds his Godpredictablyin nature. But the Rev. Pengilly is a minor character whose forest mysticism remains etherealized and private, useless in any combat of ideas. An even more vital and significant foil for Gantry like Frank Shallard offers Lewis no model for a hero. An honest doubter like Shallard is to be preferred to a thoroughgoing hypocrite like Gantry, but the genus is not promising for Lewis. The preachers, like the practicing physicians and the businessmen, are Lewiss second-class citizens, functionaries and servants of the social order rather than its designers and creators. Dodsworth (1929) presents the fullest treatment of the more characteristic figure toward whom the earlier novels have been pointing. In the opportunities for self-examination afforded by a vacation and a trip to Europe with his wife, Fran, Sam Dodsworth, fifty-year-old industrialist, decides that he wants to return to America and do something more with his life than build automobiles, an activity in which, he decides, there is but little pioneering. Instead, he plans to design and build gardened and forested communities with noble houses that would last three hundred years, and
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not be scrapped in a year, as cars were.In pursuing this venture, Dodsworth prepares to become Lewiss most significant and characteristic new pioneer: a western idealist who has mastered the technology necessary to achieve his goal, a goal sanctioned by its associations with the familiar Lewis touchstones of cultural progress, individual creativity and nature. Although Dodsworth is the culmination of Lewiss efforts to bring forth a visionary western technologist and builder, the work reveals a troublesome lessening of intensity toward the implications and consequences of the authors ideas, an inability or unwillingness to follow them through to their novelistic conclusions. Dodsworth closes with the promise of a new life for Sam, but he has now bounced from wooded estates to travel-trailers, which he imagines carrying urbanites in comfort into the forest. (Kind of a shame to have em ruin any more wilderness. Oh, thats just sentimentality, he assured himself.) And houses or trailers, we are never witness to their creation, nor do they quite qualify for their role, however much they might widen the vistas of nature-hungry Americans. The earlier dream of a Carol Kennicott, hazy as it was, embraced the entire community in a gesture of democratic inclusiveness, rather than just that comfortably well-off portion of it to which Sam Dodsworth seems ready to devote himself. In such curiously diminished forms, western builders will continue to appear in Lewiss later novels, such as Work of Art (1934), Cass Timberlane (1945), Kingsblood Royal (1947), and The God-Seeker (1949). Finally, in Lewiss last novel, World So Wide (1951), published in the year of the authors death, the hopeful western horizon has simply turned into a blank wall. Once again Lewis posits his familiar builder-hero, but here his dream does not survive even the opening chapter. These reformed visionaries of his later works demonstrate Lewiss difficulty in engaging fully the concept of new pioneering which engrossed him throughout his career as a novelist. In one respect, these western pilgrims, forever diverting themselves from the shining city on a hill which is their professed destination, may dramatize their creators misjudgment of his own abilities: although Lewiss impulses were often romantic and idealistic, his talents did not extend beyond the brilliant rendering of the actual and the ordinary. He may thus be seen as the victim of an idea which compelled him even as its formulation resisted his efforts to bring it to fictional life. In another respect, the halfhearted builders may suggest a collapse of will on Lewiss part, another manifestation of the familiar American failure of the dream. Yet it is not Lewiss renunciation of his vision that is most striking, but rather that he clings to it long after it ceases to be a working force in his fiction, that he finally cannot renounce the vision. While the dream goes slack or is vulgarized in the later works, we are nevertheless left with an
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assertion of, or preoccupation with, a basic credo which remains consistent throughout Lewiss novels and which transcends his divided self. Whether Lewis defines the good life explicitly in the idealistic quests of his main character, or implicitly in the objects he selects for attack, the satirist and idealist in him merge to form his moral basis. Like Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis attempted the great survey of American life as it passed swiftly into the modern phase. Somewhere, Lewis believed, between the sod shanty and the asphalt parking lot we had missed achieving an American civilization, but perhaps it was still not too late. When Lewis complained of and satirized the failures of his country, he also attempted to provide it with new emblems of possibility to stand against these shortcomings. When he attacked specimen American myths, he did so only when they became empty memorials of the past and apologies for present mediocrity, rather than dynamic impulses to advance our cultural possibilities. In his new pioneers, Lewis found a unique means to combine his divergent goals of personal freedom and creativity, on the one hand, and obligation to the social order, on the other. The fundamental Lewis hero hopes thus, through the discovery of his role and the achievement of his creative endeavorinvention, structure, community, medical discovery not only to assert his own individuality but also to acknowledge his participation in the communal experience and his commitment to help shape the emerging new America.
G LEN A. LOVE , University
of Oregon
Notes
1. 2. Sinclair Lewis, The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 19041950. Edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane (New York: Random House, 1953; rpt. Pocket Books, 1963), p. 105. The Man from Main Street, p. 37.
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A Literary History of the American West Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924; 2d ed. New York: Dover, 1955), p. 193. 4. Sinclair Lewis, Minnesota, the Norse State, The Nation 116 (May 30, 1923): 626. 5. Quoted in Mark Schorers Afterword to Arrowsmith (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 432. 3. Acknowledgment: This essay on Lewiss western writings is adapted from material in Glen A. Loves New Americans: The Westerner and the Modern Experience in the American Novel, published in 1982 by Bucknell University Press through Associated University Presses, and in his essay on Lewis, New Pioneering on the Prairies, appearing in American Quarterly 25 (December 1973): 558577 (copyright, 1973, Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania).
Primary Sources ( in chronological order) The Trail of the Hawk. New York: Harper, 1915. An early Lewis novel, notable for its anticipation of the authors later themes and characters. Main Street. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. Lewiss first major novel, concerning a visionary girl and her stodgy husband in a midwestem village. Babbitt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922. A brilliant treatment of the American businessman and the dream which eludes him. Arrowsmith. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925. Lewis dissects the medical profession and brings forth his most radical hero in a young scientist, Martin Arrowsmith. Elmer Gantry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. The authors most caustic satire, an unrelieved attack upon the practitioners of the religion business. Dodsworth. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. A mature treatment of the American businessman, prepared at last to follow his creative ambitions. The God-Seeker. New York: Random House, 1949. A historical novel set on the frontier of the upper Mississippi Valley. The Man from Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader. Selected Essays and Other Writings, 19041950, edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane. New York: Random House, 1953. Collects many important essays and personal statements, published and unpublished, by Lewis. Secondary Sources 1. Books and Sections of Books Austin, James C. Sinclair Lewis and Western Humor. In American Dreams, American Nightmares, edited by David Madden, pp. 94105. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. Sees Lewis as the leading figure in the tradition of American humor in the upper Midwest.
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Geismar, Maxwell. Last of the Provincials, pp. 69150. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. Perceptive reading of Lewis as writer in an era of historical transition. Fleming, Robert E., with Esther Fleming. Sinclair Lewis: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. A thorough and recent annotated bibliography of Lewis works and criticism. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Sinclair Lewis. New York: Twayne, 1962. One of the most reliable and accessible introductions to Lewiss life and art. Lewis, Claude. Treaty Trip, edited by Donald Greene and George Knox. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959. Shows Lewiss attraction to, and repulsion from, the wilderness, as revealed in a journal kept by his brother. Love, Glen A. Sinclair Lewis: New Pioneering on the Prairies, in his New Americans, pp. 21954. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1982. An expanded version of the material in these pages, treating Lewis as a visionary westerner. Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963. A brief (44 pages) summary of Lewiss life and work, for those not wishing to tackle Schorers mammoth biography. , ed. Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962. A collection of the best critical essays about Lewis and his work. . Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. A huge and impressive work, setting a new standard for excellence in American literary biography. 2. Periodical Articles Fife, Jim L. Two Views of the American West. Western American Literature 1 (Spring 1966): 3443. Lewis, as a debunker of the American West, is contrasted with Eugene Manlove Rhodes. Both see the possibilities for the West. Flanagan, John T. The Minnesota Backgrounds of Sinclair Lewis Fiction. Minnesota History 37 (March 1960): 115. Settings for many of Lewiss novels and stories are identified in Minnesota. Lea, James. Sinclair Lewis and the Implied America. Clio 3 (October 1973): 2134. Surveys Lewiss attitudes toward America by examining seven of his novels ranging chronologically from 1830 to 1946. Manfred, Frederick. Sinclair Lewis: A Portrait. American Scholar 23 (Spring 1954): 16284. Western writer Manfreds account of his friendship with Lewis, including perceptive observations on Lewiss character. Miller, Perry. The Incorruptible Sinclair Lewis. Atlantic Monthly 187 (April 1951): 3034. Revealing insights into Lewiss later life by a renowned scholar and friend of Lewis. Tanselle, G. Thomas. Sinclair Lewis and Floyd Dell: Two Views of the Midwest. Twentieth Century Literature 9 (January 1964): 17584. Compares and contrasts the two novelists in their treatment of midwestem setting and character.
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novelist, biographer, lecturer and teacher, Mari Sandoz (Marie Susette Sandoz, 18961966) was the oldest child of Jules and Mary Fehr Sandoz, Swiss immigrants and homesteaders in the Niobrara River region of northwestern Nebraska. She grew up in a turbulent, impoverished household, dominated by her fathers violent temper. When Mari was fourteen, the family moved to the sandhills, twenty-five miles southeast of the Niobrara. The area was treeless, stark, monotonous, and mysterious; the hills both fascinated and frightened Mari. After graduating from the eighth grade, Mari taught in nearby country schools. She did not attend high school. At eighteen, she married a neighboring rancher, Wray Macumber, and continued to teach intermittently during the next five years. In 1919, Mari divorced her husband and left the sandhills for Lincoln, 450 miles across the state. For the next sixteen years she taught school, held a variety of jobs, managed to get admitted to the University of Nebraska despite the lack of high school credits, and wrote constantly, although with almost no success. During those years, she claimed, she received over a thousand rejection slips for her short stories. In 1935 Sandozs biography of her father, Old Jules, won the Atlantic Non-Fiction Prize of $5000. From then on her life was dedicated to writing and research. In 1940 she moved from Lincoln to Denver for better research facilities, and also because of hostility in Lincoln, brought on by publication of her Capital City, which depicts the political machinations in a midwestern state capital. Lincoln residents refused to believe Sandozs denial that her fictional capital city was based on Lincoln. In 1943, after the publication of Crazy Horse, Sandoz moved to New York. She wanted to use the great western research collections in the East, and she needed to be near her eastern editors and publishers in order to work successfully with them. She always claimed to hate New York and was often in the West, lecturing, promoting her books, or researching. Mari Sandoz died of cancer in 1966, in New York. She was buried according to her wishes on a hill overlooking the Sandoz ranch in the sandhills of Nebraska.
HE NOTED WESTERN HISTORIAN,
Because most of Sandozs serious writing is nonfiction, critics have sometimes overlooked her literary achievements. But though her major
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work, the six-volume Great Plains Series, together with other studies of the Great Plains and its inhabitants, is classified as history or biography, Sandozs initial intention was to succeed as a fiction writer. That the material from which she drew her sources was historical was to some extent happenstance. She realized that to be successful, she must have close emotional ties with her subjects; those subjects were to be found in the trans-Missouri region, the Nebraska frontier, the sandhills in which she grew up, and Lincoln, where she moved in her early twenties. The people who lived there and the events that took place there held her attention all during her writing career. Sandoz had formed her theories and opinions, her world view, by the time her first book, Old Jules, was published in 1935, and she held to those views consistently throughout her life. She felt she had a mission to elucidate her region to the world. Her apprentice work, written during the years of struggle to learn control of her material and to gain recognition, was based on actual events and the setting was her native Nebraska. Old Jules, the biography of Sandozs father, had been years in the writing. It certainly fulfilled her requirement that the subject matter be associated with her emotions, for Jules Sandoz, the subject, was the most important man in her life. An egotistical, eccentric, sometimes brutal man with an explosive temper, he dominated his wife and children not only during his lifetime, but for years afterward. Mari feared her father, but she admired him also, for she knew that he was an important figure in the frontier community he helped to develop. Juless life story is inextricably involved with that of the Nebraska frontier, one of the last in the United States. Realizing this fact, the author limned the strengths and weaknesses of the man and portrayed the biography of the community as well. The book is successful because she was able to depict a believablethough hardly likeableman in relation to both family and community background. Old Jules is so unique it has few imitators. The authors ability to fuse Juless importance to his region with scenes from his domestic life, which involved Sandoz herself, is rare. In 1935 Old Jules shocked many readers, not only because of the domestic scenes but because it showed the public a rough, unglamorous picture of the frontier. The strong language, the sometimes fierce realism, the frankness, were all criticized vigorously, but they make the book powerful. The swearing no longer shocks the contemporary reader, but the realism and frankness are as gripping now as they were then. That Sandozs first book varies so slightly in sentence structure, style, organization, and purpose, from her last, published thirty-two years later, is not so remarkable when one realizes that she had been writing seriously for over thirteen years before Old Jules was published, and had worked over seven years on this book alone. Sandoz, although familiar with the frontier
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and living through many of the episodes herself, researched the background material at length, through newspapers, journals, diaries, publications, and interviews. Jules himself despised authors, and during his lifetime she had not questioned him directly on his activities; nevertheless, he had often talked to her of his experiences. After his death in 1928, she began in earnest to write the story of his life. But eastern publishers were not eager for the book. It was sent to thirteen publishers, rejected and completely rewritten thirteen times before it won the Atlantic Non-Fiction Contest. It was also one of the selections for the Book-of-the-Month Club that year. The prize-winning version was given serious attention by prominent reviewers. While some were startled, almost without exception they were excited by this new talent and her unusual book with its almost unheard-of locale and strange protagonist. The authors persistence and faith in herself and her subject matter had paid off. Why a book so well regarded (and to this day selling well) took so long to be published is made clear when one remembers the thirteen revisions. While most of the early manuscripts no longer exist, those who read them emphasize that the later version is much more mature, less vindictive, and written in better style. One of the most remarkable aspects, the aesthetic distance achieved by the author who is, after all, daughter of the protagonist and who figures in several episodes, could have come only through successive rewritings. As John Cawelti points out in The Six-Gun Mystique: Certain unresolved impulsesparticularly those growing out of the relations between parents and children in the course of the childs psychological developmentare so imperative that if he fails to resolve them in childhood, an individual is doomed to constantly reexperience these impulses and psychic conflict they generate through various analogies and disguises. . . . In addition, this conflict is likely to shape the kind of art he creates and enjoys. While Sandozs early work stemming from her own life is charged with too much personal emotion, too much sympathy for her characters, her many reworkings of Old Jules to some extent exorcized a too-close tie to her past. The many reworkings were difficult for her, but undoubtedly necessary, for this book and for future writing as well. A major problem in evaluating the book is its genre. Sandoz identified some of her earlier versions as fiction. She considered the final one nonfiction, and Atlantic Press obviously did also, as did most reviewers, but it reads as if it were fiction. The narrative skills she had developed during her long years of writing are used successfully here, but the result confuses those 766
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who believe nonfiction should use exposition rather than a story-telling approach. The author employs suspense, carefully regulated rising and falling action, direct dialogue, narrative descriptionwhat one expects to find in good fiction. Despite an occasional distressed reviewer, however, the reading public liked it. Her combining of meticulous research and narrative mode succeeded so well here that it set the pattern for most of her nonfiction. Sandozs skill as a conscious artist is clear when one examines Old Jules, even superficially. On the first page she introduces the time, the place, the protagonist, and suggests the conflict between the man and the land. The importance of the physical world to the characters and movement of the story is established in the first few paragraphs: The border towns . . . were shaking off the dullness of winter. . . . But west of there the monotonous yellow sandhills unobtrusively soaked up the soggy patches of April snow. Fringes of yellow-green crept down the south slopes or ran brilliant emerald over the long, blackened strips left by the late prairie fires. . . . All winter the wind had torn at the fire-bared knolls, shifting but not changing the unalterable sameness of the hills that spread in rolling swells westward to the hard-land country of the upper Niobrara River, where deer and antelope grazed almost undisturbed except by an occasional hunter. . . . And out of the East came a lone man in an open wagon, driving hard. This emphasis on the land, humans effect on it, and its effect on humans, was her major theme throughout her life. The shape of the book is loose, beads on a string as Sandoz describes it, as it follows Juless life, but there is a deliberate structural line. The book begins in medias res, not with Juless birth, his life in Switzerland, or even his arrival in the United States, but with his coming into the Niobrara region, some years later. The story begins with a young man making a new beginning, in the spring of the year. It ends when Juless life ends, in the autumn. And although Jules has done much to change the country during his long life, actively bringing in settlers, battling cattlemen, developing adaptable crops, and planting orchards, the description of the sandhills on the last page recalls that at the beginning: Outside the late fall wind swept over the hard-land country of the upper Running Water, tearing at the low sandy knolls that were the knees of the hills, shifting, but not changing, the unalterable sameness of the somnolent land spreading away toward the East. While one of the most remarkable features of Old Jules is the fine sense of detachment the author maintains between her protagonist and herself, 767
A Literary History of the American West conversely, one of the most successful aspects of her Indian biographies, Crazy Horse (1942) and Cheyenne Autumn (1953), is her intimate relationship with the Indian community. The closeness the reader feels toward the Indians is achieved through the authors use of language and point of view. The story is told as if by an Indiansomeone knowledgeable about their culture, their ideals, their religion and customs. Furthermore, the reader knows only what the Indians know about their situation and can therefore share their emotions as they experience them. His sympathy is with the Indians in conflicts between Indians and whites. The sense of authenticity pervading the books comes through Sandozs language. She uses only figures of speech compatible with the Indians references and way of life. As she says in her preface to Crazy Horse, I have used the simplest words possible, hoping by idiom and figures and the underlying rhythm pattern to say some of the things of the Indian for which there are no white-man words, suggest something of his innate nature, something of his relationship to the earth and the sky and all that is between. The Indian concept of his physical world is found throughout her books, in which the natural elements seem to be active: the black shadow of a canyon that humped itself against the western moon . . . as the first sun climbed into the sky, it dried up the little clouds that had slept in the west . . . a steep hill lifted itself against the winds to come . . . a scattering of box elders standing in their fallen leaves . . . lower hills made a wall all around. . . the clouds now seeming to walk on the far hills. . . . On the literary level, both books are consciously and carefully crafted. Roth are also important as historical writing; Sandoz once again was indefatigable in her research. She had privileged and unusual information and she used it with integrity. Crazy Horse, the Oglala Sioux war chief who fought successfully against both General Crook and General Custer before his betrayal and death at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in 1877, attracted Sandoz as a hero more than any other she wrote of. She had heard of him and his tragic fate first from her fathers cronies, who used to stop and swap stories with him when the family lived on the Niobrara River. Mari as a small girl sat up in the wood box by the kitchen stove long after bedtime to hear these story tellers. When she learned that Crazy Horse had roamed nearby, probably had been in the very place where she now lived, she was even more interested in him. Sandoz, before she wrote anything, always literally placed herself in the scene. She could then remove herself in her imagination, but that first step as active observer was always necessary for her. In envisioning Crazy Horse as a youngster and young man existing on this very land, she formed a close sympathy for him. Her intensive research only strengthened that sympathy. 768
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While her respect for the two Cheyenne chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf and their band is clear in Cheyenne Autumn, Crazy Horse was her greatest hero. Many consider Crazy Horse her finest work. In both books the structure is close to that of the traditional classic epic. Crazy Horse begins with the death of the Indians peace chief, Conquering Bear, and ends with the death of Crazy Horse himself. All events in the book point to that death. The last chapter, A Red Blanket from His Own, is especially foreboding and filled with symbols suggesting his doom. In Cheyenne Autumn the authors usual circular structure (the end implied at the beginning) is made even clearer through her use of symbols. Little Wolf at the beginning is carrying his chiefs bundle, the insignia of his office and symbol of responsibility to his tribe; he is wearing also a peace medal given him in Washington, symbol of his efforts to work with the whites. All during the book he attempts to reconcile the conflicting purposes of the two cultures. At the end of the journey, after months of fighting, fleeing, killing and being killed, the remnant of his tribe is given their northern reservation, and Little Wolf still carries both the chiefs bundle and the medal. In both books the authors veneration for the old, lost cultures of the Indians is evident. The remaining three books of her Great Plains Series, The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Cattlemen (1958), and The Beaver Men (1964) each develop the history of the West in relation to an animal species. The lack of a major human protagonist and the great amount of detail make these books somewhat disjointed and present a challenge to the readers memory as events and characters move rapidly across the pages. While these three dont hold ones sustained interest as do the biographies, the authors tales about such well-known characters as Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, General Sheridan, and General Custer, and her ability to bring lesser-known characters to life, make them entertaining. Her use of anecdotes and vignettes, told with her pithy, colloquial western expressions, indicate her belief in the spoken word as it was used by the old story tellers of her youth, a factor in her ability to recreate scenes of visual accuracy or great dramatic action. Although her major purpose was to make her audience aware of the historical and economic importance of the West, she also wanted to draw attention to the tall-tale quality of life in her region and to give readers a sense of healthy skepticism for received, written history. Strongly affected by her sense of history when she worked with protagonists whom she could identify with her own regions, she wrote powerful and effective works, recreating the people and their world as it must have been, rebuilding lost cultures of the past, emphasizing the moral issues involved when one culture destroys another, whether human or animal, and
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illustrating her own romantic view that the individual has dignity and worth. Despite the success of Old Jules and her later nonfiction, Sandoz for years adhered to her determination to be recognized for her fictional achievements, rather than her work in history or biography. Slogum House (1937) had been taking shape even before Old Jules was published. In this, the only novel based in her native Niobrara region, the setting is a mythical bend in the Niobrara River and encompasses two mythical counties nearby. Gulla, a domineering, villainous woman, as ugly as her name implies, gains land and power by prostituting her own daughters and using her sons as gunslingers. Slogum House succeeds in depicting an individual whose will to power overwhelms the good characters because of their weakness or ineffectuality. It is somber and powerful and depressing. It was also intended by the author as an allegory of a will-to-power nation greedy for world domination. She had read Hitlers Mein Kampf and feared him and his purpose. Hardly anyone recognized the story as allegory, because the characters were well developed and the action realistic. But Sandoz believed a serious writer had a duty to express his world view and should write to influence others. All her fiction is didactic to some extent. Her later novels, Capital City (1939) and The Tom-Walker (1947) are both frankly aimed at correcting some of the worlds ills. Capital City was based on a study of ten midwestern state capitals, and its characters, so Sandoz claimed, were composites representing traits rather than attempts at human recreations. However, people in Lincoln, Nebraska, were sure the book was a roman clef, that the city described was really Lincoln, and that the characters were indeed based on well-known figures there. They believed Sandoz was repaying them for the poverty and slights she experienced during her early writing days. The author never acknowledged that any of the charges were true. She did admit the book was an unsuccessful experiment, but it is of interest because some predicted world events later came true, and because of her effort to make a city the protagonist, rather than individuals. With the exception of her three novellas, Winter Thunder (1954), The Horsecatcher (1957), and The Story Catcher (1963), most of Sandozs longer fiction was experimental. It was frequently misunderstood and unsuccessful with readers, but is of interest to those investigating the writers purposes and goals. Most critics have categorically relegated her longer fiction to a level of lower excellence than her nonfiction. However, the quality of her novels varies widely. Slogum House seems the best work at present, but her experimental work may find favor with readers in the future. Son of the Gamblin
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Man (1960), Capital City, and The Tom-Walker received very low marks by reviewers, but Sandoz was attempting something avant-garde with the first. Writing of the artist Robert Henri, who lived as a boy in Cozad, Nebraska, she attempted an impressionistic work in fiction to compare to twentiethcentury innovations in American art such as those found in Robert Henris painting. Capital City is a protest novel, a type not in much favor today. Sandozs use of allegory in her fiction, utilizing the underlying symbols of the human mind, has not yet been seriously investigated in published work, although recently a number of graduate studies have explored that aspect. Her nonfiction often contains allegory as well. It is less obvious, since these books treat actual persons, but the elements are there, stressing the authors belief in the absolute necessity of individual development through struggle, and, particularly in the Indian books, the loss the white civilization inflicted upon itself because of discrimination. She approved her eminent contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner in their choice of the allegorical mode to illustrate their world views. Hemingways Old Man and the Sea and Faulkners A Fable ranked, she felt, with MobyDick and Steppenwolf among the worlds great books. Sandozs work reflects the world view of one imbued with the mythos of the West. As with other western writers, Sandozs close identification with nature and the land is evidenced throughout her books. Listed with the rest of the characters in Old Jules, for instance, is The Region: The upper Niobrara countrythe hardland table, the river, and the hills. The Plains and the cycle of nature form the unity in almost all her books. This western world view is overlaid by the archetypal patterns Sandoz found in ancient classical traditions of myth, epic, and tragedy. The heroes in her nonfiction, particularly, are larger than life and move on a vast landscape. The heroic characteristics of Sandozs protagonists, the sense of doom for the Indian heroes, the classic battles of man against fate, all have ancient prototypes. Her sense of the mythic is the means by which she presents her historical vision. Sandozs understanding of myth accords with that of other western realists as described by Max Westbrook in Conservative, Liberal and Western: Three Modes of American Realism ( South Dakota Review, Summer 1966), in which he points out that western writers are concerned with the sacred unity of life. Since this is the major theme of the Plains Indian religion which Sandoz so much admired, it is to be expected that she would agree. She accepted as well the importance of the unconscious, basing her ideas on Jungs concept that the archetypes of race memory are inherited by all, that the unconscious, the intuitive, is primary, and that conscious reason is unrealistic, a bifurcation of the human soul.
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Sandozs biographies in particular demonstrate Westbrooks idea that for the western realist determinism and belief in the human spirit can live side by side. Just as in the ancient Greek stories of Phaedra, Oedipus, and Orestes, Sandozs heroes are defeated by forces they cannot control, but they maintain their struggle, knowing they cannot win but continuing because their own integrity demands it. The fates of Dull Knife, Crazy Horse, and even to some extent Old Jules, were determined by forces beyond their control; nevertheless they remained formidable until the end. Sandozs view of life remained remarkably consistent throughout her writing career. While she left no written evidence of a consciously formulated philosophy, there is consistent evidence of the themes stressed in an epic vision: the workings of fate, the power of evil, mans inhumanity to man, and, paradoxically, humankinds essential nobility. As with most western writers, Sandoz was a loner, a member of no group or school or movement as such, although during her Lincoln years she knew and talked writing with other young eager authors, an experience most exhilarating to the young woman fresh from the isolation of the sandhills. She felt it true that the American writer in particular suffers from creative isolation, for in the great periods of world literature, in other cultures, there was a great deal of natural contact and friction. But even during her New York years, when she was near contemporary writers, Sandoz maintained her independence. Her impetus came, instead, through her travels, research, and reading. A prodigious reader, consuming on the average seven to ten books a week, she read everything current and everything having to do with subjects interesting to her. Few American writers affected her directly, however. With the exception of Theodore Dreiser and Willa Cather, she was more impressed with Europeans. She credited two as most important to her: Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy. Conrads books she read as a child, Hardys shortly after coming to college. Their treatment of an individual in his physical environment seemed similar to her own experience. And when she began to read Greek drama and history in college she clearly recognized the similarity between those myths and attitudes and those of the nineteenthcentury Plains Indians. The only western writer who affected Sandoz in a literary sense was John G. Neihardt, whose Black Elk Speaks and Cycle of the West she admired. Although she was familiar with much western writing, she seldom discussed western authors individually in her letters, and when she did she judged them primarily in relation to the amount and accuracy of their research. She tended to approve or disapprove of an author on the grounds of how well he presented history, especially after she began to think of herself as a historian. 772
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When the inevitable comparisons were attempted between her work and that of Nebraska author Willa Cather, Sandoz pointed out that they were writing of different eras and different locales. The pioneer region of Cathers Red Cloud, in south-central Nebraska, was quite different from the sandhills; it was more settled, closer to railroads, and more populated in 1860 than the western area was when her father arrived there in 1884. But the real difference lay much deeper, according to Sandoz. It was between an artist of Cathers calibre and an ordinary frontier historian with a desire to write. Robert Overing in his Masters thesis said of them: Miss Cather looked at the prairie through a telescope; Miss Sandoz looked at it through a microscope. Miss Cather, poised and sure, shot her game with an unerring bow and arrow; Miss Sandoz used a scattergun, recording everything it hit, The two shared one major passion, however, their love for the land. Sandoz has a respectable twenty-one books to her credit, in addition to short stories, recollections, and articles. Her work is uneven, the fiction in particular showing weaknesses. On the other hand her vast knowledge of her subject matter and her conscientious and careful craftsmanship give her nonfiction significant literary quality. As one reviewer said of her last book, The Battle of the Little Bighorn, Her brain was the last repository of unrecorded minutiae of the Plains Indians and the pioneer whites. Nobody can ever again acquire the intimate knowledge she had of the Sioux, early fur traders, trappers, buffalo hunters, and cattlemen. As she once said, posterity will have to take her word for some of it. . . . Her style sings like one of those Seventh Cavalry bugles, and [her words] race along at times like raindrops making light running sounds over the dry earth of the prairies she 1 knew so well.
H ELEN W. STAUFFER , Kearney
State College
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Note
1. Rudolph Umland, Just Take Her Word for Some of It, review in Kansas City Times, July 8, 1966.
Primary Sources ( in chronological order) 1. Non-fiction Old Jules. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962. This and the following five books comprise Sandozs Great Plain Series, her major historical work. Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1942. Cheyenne Autumn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953. The Buffalo Hunters. New York: Hastings House, 1954; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. The Cattlemen: From the Rio Grande Across the Far Marias. New York: Hastings House, 1958; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. The Beaver Men, Spearheads of Empire. New York: Hastings House, 1964; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. These Were the Sioux. New York: Hastings House, 1961; New York: Dell, 1971. Love Song to the Plains. Harper & Row State Series. New York: Harper & Row, 1961; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971. The Battle of the Little Bighorn. Lippincott Major Battle Series. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. 2. Fiction Slogum House. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. An allegorical novel. Capital City. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939. An allegorical novel. The Tom-Walker. New York: Dial Press, 1947. An allegorical novel. Miss Morissa: Doctor of the Gold Trail. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. The Horsecatcher. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957. For young adults. Son of the Gamblin Man: The Youth of an Artist. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1960; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976. The Story Catcher. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963. For young adults.
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3. Essays The Kinkaider Comes and Goes: Memories of an Adventurous Childhood in the Sandhills of Nebraska. North American Review 229 (April, May 1930):43142, 57683. The New Frontier Woman. Country Gentleman, Sept. 1936, p. 49. There Were Two Sitting Bulls. Blue Book, Nov. 1949, pp. 5864. The Look of the West1854. Nebraska History 35 (Dec. 1954):24354. Nebraska. Holiday, May 1956, pp. 10314. Outpost in New York. Prairie Schooner 37 (Summer 1963):95106. Introduction to George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. New York: Cooper Square, 1962. Introduction to Amos Bad Heart Bull and Helen Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. 4. Collections of Short Writings Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings of Mari Sandoz. Edited by Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959 and 1976. Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections. Edited by Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Biography and Criticism Clark, LaVerne Harrell. Revisiting the Plains Indian Country of Mari Sandoz. Marvin, South Dakota: The Blue Cloud Quarterly, 1977. A small book containing personal remarks, quotes from Sandozs books, and photographs of the sandhills. Doher, Pam. The Idioms and Figures of Cheyenne Autumn. Platte Valley Review 5 (April 1977): 11930. Looks at Sandozs use of language. Greenwell, Scott. Fascists in Fiction: Two Early Novels of Mari Sandoz. Western American Literature 12 (August 1977):13343. Examines the political implications in Slogum House and Capital City. MacCampbell, Donald. Mari Sandoz Discusses Writing. The Writer (November 1935):40506. . Flair Personified: Mari Sandoz. Flair 1 (June 1950):6669. Personal recollections of Sandoz. Morton, Beatrice K. A Critical Appraisal of Mari Sandoz Miss Morissa: Modern Woman on the Western Frontier. Heritage of Kansas: A Journal of the Great Plains 10 (Fall 1977):3745. Applies feminist criticism in her evaluation of Sandozs woman doctor. Nicoll, Bruce H. Mari Sandoz: Nebraska Loner. American West 2 (Spring 1965):3236. Personal recollections. Pifer, Caroline. Making of an Author: From the Mementoes of Mari Sandoz. Gordon, Nebraska: Gordon Journal Press, 1972.
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A Literary History of the American West . Making of an Author, 19291930 (Vol. II). Crawford, Nebraska: Cottonwood Press, 1982. These volumes, by Sandozs sister, are based on family recollections and the authors letters. Rippey, Barbara. Toward a New Paradigm: Mari Sandozs Study of Red and White Myth in Cheyenne Autumn. In Women and Western American Literature, edited by Helen Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski, pp. 24766. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Press, 1982. Stauffer, Helen Winter. Mari Sandoz and the University of Nebraska. Prairie Schooner 55 (Spring 1981):25362. Contains personal recollections of the author. . Mari Sandoz Story Catcher of the Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. The first full length biography of Sandoz. . Two Authors and a Hero: Neihardt, Sandoz, and Crazy Horse. Great Plains Quarterly 1 (Jan. 1981):5466. Discusses Sandozs debt to John Neihardt in her characterization of Crazy Horse. Whitaker, Rosemary. An Examination of Violence as Theme in Old Jules and Slogum House. Western American Literature 16 (Fall 1981):21724. Bibliography Whitaker, Rosemary, and Myra Jo Moon. A Bibliography of Works by and about Mari Sandoz. Bulletin of Bibliography 38 (June 1981):8291. Unpublished Studies of Sandoz McDonald, Judith. Antaeus of the Running Water: A Biographical Study of the Western Nebraska Years of Mari Sandoz, 18961922. Research paper, University of Denver, 1972. . Mari Sandoz: An Educational History. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1980. Explores Sandozs lifelong interest in teaching and education. Mattern, Claire. Mari Sandoz: Her Use of Allegory in Slogum House. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1981. Postulates that H. L. Mencken influenced Sandozs use of Nietzsches theories in that book. Overing, Robert. Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz: Differing Viewpoints of the Early West. M.S. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1971. Walton, Kathleen ODonnell. Mari Sandoz: An Initial Critical Appraisal. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1970. A fine overview of the entire oeuvre. Young, Marguerite. An Afternoon with Mari Sandoz. Unpublished manuscript in the University of Nebraska Archives, ca. 1949. Written from the point of view of a fellow author.
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Wright Morris
RIGHT MORRIS was born in Central City, Nebraska, on January 6, 1910, and although he left the state at fourteen and has since lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and even Venice, he is firmly identified with Nebraska. During a career beginning in 1940, he has published some thirty volumes, including novels, stories, literary and social criticism, and books combining his own photos and text. Almost everything about his career involves paradox and seeming contradiction. Although Morris has been called one of the most original contemporary American authors and although he won the National Book Award for The Field of Vision (1956) and received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Western Literature Association in 1979, he is still widely unread, and the number of critical studies of his work is small. In an age when the publication of academic criticism is a flourishing cottage industry, this neglect is almost as much a phenomenon as the works themselves. It may be accounted for by several of the other paradoxes which give Morriss works their distinctive character and their originality. John Aldridge has speculated that Morris has not received the attention he deserves because of his unfashionable subject, especially his concern with the milieu of the plains. Indeed, his work is unfashionable in more than just its setting. At a time when serious fiction is what is deemed serious by an academic and critical establishment located in New York and the great universities, Wright Morris is the poet laureate of middle America. It is hard to think of another contemporary novelist who writes about middle class characters in the way he doesthat is, with compassion and without condescension, with a clear eye for their shortcomings and yet without creating the feeling, present in a Kurt Vonnegut or Philip Roth, that the reader is on one side and the middle American is on the other. Morris is also the leading chronicler of the average, the uneventful, undramatic, middle-of-the-road quotidian in our national experience. This picture makes Morris sound a little like a prose Norman Rockwell. In an essay on Rockwell in The Territory Ahead (1958), however, Morris attacked the painters exploitation of his audiences sentimental nostalgia for a clich American innocence existing only in the popular imagination, and Morriss fiction often seems to offer a deliberate corrective to Rockwells sentiment, exposing the emotional blight, the desperation at the futility of
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the American dream which lurks behind American clichs. There is also an element of the grotesque in Morriss perception of life, evident for instance in Paul Kahler, the psychotic transvestite of The Field of Vision, and in the silent, perhaps retarded Blanche of Plains Song (1980), whose complexion is so translucent that she looks as if she might glow if a lighted candle could be placed in her mouth. Yet Morris and Rockwell do focus on some of the same areas of American life. This accounts for the charge which has occasionally been made that the types of characters Morris creates are not interesting. It is more accurate to say that they are not sophisticated and thus do not interest a critical audience which prides itself on its sophistication. Even Morriss artist figures, like Webb of The Deep Sleep (1953) or Boyd of The Field of Vision, are small town boys at heart. In Love Among the Cannibals (1957), the subject is sexual liberation in a corrupt, urban present epitomized by Hollywood, but one need only think of what a novelist like Norman Mailer has made of the same material to feel that the writer Horters hard-boiled worldliness is an impersonation. The paradox is that Morriss mature novels are too sophisticated in another sense to appeal to Rockwells popular audience. While the fiction of a Thomas Pynchon or a John Hawkes proclaims its difficulty from the opening page, Morriss apparent simplicity obscures the fact that the satisfactions his work offers are rarely immediate but arise out of sustained study and reflection. The perceptions about life which his novels dramatize are elaborate, subtle, and often abstruse, and his technique can also be complicated. Although Morris has discouraged readers from trying to interpret his novels as symbolic, he has admitted that when the writing is good everything is symbolic, in the sense of being suffused with meaning and integrated into the works overall design. A character, an episode, or a detail from one of his novels will frequently have a range of implication far beyond its immediate meaning and function. His use of the Nebraska setting is a telling instance. Probably no American writer has evoked the plains as a physical locale any more beautifully than Morris has done in such books as The Works of Love (1952) or Fire Sermon (1971), but as David Madden has pointed out, Morris also exploits all of the historical and geographical suggestiveness of the plains. They embody opposing poles of American culture and character, marking the meeting point of East and West, realism and idealism, agrarian novel and western romance. In the nineteenth century, the pioneer projected on the plains his vision of American promise; in the twentieth, they became the wasteland where the dream turned to dust. On a metaphysical level, their empty expanses suggest the void of reality before it has been processed and given shape by the consciousness of the perceiver. Although Morriss early experiments in combining photos and text especially his photo-text narrative about rural Nebraska, The Home Place 778
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(1948)have given weight to the impression that he is a local colorist, his ability to generalize from particular instances, an ability illustrated by his treatment of the plains, insures his best writing against imputations of parochialism. Morris is doing more than recording the look and manners of any particular place. In his fiction, forms of behavior which might seem indigenous to the American West are revealed as expressions of more universal American and human impulses. For instance, the title character of My Uncle Dudley (1942) is a thirties version of the cowboy, but the impulse which inspires Dudleys western style of heroism is also discernible in various of Morriss non-western heroes, such as Virgil Ormsby of Man and Boy (1951) and Charles Lawrence of The Huge Season (1954). The analysis of American life and literature which often emerges in Morriss novels through characters such as these has the same precise and particular meaning and offers many of the same judgments found in his expository writing (especially The Territory Ahead and A Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods [1968]) and in critical studies by other writers. His novels of the fifties, for instance, anticipate some of the ideas in Leslie Fiedlers Love and Death in the American Novel. In the series of books from Man and Boy to In Orbit (1967) especially, Morriss cultural observations are not secondary to the personal drama of his characters or merely tacked on to the narrative. Rather, they are the very stuff and focus of the narrative: character, episode, structure, and image are selected for their ability to suggest these observations as well as for plausibility and dramatic appeal. As a result, part of the pleasure in reading Morris comes from recognizing how the action and detail of the fiction work to dramatize his analysis of American culture. Allusions (especially, but not exclusively, literary allusions) play a large part in this dramatization. For instance, in The Field of Vision, the reference to Boyds piece of Ty Cobbs pocket as the portable raft on which he [Boyd] floated, anchored to his childhood connects him with Huck Finn and identifies his audacity in grabbing the pocket with the American males urge (also manifested in the cowboy figure) to escape from civilized life embodied in marriage and the family into some form of rugged male individualism. In addition, Morriss allusions are not merely verbal echoes, but also govern his choice of structure, character detail, and episode. The bullfight in The Field of Vision alludes to Hemingways treatment of the macho ethic, and the pattern of success and failure in Boyds career alludes to American writers like Wolfe who succeeded in early books and failed later. These remarks illustrate that Morris is a more intellectually demanding writer than it may first appear, and indeed many of his books are concerned with issues of epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphysics as well as American culture. In the thirties and forties, his interest in photography (he received 779
Guggenheim Fellowships in 1942 and 1946 for work in this medium) brought home to him the opposition between the operation of time evident in the decay of Nebraska artifacts around him and the suspension of time in his snapshots of these artifacts. Photos also helped to dramatize differences between what the eye of man and the eye of the camera see and between facts as they exist in the world and the fictions they become in mans imagination. The failures of Morriss first two novels helped to turn him toward related questions of how the art and life of the past affect mans present perceptions and why originality is necessary in art. As set forth in The Territory Ahead, About Fiction (1975), and other writings, Morriss mature views of these subjects are typical of the romantic tradition. Although reality has an objective, time-bound existence apart from human perceptions of it, man cannot know this reality directly, only the vision of it he has in his consciousness. Vision is inevitably shaped by the imagination of the individual, which is influenced in turn by the art of the past. Art presents the vision of the artist in the tangible form of an image. Some images may contain greater imaginative distortion; some, greater reality. But even the most realistic image, even the photograph which appears to capture reality itself, actually supplies what Morris, borrowing from Wittgenstein, calls a model of reality. By giving man his model of reality, art in a sense creates the world in which he perceives himself to live. Morriss insistence on originality in art is also typically romantic: the world is in a state of becoming; art must be dynamic, must be constantly making mans vision of the world anew, because only dynamic vision is true to the dynamic character of life. The idea of a dynamic universe is implicit in Morriss work from the first, but beginning with The Huge Season, he connects it explicitly with a creative evolution taking place in nature, of which man is one expression. Mans evolutionary role is creative in two sensesfirst in the existential sense that, as a being living in time, he makes active choices (and, because they are unpredictable, free choices) in the present and in so doing helps determine the shape of the future, and second in the romantic sense that his consciousness is constantly expanding to create new imaginative possibilities. This dual creativity gives rise to another paradox: as a product of creative evolution, man himself is very much a part of material nature and inescapably subject to time and change, but mans creative acts, like a snapshot or any work of art, achieve a timeless, transcendental status. They are, in one of Morriss favorite phrases, out of this world. What he writes about Jubal, of In Orbit, is true of man as a whole: The supernatural is his natural way of life.
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As with his views on America, Morriss aesthetic views are not just assumptions underlying his work but often explicit themes worked out through the action of the novels. Books like The Man who Was There (1945), The Field of V ision, What a Way to Go (1962), and The Fork River Space Project (1977) are as much about the nature of art and vision, and have the same high degree of self-consciousness, as John Barths Chimera, John Hawkess The Lime Twig, or Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita, and in some ways Morris has a closer affinity with such authors than with more conventional realists like Saul Bellow or William Styron. This affinity has not been widely recognized because his work is representational and because he is dedicated to the vernacular as the dominant language of American fiction. In About Fiction, in Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments (1978), and elsewhere, Morris has described how the vernacular traditionthe use of lifelike spoken English originating with Twain and stretching through the work of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Faulknerinspired in the reader the damaging misconceptions that fiction provides the facts themselves and that plain talk and plain facts are enough. By their nature, four-letter words can reveal (and thus encourage an exclusive preoccupation with) only the crudest truths, with the consequent loss of the subtle distinctions and enlarged consciousness found in Twains great contemporary, Henry James. In this way, Morris says, . . . the language itself has taken precedence over the complexities of experience the language is supposed to deal with. Morriss fictional aim is to enlarge the rhetorical possibilities of Twains vernacular to the point that it can accommodate the fine distinctions and dedication to implication over bald statement found in James, as well as the philosophical interests of Morris himself. Like James, Morris registers the private tremors of consciousness, tremors set off in Morris by the public events and personal traumas of postwar America. The reader is thus confronted with another of the paradoxes which have made it so hard for Morriss fiction to find its audience. Honed by his work with photography, the authors eye for the palpable factfor the object which evokes place, the custom which reveals ethos, the gesture which delineates character is impressively sharp, but the central focus of his best prose is often on nuances of consciousness almost too elusive, too fine, to put into words. If Morriss photos seem to offer an image of the material subject, it is, as he said of James, the im material we find in his books. Morriss method for capturing the immaterial involves a deliberate reticence about the subjects the fiction deals with and the way they are dealt with. Given the preoccupations of the age, his work is distinguished as much by what it leaves out as by what it brings in. In a revealing essay,
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Privacy as a Subject for Photography, Morris has written, If I once believed that there could be no peace until everything had been said, I now seem to believe that such talk would make peace impossible; that the important things are those that remain unsaid; that the problems of art are concerned with how we hint at them. One result of this desire to hint at truths is a language that is tentative and hedging. Another result is suggested in the same essay when Morris recounts how he rejected one photo of a rural Nebraska bedroom because a chamber pot under the bed spoke too shrilly to the viewer. The chamber pot represented an indisputable fact of rural life, but the modern eye, conditioned by the passion for plain seeing, for plain speaking, would seize on this stark fact and miss other subtler meanings the room might convey. Twenty Morris novels have been devoted to suggesting the more general ambience and less material realities. In The Territory Ahead, Morris attributed the tendency of our native authors to write promising first books and disappointing later ones to a peculiarly American lack of consciousness about what they were doing: having relied on unschooled intuition for success, they did not understand what produced their success once it came and thus could not duplicate it. In contrast, Morriss work shows a sustained improvement made possible by a growing self-consciousness about what he is doing. Elements used instinctively in early books are later employed with a conscious purpose; values and behavior espoused early are later held up for critical appraisal and their shortcomings demonstrated; allusion becomes more prominent and relevant, structure and image more elaborate and functional, style more controlled, and theme more carefully focused. It is not too much to say that such works as The Huge Season and The Field of Vision are, among other things, directly concerned with why earlier works like My Uncle Dudley and The Man Who Was There failed. Writing did not come easily for Morris. He labored eight years before his first novel, My Uncle Dudley, was published, and even so it contains elementary lapses in the handling of theme and structure. Centering on a car trip across the Southwest from California to Arkansas, the novel portrays Dudleys egalitarianism, individualism, and spontaneous wit as the qualities of one who lives in the present, but his final act in the novel, spitting in the eye of a brutal policeman, is a comic rendition of the western shootout and more appropriate to the past. In addition, the episodes of the journey seem randomly strung together, and the climactic jail scene is not integrated into the novel. The Man Who Was There consists of three novellas centering on the artist-turned-soldier Agee Ward and introduces some major Morris themes. The hero Ward, physically absent in Books One and Three, is nevertheless there in the effect he has upon the imagination of his landlady and a boyhood friend, in whom his creative qualities are sym782
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bolically reborn. The autobiographical Book Two describes Wards earlier return to his roots in Nebraska, where he found that creative traits of his ancestors were perpetuated in him. As in his subsequent novels, Morris distinguishes two types of creative powerthe power to give physical life, identified with females, and the power to imagine, identified with males. He admitted later in The Territory Ahead that this novel and My Uncle Dudley (which also contained autobiographical elements) failed because he was so fascinated with his own past as sheer experience that he could not work out its significance. From such failures grew Morriss dissatisfaction with the past as a model for action and his distrust of nostalgia. The artist, he decided, needs a distanced perspective on the past, one that will dispel its enchantment and allow him to discover its meaning: the man on the street also needs such a perspective so that he can live in the present. Initially the products of a nostalgic desire to preserve the past, Morriss first two photo-text books ultimately help him to achieve such a distancing. The Inhabitants (1946) combines photos of buildings from all over the United States with two texts-a continuous meditation on what it means to be an American and a series of separate vignettes of American life. The Home Place combines photos of rural Nebraska with an autobiographical novella about an authors return to his ancestral farm. This second book records, in the person of the hero Clyde Muncy, Morriss own dawning recognition that the protestant virtues of the pioneersabstinence, frugality, and independencewere achieved at the sacrifice of pleasure and feeling and are of diminished value in a land tamed by progress. In The World in the Attic (1949), a sequel to The Home Place from which photos were dropped, Muncys nostalgia turns to home town nausea as he discovers that the pioneer past has engendered the culturally and emotionally sterile small town of the late forties. In his next three novels, Morris begins to examine the destructive effects of the past. In Man and Boy, the Ormsbys represent the sort of marriage produced by the protestant ethic. Capitalizing on a false air of moral purity which this ethic grants to the female, Mrs. Ormsby dominates her weak-kneed husband, who has not developed pioneer hardihood because it is not needed in the modern world. The male Ormsby with courage has been the rebellious son Virgil, killed in combat with the Japanese. Virgils career as hunter and man with a gun places him in a long line of American heroes, including Natty Bumppo, Robert Jordan, and Dudley, but Morris implies that such heroes are really more like Huck on the run from Aunt Sally, little boys who duck the less glamorous but more mature demands of settled family life. Their heroics, in evading commitment to daily life, lead to war and death. The Works of Love traces an analogous evasion of commitment by Will 783
Brady, a kind of American everyman loosely based on Morriss father. Because of the protestant clich of the pure woman, Brady cannot satisfy both spiritual and sexual needs in a single relationship. During his life, his modes of love become more and more impersonalprogressing from sexual love for several women, to platonic love for his adopted son, to a mystic love for all mankind. But mystic love proves impossible in this material world. Brady drowns trying to embrace an abstraction, the abstraction humanity, symbolized by the stench of sewage from the Chicago River. His fate is ambiguous. From a realistic point of view, he fails in all his relations with particular human beings and dies reaching for a love which requires that he transcend his world. This yearning for transcendence is a cosmic version of Virgils destructive evasion of commitment. On the other hand, in the course of his failure, the unsophisticated Brady acquires remarkable insight into the human heart. The Deep Sleep recasts many of the same materials of Man and Boy, abandoning the comic tone of the earlier book for a more serious tone and employing five centers of narrative consciousness instead of two. The novel moves from one characters perspective on the action to anothers, returning to each several times. The focus of interest, the Porter marriage, has been shaped by the same protestant attitudes found in Man and Boy, and shaped in similar ways, but the new structure in The Deep Sleep makes for an enormous increase in the complexities of judgment possible for Morris and in the richness of the drama. He was to employ the same structure in several of his best novels. (The novel War Games, published in 1971 but written in 195152, examines subjective consciousness as a theme. The treatment is tentative, which probably accounts for the delayed publication, but War Games sharpened the authors thinking about consciousness.) The Huge Season turns away from love as a subject back toward the nature of American heroism and the effect of heroics on the imaginations of those who witness them. The disastrous personal and aesthetic results of trying to repeat a heroic gesture from the past are also portrayed. Charles Lawrences romantic fatalism, typical of the disillusioned twenties, expresses the inevitable disenchantment which results when the desire for the impossible fulfillment promised by the American dream runs up against the facts of finite existence. Like Bradys mystic love, Lawrences habit of perfection leads him out of this imperfect world to suicide, and his heroic gestures, symbolic of the spell which the art and life of the 1920s threw over subsequent decades, cripple his witnesses, who try unsuccessfully to continue his heroism into the 1950s. Morris also uses the novel to attack the faith in technological progress as a destructive manifestation of the Ameri-
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can dream. Both technology and Lawrences example are unfavorably contrasted with creative evolution (that is, growth in the realm of the possible) as a successful mode of life. The Field of Vision is a virtual compendium of Morris subjectsheroism, vision, the nature of the creative act, married love in America, the effects of the pioneer myth, creative evolution, the heros relation to his witnesses, the natural and the supernatural, and more. The five characters who serve as centers of consciousness all attend the same bullfight; but, with varying degrees of distortion, each projects his own vision of reality upon events. The focus, then, is on the inner counterpoint of memory, fantasy, and perception. McKee, one of the best portraits of the average American in fiction, is a conventional success, but his memories are dominated by his fiftyyear friendship with the failed artist and one-time bad boy, Gordon Boyd, without whom McKees past would be drab and colorless. In these two, Morris dissects our public faith in material success, our private romance with hopeless and doomed Gatsbys. Lois is the protestant female, once almost liberated from ice-bound prudishness by Boyd but forty years the wife of McKee. Her father, Tom Scanlon, illustrates once again that the fascination with a mythic western past is an evasion of reality and a refusal to engage the present. The psychiatrist Lehmann achieves such engagement by using the past as a guide to enlarged understanding rather than being trapped in it, by remaining in a state of becoming, and by retaining the link with physical nature and the evolutionary past denied by his patient Paul. In The Field of Vision, the halting, unsure Morris of the early books has disappeared; he achieves final clarity about what he has to say and full control of the technical means to say it. The Field of Vision offers a theoretical analysis of immanence or creative living in the present with ones finitude. It entails recognition of ones part in creative evolution, commitment to the possible, an existential acceptance of the responsibility for choosing ones essence in a contingent world, and rejection of outworn patterns from the past. The Greek, in Love Among the Cannibals, personifies a state of immanence; her spontaneous sexuality confirms her tie to biological forces and makes her a carrier of physical life. Her reliance on instinct in responding to others constitutes a democracy of soul first evident in Dudley and characteristically American. Morris credits the Greek with an authenticity not found in the artificial, imaginatively sterile present of Hollywood and uses her behavior as a metaphor for art which is genuinely creative and free of the clichs of contemporary culture. Ceremony in Lone Tree reexamines Boyd, Scanlon, and the McKees in
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light of the Greeks organic spontaneity (here embodied in Loiss niece Etoile). The novel makes Morriss steadily darkening view of the impulse motivating the cowboy figure strikingly apparent. He depicts it as deriving from childish fears of adult sexual relationships and resulting in murderous violence by boy-men like Lee Roy Momeyer, Calvin McKee, or mass murderer Charles Starkweather, who inspired the novel. When threatened by female civilization, the historical cowboy and hunter could get away to the territory, but deprived of wilderness, these contemporary neurotics can only explode in violence. Five years later Morris was inspired by the Kennedy assassination to look at violence again: in One Day, he sees a more metaphysical frustration (at time, chance, death, and finitude) as the source of the impulse to get away. The two novels, among Morriss best, are companion piecesthe first analyzing the influences from the past which cause failure of feeling and violence, and the second the influences from the present. The gathering gloom of Ceremony in Lone Tree and One Day is dispelled in a trio of works in which Morris accepts lifes terrible limitations and affirms the joy and majesty of being in the face of them. The comic novella In Orbit focuses on the ambiguous creative and destructive forces at work in a culture and a world ruled by time and process. Jubal Gainer is an archetype reflecting a range of American heroic figures from cowboy to astronaut. He speeds through a universe ruled by the random conjunction of material forces, epitomized by a tornado, but the element of motion aligns him with time and turns his flight into existential engagement with the present. Morriss positive interpretation of Jubals urge to get away is in keeping with the books concluding affirmation of life in all its tormenting contraries. The theme of resignation to life as process is more movingly developed in two of Morriss finest worksthe novella Fire Sermon and its sequel A Life (1973). The protagonist Floyd Warner is another Dudley figure, but this time his trek from the West Coast across the plains is not a Huck Finn adventure of escape from a corrupt modern California, although Warner initially intends it to be. Rather, the journey brings home to him the individuals subjection to time, change, and death, to the transpersonal forces of the living cosmos. Warners eventual resignation to these forces makes his death seem like the fulfillment of life, not (like Bradys death) the frustration of it. It is not an end but an apotheosis, Warners merging with the everlasting cosmos and his achievement of final transcendental insight. Two late critical books illustrate Morriss preoccupation with the effects of voice, particularly the vernacular, on fiction. Although About Fiction presents a strong case for a fiction which takes its inspiration from objective reality, the concluding essay of Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments (on Hieronymous Bosch) reaffirms that art is after all vision and the most bizarre
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visions will seem real if the artists craft is equal to his task. The limitless potentialities of vision form the central theme of The Fork River Space Project, where the possibility of a U.F.O.s landing on the prairie alters the consciousness of all who entertain that possibility, even though it may have no basis in fact. While The Fork River Space Project uses the prairie as a setting for a timeless, unearthly vision, Plains Song deals with the other pole of Morriss interestphysical life in time and on earth. Although Cora Atkinss pioneer existence on a Nebraska farm has the austerity Morris first criticized in The World in the Attic, the thrust of the novel is to show how inadequate and reductive are the judgments passed on Coras life by her granddaughter, whose pragmatic materialism leads her to equate value with use. Coras life has the sense captured in Morriss photographs that what is homely and crude can be at the same time richly moving; to paraphrase About Fiction, in Plains Song the commonplace is made uncommon. Morriss affinity with Twain is once more illustrated by Wills Boy (1981), an autobiographical memoir about his childhood and adolescence, but by adopting a matter-of-fact tone and crowding a highly eventful narrative into a relatively small space, Morris seeks to avoid the obvious sentimentalizing of boyhood found in Twain. The effect is that Morris wants to get the facts about his youth (a portion of his life highly significant to his fiction) on the record once and for all. Plains Song illustrates once more Wright Morriss sympathetic treatment of middle American types, and his ability to find meaning and worth in the most unpromising lives. That these and other unusual gifts have still not won for Morris the wide audience he deserves is finally attributable to the fact that he does not fit into any convenient category. He is both traditional and original, a chronicler of the commonplace and the bizarre, the material and the immaterial. He is a local colorist at home in a meta, physical landscape of ideas, a realist fascinated by the fictive and by characters who live a dream, a poet of the American backwaters immersed in the main currents of contemporary consciousness. Fittingly, Morriss recent, almost complementary novelsThe Fork River Space Project and Plains Songoffer final examples of his paradoxical concern with both the supernatural and the natural, and demonstrate again why he eludes categorization.
G. B. CRUMP , Central
Missouri State University
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Primary Sources 1. Books About Fiction: Reverent Reflections on the Nature of Fiction with Irreverent Observations on Writers, Readers, & Other Abuses. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. A Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods. New York. New American Library, 1968. The Cats Meow. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975. Cause for Wonder. New York: Atheneum, 1963. Ceremony in Lone Tree. New York: Atheneum, 1960. A Cloak of Light. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. The Deep Sleep. New York: Scribners, 1953. Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments: American Writers as Image-Makers. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. The Field of Vision. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956. Fire Sermon. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. The Fork River Space Project. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Gods Country and My People. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Green Grass, Blue Sky, White House. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1970. Here Is Einbaum. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1973. The Home Place. New York: Scribners, 1948. The Huge Season. New York: Viking, 1954. In Orbit. New York: New American Library, 1967. The Inhabitants. New York: Scribners, 1946. A Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Love Affair: A Venetian Journal. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Love Among the Cannibals. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957. Man and Boy. New York: Knopf, 1951. The Man Who Was There. New York: Scribners, 1945. My Uncle Dudley. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. One Day. New York: Atheneum, 1965. Picture America. New York: New York Graphic Society, 1982. Plains Song: For Female Voices. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Real Losses, Imaginary Gains. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe, 193334. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. The Territory Ahead. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958. War Games. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1972. What a Way to Go. New York: Atheneum, 1962. Wills Boy. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. The Works of Love. New York: Knopf, 1952. The World in the Attic. New York: Scribners, 1949.
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2. Selected Essays Letter to a Young Critic. The Massachusetts Review 6 (AutumnWinter 1965): 93100. The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet. The Kenyon Review 27 (Autumn 1965): 72737. Made in U.S.A. The American Scholar 29 (Autumn 1960): 48394. National Book Award Address, March 12, 1957. Critique 4 (Winter 196162): 7275. Nature Since Darwin. Esquire, Nov. 1959, pp. 6470. One Day: November 22, 1963November 22, 1967. In Afterwords, edited by Thomas McCormack, pp. 1027. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. The Origin of a Species, 19421957. The Massachusetts Review 7 (Winter 1966): 12135. Privacy as a Subject for Photography. Magazine of Art, Feb. 1951, pp. 5155. Where the West Begins. Prairie Schooner 54 (Summer 1980): 514. Secondary Sources Baumbach, Jonathan. Wake Before Bomb: Ceremony in Lone Tree. Critique 4 (Winter 196162): 5671. This essay offers a close reading of Ceremony in Lone Tree, especially focusing on Morriss treatment of sexual frustration in the novel. In Baumbachs account, Morriss fiction is more concerned with concrete social phenomena than the conflict of temporal and timeless worlds. Bleufarb, Sam. Point of View: An Interview with Wright Morris, July 1958. Accent 19 (Winter 1959): 3446. This wide-ranging interview contains valuable comments by Morris on his themes, his influences, his individual works, and the overall shape of his career. Booth, Wayne C. The Two Worlds in the Fiction of Wright Morris. The Sewanee Review 65 (Summer 1957): 37599. This very significant early essay distinguishes two worlds in Morriss fictionthe temporal world of everyday reality and a platonic world which is timeless and more real. Morriss heroes try to build a bridge from the temporal to the timeless using heroism, imagination, or love. This essay especially influenced Madden, Klein, and Crump. Carabine, Keith. Some Observations on Wright Morriss Treatment of My Kind of People, Self-sufficient, Self-deprived, Self-unknowing. MidAmerica VIII: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (1981): 11534. Carabine argues that Morriss command of the vernacular style and of voice makes possible the characteristic mixture of sympathy and ironic detachment with which he treats his middle American characters. To illustrate his thesis, Carabine analyzes the style of several passages dealing with the father figure and with Bud Momeyer, of Ceremony in Lone Tree. Crump, G. B. The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. Crump traces Morriss career through A Life, distinguishing between immanent and transcendent heroes and between the still point and open road structures in some of the novels. Crump ties the
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A Literary History of the American West theme of nostalgia in Morris to heroes who try to escape from time, and further argues that, even in his early novels, Morris wanted to discover a style of heroism which remains in time and engages the real world, rather than a style of heroism which attains a platonic timelessness. Howard, Leon. Wright Morris. Univ. of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, no. 69. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968. Howard, a former teacher of Morriss, traces his works through A Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods. Howard examines Morriss view of man as fallen, especially in his relations with women, and his comedy, while giving an overview of his career. This is an excellent brief introduction to Morris. Hunt, John W., Jr. The Journey Back: The Early Novels of Wright Morris. Critique 5 (SpringSummer 1962): 4160. Hunt analyzes the novels through The World in the Attic, focusing especially on how Morris, in these early novels, seeks a sense of connection with his past. His characters try to recover meaning from the past by transforming it and thus making it available in the present. Klein, Marcus. Wright Morris: The American Territory. In his After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century, pp. 196246. Cleveland: World Publishers, 1964. Klein surveys Morriss novels through Cause for Wonder. He argues that Morriss fiction up to The Works of Love embodied a quest for a kind of platonic reality. In The Works of Love, Morris finally learned that the logical end of such a quest was death. In subsequent novels Morris abandons his quest and turns to accommodation to the nature of things, as manifested in the multiple pointof-view technique and the theme of sexual vitalism. Knoll, Robert E., ed. Conversations with Wright Morris: Critical Views and Responses. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. This collection contains essays by John W. Aldridge on the general qualities of Morriss works, by Wayne C. Booth on The Works of Love, and by Peter C. Bunnell on Morriss photographs. It also contains a primary and secondary bibliography on Morris through 1975, four interviews with Morris, and one essay by Morris on the roles of memory and imagination in his work. This is a very useful collection. Madden, David. The Great Plains in the Novels of Wright Morris. Critique 4 (Winter 196162): 523. This essay examines the depiction of the plains in Morriss novels as the meeting point of realistic and romantic aspects of the American temperament. The plains locale is also a source of mystical creative power for the hero. . The Hero and the Witness in Wright Morris Field of Vision. Prairie Schooner 34 (Fall 1960): 26378. This important early essay argues that Morriss works are focused on a relationship between a hero who reaches out of this world through audacity, improvisation, and transformation and witnesses who are enthralled and liberated by the heros example. . Wright Morris. Twayne United States Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1964. This book surveys all the novels through Cause for Wonder, incorporating the concepts from Maddens essays on the hero-witness relationship and the plains. There are also general chapters on Morriss character types and his narrative technique, and some attention is given to Morriss debt to Henry
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James. This is still one of the best works on Morris. . Wright Morris In Orbit: An Unbroken Series of Poetic Gestures. Critique 10 (Fall 1968): 10219. Madden analyzes the tissue of images in In Orbit, finally focusing on the central image of the tornado which embodies the typical impulses of American culture. Like the tornado, our culture is in unpredictable motion and exists only in the present. Miller, Ralph N. The Fiction of Wright Morris: The Sense of Ending. MidAmerica III: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (1976): 5676. Miller argues that Morriss novels display a sense of entropy, a fascination with death and a general stress on the ends of things. His novels also focus so much on needlessly complicated form and on idea that a feeling for characters as people is lost, and the endings of the novels are inconclusive. Though generally critical, this essay is valuable in being highly thoughtprovoking. Neinstein, Raymond L. Wright Morris: The Metaphysics of Home. Prairie Schooner 53 (Summer 1979): 12154. The essay argues that Morris is a neoregionalist who has used the plains setting to dramatize the various ways Americans have felt about home. Morris moves from associating the plains with destructive nostalgia to associating them with a consciousness that embodies the values of the past. The essay is especially good on the tension between photos and text in the early photo-text books and on Warners development in A Life. Pfeil, Fred. Querencias, and a Lot Else: An Interview with Wright Morris. Place 3 (June 1973): 5363. In this interview Morris comments on the sense of place in his photographs and his fiction and provides some biographical information about his early years. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Craft of Vision. Critique 4 (Winter 196162): 4155. Trachtenberg traces the gradual development of Morriss fictional technique, showing how his experiments with photos and text influenced his narrative point of view, especially his use of multiple narrators in The Field of Vision. Waterman, Arthur E. The Novels of Wright Morris: An Escape from Nostalgia. Critique 4 (Winter 196162): 2440. Watermans essay is the standard treatment of the theme of nostalgia in Morriss novels through Ceremony in Lone Tree. For Waterman, as for some other critics, the crippling effects of nostalgia for a personal past or collective pioneer past is the major theme in Morris, and his career chronicles his own gradual liberation from the spell of his Nebraska boyhood. Wydeven, Joseph J. Consciousness Refracted: Photography and the Imagination in the Works of Wright Morris. MidAmerica VIII: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (1981): 92114. Wydeven examines several Morris photographs from the perspective of three conceptual categories the thing itself, the photograph as equivalent of emotion, and metaphotographytracing the history of the categories among American photographers. Much remains to be done with Morriss photography, but this essay is a good start.
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as a young man on a farm in northwestern Iowa, remembers pausing in his reading of O. E. Rlvaags Giants in the Earth to look up across the rolling farm land and realize that the novel he was reading was about his placethat he lived in an area worthy of literary interpretation. In that special moment of revelation, Manfred would say that the place chose him to write for it, not that he chose his lifetime subject. In being loyal to that moment and that charge from the land, Manfred, when he began writing, resolved that every book he wrote would touch his native region in some way. He named his territory Siouxland, that area where Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska join. In his novels the action moves out from that focus to the Rocky Mountains, to the Northwest Angle on the Minnesota-Canadian border, to Michigan and New York, and to the southern borders of Iowa and Nebraska, but always the tie to Siouxland is clearly made. Frederick Manfred senses that he was chosen to be a prairie watchman for the land he loves. He has sought to personalize his tie to the land not only by making his home in Luverne, Minnesota, just a few miles north of his birth place in Doon, Iowa, but also by anchoring his first home there to the solid rock of the Blue Mounds. The Sioux quartzite that makes up the Mounds is three and a half billion years old, geologists have told Manfred, part of a huge mountain range taller than Mt. Everest that ran from Mitchell, South Dakota, to Mankato, Minnesota. As a boy, Manfred had been fascinated with the Mounds and had sensed that they had for him a special significance. Years later, when his friend Frank Waters, the novelist, was walking with Manfred over his land, Frank became silent and after a bit said, Fred, youve built your house on a sacred place. . . . Dont offend it. For Manfred, offending that place would be like offending his primate nature, which he views with reverence and likes to call the Old Lizard. As the primordial mountain range was worn down by glaciers, wind, and time, so one might say our primate natures have been worn away by civilization, worn away but still there as the quartzite is. The Old Primate still hangs around in us, Manfred says. If you get him on your side as a writer, youve got it. The Old Lizard and Manfred are on good terms, for some of his most significant work has been devoted to interpreting the natural life-style of
REDERICK MANFRED,
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plains Indians, particularly in his Buckskin Man Tales and in The Manly Hearted Woman (1975). The Buckskin Man Tales, the most traditionally western of Manfreds work, include Conquering Horse (1959), Lord Grizzly (1954), Scarlet Plume (1964), Riders of Judgment (1957), and King of Spades (1966). Each tale interprets a different aspect in the white invasion of the plains in the nineteenth century and together the books make up an important record of the cultural adjustments that have resulted from the westward expansion. In addition to the Tales, a second important grouping of Manfreds work is his farm novels, most of which have strong autobiographical overtones. They extend the western stories of the Tales into the early twentieth century, documenting the period during which family farms were established on the prairies. The farm novels include The Golden Bowl (1944), This Is the Year (1947), The Chokecherry Tree (1948), The Man Who Looked Like the Prince of Wales (1965), Eden Prairie (1968), and Green Earth (1977). At least two of his books, though they have rural themes, are in fact transitional in that they extend the prairie history from farmstead to city. Both Morning Red (1956) and Milk of Wolves (1976) have a contrapuntal structure which enables Manfred to play the rural against the urban. Because they also contain some elements of melodrama and the grotesque, these books are less realistic than the farm novels and could be called romances in the Hawthorne tradition. Although Sons of Adam (1980) does not follow the romantic pattern, it too is concerned with the contrast between life styles of city and country people. Novels that are strongly autobiographical make up a fourth category for Manfreds work, books he would call rumes, books in which he himself figures as a character. Included under this label would be Boy Almighty (1945); Wanderlust (1962), representing a rewriting of The Primitive (1949), The Brother (1950), and The Giant (1951); and Green Earth (1977), also listed as a farm novel. Manfred calls his recent The Wind Blows Free (1979) a reminiscence rather than a novel, but it reads as if it were a rume. Classifying this outpouring of books Frederick Manfred has written since 1944 suggests the range of his creativity. However, it is important to note as well that Manfreds work belongs in the tradition established for American literature by such writers as Hawthorne, Cooper, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Cather, and Lewis. His novels interpreting the prairie farming experience have done for Siouxland what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Steinbeck did for the Monterey Peninsula, and Cather did for Nebraska. His Buckskin Man Tales, as western novels, have given a balanced interpretation of the westward expansion into the upper Midwest during the nineteenth century, continuing a pattern set by James Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales. His complex romances have elements 793
A Literary History of the American West in them Hawthorne liked to use, but in their critical appraisal of the city they remind one of Lewis attacking the small town. In his autobiographical books he might be seen as a more versatile Thomas Wolfe. Manfred, who is greatly aware of his own voice, or tone, does not like classifications and comparisons. He likes best to be known simply as a storyteller, one who captures the readers interest with a tale well told.
II
To Manfreds parents, Frank Feikema and Aaltje (Alice) Van Engen, Frederick Feikema (Fy' kah-ma) was born January 6, 1912, on a rented farm northeast of Doon in northwestern Iowa. (His first seven books were written under the name Feike Feikema, which was often mispronounced, so he added Manfred to his legal name of Frederick Feikema.) Frederick is the eldest of six brothers, all of whom are over six feet two inches tall, with Fred being tallest at six feet nine. His height and his Frisian/Saxon heritage have tended to set him apart and at the same time have been important to him in his writing. The Saxon line comes through his mothers family, the Van Engens, his great-grandfather Harm Van Engen having been born in Emlichheim, Lower Saxony, Germany; the Frisian line comes from the Feikemas of Tzum, near Franeker, West Friesland. The most important figures in Manfreds early life were his father, mother, and Aunt Kathryn. Through the two women he learned sensitivity to aesthetic values, and through his father he came to know the manly sweetness of life, the joy in physical labor and play. His fathers sister Kathryn was his country school teacher and lived with his family while she was teaching. She wrote poetry and was the first person to encourage Manfred toward a writing career. Also important to his writing was the daily Bible reading that his parents practiced as members of the Christian Reformed Church. They sent him to a high school sponsored by their church, Western Academy in Hull, Iowa, where he put muscle on his slim frame by running the seven and a half miles between his farm home and school. He became an excellent baseball pitcher and dreamed of trying for a professional career in the sport. The death of Manfreds mother April 19, 1929, was a blow to the boy, especially in view of his fathers relatively quick remarriage. As a result of that family adjustment, Manfred found himself free to get off the farm and work his way through college. The reservoir of material from these early years has stood Manfred in good stead, providing him with background for his first novel, The Golden Bowl (1944), and also serving as the basis for his autobiographical novel Green Earth (1977). The Golden Bowl got Manfred off to a good start with the critics and established a theme that he has followed consistently. Young Maury Grant, victim of the Dust Bowl, rejects farming and nature as evil, 794
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then meets the Thor farm family and helps them through a bad time, only to escape again from the land and human entanglements. In Grants return to the Thor family and acceptance of the land and responsibility, Manfred shows that, far from being a malevolent force, nature is a benign treasure to be accepted and protected. What happens when that treasure is neglected and abused is the theme of This Is the Year (1947). Pier Frixen, unlike Pa Thor of The Golden Bowl, does not love the land. After forcing his Frisian parents off their homestead, Frixen marries a woman he treats with the same disrespect he shows to his farm land. His lovemaking and his plowing alike are nothing less than rape. His son, Teo, and the county agent try to teach Pier, but he is bull-headed and determined to survive alone. As an isolated self, he fails and runs without returning. In The Chokecherry Tree (1948) Manfred shows us how a less gifted man than Pier Frixen can succeed and find happiness in acceptance rather than in exploitation. Elof Lofbloom, while something of a comic figure, is nonetheless worthy of our attention as representative of the home folks who populate so many of Manfreds stories. Elof has many false starts and fails often, but he perseveres and settles into a solid life as owner of a gasoline station on Chokecherry Corner, which is Perkins Corners in Iowa, where the young Manfred himself worked selling gas. In telling Elofs story, Manfred draws heavily on his own experiences playing ball and enjoying the joys and tribulations of rural small town life. It is in Manfreds use of this midwestern rural life as metaphor for Eden that his work most clearly shares a major theme in American literature, as identified by R. W. B. Lewis in his The American Adam. In early works of American literature the Adamic theme centered on the American as a radically new personality emancipated from history and ancestry, standing alone and self-reliant as Adam before the Fall. However, Lewis points out that such authors as Hawthorne and Melville in their later works, The Marble Faun and Billy Budd, summarize the whole of their experience of America in the complete story of Adam and the Fall. The action of the story of The Marble Faun, Lewis points out, is the transformation of the soul in its journey from innocence to conscience: the souls realization of itself under the impact of and by engagement with evilthe tragic rise born of the fortunate Fall. . . . It is what has to happen to golden youth if it is to mature. Both Karen and Konstant in Manfreds Eden Prairie ( 1968) are golden youths who struggle toward maturity. Their rural Iowa Eden has in it also the vulgar and the sordid, which they must confront in order to find a complete life. The model for pure innocence, the Karen of Eden Prairie, was Manfreds Aunt Kathryn, whose experiences in the one-room school of the 795
prairie are detailed in the novel. Where Karen and Konas well as Elof in The Chokecherry Treeare troubled by their lack of experience, Garrett in The Man Who Looked Like the Prince of Wales is the sort of person whose physical beauty and appetites are more than he can handle. He seems to be very much like Donatello of Hawthornes Marble Faun, a creature in a state of development less than what mankind has attained, part animal and part child, that wild, sweet, playful rustic creature. Certainly Manfred is playful, too, in this book, which is sprinkled with rustic humor and pranks. Manfreds own journey through innocence to maturity is detailed in the autobiographical novel Green Earth (1977). Told largely through the sensibility of Free, the story is realistic enough to be a documentary of rural life in Siouxland between 1909 and 1929. It is also a love story. Ada Engleking, Frees mother, is a woman of strict Christian upbringing and of delicate sensibilities, while Alfred Alfredson, his father, is a strong and good illiterate whose own father was a free thinker. How these opposing personalities were blended through give and take into a strong bond of love is a central concern of the novel. In telling the particular story of his own parents, which is at the same time the story of a particular region, Manfred achieves the universal. In a postscript to the first edition of The Giant, he says he feels that in the rume he is creating something holy and passionate, that he feels somewhat as the old runesters felt when they slashed their single strokes on tree or stone, thinking . . . Here, this now, this we must record. Today. It is not all of our lives. But it catches up as much as a single stroke can what is most us in this singular moment. Manfreds recording of events as a farm youth is to be seen also in his shorter fictions and poems. The title piece of his one volume of poetry, Winter Count (1966), is an outline for Green Earth. His collected short stories, Apples of Paradise (1968), are peopled with Siouxland characters, most of whom are caught up in problems of childlessness. Two of his novellas in the volume Arrow of Love (1961), Lew and Luanne and Country Love, are explorations of the rural personality as it is bound by love, and the third story, Arrow of Love, depicts that same theme as played out in the Indian community surrounding Old Fort Snelling.
III
With his mothers death in 1929 when he was seventeen and his fathers remarriage, Manfred was free to work his way through Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a school supported by the Christian Reformed Church. There he found an intellectual climate which caused him to question some of his earlier religious training, and he had his first literary success writing for campus publications. His most influential teacher was his philos-
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ophy professor, Dr. Harry Jellema, who ran the Plato Club, an informal study club, much like a graduate seminar. Along with this initiation into intellectual life, Manfred also tasted the pleasure and pain of a first romance and the accolades that came from being a basketball hero. Following graduation, he hitchhiked east where he took a job with U.S. Rubber in Passaic, New Jersey, and got involved in local politics. After eight months there, he had longings for the West and returned to Siouxland by way of another hitchhiking trip, this time farther west and including Yellowstone Park. He spent some time in Sioux Falls, where he took courses at a commercial college, tried his hand at selling and at insurance investigating, then moved to Minneapolis where he became a sports reporter for the old Minneapolis Journal. He helped organize the Newspaper Guild there, an activity which helped shorten his newspaper career. Then, in April of 1940 he entered Glen Lake Sanatorium with tuberculosis and fought a hard battle with the disease until his release in March of 1942. In October of that year he married Maryanna Shorba, who had been a fellow patient at Glen Lake. Perhaps the most important decision in his life came in 1943 when, after a short time on the staff of Modern Medicine, he decided to devote his life fulltime to the writing of novels. He began by writing a story that he found attracted attention when told to a partythe account of his hitchhiking trip to Yellowstone Park. What evolved was The Golden Bowl, a compact gem of a novel little resembling the trip that inspired it. Manfred was held fast to the memories of the trip that launched his career and in 1979 wrote them into a reminiscence he calls The Wind Blows Free. Manfreds experiences at Calvin College are quite accurately recorded in Wanderlust (1962), a revised and shortened version of the trilogy Worlds Wanderer. The college career of the hero, Thurs Wraldson, nearly duplicates the authors, except that Thurs is a musician rather than a writer. Manfred says Wanderlust is the story of a mans search for ultimate happiness, of his not finding it in religion, or in social systems, or in science, and then finding it in the expression of beauty he finds within himself. In Boy Almighty (1945) Manfred fictionalizes his two years of struggle with tuberculosis at Glen Lake Sanatorium. In this book the hero, Eric Frey, goes through experiences similar to the authors. In picturing the ordeal as similar to Jobs, Manfred has Eric reflect on his life and develop an inner awareness that allows him to accept responsibility for his actions and not blame his father or the Whipper, an outside force, for his predicament. In a very real way the bout with tuberculosis marked a turning point in Manfreds life. Before the disease he was a novice sports writer for the Minneapolis Journal; after his cure he got married and made the hard decision to
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become a full-time novelist. Something of that pre-sanatorium life as a journalist is shown in Sons of Adam. (1980), a novel that reflects the authors fascination with Biblical themes and paired characters. Alan Ross, the journalist, imagines a haunt brother to replace his elder twin who died in childbirth. Then he finds a living cousin who resembles the haunt personality, Red Engelking, a boxer and stockyards worker. In depicting Reds experiences as boxer and pig sticker and Alans roles as journalist and lover, Manfred gives a detailed account of Twin Cities life during the 1930s, but more importantly he explores the duality of human personality as it struggles to strike a balance between compassion and the killer instinct. To some extent these opposites are the subjects, too, of Morning Red (1956) and Milk of Wolves (1976). Both romances have paired characters, rural and urban contrasts, and two plot lines. In Morning Red Jack Nagel, the city man, is highly intelligent but flawed and vulnerable, whereas Kurt Faber, the country man, is less intelligent but able to survive through a gutsy use of his natural instincts. The link between both worlds and personalities is Monk, the lawyer who strikes a balance. In Milk of Wolves that healthy balance is struck by an Assiniboine Indian, Wulf Stoneboiler. From him Juhl Melander, the rural stonecutter turned city sculptor, learns that compassion gives strength; and from the trees and the wolves of the northern wilderness he learns that he is not an isolated self, as he seemed to be in the city, but one with the universe.
IV
In his own life Manfred was torn between city and country. Between 1945 and 1960 the Manfreds lived at Wralda, a ten-acre lot in Bloomington, Minnesota, overlooking the Minnesota River valley. Their daughter, Freya, was born in 1944 while they lived in Minneapolis. At Wralda a second daughter, Marya, was born in 1949, and Frederick, Jr., was born there in 1954, the year Lord Grizzly was published. As the urban sprawl from Minneapolis pushed closer to his home, Manfred decided to move his family back into the heart of Siouxland. He built his house on Blue Mound just north of Luverne. From 1968 to 1983 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, and in the fall of 1983 joined the faculty of Augustana College in Sioux Falls, teaching classes in creative writing. In connection with his residency at U.S.D., Manfreds colleague John Milton moderated a series of television interviews with the author, the scripts of which were collected and published as Conversations with Frederick Manfred (1974). Because his house was conveniently located on the south border of Blue Mounds State Park, the State of Minnesota coveted the unique building and persuaded Manfred to sell so it could be used as an in-
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terpretive center for the Park. Manfred then moved to acreage across the Rock River Valley, where he built a new house called Roundwind. The publication of Lord Grizzly (1954), first of the Buckskin Man Tales to be written, marked another turning point in the writers career. That book was the first he wrote under his new name, and it was the first to hit the best-seller lists, encouraging Manfred to continue writing the tales that place him in the western tradition of American literature. Manfreds other novels could also qualify as western according to the criterion used by James K. Folsom, who, in his The American Western Novel, defined western novels as books which deal primarily with the trans-Mississippi West. Much of Manfreds work fits what Folsom identifies as a major western theme, the debate over rural and urban values and the assessment of relative advantages gained or lost by the coming of civilization to the West. Readers of the Buckskin Man Tales are helped to remember how it was in the West before the expansion and how the country was changed in the hundred years between 1800 and 1900. Reading the Tales in chronological order makes the change obvious: Conquering Horse (1965), Indian prewhite times about 1800; Lord Grizzly (1954), mountain man times in the mid 1820s; Scarlet Plume (1964), Sioux uprising in 1862; King of Spades (1966), Black Hills justice in 1876; Riders of Judgment (1957), cattlemen times in 1892. What one senses in reading these five books is the gradual disappearance of mystical awareness as white people overran not only the land but also the traditions of the red people. In Conquering Horse, having a vision is vital. No Name without a vision is no man. The tale shows how No Name gets his vision of the white stallion, how he fulfills his vision and comes home to replace his father as leader. In structure the tale is epic, and it uses archetypal images from Greek mythology, of Oedipus and Cronus, to dramatize the universal nature of human behavior, especially with respect to father and son. Conquering Horse and The Manly-Hearted Woman (1975) are essentially religious in tone and together provide a kind of bible explaining the community life and mystical religion of the Indians. Though Flat Warclub and Manly Heart are seen as deviants in their society, their strange sexual orientation is accepted as wakan, of the gods. In Flat Warclubs vision and heroic sacrifice of himself for others, there are pagan as well as Christian parallels, such as in the Satumalia ritual. The Manly-Hearted Woman is not part of the original Buckskin Man Tales, but could be added as a companion piece to Conquering Horse. Manfred says he wrote it in six weeks, during a wonderful burst of creative energy. Mountain man Hugh Glass in Lord Grizzly is a bridge between cul-
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tures. He knows little about visions, but he has one accidentally and does not understand it, though his Indian wife Bending Reed would. When Hughs hunting party is attacked by a grizzly bear, Hugh is mauled and left for dead by his companions Jim Bridger and Fitz Fitzgerald. In hating them for violating the mountain man code, Hugh generates enough strength to crawl many miles to safety. The torture of the ordeal causes him to see a bear following him, and the vision helps him later to forgive his boys, though forgiveness had not been his intent. After reading over two hundred pieces relating to the historical Hugh Glass, Manfred was able to tie his story tightly to the real man, but in his Biblical and mythical allusions and his symbolical overtones he created a work of art that transcends the region and the time. Hughs movement from vengeance to forgiveness is a movement from Old Testament to New Testament sensibility, a movement, too, from mountain man and warrior code to the way of Bending Reed, the Indian wife. Old Hugh had to lose face, swallow his pride, and admit he was wrongthat he was not an isolated self but connected to and responsible for his boys. It is in Scarlet Plume that the two cultures come together most violently, in the Sioux uprising of 1862, which culminated in the hanging of thirty-eight Indians of Mankato, Minnesota, on Christmas Day. Manfred manages to strike a balance in presenting the two sides of a very emotional event, the scars of which are still on the region. His device is the classic love story between children of feuding families, as in Romeo and Juliet. In the midst of the terrible violence generated in the uprising, the common ground between Indian and white settler, Scarlet Plume and Judith, is emphasized as the two come to understand each other as human beings through love. The most difficult thing for Judith to understand is the mysticism of Scarlet Plumes vision, which not only is responsible for his determination to save her but also provides an understanding of life which enables him to accept his fate as a part of the universal fabric. By 1876, the time of King of Spades, the diminution of the Indian presence on the plains is such that it is represented in the novel only by a white girl Indian-raised, Erden or Blue Swallow. Manfred uses the Oedipus theme to symbolize the influence of the old world culture on the new West, a conflict particularized in Magnus King and his son. The destruction of the wilderness West by old world attitudes is symbolized in the rape of Blue Swallows Eden by the greedy gold miners who founded Deadwood, South Dakota. Thus King of Spades focuses on the relationship between aristocracy and democracy, the turning of one into the other in the American West, with the original native traditions, represented by Erdens mystical union with nature, sacrificed to both. By the 1890s that native mystical insight has been reduced to an ani800
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mal feeling inside Cain Hammett, hero of Riders of Judgment. Hunt Lawton, who might be seen as a personification of the white American Puritan spirit, is sworn to destroy even that remnant of the primitive. In retelling the historical Johnson County Range War of 1892, Manfred uses the wars hero, Nate Champion, as the model for Cain Hammett. Cain is heroic because, of all the characters in the novel, he alone comes close to controlling the animal within, to achieving a balance of sorts between the wild energy of the subconscious, of youth, and the controlled reason of the intellect, of maturity. Throughout most of the story Cain seems to be the wrong name for Hammett. He is the good guy, the helper. But even he betrays his animal, as symbolized in his riding of his horse to death. Cain Hammett is flawed, as Hamlet was flawed, in not being able to act decisively on his own in the killing of Lawton. Furthermore he carries the curse of jealousy, which leads to guilt for coveting his brothers wife, a guilt compounded by the fact that in the past he had killed for her. The jealousy of the old for the new, as represented in Grandfather Hammetts desire to kill his first-born, not only links Manfreds story to the Greek myths of Oedipus and Cronus but also informs the reader as to the nature of the conflict between the old pioneers and the new ranchers. Taken as a unit, the Buckskin Man Tales chronicle the exchange of cultures which took place in the West during the nineteenth century, an exchange which saw the natural mystical sensibility of the Indians replaced with ideas from western civilization, notions that had developed over the centuries from Greek mythology and the Old Testament. The Tales have significance for our time because, after a hundred years, we are beginning to see some disastrous results from that exchange of cultures. Rlvaags Beret in Giants in the Earth may have been more prophetic than insane in her fear of settling upon the unmarked prairie. There she sensed that some evil power, appearing as a face in the clouds, would change themhad in fact changed Per Hansa into a man who could justify destroying another mans landmarks. With the making of straight marks upon the land, the curved patterns of the Indians were erased and along with them the sense of oneness that their circles symbolized. Instead, divisions and conflicts developed over property, as in the Johnson County War. But there is no going back. Manfred in his Tales suggests that through the striking of a balance between line and curve reconciliation must come. Cain Hammett was almost able to strike it, and so was Erden Aldridge, but the time was not ripe.
V
The Buckskin Man Tales not only give Manfred solid identification with the western tradition in American literature, but they have continued to receive critical and popular favor. It should be noted as well that the 801
western themes of the Tales are represented also in Manfreds other works. His autobiographical novels are basically initiation rituals that could be compared to No Names maturing in Conquering Horse, as well as to the Wests maturing as a region. His farm novels argue for an ecological responsibility, a sense of partnership with nature that came naturally to the Indians as depicted in the Tales. His romances, in comparing and contrasting rural and urban sensibilities, present a continuation of Manfreds interest in cultural change, especially as that change affects human relationships. In telling us how we are and how we were Manfred has been particularly interested in the bonds that hold people together, whether those bonds be sexual, familial, social, political, or religious. In giving us the details of that bonding, Manfred uses a realism that Max Westbrook has called Western realism or sacrality. Writers in that tradition, according to Westbrook, measure whether events are real or unreal according to whether or not they show the inner self in contact with the universal. In Manfreds work that contact is represented in three sacralist themes: the commitment to cyclical rather than linear time, the recognition of the continuity of life, and the search for the original source. As Manfred works these days at Roundwind, he looks across the Rock River valley toward the Blue Mounds, where he can feel close to his own beginning but also to the ultimate source the Mounds symbolize, and to the source of the sacred red stone of the Indians only a few miles north of Luverne at Pipestone National Monument. In using solid realism to bring universal meaning, Manfreds novels are like the sacred red stone when it has been carved into a pipe, for then the link between earth and spirit is felt, is tasted and is known.
ROBERT C. WRIGHT , late
of Mankato State University
Primary Sources ( in chronological order) The Golden Bowl. Saint Paul: Webb, 1944; rev. ed., Vermillion, S. D.: Dakota Press, 1969.
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FREDERlCK MANFRED
Boy Almighty. Saint Paul: Webb, 1945. This Is the Year. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1947. The Chokecherry Tree. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1948; rev. ed., Denver: Alan Swallow, 1961; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975. The Primitive. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1949. The Brother. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1950. The Giant. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1951. Lord Grizzly. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Morning Red. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1956. Riders of Judgment. New York: Random House, 1957; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Conquering Horse. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Arrow of Love. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1961. Wanderlust. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1962. Scarlet Plume. New York: Trident Press, 1964; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. The Man Who Looked Like the Prince of Wales. New York: Trident Press, 1965; republished as The Secret Place, New York: Pocket Books, 1967. King of Spades. New York: Trident Press, 1966; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Winter Count. Minneapolis: James D. Thueson, 1966. (Poems) Eden Prairie. New York: Trident Press, 1968. Apples of Paradise. New York: Trident Press, 1968. (Short stories) Conversations with Frederick Manfred. Moderated by John R. Milton. With an introduction by Wallace Stegner. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1974. The Manly-Hearted Woman. New York: Crown, 1975; New York: New American Library (Signet), 1977. Milk of Wolves. Boston: Avenue Victor Hugo, 1976. Green Earth. New York: Crown, 1977. The Wind Blows Free. Sioux Falls, S. D.: The Center for Western Studies, Augustana College, 1979. Sons of Adam. New York: Crown, 1980. Secondary Sources 1. Articles Austin, James C. Legend, Myth and Symbol in Frederick Manfreds Lord Grizzly. Critique 6 (Winter 19631964): 12230. Identifies Hugh Glass as father of the New American, Lord Grizzly as beginning of a new era in the new West. Bebeau, Donald. A Search for Voice, a Sense of Place in The Golden Bowl. South Dakota Review 7 (Winter 196970): 7987. Explains how Manfreds first novel touches the universal through a particular place and gives its author a voice.
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A Literary History of the American West Daley, Dave. Truth, Not Facts, Is Historical Novelists Goal. Minneapolis Star, 4 September 1975, p. 2C. Manfred disclaims label as historical novelist. Flora, Joseph M. Frederick Manfred. Boise: Boise State University, 1974. A brief but usable survey of Manfreds work. Kellogg, George. Frederick Manfred: A Bibliography. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1965. Lists works by and about Manfred through 1965. Meyer, Roy W. The Middle Western Farm Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. An important survey of the farm fiction genre, including comment on This Is the Year. Milton, John R. Frederick Feikema Manfred. Western Review 22 (Spring 1958): 181196. Explains Manfreds main theme as the long view of human kind. . Interview with Frederick Manfred. South Dakota Review 7 (Winter 19691970): 110131. Manfred talks of dreams, Indians, the Dust Bowl, the Old Lizard, and father figures. . Lord Grizzly: Rhythm, Form and Meaning in the Western Novel. W e s t ern American Literature 1 (Spring 1966): 614. Shows mystic fusion of man and land, animal and spirit, rational and irrational in Lord Grizzly as example of mature western novel. . Voice from Siouxland; Frederick Feikema Manfred. College English 19 (December 1957): 104111. Perceptive analysis of Manfreds first eight novels. Roth, Russell. The Inception of a Saga: Frederick Manfreds Buckskin Man. South Dakota Review 7 (Winter 196970): 87100. Shows how the Buckskin Man Tales connect back to Cooper and ahead to Manfreds farm novels. . Is Manfred the Midwests Faulkner? Minneapolis Sunday Ttibune, 1 August 1954, pp. 16. Makes a case for Manfred as a midwestern writer of stature. Swallow, Alan. The Mavericks. Critique 2 (Winter 1959): 8892. A personal tribute to Manfred from a publisher. Waters, Frank. West of the Mississippi: An Interview with Frederick Manfred. Critique 2 (winter 1959): pp. 3536. Westbrook, Max. The Practical Spirit: Sacrality and the American West. In Western Writing, edited by Gerald W. Haslam. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974. Defines the themes of sacrality as commitment to cyclical time, recognition of continuity of life, and search for the original source. . Conservative, Liberal, and Western: Three Modes of American Realism. South Dakota Review 4 (Summer 1966): 219. Shows how the western realists belief that the inner self is the contact with the universal contrasts with notions of the conservative and liberal realists. Vinz, Mark. Milton, Manfred, and McGrath: A Conversation on Literature and Place. Dacotah Territory 8/9 (Fall-Winter 197475): 1926. Manfred talks about spirit of place. Wylder, D. E. Manfreds Indian Novel. South Dakota Review 7 (Winter 1969 70): 100110. Shows how Conquering Horse is more epic than naturalistic.
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2. Dissertations and Theses Boeveld, Bernice. A Study of the Depression Years Through the Fiction of Frederick F. Manfred. M.A., University of Wyoming, 1971. De Boer, Peter Pousma. Frederick Manfred: The Developing Art of the Novelist. M.A., University of Iowa, 1961. Especially critical of Morning Red and Riders of Judgment. Gits, Gordon P. The Buckskin Man Tales of Frederick Manfred: Realistic or Naturalistic? M.A., Mankato State University, 1971. Defends position that Buckskin Man Tales are naturalistic. Hillnoe, Jean. Themes of Isolation and Relationship in Selected Novels of Frederick Manfred. M.A., South Dakota State University, 1969. Covers Conquering Horse, Lord Grizzly, This Is the Year, The Secret Place, and Morning Red. Michael, Larry A. Literary Allusions in the Fiction of Frederick Manfred. M.A., University of South Dakota, 1965. Identifies authors and books important to Manfred. OBrien, Richard P. Naturalism and the Tragic View in the Writing of Frederick Manfred. M.A., Mankato State University, 1967. Identifies naturalism in The Golden Bowl, This Is the Year, The Chokecherry Tree, Lord Grizzly, and Scarlet Plume. Peet, Howard. Evolution of a Man Named Fred. M.A., Moorhead State University, 1965. Based on interviews with Siouxland people. Pruett, Jacque Suzanne Funderburk. A Critical Analysis of Lord Grizzly. M.A., Colorado State University, 1968. An exceptionally fine study of Lord Grizzly in all of its aspects. Sorenson, Charles Somner. A Comparison of the Views of Hamsun, Rolvaag, and Feikema on Rural Society. Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1955. Spies, George Henry III. John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath and Frederick Manfreds The Golden Bowl: A Comparative Study. Ph.D., Ball State University, 1973. Shows the two books to have similarities; more humor in Steinbeck, better metaphors in Manfred. Ter Maat, Cornelius John. Three Novelists and a Community: A Study of American Novelists with Dutch Calvinist Origins. Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1963.
805
Thomas McGrath
of Thomas McGraths most important work, the book1 length poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I & II , Joseph F. S. Smeall writes that the references of this poem . . . are often about near things; . . . that Tom McGrath has lived here (here being North Dakota) and has gone away and come back, and that Tom McGrath went from North Dakota to Louisiana and Alan Swallow went from Wyoming to Loui2 siana, so that McGraths first book became Swallows first book. O n e needs to add to Smealls useful description that McGraths poems, first and last, are the poems of a political radical from North Dakota, a member of what he has called the unaffiliated far left, one who understood from his 3 earliest life as a poet that the class struggle exists in North Dakota, too. McGrath was born in 1916 on a farm near Sheldon, North Dakota, one of several children of Irish-background farm people, James Lang and Catherine McGrath. Sheldon is not too far from Fargo, between the Maple and Sheyenne rivers. It forms the eastern corner of a triangle in Ransom County composed of Enderlin and Lisbon, close to where the Soo Line crosses a spur of the R. N. Railroad, about thirty miles east of Little Yellowstone Park, about forty miles west of the Minnesota border. Sheldons population, according to the 1970 census, is 192.
N A REVIEW ESSAY
And so I will name them here for the last time, who were once Upon the earth in a time greener than this: My next brother Jim, then Joe, then my only sister, Kathleen, Then Martin, then Jack, the baby. Now Jim and Jack have gone Into the dark with my mother and father. But then Oh, then! How bright their faces shown that lamplit Christmas Eve! And our mother, her whole being a lamp in all times and weather . . . And our father, the dear flesh-gantry that lifted us all from the dark . . . [In that transfiguring light, from the kitchen wall, a Christ Opens his chest like an album to show us his pierced heart As he peers from a church calendar almost empty of days. Now: say, then, who among you might not open your flesh On an album of loss and painicons of those you have loved
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Gone on without you: forever farther than Montana or sundown? No Christ ever suffered pain longer or stronger than this . . .] So let me keep them nowand foreverfixed in that lost Light as I take the lantern and go down the stairs to the cellar In search of the Christmas apples, cold in their brimming bin. There, as deep in the hull of a ship, the silence collects Till I hear through the dead-calm new-come night the far bells: Sheldon . . . Enderlin . . . bells of the little towns calling . . . Lisbon . . . North Dakota . . . [Yes, I hear them now In this other time I am walking, this other Lisbon, Portugal Bells of the Revolution, loud as my heart I hear 4 Above the continuous bad-rap of the urine colored sea. . . . ] For McGrath, North Dakota is the place of family, of hard work, of his first experiences with the struggle between workers and their bosses, of nature rough and smooth, of love and of lossand every place is North Dakota, and every town is Sheldon. To abandon oneself, which is what it amounts to, can be, for some, sometimes, if they tell us truly, no more than a pleasing experience. But it can be terror, ecstasy, i.e. to be displaced. (Perhaps that is why the poem begins so unequivocally with place?) The terror is seeing only part of the beast I am hunting, of knowing only part of the riddle. I dont want merely to report but to shape that report, to make a 5 blazoning, an icon, to cut sign so that others can make the journey, writes McGrath in describing the beginnings of Letter to an Imaginary Friend. McGrath worked the farm and other jobs, and with his familys blessings found enough money, despite the Depression, to attend the University of North Dakota intermittently, until he earned a B. A. in 1939. Then he moved to Louisiana State University, where Allen Tate was in residence, where other poets had also gravitated. He talked literature with Tate and the young poets, but he also tried to organize in the working class sections of Baton Rouge. He met Wyomings Alan Swallow, an enormously energetic young man, more interested in trying to publish some books of poetry from his garage than in going to school. Swallows first book, the first in a long line of distinguished books by younger American poets, which has virtually no peer in American publishing history, was Tom McGraths First Manifesto (1940). In 1942, McGrath was one of the contributors to Three
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Young Poets, published under the Decker imprint, but the brain-child of Alan Swallows publishing thrust. The recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship at the completion of his M. A. from Louisiana State, McGrath postponed acceptance of the grant because, as he is quoted as saying: The army got me in 1942. I wanted to go someplace sunny, so naturally they sent me to the Aleutians. I spent two years in 6 Amchitka, in no danger of dying of anything but boredom. Though North Dakota is McGraths main place to which he always returns, Amchitka is in his poetry. So is Oxford, England, where he finally activated the Rhodes Scholarship in the 194748 term; as is the State of Maine, where he taught for a time; as is Los Angeles, where he was on the faculty of Los Angeles State University until he was fired for defying the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in the 1950s, and where he began an ongoing career as a writer for animated, documentary and feature films; as is New York, where he has lived several times; as is Minnesota, where he taught writing on the faculty at Moorhead State University, until his retirement in 1982. McGraths characteristic voice is first clearly heard in two early books, published after his return from the service. The first is To Walk a Crooked Mile, published by Swallow and William Morrow in 1947, the second Longshot OLearys Garland of Practical Poesie, published by International Publishers in 1949. Both of these volumes strongly bear the imprint of McGraths war experiences, the first dedicated to Jimmy McGrath, killed June 1945, the second concluding with the powerful Blues for Jimmy, occasioned by his brothers death and dedicated to him. In technique, McGraths voice is remarkably varied. He has written a surprisingly large number of short lyrics, sometimes in loosened haiku form, like: Indian Territory The Cottonwood Sends out its smoke signals. 7 We are surrounded! Other short poems range from couplets to forms of the blues, from epigrammatic commentary, sometimes in loosened senryu form, to sharply delineated, descriptive short verse, reminiscent of William Carlos Williams. In somewhat longer poems, McGrath also writes widely differing forms. Verse is not frequent, but by no means absent from his poetry. His tendency is towards the longer, rather than the shorter line. His imagery reaches into landscape and cityscape of the various places he has lived, and uses extensively the experiences of the American labor movement and political left, 8 and often, in this regard, the folklore of Wobbly organizers riding the rails. 808
THOMAS MCGRATH
He is deeply steeped in the history and tradition of Native Americanshe founded and for some time edited the poetry journal Crazy Horse and frequently uses Native American myth in his work. The achievement that is without question the greatest in his canon is the book-length poem, Letter to an Imaginary Friend. Here McGrath tends towards the very long linehe calls it a six-beat lineoften broken up on the page. Here McGraths imagery, which returns time and again to North Dakota and to Sheldon, as it were for an anchoring place, is dazzling, deriving from personal and political sources, and from his extensive reading, not only in modern poetry but in history, philosophy and mythology. The subject matter of his poems is as complex as his forms. Though his life is often the subject of his poems, he is not, in the usual sense of that term, a confessional poet. Rather, he uses his life, and that of his family and friends, as he uses Sheldon. McGrath, the subject of the poem, is everywhere. He is a radical American, exploring, from that vantage point, the peculiarities, the vagaries, the humor, and often the horror of contemporary experience. As a radical, his approach is often that of the outraged man, furious at injustice, especially the injustice and inequity which derive from socio-political sources, but also the injustice which is a condition of being human. Because his poetry is so varied and so powerful, it is easy to overlook the pervasive humor in McGraths verse. He is very funny, and funny very often. His epigrammatic humor can be reproduced here, as in: A Sociology of Instincts The water that turns the millwheel 9 Had an unhappy childhood. Sometimes his humor is sardonic, as in the closing line of Such Simple Love: Well, Id have been better off sleeping myself. These fancies had some sentimental charm, But love without direction is a cheap blanket And even if it did no one any harm, 10 No one is warm. At times his wit is tough, biting, nearly mad-cap satire, as in several sections of Letter to an Imaginary Friend, where he even includes metapoetic commentary about poet-publisher relationships, typographical jokes, and such interlaced comments as Classical ass / Is hard to pass, which is also 11 part of a typographical icon. McGraths humor often derives from a sense of the ludicrousness of evil and injustice, of the ridiculous at the interface
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between the individual life and the sociology of living. Even persons and subjects on his own side of politics do not escape his wit, as when he entitles a poem The Uneven Development of the Heart, echoing the Leninist notion of the uneven development of capitalism, or puns on the names of 12 James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones as Bald Twin and Elroy Bones. No bibliography of McGraths work has been completed to date, and the task would be very difficult. Perhaps because of his political stance, his work has only infrequently been reviewed in the major journals that tend to establish a poets reputation with the larger poetry-reading public. He is widely known among other poets, however, and frequently cited and praised by such of his near-contemporaries as fellow-midwesterner Robert Bly, and by such younger poets as Michael Anania, who was the editor of Swallow Press at the time that house published Letter to an lmaginary Friend, Parts I & II. McGrath has published in every major poetry journal in the United States, from Poetry, where his first published poem appeared in 1938, to The Nation, American Poetry Review, and a nearly endless list of less well-known poetry journals. Among his most important books, in addition to those already mentioned, are Figures from a Double World (Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1955), and The Movie at the End of the World: Collected Poems (Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1972.) The number of his chapbooks and other books of verse, along with a vast number of uncollected poems, promise a most arduous search for his future bibliographer. McGrath then is a western American, a radical, a modern and postmodern, witty, angry, important, as yet neglected poet. Most who know his work believe that his importance in the body of recent American poetry will continue to grow, especially as additional parts of Letter to an Imaginary Friend become available in book form. His reputation will grow because McGrath has written one of the few major long poems in recent literature; it will grow because his sense of place, of the western United States in particular but of the United States as a whole, as well as of the history and politics of these cultures is, if heterodox, profound and important; it will grow because his sense of the human experience, of the agony and horror, the humor and beauty, ranks with the finest that recent American poetry has produced; and it will grow because he has contributed and continues to contribute important explorations in poetic form and in the nature of the American language.
F REDERICK C. ST E R N, University
of Illinois, Chicago
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THOMAS MCGRATH
Notes
1. Thomas McGrath, Letter to am Imaginary Friend, Parts I & II. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1962, 1970. 2. Joseph F. S. Smeall, Thomas McGrath: A Review Essay, North Dakota Quarterly 40 (Winter 1972): 29. 3. William Childress, Thomas McGrath, Poetry Now 2 (Issue 10): 2. 4. Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts III & IV (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1985), pp. 2627. 5. Thomas McGrath, McGrath on McGrath (introduced by James Bertolino), Epoch: A Quarterly of Contemporary Literature 22 (1973): 210. 6. Childress, unnumbered front page. 7. Thomas McGrath, Passages Toward the Dark (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1982), p. 83. 8. For extensive discussion of McGraths use of North Dakota, see especially Bernard F. Engel, The Utopian Dakota of Thomas McGrath, Late Harvest Bookmark, 1977. For discussion of his use of the language of the left, see Frederick C. Stern, The Delegate for Poetry: McGrath as Communist Poet, Where the West Begins, ed. Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer (Sioux Falls, S. D.: Augustana College, Center for Western Studies Press, 1978). 9. Passages Toward the Dark, p. 71. 10. Thomas McGrath, To Walk a Crooked Mile (New York: The Swallow Press and William Morrow and Company, 1947), p. 42. 11. Passages Toward the Dark, p. 106. 12. For further discussion of such humor see Stern, The Delegate for Poetry. For extensive discussion of McGraths form see Rory Holscher, Receiving Thomas McGraths Letter , Moons and Lion Tailes: A Midwestern Journal of Poetry and Comment 4 (January 1976): 2848.
No McGrath bibliography has been created, in part because of the difficulty of finding poems published in nearly one hundred poetry journals, some of them quite obscure. Secondary sources are also to be found in less well-known journals. Offered below are major book-length primary sources, and a selection of secondary sources. Primary Sources The Beautiful Things. New York: Vanguard Press, 1960. The Buddha Poems. Glasgow: Midnight Press, 1971. Clouds. Los Angeles: Melmont Publishers, 1959. Echoes Inside the Labyrinth. Chicago: Thunders Mouth Press, 1983. Figures from a Double World. Denver: A. Swallow, 1955.
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A Literary History of the American West First Manifesto. Baton Rouge: A. Swallow, 1940. The Gates of Ivory, the Gates of Horn. New York: Mainstream Publishers, 1957. Letter to an Imaginary Friend. Denver: A. Swallow, 1962. Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I & II. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1970. Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts III & IV. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1985. Longshot OLearys Garland of Practical Poesie. New York: International Publishers, 1949. The Movie at the End of the world: Collected Poems. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1973. New and Selected Poems. Denver: A. Swallow, 1964. Open Songs: Sixty Short Poems. Mount Carroll, Ill.: Uzzano Press, 1977. Passages Toward the Dark. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1982. Poems for Little People. Gloucester: Duplicated by D. Faux, n.d. Three Young Poets: Thomas McGrath, William Peterson, James Franklin Lewis, selected by Alan Swallow. Prairie City, Ill.: The Press of J. A. Decker, 1942. Voices from Beyond the Wall: A Chapbook of Poems from his Collected Poems. Moorhead, Minn.: The Territorial Press, 1974. To Walk a Crooked Mile: Poems. New York: Swallow Press, 1947. Waiting for the Angel. Menominee, Wisc.: Uzzano Press, 1979. Witness to the Times: Poems. Los Angeles: Students of Thomas McGrath, 1953. Secondary Sources Bertolino, James, ed. McGrath on McGrath. Epoch: A Quarterly of Contemporary Literature 22 (1973): 20719. McGrath comments on his life and poetry. Introduced with a brief critical statement by James Bertolino. Childress, William. Thomas McGrath. Poetry Now 2 (1975): cover, 1, 38. An interview with McGrath, focusing on his composition process. Holscher, Rory. Receiving Thomas McGraths Letter. Moons and Lion Tailes: A Midwestern Journal of Poetry and Comment 4 (Jan. 1976): 2948. A thoughtful review essay, mostly about Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I & II, but in comparison with other works of interest to younger poets and critics. Smeall, Joseph F. S. Thomas McGrath: A Review Essay. North Dakota Quarterly 40 (1972): 2938. A discussion of McGraths relationship to North Dakota near things,of McGraths North Dakota roots, and of the relationship to Alan Swallow, by a scholar close to McGraths work and background. Stern, Frederick C. The Delegate for Poetry: McGrath as Communist Poet. In Where the West Begins: Essays on Middle Border and Siouxland Writing in Honor of Herbert Krause, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer. Sioux Falls, S.D.: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978. Discusses McGraths political ideas and images, and some sources for his political metaphors. Whitehead, Fred, ed. The Dream Champ. Special issue of North Dakota Quarterly 50 (Fall 1982). A remarkable collection of tributes and critical articles, amounting to an overview of McGraths work.
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Robert Bly
OBERT BLY was born in Madison, Minnesota in 1926, and grew up on his parents farm. He went to high school in Madison, and then enlisted in the Navy, where he met for the first time a living human being who actually wrote poetry. After he left the Navy, Bly attended St. Olaf College for a year before going to Harvard, where he graduated with honors. Rather than going directly to graduate school, Bly returned to Minnesota to live alone for three years, and then spent a couple of years more in New York City. In 1955 he was married, and in 1956, after obtaining his Masters degree from the University of Iowa, he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway to translate Norwegian poetry into English (Blys ancestry, like that of many in the upper Midwest, is Norwegian). It was in Norway that Bly discovered the work of those poets who would ultimately have the most influence on his own work: Pablo Neruda, Juan Ramn Jimnez, Georg Trakl, and Csar Vallejo. When he returned from Europe in 1958, Bly began, with William Duffy, a poetry magazine called The Fifties (which subsequently became The Sixties and The Seventies). In The Fifties, Bly and Duffy published translations of those poets Bly had discovered in the Oslo library, as well as translations of ScandinaviansGunnar Ekelf, Harry Martinson, and Tomas Transtrmerwhose work displayed similarly wild and exuberant imagery. All the while, Bly was writing poems that would make up an American classic: Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). In Silence, Bly displays his love for the midwestem landscape in poems of oriental simplicity that contain the recurring images of big skies, abandoned farmhouses, barns, and fields of all kindscornfields, alfalfa fields, beanfields, barren fields, and the most familiar snowy fields with their overwhelming silence. Bly often moves through this landscape in the small world of the car whose solitude covered with iron provides him with the privacy that is inherent in the landscape he describes. In poems such as the memorable Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River, Bly meditates on the correspondence between the outer world and the inner world. Like the place-descriptive poems of the English Romantics, these poems begin with a brief descriptive passage that transforms itself through meditation from the regional into the universal and sometimes even into the prophetic:
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Snow fell all night on a farmyard in Montana. And the Assyrian lion blazed above the soybean fields. The last haven of Jehovah, down from the old heavens, Hugged a sooty corner of the murdered pine. (The Current Administration) Many of these poems, like the one above, reveal the influence of the Spanish surrealists on Blys work. The meditations become very subjective. In fact, mood and description fuse so seamlessly throughout Silence that it is difficult to tell where the objective world ends and the subjective world begins. Consequently, Blys images puzzle critics, who label him a Deep Image poet, aligning him with Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly, poets who invented this term to describe the images in their work that operate on a deep, intuitive or unconscious level. But Bly has never used the term Deep Image to describe his images, and he has actually criticized the term for its tendency to locate the image geographically in the brain. Perhaps a more accurate term for the kind of image that proliferates in Silence (and has flourished in Blys poems ever since) is the transformative image. It is an image which is usually contained in an of phrase, and which combines things from the outer world with things from the inner to transform reality into something rich and strange, as in the dungeons of sleep, or the chestnut blossoms of the mind. And while it is true that Blys images do bypass the circuits of the intellect and work on an intuitive level, they affect the reader primarily on a physical level, and thus speak to the body more than to the brain: We are returning now to the snowy trees, And the depth of the darkness buried in snow, through which you rode all night With stiff hands; now the darkness is falling In which we sleep and awakea darkness in which Thieves shudder, and the insane have a hunger for snow, In which bankers dream of being buried by black stones, And businessmen fall on their knees in the dungeons of sleep. (Unrest) In his second book, The Light Around the Body (1967), Blys preoccupation with the physical continues. However, Bly replaces much of the pastoral quietude of Silence, which is only occasionally interrupted by political concerns, with strident poems that cry out on behalf of those eaten by America, and hence against those responsible for the Vietnam War. In 1966, along with David Ray, Bly had organized Writers Against the War, and had arranged readings in which the Johnson Administration was highly 814
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criticized. Light won a National Book Award, and in a defiant gesture Bly handed his cash award over to a representative of a draft-resisters organization. Light consists mostly of surreal political poems in the manner of Neruda, poems that furiously attack Americas foreign policy in the 1960s. In the disturbing Counting Small-Boned Bodies, for example, Bly presents a terrifying portrait of Americas military intelligence: If we could only make the bodies smaller, The size of skulls, We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight! Bly projects his anguish, grief and despair over this behavior onto all of humanity: The world is a ship sinking / Where what is left and what goes down both bring despair. This despair reaches its most intense expression in The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, a long poem first published by City Lights in 1970, and which was later included in Sleepers Joining Hands (1973). A kind of surreal documentary, Teeth Mother graphically demonstrates the horrors of Vietnam in contradistinction to American affluence, and attempts to give psychological reasons for the war. Bly tries to involve his readers personally in the wars atrocities in the hope that, by putting Americans in the place of the Vietnamese, he might shock his countrymen out of their apathy: If one of those children came toward me with both hands in the air, fire rising along both elbows, I would suddenly go back to my animal brain, I would drop on all fours, screaming, my vocal chords would turn blue, yours would too, it would be two days before I could play with my own children again. In the essay that stands at the center of Sleepers, Bly elaborates on his cryptic poetic explanation of the war. It is a long, rambling essay whose ideas are derived mainly from Neumann and Jung. It argues that the Vietnam War was inevitable given the imbalance of the collective American psyche; a psyche wherein the feminine and the intuitive had been suppressed for two hundred years by the masculine and the rational. It is the male-dominated societys refusal to experience grief that leads to atrocities such as My Lai; and in this refusal, Bly contends, positive feminine energy (the Good Mother and the Ecstatic Mother) is transformed into negative feminine energy (the Teeth Mother or Death Mother) that ultimately turns on the nation itself: 815
It is because we have so few women sobbing in back rooms, because we have so few childrens heads torn apart by high velocity bullets, because we have so few tears falling on our own hands that the Super Sabre turns and screams down toward the earth. In contrast, the title sequence of Sleepers offers a way out of this nightmare. Using transformative images whose sources lie in mythology, psychology, cultural anthropology, fables and Biblical parables, Bly mines the collective unconscious for its more nourishing feminine elements. Both the exuberance of the Sleepers sequence, and the source of its title Leaves of Grassplace the book, and Bly, firmly in the Whitman tradition. Blys Whitmanesque vision becomes more and more evident in the books which follow Sleepers, especially in the prose poems of The Morning Glory (1975) and This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977). In The Morning Glory, however, Bly borrows Frances Ponges idea of the object poem for his descriptions of such minute particulars as a caterpillar, a starfish, a birds nest. Blys intention in his prose poems is to restore dignity to objectsnot to exploit them as symbolsand to draw our attention to their hidden will; it is also to celebrate the body and its myriad transformations. When Bly uses the term body, he does not mean to distinguish flesh from spirit, for to him they are both aspects of the same cellular intelligence that informs the flesh and that inheres in life itself. He accepts, then, neither the Platonic nor the Christian view of flesh and spirit as being diametrically opposed. He celebrates the body, as Whitman did, as a Dionysian vessel which contains all the organs, only one of which is the mind, the organ through which consciousness is filtered. And because the body is in a constant state of change, Bly sees it as the perfect metaphor for transformation, yet he refuses to idealize it: no sentimentality, only the ruthless body performing its magic, transforming each of our conversations into energy. In 1979 Bly published This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years as a sequel to Silence in the Snowy Fields. Its poems focus on the consciousness that Bly feels we share with nature, and they anticipate Blys selection of poems by other writers in News of the Universe (1980) that he feels also have developed this consciousness. His most recent book, The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), as a counterpoint to Sleepers, unfolds the relationship between the father and the son, a relationship which Bly believes has been virtually erased since the Industrial Revolution, and one which must be restored. In addition to this furious production of poems, Bly has managed to translate the works of an impressive number of poets from Spanish (Neruda,
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Lorca, Jimnez, Vallejo), Swedish (Transtrmer, Martinson, Ekelf, Jacobsen) , and German (Rilke and Trakl), as well as to offer versions of poems by the fifteenth-century Indian poets Kabir and Mirabai. His translation of Rilke is, in particular, a magnificent tour de force in its reworking of a very sophisticated and highly ornate syntax into contemporary American. And his own work of late has combined the ecstatic influence of Kabir and Mirabai with the melancholy of Rilke. Robert Bly has obviously had a tremendous influence on contemporary poetry. He has been solely responsible for introducing to his American audience many of the worlds most important non-English-language writers, and has managed to convince readers that poetry and politics not only can marry but should. He has, in his tripartite role as translator, editor, and poet, made his small farmhouse in Minnesota an everywhere.
D OUGLAS S MITH , University
of Manitoba
Primary Sources (in chronological order) 1. Poetry Silence in the Snowy Fields. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962; London: Cape, 1967. The Light Around the Body. New York: Harper & Row, 1967; London: Rapp & Whiting, 1968. The Morning Glory: Another Thing That Will Never Be My Friend: Twelve Prose Poems. San Francisco: Kayak Books, 1969; revised 1970. The Teeth Mother Naked at Last. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1970; Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Company, 1973. Sleepers Joining Hands. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. The Morning Glory. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
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A Literary History of the American West This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. The Man in the Black Coat Turns. New York: Dial, 1981. Loving a Woman in Two Worlds: Love Poems. New York: Doubleday, 1985. 2. Translations Georg Trakl. Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl, trans. Bly and James Wright. Madison, Minn: Sixties Press, 1961. Pablo Neruda. Twenty Poems of Pablo Neruda, trans. Bly and James Wright. Madison, Minn.: Sixties Press, 1968; London: Rapp & Whiting, 1968. Juan Ramn Jimnez. Forty Poems of Juan Ramon Jimenez. Madison, Minn.: Seventies Press, 1970. Pablo Neruda and Csar Vallejo. Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, trans. Bly, James Wright and John Knoepfle. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Miguel Hernandez and Blas De Otero. Selected Poems, trans. Timothy Baland, Bly, Hardie St. Martin and James Wright. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972. Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelf, Tomas Transtrmer. Friends, You Drank Some Darkness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. Tomas Transtrmer. Truth Barriers. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. 3. Other Books A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War, edited by Bly and David Ray. Madison, Minn. : American Writers Against the Vietnam War, 1966. Forty Poems Touching on Recent American History, edited by Bly. Madison, Minn.: Sixties Press, 1966; Boston: Beacon Press, 1970. Leaping Poetry: An idea with Poems and Translations, edited by Bly. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. News of the Universe: Poems of Two-fold Consciousness, edited by Bly. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980. The Eight Stages of Translation. Chicago: Academy Chicago Ltd./Rowan Tree Press, 1983. 4. Essays Poetry in an Age of Expansion. Nation 192 (April 22, 1961): 35054. Rewriting as Translation. Hudson Review 15 (Autumn 1962): 46975. A Wrong Turning in American Poetry. Choice 3 (1963): 3347. Looking for Dragon Smoke. Stand 9 (1967): 102. On Political Poetry. Nation 204 (April 24, 1967): 52224. On Pablo Neruda. Nation 206 (March 25, 1968): 41418. American Poetry: On the Way to the Hermetic. Books Abroad 46 (Winter 1972): 1724. The Network and the Community. American Poetry Review 3 (1974): 1921. Reflections o n the Origins of Poetic Form. Field 10 (Spring 1974): 3135.
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The Writers Sense of Place. South Dakota Review 13 (Autumn 1975): 7375. Recognizing the Image as a Form of Intelligence. Field 24 (Spring 1981): 1727. Form That Is Neither In nor Out. Poetry East 4/5 (Spring/Summer 1981): 2934. Secondary Sources Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960s. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979. Although he mistakenly persists in classifying Bly as a deep image poet, Altieri provides an insightful appraisal of Blys work in Silence and Light as an example of the Romantic resurgence in American poetry and poetics. He considers Bly to be an heir of Whitman in his capacity for concentrating external and internal energies within a single state of feeling, and he sees Blys organic notions of nature and consciousness as parallel to those of Coleridge. Atkinson, Michael. Sleepers Joining Hands: Shadow and Self. Iowa Review 7 (1976): 13553. Atkinsons article offers a detailed exegesis of the title poem of Sleepers, tracing the poets attempt to incorporate Jungian shadow material into his personality. Its interpretive scheme pays tribute to the poets resistance to Jungian individuation and thus refuses to categorize images as archetypes for the sake of systematic convenience. Friberg, Ingegerd. Moving Inward: A Study of Robert Blys Poetry. Diss. Acta Universitatis Gathenburgenis, 1977. Fribergs Ph.D. dissertation is a valuable study of the images that recur in Blys work up to the mid-1970s; images such as snow, barn, darkness, etc. She places her study in the context of Blys M.A. thesis at the University of Iowa, and she includes interesting information about particular poems that came out of her correspondence with the author. Gitzen, Julien. Floating on Solitude: The Poetry of Robert Bly. Modern Poetry Studies 7 (1976): 231241. Gitzen explores the nature of solitude in Silence, Light and Sleepers as a state of mind that mirrors the poets midwestern environment in Silence; as a necessity for spiritual sustenance in Light; and as a political force that counters masculine aggression and war in Sleepers. Harris, Victoria Frenkel. The Incorporative Consciousness: A Study of the Poetry of Denise Levertov and Robert Bly. Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1977. Harris restricts her study primarily to Silence, examining its neo-surrealistic qualities in the light of Blys distinction between two kinds of consciousness: news of the human vs. news of the universe. Bly, of course, favors the latter, and Harris labels it incorporative consciousness and studies its ability to encompass inner and outer reality and to integrate the self and its relationship with others and nature as an organic whole. Unfortunately, Harris, too, places Blys work under the rubric of the deep image. Heyen, William. Inward to the World: The Poetry of Robert Bly. The Far Point 3 (Fall/Winter 1969): 4250 [now Northern Light]. Heyen wrote one of the first appreciative articles on Bly, in which he praises Silence for its quiet, unassuming tone, its refusal to bow down to intellectual pleasures in the allusive mode of Eliot, and Light for its ability to realize the inner life. Janssens, G. A. M. The Present State of American Poetry: Robert Bly and James
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A Literary History of the American West Wright. English Studies 51 (1970): 112137. Janssens summarizes Ronald Morans and George Lansings article in The Southern Review (1967) that later grew into the book Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination (1976), and an earlier article by Cleanth Brooks also in The Southern Review (1965). He mistakenly divides the articles on contemporary American poetry into two embarrassing, warring orthodoxies (p. 115), whereas the two articles agree that the kind of imagination present in the work of Bly and Wright is by no means new and finds its origins in the poetry of the English Romantics. Jones, Richard, and Kate Daniels, eds. Poetry East, Nos. 4 and 5 (Spring and Summer 1981). Jones and Daniels have collected essays, memoirs and tributes in verse and letters about Bly and his influence on American poetry. Included, too, is more recent poetry and translations by Bly, as well as a fascinating essay on poetic form: Neither Far Out nor In Deep. Of the critical work in this special double issue, the essays by David Seal and William Virgil Davis stand out. Lacey, Paul. The Inner War: Forms and Themes in Recent American Poetry. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972. Lacey examines Blys poetry and prose poems in the light of the poets important essays in The Sixties. He provides thorough studies of individual poems based on the influences on them of the ancient Chinese poets, and also of Rilke and Trakl. He praises Blys ability, in Teeth Mother, to unite the three realms of politics, the streetcar and the ocean in a single realm. Libby, Anthony. Robert Bly Alive in Darkness. Iowa Review 3 (Summer 1972): 7891. Libby reviews Blys call for association as a form of content as it appears in Silence, Light, and Sleepers, but concludes that Blys uses of Neumann and Jung in Sleepers is archetypal sociology [that] does not fully convince (p. 86). He argues that Blys greatest strength is his ability to discover . . . images that are not archetypal . . . because they are only beginning to loom into view (p. 87). Libby offers an excellent reading of Teeth Mother. Mersmann, James F. Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poetry and Poets Against the War. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974. Mersmann considers the effect that the Vietnam War had on Blys (and others) work, concentrating on the anti-war poems in Light and Sleepers. His treatment of Teeth Mother, from the latter volume, is by far its most thorough and most intelligent reading. Molesworth, Charles. Thrashing in the Depths: The Poetry of Robert Bly. The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 29 (Autumn 1975): 95117. Nelson, Howard. Welcoming Shadows: Robert Blys Recent Poetry. The Hollins Critic 12 (April 1975): 115. Nelson argues that Silence remains Blys best book due to its use of artful repetition (p. 3), and places it in the American Transcendentalist tradition of Thoreaus Walden. He analyzes Blys comments on association in The Sixties and applies them to his consideration of the Jungian extravaganza (p. 4) in Sleepers Joining Hands. In considering Blys tiny poems from Jumping Out of Bed, Nelson comments on how their plainness and directness is balanced by their surrealistic tendencies. He also deals with
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Blys prose poems from The Morning Glory, focusing on their imaginative leaps and correspondences. An excellent article for its all-inclusive approach to Bly. Picionne, Anthony. Robert Bly and the Deep Image. Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1969. Picionnes Ph.D. dissertation is one of the earliest major studies of Blys work in Silence and Light, in the context of the poetics in The Fifties and The Sixties. Despite his misreading of Blys work as deep image material, it is significant for its careful handling of individual poems, and for its bold recognition of Bly as a major voice among American poets in the late 1960s. Rosenthal, M. L. The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Rosenthal provides a very brief reading of Silence, relegating it to the perimeters of limited, regional art, while grouping it with the work of James Wright, Donald Hall, and James Dickey an odd conglomeration indeedas an example of the surrealist mode. Stepanchev, Stephen. American Poetry Since 1945. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Stepanchev is responsible for first associating Bly with the deep image poets Robert Kelly and Jerome Rothenberg. He defines deep image as a concrete particular that has attracted and operates in a context of powerful feelings and associations in the unconscious of the poet and wakes a similar context in the unconscious of the reader (p. 177). Bly does not object so much to the definition as to the term itself, arguing that it restricts the image and its source to a geographical location in the brain (Talking All Morning, p. 258).
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SECTION IV
The Rocky Mountains
Introduction
HE SECTION which this chapter introduces deals with authors prominently, though not exclusively, connected with six statesIdaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. It is a scholarly convenience rather than a strict geological fact to call these states the Rocky Mountain region, for Nevada contains none of the true Rockies while New Mexico, excluded from this categorization, does. Furthermore, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, like Nevada, contain numerous mountain ranges. Nonetheless, the Rocky Mountains have a special prestige, bearing from centuries ago a poetic, evocative image. Part of a massive cordillera stretching from Alaska to Yucatan, the American Rockies subdivide into three geological provinces: the northern province includes the ranges of Idaho and Montana; the middle, the ranges of Wyoming and northeastern Utah; the southern, the ranges of Colorado and northern New Mexico. There is a propriety in giving their name to a major region of the West, recognizing thus that mountainous terrain has had an immense influence upon western culture and upon the literature which interprets it. In describing that terrain, one is describing not only the setting of much western literature but also the source of its richest imagery and symbolism. The Herculean uplift of the Pacific tectonic plate explains almost every distinctive topographical feature of the Mountain West. Because of it, surfaces have fractured, great expanses of rock and soil have sheared away, crests and ridges have risen, basins and valleys have dropped, and an entire third of a continent, elevated, chopped, and fissured, has become susceptible to the sculpting of water and wind. The numerous ranges are unquestionably the most prominent feature of the Mountain West. Irresistibly they impose themselves upon the human mind, compelling attention and insisting upon response. Whether the ranges belong to the three geological provinces of the Rockies proper or whether they belong to one of the surrounding plateau or basin provinces, they bear haunting, evocative names: Sawtooth, Bitterroot, Elkhorn, Wind River, Absaroka, Uinta, Gore, San Juan, Sangre de Cristo, Abajo, Toiyabe, Black Rock. To those who under-
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stand its watershed, each range has a distinctive face, but to the uninitiated, each is likely to seem a confusing tangle of main and lateral ridges whose crests are serrated by peaks and saddles, and whose sides, furrowed into large canyons, are disguised by forests of pine, fir, aspen, oak, or juniper. The mountain country owes much of its beauty to its chasms, some of which, like Royal Gorge, Flaming Gorge, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, and the River of No Return, are justly famous, while many others, almost equally impressive, are little known. Particularly moving are the great canyons cut by established rivers through gradually elevated plains and plateaus. In Idaho, the visitor comes unexpectedly upon the Snake River Gorge, whose vertical sides have been cut into the black igneous rock of the surrounding plain. One of the authentic wonders of the world is the massive complex of canyons in the heart of the Colorado Plateau of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Appropriately named Canyonlands, this region has been cut by the Colorado and its tributaries into a stunningly intricate maze of ravines, arroyos, chasms, and gorges. Frequently its river courses are narrow ribbons girded by sheer cliffs rising hundreds and even thousands of feet. At times, they loop into goosenecks or scoop out broad basins of slickrock punctuated by mesas, buttes, and pinnacles. Everywhere lines, textures, and configurations profusely overwhelm the human eye. Equally a part of the Mountain West are the flat places. The eastern halves of Montana and Colorado belong to the Great Plains province. The Wyoming Basin province is composed of high, broken plains. Further west, among the Rockies and beyond, mountain ranges alternate with valleys whose undulating floors are miniature plains. Although some high mountain valleys are remarkably lush and green, most valleys are arid and dreary. Overgrazed, dominated by invasive sagebrush and juniper, they offer little beauty or distraction. This is particularly true in the severely arid valleys of the Great Basin which comprises most of western Utah and nearly all of Nevada. Driving across interminable miles, the modern traveler can readily appreciate the fatigue and hopelessness with which nineteenth-century immigrants toiled their way toward California. Many plains and valleys have, of course, been transformed into oases by human effort, for it is upon such flat, amenable surfaces that the large majority of the cities, towns, and farms of the Mountain West have been established. Paradoxically, it is the heights which permit the lower oases, for all water originates in the mountains. Their elevation captures summer rains and winter snows and funnels the runoff into the beginnings of great rivers destined for faraway oceans the Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas, the Rio Grande, the Green, the Colorado, the Snake, the Salmon. Other rivers like the Sevier and the Humboldt flow from the mountains toward an eventual extinction in the sands of the Great Basin, which has no outlet to the sea. 823
The Mountain West is a land of strange contrasts, a land of rushing rivers and stern deserts, of incredible beauty and numbing monotony. Its traits have impressed themselves upon the mentality of its people, for many of whom it is addictive and indispensable. Its beauties and deprivations are integral to their character and to the literature which expresses that character. Its variety and immensity force the fact of natural process upon the human mind, and its infinite lines, colors, and shapes feed the human hunger for sensation. To a population for whom water is a precious, precarious gift, the wet, timbered mountains symbolize youth, nurture, even life itself. Furthermore, the mountains are barriers between the people who live near them and the rest of the nation. Despite the integration of the Mountain West into the national economy, despite freeways, railroads, and jetports, it retains a provincialism, a subtle sense of separation and distinction, induced in part by actual distances and in part by the image of high, looming walls which the experience of mountains leaves in the western mind. Like other westerners, the people of the Rocky Mountains are devoted to the frontier tradition and to modern beliefs and values which they associate with the frontier. Ignoring the fact that many of their present industrial and urban traits had their beginnings on the frontier, they choose to emphasize those aspects of frontier life which allowed for simplicity, self-sufficiency, and intimacy with nature. The two facets of their personality, national and regional, exist in disharmony with one another, a tension arising from the clear need for a regional identity in some manner distinct from the American personality at large. Selected features of their history will illuminate the divided character of these people and the source from which derive most of the settings and themes of Rocky Mountain literature. Two pairs of frontier activitiesmining and railroading on one hand, farming and ranching on the otherremain important in the economies of the modern mountain states. Mining and railroading propelled frontier Americans rapidly toward the urban complexities of today, for almost instantly they became industrialized and highly capitalized. Farming and ranching were less amenable to an industrial pattern. Even today they retain some flavor of their original frontier individualism and intimacy with nature. Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana experienced major gold rushes between 1858 and 1862, in consequence of which Congress admitted each of them to territorial status between 1860 and 1864 (Nevada receiving statehood in the latter year). Silver soon replaced gold as the most important metal, inducing the mountain territories and states to call loudly for free coinage and federal subsidies for silver until well into the twentieth century. Copper became lucrative in Nevada, Utah, and Montana before 1900 and
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soon became much more important than either gold or silverso important that the Anaconda Copper Mining Company could dominate both the economics and the politics of Montana from 1890 to 1950. Coal has become important in Wyoming and Utah, where large reserves promise to make these states important sources of energy. In addition, oil has become important in Wyoming, where at present a boom is straining the social fabric of its southwestern counties. Very early in the frontier era, Rocky Mountain mining became a fullfledged part of the industrial revolution, because the exploitation of lodes ore-bearing strata buried in the earthrequired massive capital, advanced technology, and an industrial organization of investors, managers, and laborers. From other mining regions the new industry borrowed such inventions as the steam-powered hoist, the air-operated rock drill, and dynamite, and it added its own inventions to world mining technology. From the silver mines of Nevadas Comstock Lode, for example, came the Washoe pan process of ore reduction and square-set timbering for shoring up shafts and tunnels. Unionization was also evidence of an international industrial development. Rocky Mountain miners, most of them immigrants, had ample reason for joining unions. Hours were long and wages low. Hazards abounded abrasive rock dust, unventilated shafts, open lift cagesand there was little or no compensation for the disabled or for the survivors of the dead. In the early years of the twentieth century strikes increased in number and bitterness, as miners formed the Western Federation of Miners and the United Mine Workers. Some joined the Industrial Workers of the World, an international organization advocating revolution. Early results were discouraging. Governors called out the National Guard to support the strikebreaking tactics of mine owners. In 1914 Colorado Guardsmen burned a tent city of striking miners at Ludlow, killing a number of women and children. The 1915 Utah execution of Joe Hill, an IWW official accused of murder and robbery, was interpreted as a blow against unionism among western miners. Nonetheless, the demands of the miners, joined with those of other industrial workers in America, at last had an effect in the favorable labor legislation of the New Deal in the 1930s. The coming of the railroad sharply accelerated industrialization in the Rocky Mountains. Wyoming received territorial status in 1867 as small but energetic cities grew up along the advancing track of the Union Pacific. Once the continent had been spanned by the meeting of the rails at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, railroads grew apace throughout the Mountain West, and lode mining blossomed. Despite the frontier conditions prevailing in railroad construction camps, there was nothing primitive or simple about the
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rolling stock and the operation of a railroad. Locomotives, Pullman cars, and switching yards were visible extensions of a highly mechanized, thoroughly capitalized civilization. Frontier farming and livestock raising were also quickly pulled into the national commercial network, yet they were rooted in an age-old agrarian philosophy, vestiges of which they retain even today. According to the agrarian ideal, espoused by Thomas Jefferson and a host of lesser Americans, the most desirable commonwealth was to be composed of yeoman farmers, free from landlords and creditors, uncorrupted by urban luxuries, and self-sufficient through subsistence farming and the minor industrial arts of rural villages. The Rocky Mountains became a farming frontier in 1847 with the arrival of the Mormons in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, following which, in 1850, Utah became a territory. The Mormons, reinforced by an unceasing flow of American and foreign converts, aggressively preempted hundreds of village sites where streams, emerging from the mountains, provided irrigation. Non-Mormons too began to take up farms in the territories beyond Utah. Frontier cities and migrating settlers offered minor markets to early farmers, but with the opening of national markets by the coming of the railroads, Rocky Mountain farmers had a strong impetus to abandon the austerity of subsistence farming and to enter the national economy. NonMormon farmers adapted to market farming more readily than did the Mormons, who for almost forty years after their arrival adhered to the agrarian ideal of village self-sufficiency. Another link with the national economy was promotion and speculation in farm land. Many farmers received free public land through the Homestead Act of 1862, the Desert Land Act of 1877, and later legislation, but many others bought their farms from railroads, brokers, and other purveyors of private lands. Furthermore, promoters were indispensable in encouraging and persuading people to immigrate into the arid, inhospitable lands of the Mountain West. In 1870, the city of Greeley, Colorado, had its beginning when Horace Greeley and his friends founded an association providing its subscribers with farm land, irrigation water, city lots, and civic improvements. Similar promotions, often less successful, went on throughout the frontier era. Perhaps the most pervasive promotion was that which attended the dry farming boom between 1900 and 1918. Governors, editors, professors of agricultural science, brokers, and railroaders theorized enthusiastically on the potential of farming without irrigation and disseminated the techniques for deep plowing and fall planting of wheat. Thanks to promoters like Jim Hill, proprietor of the Great Northern railroad, Mon-
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tana saw such an influx of dry farmers on her eastern plains that agriculture soon outstripped mining as the states major economic activity. Wet years and high wheat prices, stimulated by World War I, brought dry farming to a peak from which it tumbled disastrously in the dry, depressed years between the two world wars. Another important aspect of Rocky Mountain agriculture was federal reclamation. From the beginning, irrigation was a cooperative affair, whether developed by water users like the Mormon villagers or by commercial companies intending to sell water rights to prospective farmers. However, convenient water was quickly preempted, and private reclamation efforts in the later years of the nineteenth century often failed. With the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, the federal government entered upon reclamation with serious intent, constructing numerous dams, reservoirs, and canals throughout the Rocky Mountain states. One of the most complex projects is on the upper Snake River where between 1904 and 1959 the Minidoka, American Falls, and Palisades dams were added to an existing dam at Jackson Lake. As a result, the Snake River plain of southern Idaho, originally desolate, has blossomed into a bounteous farming region, helping make agriculture the most prominent of modern Idahos economic pursuits. The modern farm is highly mechanized, equipped with air-conditioned tractors, specialized trucks, and automated hay loaders. Despite this fact, and despite the innumerable other ways in which modern farmers depend upon an industrial economy, they do not fit into an urban pattern. Their work remains an individual rather than a corporate enterprise, having never lent itself well to the industrial model of investors, managers, and laborers. Moreover, their environment, the rural landscape, remains half natural, not totally unlike the landscape of the Rocky Mountain frontier. The same can be said for Rocky Mountain ranchers. Since frontier times the plains and valleys have offered year-round grazing, while the mountain ranges make excellent summer pasture. Livestock came to the mountain country in modest numbers with the first farmers, and territorial legislatures paid early attention to herding, branding, and maverick regulations. The 1870s were a turning point, for by the end of that decade, Indians were largely restricted to reservations, the buffalo had been eradicated from the ranges, and railroads had opened eastern markets. The free grass of the public domain beckoned irresistibly. Promotional literature appeared in the East and in Europe, and almost overnight individuals and companies rushed to stock the open ranges with cattle and sheep. Sheep eventually outnumbered cattle, but cattle caught the fancy of the nation. Cowboys trailed in herds from California, Oregon, and Texas and achieved a reputa-
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tion for profligacy and license. Cattlemen took what homesteads and land preemptions they could as a home base for their operations and evolved the cooperative roundup as a way of gathering and sorting the animals which mingled freely on the public ranges. By 1885 the plains of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado were grossly overstocked. The hard winter of 188687 chastened local cattlemen and foreign investors alike and started the cattle industry on a slow course toward the fenced ranches and regulated public grazing lands of today. Regulated grazing came first on the national forests, created between 1891 and 1910; it came to the rest of the public domain with the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. Both cattlemen and sheepmen have consistently grumbled over quotas and fees, yet as a result of regulation the public lands of the Mountain West offer sustained grazing to millions of animals. The regulation of grazing lands also resolved much of the conflict for which the frontier cattle trade was notorious. Violence was particularly conspicuous in Wyoming, which still calls itself the cowboy state. Cattle increased in Wyoming from 8000 in 1870 to 1,500,000 in 1885. Investorowned companies and substantial cattlemen, ambivalently called cattle kings, dominated the ranges. Organized as the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, they influenced the territorial legislature during the 1880s to remand to them the official supervision of roundups, cattle inspection, and maverick disposal. Bluntly prejudiced in favor of its members, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association roused great resentment among small cattlemencowboys and settlers who took out homesteads, ran their few cattle on the public ranges, andso claimed the cattle kingshelped themselves to mavericks and branded cattle. In 1892, cattlemen connected with the Association hired Texas gunmen and invaded Johnson County, intending to kill certain suspected rustlers, exile others, and intimidate the remaining small ranchers. Delayed by the courageous resistance of a single rustler, Nate Champion, they themselves were besieged and required rescue by federal troops. It was typical of the legal chaos of early Wyoming that the invaders were never brought to trial. Today many cattle, fattening in city feedlots, never see an open range, and many ranches are mechanized. Nonetheless, the tradition of the stock raisers frontier is strong in the Mountain West. Many stockmen still live on remote ranches, surrounded by a wild country. Ranges exist almost everywhere; one can travel very few miles beyond the cities without encountering grazing cattle, sheep, and horses. Boots and high crowned hats are common dress, even in cities. Rodeos remain a favorite summer entertainment; large and small, they are sponsored by dozens of towns and cities throughout the Rocky Mountains. Like farmers, ranchers are independent of mind,
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conservative in politics, suspicious of government, and hostile toward labor unions. Most of them run their own operation with few or no employees; like farming, their occupation has not lent itself to the industrial pattern. Both farmers and ranchers retain a respect and wield an influence in the Mountain West far beyond their numbers. To their city counterparts they smack of the frontier. They seem a little closer to self-sufficiency and independence and on better terms with nature. Of all modern westerners they seem the most true and authentic, expressing most completely the distinguishing traits of the regional identity. The Rocky Mountains have had a literature for nearly two hundred years. At first it was chiefly a literature of exploration, travel, and observation. The journals of early explorers were widely read, perhaps none more so than the journals which Meriwether Lewis and William Clark kept during their epic expedition of 18041806. History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean (1814) is the first and most influential of several redactions of their daily entries. As settlements appeared in the Rocky Mountains, innumerable travelers and sojourners maintained personal diaries, of which most are sparse and ungrammatical but a few are abundant in detail and emotion. In 1840 Rufus B. Sage, a literate freighter and frontier merchant, began the personal materials published over a century later as Letters and Papers . . . with . . . His Scenes in the Rocky Mountains and in Oregon, California, New Mexico, Texas, and the Grand Prairies (1956). Typical of Sages acuity is an 1846 entry concerning the eccentricity of Rocky Mountain trappers: A genuine mountaineer is a problem hard to solve. He seems a kind of sui genus, an oddity, both in dress, language, and appearance, from the rest of mankind. Another excellent documentone among a number of remarkable Mormon diariesis On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 18441861 (1964), which gives a painfully honest account of the rigors of the Mormon exodus. Even more abundant, at least in published form, were travel narratives and pioneer chronicles. Washington Irvings Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U. S. A. (1837) recounts the strenuous perambulations of Bonneville, a sometime Army man who failed as an entrepreneur in the mountain fur trade. Edgar Allan Poe, for his own whimsical reasons, worked upon but never completed a spurious exploration account, The Journal of Julius Rodman (1840). Claiming his hoax to be the record of the first successful crossing of the Rocky Mountains in 1792, Poe copied passages from genuine accounts, including extensive portions from Voyages (1801) of the 1 British explorer Alexander Mackenzie.
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Among many Rocky Mountain books published in foreign countries is Father Pierre-Jean De Smets Missions de lOregon et Voyages dans les Montagnes-Rocheuses en 1845 et 1846 (Paris, 1848). The noted Belgian-born Jesuit wrote his account as a promotion of the missions which he and his colleagues were successfully establishing among the Indians of northwestern Montana and Idaho. A narrative of more enduring fame is George Frederick Ruxtons Life in the Far West (1848), based upon the adventures of the young Englishman among trappers and Indians of the Rocky Mountains. Of particular interest is the distinct and colorful dialect which Ruxtons mountain men speak. Scholars disagree whether this dialect is a faithful recording or whether it is Ruxtons invention, but they do not dispute its influence upon recent authors who have modeled the speech of their fictional mountain men upon Ruxtons earthy metaphors and startling neologisms. A thoroughly typical travel narrative is that of Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield, Mass., Republican, whose journey with the speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives was published as Across the Continent: A Summers Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States, with Speaker Colfax (1865). Bowles could report that in Salt Lake City the Mormons had erected a theater where, during the winter season, performances are given twice a week; and the theater proves a most useful and popular social center and entertainment for the whole people. Much of the literature describing the mountain country was promotional in its intent. An unflagging boosterism was evident on the editorial page of every Rocky Mountain newspaper in frontier times and found expression in innumerable books and pamphlets. One of the most prominent promoters was William Gilpin, who for a single year served as the first territorial governor of Colorado before plunging into promotional and speculative schemes in agricultural real estate in the San Luis Valley. Gilpins speeches and articles, in which he preached the superlative potential of Colorado with a religious fervor, were published as The Central Gold Region: The Grain, Pastoral, and Gold Regions of North America, with Some New Views of Its Physical Geography and Observations on the Pacific Railroad (1860). In later writings Gilpin developed the grandiose theory that the American West, with Colorado at its center, would become the ultimate world empire, dominating, guiding, and inspiring all other parts of the world. Long before the end of the frontier era, the Rocky Mountains had generated a considerable historical literature of an informal and polemic nature. A notable specimen is Thomas J. Dimsdales The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Justice in the Rocky Mountains (1866), the first book published in Montana. An Oxford-educated Englishman, Dimsdale served as Montana territorys first superintendent of public instruction and edited Virginia
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Citys Montana Post. Dimsdales book narrates the effective but controversial vigilante campaign against Henry Plummer, who had doubled as elected sheriff and leader of road agents preying upon travelers between Montanas isolated mining camps. The episode left behind such turbulent feelings that in 1890 Nathaniel Pitt Langford published a reprise of Dimsdales work, Vigilante Days and Ways: The Pioneers of the Rockies, the Makers and Making of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. A vigorous, detailed book, Langfords work, like Dimsdales, argues that frontier vigilante justice was a necessary step toward a civilized state of law and order. Taking an opposite view of vigilante justice is a book by A. S. Mercer, The Banditti of the Plains, or the Cattlemens Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 (The Crowning Infamy of the Ages) (1894). This book narrates the Johnson County War from the bias of the homesteaders and small ranchers who successfully resisted the invasion of the large cattlemen and their hired Texas gunmen. Mercer, at one time president of the University of Washington and later editor of the Northwestern Live Stock Journal in Cheyenne, wrote with a rare and relentless invective against prominent Wyoming cattlemen and politicians, including the new states acting governor and its two U. S. Senators. Officials seized the bulk of the printing, destroyed the plates, charged Mercer with mailing obscene matter, and saw that copyright copies were removed from the Library of Congress. However, several hundred copies were surreptitiously removed to Colorado and the book went forth to inspire a number of later novelists likewise to treat the Johnson County War from the point of view of the small ranchers. In particular, it made a hero of the rustler Nate Champion, who held back the invaders until they set fire to his cabin: No stronger expression of nerve and heroism has ever been recorded, writes Mercer, and coming generations will point to Nate Champion as one of the coolest and bravest men of the nineteenth century. A most unusual account of frontier violence is Mormonism Unveiled, or the Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee (1877), published shortly after Lees execution for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. In southwestern Utah a company of Mormon militiamen, assisted by Indians, treacherously reneged on a promise of safe conduct and killed some ninety-six men, women, and children of an Arkansas company bound for California. The militiamen, drawn from nearby settlements, were motivated by war hysteria rising from the invasion of Utah by the U. S. Army, by unfortunate claims of some of the immigrants to have helped murder Joseph Smith, and by the arcane doctrine of blood atonement preached by Mormon leaders from Salt Lake City. Lees book outlines his faithful participation in the Mormon exodus to the Rocky Mountains and in the settlement of southern Utah. More importantly, it extends responsibility for the
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massacre to Lees military and ecclesiastical superiors and attributes a startling incident of blood atonement to one of Lees colleagues. Although historians have categorized the book with the virulently biased anti-Mormon literature common in the nineteenth century, it remains a testimony to the fact that frontier conditions provoked the Mormons to an uncharacteristic bloodiness. In addition to an informative literature of diaries, travel narratives, and informal histories, the Rocky Mountain frontier produced a literature with an imaginative and aesthetic intent. The desire for literary culture was often evident in the most raw, unfinished frontier city. Cheyenne boasted a Young Mans Literary Association by 1867, some months before the railroad arrived in that booming new town. Another notable Wyoming literary event, one defying categorization, occurred in Washington, D. C., when Stephen W. Downey, Laramie attorney and territorial delegate to Congress, received routine permission to print a bill in the Congressional Record of 1880; he deceitfully included The Immortals, his own poem of more than 2500 lines of free verse which, in the words of one historian, shows considerable debt to Homer, Vergil, and Dante and is heavily freighted with mythology, allegory, and 2 moral instruction. By 1880 Salt Lake City had produced many literary groups, including the Wasatch Literary Society and the Polysophical Society, in which rebellious young Utahns could stretch their intellectual wings, sometimes to the alarm of their staid elders. Two poets, unknown beyond Utah, had considerable prominence among cultivated Mormons. Eliza R. Snow, a brilliant plural wife to Joseph Smith and, after his death, to Brigham Young, wrote numerous poems, some of which appeared in a collection, Poems: Religious, Historical, and Political (vol. I, Liverpool, 1856; vol. II, Salt Lake City, 1877). One of her poems provides the lyrics for a beloved, haunting Latter-day Saint hymn, O My Father. Originally called Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother, it alludes to the Mormon doctrine of a divine mother which modern church authorities, in their battle against womens liberation, find troublesome. The poetry of Orson F. Whitney, Mormon apostle and an early chancellor of the University of Utah, was similarly oriented to Christian themes. His Elias, an Epic of the Ages (1904) is a lengthy poetic narrative setting forth the Christian cosmography as conceived by the Latter-day Saints. In an essay of 1888, Home Literature, Whitney predicted a flowering of Mormon literature, asserting that the Holy Ghost is the genius of Mormon literature and that we will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. The small cities of the Rocky Mountain frontier also generated a respectable number of magazines, most of which, like the Contributor and Womens Exponent of Utah and the Colorado Monthly and Out West of Colo832
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rado, had brief lives. Of particular note is The Great Divide, published in Denver between 1889 and 1895. In this short time The Great Divide achieved a national popularity, having 32,000 subscribers in 1893. Its stories, essays, and poems celebrate the healthy climate and scenic beauties of Colorado, extol the good life of its farmers, ranchers, and miners, and emphasize 3 the rise of obscure persons to wealth through pluck and hard work. The following stanza is from a poem, Colorado Sunshine, by a poetess signing herself as Wild-Bird: Sunshine for the pale and palsied, Sunshine for the chilled and weak, Giving pallid lips the rubies And the rose to Pallors cheek. Praise God for the floods of sunshine, Free as een the mountain air! This is Colorados glory, Poured like rivers everywhere. Perhaps the most celebrated author of the mountain frontier was Mark Twain, whose Roughing It (1872) covers his stay in Virginia City, Nevada, during the Civil War and his later travels to San Francisco and Hawaii. This book is elevated above the status of a travel narrative, which in part it is, by its undeviating satire of western manners and morals. Less famous but more thoroughly of the Rocky Mountain country was Bill Nye, a Wyoming humorist on the order of Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby. Edgar Wilson Nye, as he was christened, practiced law and journalism in Laramie between 1876 and 1889; afterward, having moved for reasons of health, he continued a writing career in the East. Nye established and edited the Laramie Boomerang, a newspaper named after Nyes mule. This irreverent title is indicative of the sketches he wrote of all kinds of subjects, including local politicians, classical lore, womens suffrage, and Chinese labor. His chief satirical method was parody a use of pretentious, elevated language upon common and undignified subjects. Besides a daily column for the Boomerang, he made contributions to the Cheyenne Sun, the Denver Tribune, and newspapers in the East. Many of the comic sketches written in Wyoming are included in Bill Nye and Boomerang, or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems (1890) and Baled Hay: A Drier Book Than Walt Whitmans Leaves o Grass (1893). Another writer with a minor national reputation was Helen Hunt Jackson. An acquaintance of Emily Dickinson, Jackson was an established author before migrating to Colorado Springs for her health. Never identifying closely with Colorado, she made slight literary use of the Mountain West. Her Verses (1873; 1887) offer poems of a competent prosody in the tradition 833
of genteel romanticismEuropean and Asian settings, domestic joys and griefs, allusions to kings and queens, and high moral sentiment. She is best remembered for her book of courageous protest, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Governments Dealings with Some of the lndian Tribes (1881), and for an Indian novel set in the mission country of southern California, Ramona (1884). Nonetheless, she wrote one novel set in the Rockies, Nellys Silver Mine: A Story of Colorado Life (1878), which effectively describes local landscape and depicts the patient, cheerful personality of Nelly, the juvenile protagonist. Also notable was Charles King, whose more than sixty novels and two hundred stories did much to establish the Indian-fighting cavalryman as a recognized American hero. Reared in Milwaukee and educated at West Point, King served as a cavalry officer in the Civil War and in the Indian wars of Arizona, Wyoming, and Montana; retiring from the regular service because of wounds, he continued to serve in the National Guard while pursuing an active literary career. Typical of the many novels King set in the mountain territories and states is Marions Faith (1886), which treats cavalry life from the perspective of an officers wife. Depicting events culminating in the Custer Massacre, this novel emphasizes the decency and decorum of both cavalrymen and the wives who wait behind in the forts. Trooper Ross (1895) also touches upon an actual historical event of Wyoming, the Fetterman Massacre. It features the pluck and bravery of an officers son, who, unable to compete academically at West Point, joins the cavalry as a common trooper determined to work his way up through loyal service. The most remarkable woman writer of the Rocky Mountain frontier was Mary Hallock Foote, the pattern for Susan Ward in Wallace Stegners Angle of Repose. A genteel eastern Quaker, she married a mining engineer who took her to Leadville, Colorado, to Mexico, and to the Boise Valley of Idaho before settling permanently in California. Exploiting her frontier experiences with verve and insight, Foote was highly successful in the eastern press as both an author and an illustrator. In her first novel, The Led-Horse Claim (1883), a young man and woman learn to love each other despite the violent claim disputes dividing a Colorado mining camp. In The Chosen Valley (1892), set in the Boise Valley, romantic love again triumphs over the hatred roused when an unscrupulous engineer attempts to construct an irrigation dam by profitable but dangerous methods. In Coeur dAlene (1894), love flourishes against the violent backdrop of a laborers strike at the Idaho mines of Coeur dAlene. Foote paints the striking miners as malicious, even villainous, while she depicts the owners and managers as heroic and magnanimous. Although modern readers no longer relish her sentimentalized fiction, her posthumously published autobiography, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (1972), is 834
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most readable. It is detailed, observant, and energetic and shows her to have been affectionately engaged by the frontier West in which she lived. Neither life nor literature in the Rocky Mountains changed abruptly with the coming of the twentieth century. Numerous people continued to live under near-frontier conditions until World War II. Nonetheless, by 1900 the frontier had clearly become a tradition. Many authors, among them Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister, lamented with great nostalgia the passing of the frontier, which Frederick Jackson Turner had underscored in his scholarly paper of 1893, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. The people of the Rocky Mountains, like other westerners, cheerfully accepted their national role as curators of the frontier tradition. Their westernness would remain inextricably associated with the fact that their land had been the locale of the last great American frontier. Perhaps the best western book published in the first decade of the new century was Wisters The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902). It remains one of the best novels set in Wyoming and despite its subtitle it also takes its reader into the mountains. Undoubtedly it contributed to the nascent formula cowboy novel by depicting the Virginian as superlative and by creating one of the first of the stylized shootouts between hero and villain that would become a stock feature of the formula Western. But it also has a humorous vein, depicts manners of the Wyoming frontier with a vivid realism, and conscientiously studies the tensions between eastern tradition and western innovation. The new century also saw the appearance of cowboy novels by a number of other authors, who unlike Wister made permanent homes in the Rocky Mountain region. One of these was Andy Adams, who lived in Colorado Springs; his novel, The Log of a Cowboy (1903), set upon the Great Plains, is prized for its historical authenticity. Writing for a widespread popular audience was William MacLeod Raine, one of the foremost early practitioners of the formula cowboy novel. Born in England, Raine taught school in Seattle, took a position with the Rocky Mountain News of Denver shortly after 1900, and soon settled into a prodigious writing careerover eighty novels, which in original and reprint have sold millions of copies, two hundred short stories, and a handful of historical books and articles. Among his novels set in the Mountain West are Wyoming (1907), Ridgway of Montana (1909), The High Grader (1915), and Colorado (1928). A similar author was Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, who under the pen name of B. M. Bower wrote ranch Westerns for three decades. Living most of her life in Big Sandy, Montana, Bower set many of her novels in Montana and other parts of the Mountain West. Chip of the Flying U (1904), her most famous novel, adds a new wrinkle to frontier romance. The good-natured cowboy, Chip, injured by a bronco, takes up oil painting at the advice of a 835
lady doctor from the East. His untutored primitive paintings stun all who see them, and in the end the unlettered Chip and the sophisticated lady doctor marry. This novel is interesting not only because it substitutes artistic expression for heroic violence in its cowboy protagonist but also because that protagonist is obviously modeled on Charles M. Russell, whom Bower knew well and whom she persuaded to illustrate a number of her books. Hamlin Garland, generally known for his Great Plains fiction, became an important Rocky Mountain writer during the early years of the new century. Abandoning the grim realism of Main-Travelled Roads (1891), Garland mined a profitable vein of romance in such works as The Captain of the GrayHorse Troop (1902), a novel about a cavalry action against renegade Indians in eastern Montana. Having first visited the Rockies in the winter of 189293, Garland thereafter traveled widely in the mountain country and spent many summers in Colorado. At first he was an enthusiastic admirer of the energy and vigor of the mountain frontier, but gradually he became disillusioned by the squalor that fell upon its towns as the boom spirit died away. The newly organized Forest Service salvaged his admiration by bringing into the mountain forests a decent, purposeful group of professional men. He wrote a number of Forest Service novels of which Cavanagh, Forest Ranger: A Romance of the Mountain West (1910) is best known. Garland described this novel as a love story with a federal forest for historical relief. Its protagonist, an ambitious young forest ranger, helps the woman he loves resurrect a sense of decency in her mountaineer parents. Frank B. Linderman was the most important writer to emerge during the second decade of the twentieth century. Linderman came to Montana in 1883 as a youth, lived the isolated life of a trapper, and later became legislator, newspaper publisher, and insurance agent. He turned naturally to writing as a means of commemorating the fading frontier to which he had a passionate attachment. Particularly interested in the Indians of Montana and Idaho, he assembled respectable books of myth and legend, including Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagles Lodge Fire (1915), Kootenai Why Stories (1926), and American: The Life Story of a Great Indian, Plenty-coups, Chief of the Crows (1930). In addition, Linderman wrote fiction. Lige Mounts: Free Trapper (1922), one of the earliest of mountain man novels, makes an authentic reproduction of the trapping frontier. An author whom readers rarely associate with the West is Upton Sinclair, a socialist reformer who fought against the industrial exploitation of workers and the poor during a fervent, energetic career of some fifty years. His most famous novel, The Jungle (1906), dramatizes the brutality of the owners and managers of the Chicago meat packing industry. Judging the Rocky Mountain mining industry to be similarly exploitative, Sinclair sup-
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ported the miners in the unsuccessful and violent coal strikes of 1914. He wrote The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (1919) to denounce the Associated Press for obstructing his efforts to give national publicity to the plight of the striking laborers. The title of the work, derived from the token often used in houses of prostitution, suggests the prostitution of the press by big money. Sinclair made fictional use of the Rocky Mountains in Mountain City (1930), a novel which follows the rise of a Colorado farm boy to a position of corrupt wealth in a city modeled on Denver. The 1920s were notable for the first appearance of a stern realism in Rocky Mountain fiction. Hitherto, it had portrayed frontier life in heroic, romanticized terms. Plots ended in triumph, and protagonists were idealized. Sexual matters were veiled in accordance with genteel inhibitions: it will be remembered that the Virginian and Molly, camping out on their honeymoon, bathe on different sides of the island which splits a mountain stream. Suffering from cultural lag, Rocky Mountain authors did not take up a dark realism until almost a quarter of a century after Crane, Norris, and Dreiser had begun to employ it in their naturalistic fiction. From its beginnings in the 1920s, Rocky Mountain realism would grow until by the 1940s it would become the major mode among those authors destined for the highest critical accreditation. Characteristic of such authors is a willingness to portray protagonists as victims, to deal in frontier tragedy, and to weigh the losses of the frontier experience. Three authors destined for critical acclaim began their careers in the 1920sBernard DeVoto, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, and Vardis Fisher. A native of Ogden, Utah, DeVoto chose to reside in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he pursued a distinguished career as editor, free-lance writer, literary critic, historian, and social commentator. Although some of his novels for example, The Crooked Mile (1924)are set in the Mountain West, his major works relating to this region are historical. Across the Wide Missouri (1947) is widely considered to have the greatest literary merit of all histories of the mountain men. Unlike DeVoto, Ferril has chosen to remain in his native city, Denver, to which his ancestors came as pioneers. Ferrils first collection of poems, High Passage (1926), demonstrates the competent free verse, the obliqueness of statement, and the feelingful appeal to the western scene which have continued to characterize his poetry. Vardis Fisher, turning his back on a university position in the East, returned in the twenties to begin a literary career in his native Idaho. His first novel, Toilers of the Hills (1928), paints a harsh, unflattering picture of the dry farming experience. It is the most remarkable early example of a dark realism in Rocky Mountain fiction. The 1920s also saw the publication of Charles M. Russells stories,
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Rawhide Rawlins (1921), More Rawhides (1926), and Trails Plowed Under (1927). Like Linderman, Russell migrated to Montana in his youth. Possessing an extraordinary talent for painting, he preserved the landscape and people of the frontier in representational paintings which today are highly esteemed. Turning to writing late in life, he tried, as he said, to write some of these yarns as nearly as possible as they were told to me. Told in the fractured grammar of frontier cowboys and containing numerous digressions, the tales come to humorous and ironic endings and reflect the irreverent exuberance of the young fugitives from civilization whom Russell so much admired. Another fascinating author is Gwendolen Haste, whose modest production of poetry demonstrates a high competence and an earnest calculation of lifes rigors on the Montana plains. A native of Wisconsin, Haste spent most of the years between 1915 and 1925 in Billings, Montana, assisting her father in editing The Scientific Farmer. Afterward she moved permanently to the East. Montana figures in many of the poems published in The Young Land (1930) and Selected Poems (1976). The Ranch in the Coulee, which shared The Nation poetry prize in 1922, is about a Montana ranch woman who in seasons when no travelers come by goes mad from isolation. The Reason, a brief but skillful poem, gives the real reason an acquitted killera farm wifehas had for shooting her husband: She saw the withered field beyond the door, / The rotting barns, the filth, the broken fence, / And all her faded days, robbed of delight. The 1930s mark the first publications of Frank Waters, who like Ferril and Fisher has come into high critical esteem. Although much of Waterss best work is set in the Southwest, his childhood in Colorado Springs gave impetus to several works associated with Colorado. A trilogy of novels, The Wild Earths Nobility (1935), Below Grass Roots (1937), and The Dust Within the Rock (1940), traces the evolution of Waterss family in frontier Colorado. Waters also wrote Midas of the Rockies (1937), a biography of Winfield Scott Stratton, a prospector of the Rockies who struck it rich. A phenomenon of a different sort also affected the literary scene of the Mountain West in the 1930s. Funded by the WPA of the New Deal, the Federal Writers Project produced useful historical and descriptive guides to each state of the Union. A spectacular state effort was that of Idaho, carried forward by Vardis Fisher, whose $2300 yearly salary subsidized his other literary ambitions as well. Idaho, a Guide in Word and Picture (1937), printed by Caxton Printers of Caldwell, Idaho, was the first such work completed in the nation and served as a model for those that followed. In Utah, the project gave a start to Juanita Brooks, a historian who in later years wrote Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950). This definitive work compelled Brookss fellow
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Mormons to recognize the tragic fact that good Mormons, rather than renegades, had planned and carried out the massacre of 1857. The 1930s produced stirrings of an indigenous critical recognition of Rocky Mountain literature. Western Prose and Poetry (1932), an anthology compiled by Rufus A. Coleman, professor of English at Montana State University, was a harbinger of the serious study of western literature in Rocky Mountain colleges and universities. Another promising event was the 1937 founding of the Inter-mountain Review in Salt Lake City. Subsequently the journal changed locations some six times and underwent two changes in titlefirst, the Rocky Mountain Review; later, the Western Review. Founder and editor Ray B. West, Jr., pursued the policy of publishing unestablished authors whose only common denominator was what West perceived as high literary ability. However, for many years West maintained a specific interest in Rocky Mountain literature and must be esteemed as one of the first to give important critical and editorial attention to it. He compiled an anthology, Rocky Mountain Reader (1946), and wrote a critical statement, Writing in the Rocky Mountains (1947). Predicting with remarkable accuracy the authors whom later critics would certify, West developed the thesis that Rocky Mountain literature serves to impose meaning upon the otherwise blank and inchoate events of frontier history. An early associate of Wests was Alan Swallow, who came to have an even greater editorial impact upon Rocky Mountain literature. A native of Wyoming who made a career of commercial publishing in Denver, Swallow encouraged a host of aspiring western poets and fiction writers and often risked his own money by publishing their works. In addition, his own poetry and criticism are respectable and stimulating. XI Poems (1943) and The Nameless Sight: Poems 193756 (1956) give a sampling of his poetry, which often treats Rocky Mountain themes. An Editors Essays of Two Decades (1962) contains Swallows critical views on a variety of national and western literary subjects. One essay, A Magazine for the West, reveals his doubt that the West can produce a magazine of national circulation because of distance, isolation, colonialism of dependence upon what is the fashion outside our region; yet it expresses a hope that westerners will rally round the voices, little and great, which we have. With the 1940s Rocky Mountain literature came of age. No other decade has seen the appearance of so many early works by authors whom time would prove to be of first rank. The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), first novel of Walter Van Tilburg Clark of Nevada, received national acclaim for its realistic treatment of miscarried vigilante justice. In Clarks The Track of the Car (1949) a ranch family of the Sierra Nevada acts out an allegory of transcendental good and evil. In 1947 A. B. Guthrie, Jr., published The Big Sky;
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esteemed by many as the finest of mountain man novels, this work is infused with a haunting nostalgia. Guthries The Way West (1949) is one of the best novels of the Oregon Trail. Wallace Stegner emerged as an important Rocky Mountain author with the publication of The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), a novel interpreting the frontier experience as a futile search for an impossible bonanza. Jack Schaefer also began his career as a western author with the publication of Shane (1949), a sensitive, symbolic novel in the tradition of the heroic cowboy. The 1940s also date the emergence of Dorothy M. Johnson, a popular Montana writer whose works are presently growing in critical esteem. Raised in Montana, Johnson returned there at mid-life to continue a successful career as journalist, commercial editor, and free-lance writer. A skilled craftsman in the popular short story, Johnson placed numerous stories in national magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, Argosy, Colliers, and Cosmopolitan. Some of her Rocky Mountain stories have been collected in Flame on the Frontier: Short Stories of Pioneer Women (1948), Indian Country (1949), and The Hanging Tree (1951). The title story of the latter collection, perhaps her most noted work, turns upon the decision of a tarnished woman to ransom her lover from hanging by relinquishing a rich mining claim. Very worthy of mention is Jean Stafford, an eastern expatriate from Colorado. Among her notable American short stories are a number which treat the cultural disharmony of East and West. Her most impressive Rocky Mountain work is The Mountain Lion (1947), a novel about the experiences of two California children on their uncles Colorado ranch. The wild Colorado country and the mountain lion that the children occasionally see symbolize the vanishing childhood of the sister and brother. Despite an improbable ending, the novel is excellent because of its careful rendering of the childrens lonely eccentricities. Since the 1940s, the literature of the Rocky Mountains, like that of other parts of the West, has multiplied enormously. Previously established authors have continued to publish, and new authors have appeared in such numbers that the concluding pages of this chapter will not pretend to survey all who deserve attention. Instead, a few authors and events of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s will be cited as examples of the growth and thematic complexity which have come to the recent literature of the Mountain West. Rocky Mountain authors continue to write popular Westerns with a traditional emphasis upon heroic action and romantic lovewith the added feature of a new sexual explicitness. Serious authors continue to examine the frontier experience with an effective, compelling realism which often turns toward tragic or disillusioning subject matter. However, in the writing of some of the best contemporary authors the frontier is no longer
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THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS
the single great matter of Rocky Mountain literature. Most Rocky Mountain authors now live in cities. Many of them have received a cosmopolitan education, are well traveled, and are thoroughly conversant with national and world issues. As a result, recent Rocky Mountain literature often provides startling juxtapositions between the frontier past and the urban present or between traditional regional concerns and unfamiliar exotic themes. In 1954 appeared The Last Hunt, a very competent first novel by Milton Lott, native of the Snake River Valley of Idaho. Set on the buffalohunting frontier of northwestern Montana, this book offers an authentic reconstruction of the hide hunters way of life and a sensitively characterized conflict between blood lust and compassion. Two hunting partners act out an allegory of damnation and salvation: one, a bloody-minded man, dies frozen in a green hide during a blizzard; whereas his more conscientious partner, guilt-stricken by the wanton destruction of the buffalo and of the Indians who depended on them for food, finds a saving penance. Lott also wrote Dance Back the Buffalo (1959), a very readable novel about an abortive Indian revolt associated with a ghost dance among the Lakota Sioux. His Back Track (1965) is an effective novel of the cattle trade. A native Nevadan of Basque descent, Robert Laxalt, also came to prominence in the 1950s. His Sweet Promised Land (1957) is a touching reminiscence of his father, who after a long life of herding sheep on the Nevada slope of the Sierras returns for a visit to his native Pyrenees. Laxalt vividly describes both the Sierras and the Pyrenees and effectively evokes his fathers intense personality. The old man yearns to stay in the Pyrenees among the people of his childhood; but finally he departs again because Nevada, the new land long lived in, has claimed him. Laxalt thus exploits a venerable western theme: even in the twentieth century, the West transforms immigrants into Americans. Laxalt also authored The Violent Land: Tales the Old Timers Tell (1953), a collection of anecdotes from Nevadas history; In a Hundred Graves: A Basque Portrait (1972), a collection of stories and sketches about Basque peasants in the Pyrenees; and Nevada (1976), the bicentennial history of that state. In 1960 appeared Butchers Crossing, an extraordinary Rocky Mountain novel by John Williams, professor of English at the University of Denver. Its youthful eastern protagonist joins a buffalo hunt in a high Colorado valley; following a wasteful slaughter, he suffers a snowbound winter and returns to town to discover that the entire venture has been made futile by the failure of the hide market. These events are given philosophical dimension by the fact that the protagonist enters upon his experience expecting to find God and bliss in the wilderness, but finds instead vacuity and meaninglessness. The novel thus figures forth, against the senseless destruction of the buffalo,
841
the evolution of the American mind from the transcendentalism of the nineteenth century to the existentialism of the twentieth. Among other works, Williams also authored Augustus (1972), a novel set in ancient Rome, for which he received a National Book Award. Robert A. Roripaugh is a Wyoming author who, having ranched and rodeoed in various parts of the West, became a professor of English at the University of Wyoming. His novel A Fever for Living (1961) is about the tragic love of an American soldier and a Japanese woman during the occupation of Japan. More typically western, his novel Honor Thy Father (1963) features a son who because of moral conviction refuses to side with his father in the Johnson County War of frontier Wyoming. In addition, Roripaugh has published a collection of poems, Learn to Love the Haze (1976). One poem, Elegy for an Indian Girl, is about a reservation girl who, raped, commits suicide with the revolver of the policeman who is taking her home to her parents: Quiet girl, your face keeps floating up / From mountain water / In dark dreams. A notable Mormon poet is Clinton F. Larson, a Utahn, whose works include The Lord of Experience (1968) and Counterpoint (1973). Larsons poetry demonstrates closely rendered image and sound, an abundance of oblique metaphor, and a diction ranging, often in the same poem, from the precisely concrete to the obscurely abstract and allusive. Some of his poems touch upon frontier themes; almost all of them exploit the mountain landscape. His most characteristic poems are religious; their conscientious form and constant allusion to other intellectual and religious outlooks raise them above mere Mormon sectarianism and place them in the general tradition of Christian poetry. The novels and poems of James Welch, a Montana Indian author appearing in the 1970s, effectively depict what eastern literary critic Leslie Fiedler has called the ghettos of the reservation. Fiedler, who came for a stint of teaching in Montana with a romantic expectation of finding people living in a moral, happy proximity to nature, found instead that a sterile landscape had overwhelmed Montana society and that white Montanans 4 have continued to sequester and suppress the Montana Indians. This view is amplified by James Welchs book of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971), and his two novels, Winter in the Blood (1974) and The Death of Jim Loney (1979). Welchs poems portray a bleak Montana landscape and a degraded, hopeless people. Meaning gone, we dance for pennies now. . . . he writes in Blackfeet, Blood and Piegan Hunters. Or in Harlam, Montana: Just off the Reservation: The constable, / a local farmer, plants the jail with wild / raven-haired stiffs who beg just one more drink. Welchs novels, which received favorable reviews in the national press, depict young Indian men haunted by a lack of antecedents and roots. In the second novel, Jim 842
THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS
Loney has been abandoned by his Indian mother during infancy and by his white father during adolescence. He lives into adulthood only long enough to demonstrate the hollow confusion of his unparented life; accidentally killing a friend, he readily turns his gun upon himself. A view of social disorientation among modern Montana whites appears in Norman Macleans A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976). The author returned to his native Montana following retirement as professor of English at the University of Chicago. The title work of his collection, a novella, is about the sons of a Montana clergyman who has indoctrinated them in fly fishing as a ritual of perfection. One of the sons, the narrator, has migrated; the other has elected to remain in Montana, work for a newspaper, frequent bars, fornicate, and devote himself intensely to fly fishing on wild Montana rivers. His life has a hopeless beauty and ends abruptly when he is beaten to death in an alley after a barroom quarrel. The novella, lucid in its prose and finely etched in detail, is at once humorous, tender, and tragic. Another work of note is Gino Skys Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha (1980), a ribald, unstructured novel fielding a confusing array of cowboys and cowgirls in modern Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. These impoverished but happy souls spend their days driving pickups, riding in rodeos, drinking in bars, having sex, undergoing drug-induced fantasies, and rationalizing their lives by a garbled Buddhism. A few of them travel between Idaho and Tibet by psychic projection. The novel is remarkable for two things: its marriage of Oriental religious ideas and the frontier tradition of the Mountain West, and its unrelenting violation of ordinary American proprieties. A final author to be considered here is Richard Hugo. Born in Seattle and educated at the University of Washington, Hugo first emerged as a poet of the Northwest, where his poetry received a number of regional awards. By 1965, Hugo had migrated to a teaching position at Montana State University. Later, following study abroad, he taught at the University of Colorado. Two of his collections, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973) and What Thou Lovest Well Remains American (1975), show the diversity of theme and setting in his poetry. While some of his poems allude to Great Britain and Europe, others relate to Montana and other parts of the Mountain West. Hugos poetry is precise in detail and oblique in metaphor; its major tone is sombre, suggesting miscarried purpose and overshadowing grief. It tends to treat the open stretches of the mountain country affirmatively, as in Driving Montana, and its towns and cities with disillusionment, as in The Only Bar in Dixon and 2433 Agnes, First Home, Last House in Missoula. There is an intriguing originality about his 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (1977), a book composed of alternating dreams and versified 843
letters to his friends. Surrealistic imagery abounds in the depressed, incoherent dreams. The poetic letters are personal and full of feeling. Typical is Letter to Welch from Browning, in which Hugo writes to James Welch about a visit to his friends home town on the reservation: A scene of raw despair. Indians sleeping on the filthy floor. Men with brains scrambled in wine. And later: Ill never see you the same. Covering a period of almost two hundred years, this survey of Rocky Mountain literature necessarily has left unmentioned an enormous number of authors and books. The literature it has reviewed has often been of a personal or expository sort or, if imaginative and creative, of a popular rather than an aesthetic quality. That literature has remained preoccupied with the frontier experience and with the modern mountain landscape. Much of it has been optimistic and heroic; on the whole, citizens of the mountain country, like other westerners, remain cheerful about themselves and their future, as Wallace Stegner remarks in his essay Born a Square The Westerners Dilemma. However, thematic profundity and artistic competence are evident in an encouraging number of Rocky Mountain works. In many of them, life in the Mountain West is transcribed as problematic and tragic; its small cities produce intractable tensions, its Indians remain incarcerated on their reservations, its intellectuals absorb the anxieties of the world at large. What of the future? Possibly the urban experience will supplant the frontier as the predominant matter of Rocky Mountain literature. Possibly western writerswell traveled, conversant with the intellectual tradition of Euro-America and the Orientwill make their westernness a matter of mere location, writing books that could as easily be set in New York, Paris, or Tokyo as in Denver, Reno, or Missoula. But possibly not. The land remains a conservative factor. The farms and ranches, the grazing cattle and sheep, the vast stretches of sagebrush, pinyon, and juniper, the unfathomable canyons, the high, bare ridges are still there, just beyond the edge of the Rocky Mountain city.
L EVI S . P ETERSON , Weber State College
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THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS
Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. Wayne R. Kime, Poes Use of Mackenzies Voyages in The Journal of Julius Rodman, Western American Literature 3 (Spring 1968): 6167. T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 137. M. James Kedro, Literary Boosterism!, The Colorado Magazine 52 (Summer 1975): 200224. Leslie A. Fiedler, Montana; or The End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, Vol. I (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). First published in Partisan Review, December 1949.
Primary Sources Bower, B. M. Chip of the Flying U. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904. Bowles, Samuel. Across the Continent: A Summers Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States, with Speaker Colfax. Springfield, Mass.: Samuel Bowles & Co., 1865. Brooks, Juanita. Mountain Meadows Massacre. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970. First published 1950. Coleman, Rufus A. Western Prose and Poetry. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932. De Smet, Pierre-Jean. Missions de lOregon et Voyages dans les Montagnes-Rocheuses en 1845 et 1846. Paris: Poussielgne-Rusand, 1848. Dimsdale, Thomas J. The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular Justice in the Rocky Mountains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953. First published 1866. Foote, Mary Hallock. The Chosen Valley. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892. . Coeur dAlene. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894. . The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of a Mining Camp. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883. . A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote. San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1972. Garland, Hamlin. The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop. New York: Harper &. Brothers, 1902. . Cavanagh, Forest Ranger: A Romance of the Mountain West. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910. Gilpin, William. The Central Gold Region: The Grain, Pastoral, and Gold Regions of North America, with Some New Views of Its Physical Geography and Observations on the Pacific Railroad. Philadelphia: Sower, Barnes, 1860. Haste, Gwendolen. Selected Poems. Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1976. . The Young Land. New York: Coward-McCann, 1930.
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A Literary History of the American West Hugo, Richard. The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. . 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. . What Thou Lovest Well Remains American. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Governments Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1881. . Nellys Silver Mine: A Story of Colorado Life. New York: Garland Publishing, 1976. First published 1878. . Ramona. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1912. First published 1884. Johnson, Dorothy M. Flame on the Frontier: Short Stories of Pioneer Women. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1967. First published 1948. . The Hanging Tree and Other Stories. Boston: Gregg Press, 1980. First published 1951. . Indian Country. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968. First published 1949. King, Charles. Marions Faith. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1911. First published 1886. .Trooper Ross. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1895. Langford, Nathaniel Pitt. Vigilante Days and Ways: The Pioneers of the Rockies, the Makers and Making of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. Missoula: Montana State University Press, 1957. First published 1890. Larson, Clinton F. Counterpoint. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1973. . The Lord of Experience. Salt Lake City: Promised Land Publications, 1968. Laxalt, Robert. In a Hundred Graves: A Basque Portrait. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1972. . Sweet Promised Land. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. . The Violent Land: Tales the Old Timers Tell. Reno: Nevada Publishing, 1953. Lee, John D. Mormonism Unveiled, or the Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee. St. Louis: Bryan, Brand, 1877. Lewis, Meriwether, and William Clark. History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean Performed During the Year 180456 by Order of the Government of the United States. 2 vols. Ed. Paul Allen. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep; New York: Abm. H. Inskeep, 1814. Reprinted Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1924. Linderman, Frank B. American: The Life Story of a Great Indian, Plenty-coups, Chief of the Crows. New York: John Day, 1930. . Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagles Lodge Fire. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1915 . Kootenai Why Stories. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1926. . Lige Mounts, Free Trapper. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1922. Lott, Milton. Back Track. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. . Dance Back the Buffalo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. . The Last Hunt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.
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Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Mercer, A. S. The Banditti of the Plains, or the Cattlemens Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 (The Crowning Infamy of the Ages). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954. First published in Cheyenne, 1894. Nye, Edgar Wilson. Baled Hay: A Drier Book Than Walt Whitmans Leaves o Grass. Chicago: W. B. Conhey, 1893. . Bill Nye and Boomerang, or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems. Chicago: Donohue, Henneberry, 1890. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Journal of Julius Rodman. In The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by James A. Harrison. New York: de Fau, 1902. Raine, William MacLeod. Colorado. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. . The High Grader. New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1915. . Ridgway of Montana: A Story of Today, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain. New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1909. . . Wyoming: A Story of the Outdoor West. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1907. Roripaugh, Robert A. A Fever for Living. New York: William Morrow, 1961. . Honor Thy Father. New York: William Morrow, 1963. . Learn to Love the Haze. Vermillion, S. D.: Spirit Mound Press, 1976. Russell, Charles M. Rawhide Rawlins Stories. Pasadena: Trails End Publishing, 1946. First published 1921. . Trails Plowed Under. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1927. Ruxton, George Frederick. Life in the Far West. Edinburgh & London: W. Blackwood & Sons; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849. Sage, Rufus B. Letters and Papers, 18361847, with an Annotated Reprint of His Scenes in the Rocky Mountains and in Oregon, California, New Mexico, Texas, and the Grand Prairies. The Far West and the Rockies Historical Series, edited by LeRoy R. & Ann W. Hafen. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1956. Sinclair, Upton. The Brass Check: A Study of American ]ournalism. New York: Arno Press, 1970. First published 1919. . Mountain City. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930. Sky, Gino. Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha. Garden City, N. Y. : Doubleday, 1980. Snow, Eliza R. Poems: Religious, Historical, and Political. Vol. 1, Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1856; vol. 2, Salt Lake City: Latter-day Saints Printing, 1877. Stafford, Jean. The Mountain Lion. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. First published 1947. Stout, Hosea. On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 18441861. 2 vols., edited by Juanita Brooks. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1964. Reissued 1982. Swallow, Alan. An Editors Essays of Two Decades. Denver: Experiment Press, 1962. . The Nameless Sight: Poems 193756. Denver: Swallow Paperbacks, 1963. First published 1956. . XI Poems. Muscatine, Iowa: The Prairie Press, 1943.
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A Literary History of the American West Welch, James. The Death of Jim Loney. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. . Riding the Earthboy 40. New York: World Publishing, 1971. . Winter in the Blood. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. West, Ray B., Jr., ed. Rocky Mountain Reader. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946. . Writing in the Rocky Mountains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1947. Whitney, Orson F. Elias, an Epic of the Ages. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1904. Williams, John. Butchers Crossing. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978. First published 1960. Secondary Sources Abbott, Carl. Colorado: A History of the Centennial State. Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1976. This is a very readable treatment of Colorado political and social life from frontier origins to the mid-twentieth century. Elliott, Russell R. History of Nevada. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. This is a scholarly yet very accessible overview of Nevada history from prehistorical times to the present. Hunt, Charles B. Physiography of the United States. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1967. This work defines and characterizes the geological provinces of the Rocky Mountains and shows their relationship to adjoining provinces; it has abundant maps and illustrations and is accessible to the lay reader. Larson, T. A. History of Wyoming. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. This well-written work gives a balanced overview of Wyoming history to 1960. Lavender, David. The Rockies. Regions of America Series. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Aimed at the lay reader, this book by a gifted writer traces common developments in the Rocky Mountain territories and states up to the close of the frontier. Malone, Michael P., and Richard B. Roeder. Montana: A History of Two Centuries. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976. This work gives a well-written, thorough coverage of political and cultural trends in Montana history. Peterson, Charles S. Utah: A Bicentennial History. The States and the Nation Series. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Despite its brevity this is a balanced, objective treatment of Utah history, giving recognition to non-Mormon as well as to Mormon contributions. Wells, Merle W. A Short History of Idaho. Boise: Idaho Historical Society, 1974. This is a brief but useful summary of the major trends in Idaho history.
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Mormon Novels
those who wrote western adventure stories could write about miners, Indians, ranchers, or Mormons, but when they wrote about settling the West, about bringing civilization to the West, they wrote about the pioneers, and by far the largest single group of pioneers, as well as the most famous, were those Mormons who followed Brigham Young from Illinois to Utah, the geographical center of the West. The Mormonsmembers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saintsand their history are characteristic of the West in many ways, as are the novels written about them. The western part of the United States, the frontier of a hundred years ago, has changed rapidly; there is still a lot of open country in the West, but there is no isolation. The individual westernerMormons includednow encounters the same anxieties and pleasures that the individual easterner experiences. Likewise the novels written about Mormons have changed from the melodramatic or the sensational kind to the more universal experiences of individual Mormons. The survey which follows does not pretend to be exhaustive; its intent is to acquaint students of western American literature with some of the names and titles frequently mentioned in discussions of Mormon novels and to place them in sequence as an aid to seeing the changes that have occurred. Mormonism was becoming a controversial movement even before its formal organization as a church in 1830, and by 1843, when Captain Frederick Marryat published his three-volume Monsieur Violet, that controversy was an established one. Of course at that date detailed knowledge of Mormonism was limited and the small part of Marryats work which touches on Mormonism is restricted to the Mormon activities in the eastern states. However, the disclosure that the Mormons practiced polygamy aroused general concern about the Mormon menace, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton took advantage of that concern in his 1851 potboiler Alice; or, The Mysteries. Other anti-polygamy, Mormon-menace novels soon followed with titles similar to the suggestive headlines of a modern tabloid, establishing a pattern of sensationalism which became characteristic of the early Mormon novels: Orvilla S. Belisle, The Prophets; or, Mormonism Unveiled (1855), Maria Ward, Female Life Among the Mormons (1855), W. J. Conybeare, Perversion; or, The Causes and Consequences of Infidelity, a Tale of the Times
N THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
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(1856), and Metta Victoria Fuller, Mormon Wives (1856, retitled Lives of Female Mormons in 1860). In 1861 Captain Mayne Reid followed the pattern with his threevolume The Wild Huntress and Theodore Winthrop tried his hand with John Brent. The sensational aspects of Mormonismgolden plates, polygamy, and secret policewere becoming legend by 1870, and the idiosyncrasies of the Mormons became popular fare for the humorists and local colorists. Artemus Ward and Mark Twain commented in individual essays and stories, but others treated the Mormons at length: Langdon E. Mitchell in Two Mormons from Muddlety: Love in the Backwoods (1876), Charles Bertrand Lewis in Bessie Bane; or, The Mormons Victim (1880), and G. A. Meears in The Geese of Ganderica, Their History, Their Sense, and Nonsense, by a Utah Goose (1882). Still, the majority of the novels continued to be anti-Mormon sensationalism such as John Hansen Beadles Life in Utah; or, The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism (1870), and Cornelia Paddocks In the Toils (1879) and The Fate of Madame La Tour (1881). Serving as editor of the Salt Lake Reporter, Beadle was well acquainted with the geography of the city and the daily routines of his Mormon neighbors. His assertions about the Mormons, while obviously biased, were closer to reality than were those of many other nineteenth-century novelists who relied on convenient errors of fact, such as locating the Mormon Temple on the shore of the Great Salt Lake so that a captive maiden could escape from a forced marriage to a hoary elder by jumping from the temple into the lake. Even the respected Arthur Conan Doyle relied on the sensational when he wrote his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). This is the story of how Jefferson Hope pursued and killed the Mormons Drebber and Strangerson because they had murdered John Ferrier and abducted his daughter, who died of a broken heart after a forced marriage to Drebber. In 1924 Doyle admitted in Our Second American Adventure that in writing A Study in Scarlet he had used . . . a rather sensational and overcoloured picture of the Danite episodes which formed a passing stain in the early history of Utah (p. 87). But the nineteenth-century pattern for Mormon novels had been firmly set, and novels by Marie A. Walsh, Max Adeler, Joaquin Miller, A. Jennie Bartlett, Jeannette Ritchie H. Walworth, Albion W. Tourgee, Mary W. Hudson, Alvah Milton Kerr, and Grace Wilbur Trout did not alter the pattern. The pro-Mormon response was slow to come, but in 1898 Nephi Anderson published Added Upon, the first of nine novels written to explain the major beliefs of the Mormons. Andersons novels are intended for Mormon readers, or for those who may be sympathetic to the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, explaining that theology, usu-
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MORMON NOVELS
ally in a very broad way, and attempting to demonstrate that those who rigidly follow it, despite the hardships, will receive the greatest of blessings. And Mormon readers have continued to keep Added Upon in print; in 1979 it was in its forty-fourth printing. While Anderson was heavy on doctrine and light on development of character and plot, other pro-Mormon writers were equally didactic. Most of the early pro-Mormon fiction was short fiction, published for young Mormons in Mormon periodicals such as the Young Womens Journal and The Improvement Era, but occasionally one of the short story writers produced a novel. Susa Young Gates published John Stevens Courtship in 1909, but this novel about the Utah-U.S.A. war is directed toward young readers and most adult readers are not excited by it. With the exception of the introduction of pro-Mormon novels, the novels written during the first twenty years of the twentieth century followed the tradition of sensationalism that had been established half a century earlier. Alfred H. Henry defended the anti-Mormon bias of his By Order of the Prophet (1902), declaring that he was attempting to show that the Mormons theology was faulty and not that he was simply vilifying the Mormons. But Henrys novel is merely an imitation of its predecessors: main characters stereotyped, minor characters undeveloped, geography and climate adjusted to fit the plot. Harry Leon Wilson used the historical approach to Mormonism as the framework for The Lions of the Lord (1903), taking his protagonist from the persecutions in Illinois, across the plains with the handcart companies, through the Utah-U.S.A. war, and to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Wilson developed his protagonist, Joel Rae, fairly well, showing his struggle to maintain his moral integrity and remain a faithful member of the church, doing whatever he was called, to do without question. It is Joel Raes religious struggle that carries the reader through The Lions of the Lord, nothing else. The other characters are paper figures found in almost every other Mormon novel, and the historical framework is standard. In Ezra the Mormon (1907) Winifred Graham magnified the rumors of Mormon wickedness that circulated throughout the world. But this English novel was reprinted three times during its first two years, attesting to the international popularity of the Mormon subject matter in fiction. Naturally, that popularity was strengthened when recognized authors, such as Zane Grey and Jack London, also wrote about the Mormons. Grey wrote two novels that are primarily about Mormons: The Heritage of the Desert (1910) and Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). In the first, Grey presented the Mormons as hardworking, honest ranchersexcept for one rebellious sonwho have trouble with outlaws; in the latter, Grey reversed the situation, making a rebellious
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Mormon woman the victim and the Mormon elders the villains. In both novels the hero is an outsider who saves the innocent from the wicked. And Jack London used the Mountain Meadows Massacre as the historical basis for the longest of the reincarnation stories in his novel The Star Rover (1915). Although London did nothing new in his treatment of the Mormons, his use of Mormon subject matter being the traditional use, his description of the Mormon attack upon the Fancher train at Mountain Meadows is one of the most powerfully and convincingly related versions of that event. Following World War I, Mormon novels began to move away from the heavy-handed sensationalism of the past and to focus on real people in realistic surroundings. Some authors even wrote Mormon novels without mentioning polygamy. Bernard DeVoto did that in The Crooked Mile (1924). This novel is not only representative of DeVotos contribution to the new American fiction which characterized the 1920s but it also manages to be a Mormon novel without having Mormons or Mormonism as central subject matter. The protagonist in this novel is Gordon Abbey, a young man whose background and temperament are almost the same as DeVotos, and the setting is a western town named Windsor, which is a reconstruction of DeVotos home town, Ogden, Utah. While the story is about Gordon Abbeys struggle to find his place in modern society, specifically the conflict concerns his inability to come to terms with the local society of Windsor. DeVoto uses the subject of Mormonism as a part of the background of Gordon Abbey, but while Mormons and their influence are present in the novel, the focus is upon the individualGordon Abbeyrather than upon a particular group or set of beliefs. The Crooked Mile represents a natural change in western novels, particularly those dealing with Mormonism. There had been so much stereotyped nonsense about the West and Mormonism that many Americans did not realize that both were changing and maturing. Gordon Abbeys story is an exposition of that change and his reaction to it. If DeVoto had looked a little closer at Mormon culture, however, his emphasis upon the change might have been different. Because his protagonist is not a Mormon, DeVoto does not show, except incidentally, that there are personal conflicts among individual Mormons similar to those of Gordon Abbey. Had he chosen to make Gordon a Mormon, DeVoto could have told almost the same story. A major problem associated with bringing about a change from the traditional concerns in Mormon novels is to be found in the subject matter itself. The glamour of Mormonism as a subject for fiction lies to a great extent in the history of the Mormons. The nineteenth-century Mormons were colorful people whose adventures were remarkable and whose influ-
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ence upon the West is obvious. Any novelist who decides to write about Mormons must be tempted to write about their past, since their history is easily researched and their former practice of polygamy is a familiar subject for eager readers, one that provides abundant possibilities for rising conflict in the plot. On the other hand, if the novelist does not want to write a historical novel, he must give up easily acquired material, and he must give up the general subject of Mormonism in favor of the much more restricted but challenging subject of the individual Mormon. Frank Chester Robertson in The Mormon Trail (1931), The Rocky Road to Jericho (1935), and Red Legion (1936) was not willing to move away from the established tradition. But Norton S. Parker, Susan Ertz, Dane Coolidge, Sidney Bell, Lee Neville, and George D. Snell did make an attempt. While these authors did not emphasize sensationalism in their 1930s novels, neither did they move completely away from tradition. Rather, their novels serve as examples of the gradual change toward emphasis upon individual Mormons and their problems. Paul Dayton Baileys novels are further examples of that transition. Type-High (1937), his first novel, follows tradition and is Baileys least successful work. For This My Glory (1940), a historical novel which relates the adventures of a Mormon pioneer, is fairly well written, but it was published a year after Vardis Fishers Children of God, the definitive historical novel of the Mormons, and For This My Glory could not compete. Baileys The Gay Saint (1944) admits that some MormonsSamuel Brannon in this case have placed worldly affairs above those of the spirit. His Song Everlasting (1946) is a sequel to For This My Glory, focusing on the modern problems of a fourth-generation Mormon. For Time and All Eternity (1964) is Baileys attempt to blend modern realism and the traditional story of early Utah and polygamy. His characters in this novel are not the sheep that can be found in the traditional Mormon novels. These characters are real enough to be headstrong and rebellious yet they remain true to the fundamental beliefs of their religion. They are, in other words, more accurately representative of late nineteenth-century Mormons than were their counterparts in nineteenth-century Mormon fiction. It is unfortunate that Baileys thirdperson narration is marred by an abundance of his would-be objective yet more often omniscient, frequently redundant, and generally patronizing explanations and descriptive comments, because the characters in this novel are the most real, most convincingly human Mormons he has created. Vardis Fishers Harper Prize novel, Children of God (1939), has most effectively shown the relationship between the colorful history of the Mormons and the problems facing individual Mormons. However, Fisher did not write about twentieth-century Mormons in the novel, but chose to stop
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with the birth of modern Mormonism: the 1890 Manifesto from Mormon President Wilford Woodruff officially stopping the practice of polygamy. Fisher viewed Mormonism as a nineteenth-century phenomenon, a temporary religious-social movement reflecting nineteenth-century American culture. The first part of Children of God, entitled Morning, is about Joseph Smith and the religious enthusiasm which characterized the eastern United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. The second part, Afternoon, follows Brigham Young across the plains to Utah and records the problems of establishing a permanent home in the Great Basin desert. Part Three, Evening, describes the ideological conflict of a society that wants to preserve its heritage, its beliefs, yet also wants to be a recognized part of the United States. The Manifesto of 1890 was seen by Fisherand othersas the end of Mormonism, and the titles Fisher gave to the three parts of Children of God effectively indicate his view: the day of the Mormons. Vardis Fisher maintained that Children of God was his only Mormon novel; however, he wrote seven others that used the Mormons or their influence as background: Toilers of the Hills (1928), Dark Bridewell (1931), In Tragic Life (1932), Passions Spin the Plot (1934), We Are Betrayed (1935), No Villain Need Be (1936), and April: A Fable of Love (1937). Fishers autobiographical tetralogyIn Tragic Life, Passions Spin the Plot, We Are Betrayed, and No Villain Need Be was rewritten under the single title Orphans in Gethsemane (1960). The original novels tell the story of Vridar Hunter who, after struggling with his Mormon environment, sought the sophistication of New York only to discover that urban life was not the utopia he had expected it to be, and so returned to Idaho, confident that he could finally maintain his independence in that almost unchanged environment. When Fisher rewrote the Vridar Hunter tetralogy as Orphans in Gethsemane, he presented Vridar as an outsider not only in relation to his Mormon neighbors but also to the other organized religions of the world. Mormonism is used in this version, but it is used only as an example of how all religions in all ages have enslaved the individual. Many readers of Mormon novels regard the 1939 publication of Fishers Children of God as an appropriate date to mark the literary birth of Mormon novels. It was followed in 1940 by Baileys For This My Glory and Jean Woodmans Glory Spent. In 1941. three novels represent the range of quality: Hoffman Birneys Ann Carmeny is a traditional Mormon-villains type; Lorene Pearsons The Harvest Waits is a sympathetic but heavy-handed exposition of the short-lived Mormon attempt at communal livingThe United Order; and Maurine Whipples The Giant Joshua, considered by some to be one of the best-written Mormon novels, is the story of Mormon life in southern Utah from 1860 to 1886. Its coverage of that part of Mormon
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history is excellent, but the strength of The Giant Joshua lies in Whipples protagonist, Clorinda (Clory) McIntyre, a girl who was intelligent enough to know what was wrong in her life but who was helpless to change anything. Clory is a victim of both heritage and environment, born a Mormon, married in polygamy, and trapped in the isolated area of southern Utah. In 1942 Virginia Sorensen published A Little Lower Than the Angels, her first Mormon novel. She then continued with On This Star (1946), The Neighbors (1947), The Evening and the Morning (1949), Many Heavens (1954), and Kingdom Come (1960). Sorensen succeeded in telling two stories when she wrote A Little Lower Than the Angels, the story of Mercy Baker and the story of the Mormons in Nauvoo. Mercys story is the more interesting; it is the story of an individuals failure to find either happiness or significance in life. The story of the Mormons in Nauvoo is well told, but it does not involve the reader as does Mercy Bakers story. With A Little Lower Than the Angels Virginia Sorensen examined the major problems that confront Mormons, and On This Star, The Neighbors, The Evening and the Morning, and Many Heavens re-examine those problems. They are all based upon the rebellionand the problems which arise as a result of the rebellionof the second, third, and even fourth-generation Mormons. Kingdom Come is different; it is a historical novel about Mormonism in Denmark during the middle of the nineteenth century. Although the novels which she wrote after A Little Lower Than the Angels are not as successful as her first one, each of Virginia Sorensens Mormon novels is significantly better than those that followed the formulas of the nineteenth-century Mormon novels. Elinor Pryors And Never Yield (1942) and Jonreed Lauritzens Arrows into the Sun (1943) represent the continued use of Mormon subject matter according to the nineteenth-century formulas. But Richard Scowcrofts Children of the Covenant (1945) is a Mormon novel written from the point of view of one who knows the Mormons and their customs intimately. Burton Curtis is the returned missionary protagonist of Children of the Covenant who wants to be different but can not break away from the ties of church and family. Both Burtons inner conflicts and the routine activities of modern Mormons are presented expertly but with heavy satire. Children of the Covenant is a novel that angers most devout Mormons because of its satire; it amuses the less devout because they can see the validity of the satire; but it is not a novel for non-Mormons because its readers must have the same intimate knowledge of Mormons and Mormonism that its author has. Two Mormon novels that combine Mormon history and family memoirs were published in 1946: The Mountains Are Mine by Helen Hinckley and Sweet Love Remembered by Helen Cortez Stafford. Then in 1948 Blanche Cannons Nothing Ever Happens Sunday Morning and Samuel W. Taylors
855
Heaven Knows Why appeared. The Cannon novel is a sober, almost stark account of conflicting personalities in a small Utah town, but Taylors novel is unique. Heaven Knows Why is a comic novel, one that is filled with the kind of characters that Mormons have long made fun of: the Bishops curious wife who listens through the thin walls to the confidential discussions her husband has with the members of his ward, local girls who get married only when they have no other choice, coffee drinkers and smokers who try to keep the Bishop from finding out about them, and good members who would rather swindle their neighbors than love them. While Mormons fully enjoy comic situations, comedy is not common in Mormon novels; some have a few amusing scenes, but Taylors Heaven Knows Why is the first one to be completely directed to humor. Taylor also wrote a biography of his Mormon father, Family Kingdom (1951), and a Mormon history, Nightfall at Nauvoo (1971), both of which read like novels, but the historical material in these works dominates. In 1949 Ardyth Kennelly united several short sketches into the novel The Peaceable Kingdom. This work and its 1955 sequel, Up Home, relate the rather traditional activities of a woman living in Utah as a plural wife. Ezra J. Poulsen wrote in Birthright (1950) about the hardships and the good times of the Mormons of the Paris, Idaho, Second Ward; and in Wilderness Passage (1953) Forrester Blake used the Zane Grey formula for a potboiler. The family memoir novels of John D. Fitzgerald, Papa Married a Mormon (1956) and Mammas Boarding House (1958), are about life in a Utah mining town, the first being more tightly controlled, less rambling, than the second. The Fancher Train (1958) by Amelia Bean is focused on a more specific historical event: the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The Fancher Train is generally accurate in its historical facts and the subject is one with a built-in interest for most readers, but the romanticized treatment of the protagonists, Jed and Melissa, does not match the harsh reality of the history that is presented. In the 1950s several novels were written which touch on the Mormons but are not, in the strict sense, Mormon novels. Wallace Stegners The Preacher and the Slave (1950) is one. This work is about Joe Hill, the IWW activist who was tried and executed in Utah. The general anti-labor attitude of the Mormons is presented but only as one aspect of the situation. The book is about Joe Hill, not the Mormons. Another casual use of Mormon material is that of Allen Drury in Advise and Consent (1959) in which one of the major characters, Senator Brigham Anderson, is a Mormon. Drury might have been able to make the senator a more significant character had he examined the strong religious pressures upon a Mormon who was respected enough to be elected a senator but who was also a homosexual, but Advise and Consent is about Washington, not Salt Lake City. Mark
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Harris also used Mormonism in Wake Up, Stupid (1959). Lee Youngdahl, the protagonist of this Harris novel, is an excommunicated Mormon, but the novel is about Youngdahls adventures, not about Mormons or Mormonism. Novels such as these by Stegner, Drury, and Harris represent a general integration of the Mormons as part of modern society, indicating that the treatment of Mormons as an isolated cult or novelty is out of date. Nevertheless, there are many modern authors who have chosen to continue the established patterns. Richard W. Wormser wrote Battalion of Saints (1961) about the Mormon Battalion; Irving Wallace kept the sensation of polygamy alive with The Twenty-Seventh Wife (1961); J. C. Furnas caricatured historical Mormon leaders and wrote about the paranoia of Joseph Smith in his anti-Mormon The Devils Rainbow (1962); Jonreed Lauritzen wrote another historical novel, The Everlasting Fire (1962), which parallels Fishers Children of God but does not replace it; and Rodello Hunters A House of Many Rooms (1965) is a continuation of the family-memoir novel. As long as there are Mormon readers who are willing to buy standard, pro-Mormon romances, such works as Hunters will continue. The novels of Blaine M. Yorgason, Susan Evans McCloud, David E. Richardson, Herbert Harker, and Jack Weyland are examples. Most of these are written for juvenile readers and repeat the historical themes of earlier novelspersecutions, pioneering, polygamybut some use twentieth-century Mormons, placing their work closer to the lives of modern Mormons. And occasionally a wellwritten, traditional novel appears, such as Marilyn Browns The Earthkeepers (1979), a historical novel about the settlement of Provo, Utah. In the nineteenth century the pattern was set for Mormon fiction: either it was abusive or it was defensive, and the subject was nearly always polygamy. This pattern was so strong that it became traditional. But Mormons have taken pride in being progressive and the general trend in Mormon novels has followed that progress. The modern Mormon novels may mention polygamy in showing relationships of characters, or they may touch upon the good old days of the authoritarian church when men did what they were called, to do and did not question their leaders, but such traditional subjects are now being placed in their proper perspectives as background for more contemporary subjects. The better novelists who write about modern Mormons have begun to emancipate themselves from the traditions that have bound western writers in general. Furthermore, readers seem willing to accept the change. Instead of Mormonisms being described as an isolated curiosity in the West, it is described as a part of the whole. There are still traditional, romantic, sensational Mormon novels being published, but there are also modern, realistic onesjust as there are westerners who cherish the traditions of the frontier but live with all the conve-
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niences of modern society. Indeed, the changes which have taken place in the West since 1850 are reflected in and paralleled by similar changes in Mormon novels.
K ENNETH B. HUNSAKER , Utah
State University
Adeler, Max. The Tragedy of Thompson Dunbar. Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart, 1879. Anderson, Nephi. Added Upon. Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1898. . The Boys of Springtown. Independence, Mo.: Press of Zions Printing & Publishing, 1920. . The Castle Builder. Salt Lake City: Improvement Era, 1902. . A Daughter of the North. Salt Lake City: De Utah-Nederlander, 1915. . Dorian. Salt Lake City: Bikuben Publishing, 1921. . John St. John. Independence, Mo.: Zions Printing & Publishing, 1917. . Marcus King, Mormon. Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1908. . Piney Ridge Cottage. Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1912. . Romance of a Missionary. Independence, Mo.: Zions Printing & Publishing, 1919. . The Story of Chester Lawrence. Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1913. Bailey, Paul Dayton. For This My Glory. Los Angeles: Lyman House, 1940. . For Time and All Eternity. New York: Doubleday, 1964. . The Gay Saint. Hollywood, Calif.: Murray & Gee, 1944. . Song Everlasting. Los Angeles: Westemlore Press, 1946. . Type-High. New York: Sutton House, 1937. Bartlett, A. Jennie (Switzer). Elder Northfields Home; or, Sacrificed on the Mormon Altar. New York: J. Howard Brown, 1882. Beadle, J[ohn] H[ansen]. Life in Utah. Philadelphia: National Publishing, 1870. Bean, Amelia. The Fancher Train. New York: Ace Books, 1958. Belisle, Orvilla S. The Prophets; or, Mormonism Unveiled. Philadelphia: W. W. Smith, 1855. Bell, Sidney (Clarence R. Decker). Wives of the Prophet. New York: Macaulay, 1935.
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Birney, Hoffman. Ann Carmeny. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1941. Blake, Forrester. Wilderness Passage. New York: Random House, 1958. Brown, Marilyn. The Earthkeeeers. Provo, Utah: Art Publishers, 1979. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. Alice; or, The Mysteries. New York: Harpers, 1851. Cannon, Blanche. Nothing Ever Happens Sunday Morning. New York: Putnam, 1948. Conybeare, W. J. Perversion; or, The Causes and Consequences of Infidelity. New York: Garland Publishing, 1856. Coolidge, Dane. The Fighting Danites. New York: Dutton, 1934. DeVoto, Bernard. The Crooked Mile. New York: Minton, Balch, 1924. Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. London: Ward, Lock, 1887; New York: American Publishing Corp., 1890. . Our Second American Adventure. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924. Drury, Allen. Advise and Consent. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959. Ertz, Susan. The Proselyte. New York: Appleton-Century, 1933. Fisher, Vardis. April: A Fable of Love. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1937. . Children of God. New York: Vanguard Press, 1939. . Dark Bridwell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931. . In Tragic Life. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1932. . No Villain Need Be. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1936. . Orphans in Gethsemane. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960. . Passions Spin the Plot. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1934. . Toilers of the Hills. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. . We Are Betrayed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935. Fitzgerald, John Dennis. Mammas Boarding House. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: PrenticeHall, 1958. . Papa Married a Mormon. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1956. Fuller, Metta Victoria. Lives of Female Mormons. Philadelphia: G. G. Evans, 1860. Furnas, J. C. The Devils Rainbow. New York: Harper, 1962. Gates, Susa Young. John Stevens Courtship. Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1909. Graham, Winifred (Cory). Ezra the Mormon. London: Everett, 1907. Grey, Zane. The Heritage of the Desert. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910. . Riders of the Purple Sage. New York: Harper &. Brothers, 1912. Harker, Herbert. Turn Again Home. Toronto: New American Library, 1979. Harris, Mark. Wake Up, Stupid. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959. Henry, Alfred H. By Order of the Prophet. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1902. Hinckley, Helen. The Mountains Are Mine. New York: Vanguard Press, 1946. Hudson, Mary W. Esther the Gentile. Topeka: G. W. Crane, 1888. Hughes, Dean. As Wide us the River. Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 1980. . Under the Same Stars. Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 1979. Hunter, Rodello. A House of Many Rooms. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. Kennelly, Ardyth. The Peaceable Kingdom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. . Up Home. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. Kerr, Alvah Milton. Trean, or the Mormons Daughter. Chicago: Belford, Clarke, 1889. Lauritzen, Jonreed. Arrows into the Sun. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.
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A Literary History of the American West . The Everlasting Fire. Garden City, N . Y. : Doubleday, 1962. Lewis,Charles Bertrand. Bessie Baine; or, The Mormons Victim. Chicago: M. A. Donahue, 1880. London, Jack. The Star Rover. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1915. Marryat, Captain Frederick. Monsieur Violet. London, J. M. Dent, 1843. McCloud, Susan Evans. Where the Heart Leads. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1979. Meears, G. A. The Geese of Ganderica, Their History, Their Sense, and Nonsense, by a Utah Goose. Salt Lake City: Salt Lake Herald Printings, 1882. Miller, Joaquin. The Danites in the Sierras. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1881. [Reissued as a four-act drama in 1882.] Mitchell, Langdon E. Love in the Backwoods: Two Mormons from Muddlety. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876. Neville, Lee. Poplars Across the Moon. Boston: L. C. Page, 1936. Paddock, Cornelia. The Fate of Madame La Tour: A Story of Great Salt Lake. New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1881. . In the Toils; or, Martyrs of the Latter Days. Chicago: Dixon & Shepard, 1879. Parker, Norton S. Hell and Hallelujah! New York: L. MacVeagh, 1931. Pearson, Lorene. The Harvest Waits. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941. Poulsen, Ezra J. Birthright. Salt Lake City: Granite, 1950. Pryor, Elinor. And Never Yield. New York: Macmillan, 1942. Reid, Captain Mayne. The Wild Huntress. London: Richard Bentley, 1861. Richardson, David E. These Were the Valiant. Salt Lake City: Cottonwood, 1979. Robertson, Frank Chester. The Rocky Road to Jericho. New York: Hillman-Cure, 1935. Scowcroft, Richard. Children of the Covenant. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945. Snell, George D. Root, Hog and Die. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1936. Sorensen, Virginia. The Evening and the Morning. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949. . Kingdom Come. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960. . A Little Lower Than the Angels. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942. . Many Heavens. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954. . The Neighbors. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947. . On This Star. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946. Stafford, Helen Cortez. Sweet Love Remembered. Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1946. Stegner, Wallace. The Preacher and the Slave. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. Taylor, Samuel Woolley. Family Kingdom. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951. . Heaven Knows Why. New York: A. A. Wyn, 1948. . Nightfall at Nauvoo. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Tourge, Albion W. Buttons Inn. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886. Trout, Grace Wilbur. A Mormon Wife. Chicago: Van-American Press, 1895. Wallace, Irving. The Twenty-Seventh Wife. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961. Walsh, Marie A. My Queen. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1878. Walworth, Mrs. Jeannette Ritchie H. The Bar Sinister. New York: Cassell, 1885. Ward, Mrs. Maria. Female Life Among the Mormons. Hartford, Conn.: J. C. Derby, 1855.
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Weyland, Jack. Charly. Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 1980. . Sam. Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 1981. Whipple, Maurine. The Giant Joshua. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Wilson, Harry Leon. The Lions of the Lord. Boston: Lothrop Publishing, 1903. Winthrop, Theodore. John Brent. New York: J. W. Lovell, 1861. Woodman, Jean. Glory Spent. New York: Carrick & Evans, 1940. Wormser, Richard E. Battalion of Saints. New York: D. McKay, 1961. Yorgason, Blaine M. Charlies Monument. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1976. . Massacre at Salt Creek. Garden City, N .Y. : Doubleday, 1979.
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Vardis Fisher
of the literature of the American West, wrote 1 Wallace Stegner, will have to include the works of Vardis Fisher. The assertion is proper. From 1927 with Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna to 1968 with the massive Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West, Fisher explored his region, his cultural heritage, and his own past, creating a legacy that is an invitation to progress with him from the particulars of time and place to the universal. In the course of a fretful, productive life, Fisher wrote more than thirty books, the exact number a quiddity since he co-authored one book, completed most of another, and edited two more. Thirty-five is a reasonable total. In addition, he wrote short stories, countless newspaper columns, and articles for journals. In the quality, quantity, and diversity of such disjecta membra is suggested some justification for his mothers conviction that her caulborn son was destined for greatness. Although there is a degree of artificiality in compartmentalizing any mans life, Fishers life and career clearly divide themselves into five periods: the early years, 18951915; the university period, 191531; the Bridwell days, 193134; the Federal era, 193539; and finally the Hagerman years, 194068.
NY SERIOUS STUDY
THE EARLY YEARS, 18951915
On March 31, 1895, Joseph and Temperance Fisher became the parents of a boy born with a caul, a sure sign in the folk culture of rural southeastern Idaho that greatness lay ahead for him. But the caul was the only extraordinary circumstance that attended the birth of Vardis Alvero Fisher. The parents, poor and ill-educated, were no different from their relatives and neighbors. The one-room house in Annis in which he was born was made of cottonwood logs with an earthen floor and roof, similar to many frontier shelters. In 1901, Joseph moved his wife and children some thirty-six miles from Annis to the remote Antelope Hills area of the Snake Rivers South Fork. Formal schooling was impossible, so Temperance shared her meager education with her children, Vardis, Vivian Ezra, and the youngest, Viola Irene. When Vardis was twelve, the boys were sent to town to board while they finished elementary school. Eight years later at the age of twenty, Vardis was graduated from Rigby High School, finishing the early period of his life. 862
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That period is difficult to assess, partly because Fisher did not live to finish the autobiography he once said would be his next project, after the Gold Rushes book. It is helpful at this point to clarify what appears to have been a distinction in Fishers mind between autobiography and autobiographical. By the former he meant the physical facts of ones life; by the latter he meant the kind of intellectual and emotional truth or insight that can be gained from either the physical facts themselves or from an artistic, that is to say selective or imaginative or creative use of those facts. It is for this reason that he couldand didsay, I am in my books. The autobiographical importance of his early period, then, lies in understanding Fisher as a fearful, pietistic, precociously intelligent, sensitive lad, spiritually brutalized by the maiming he saw around him: butchered livestock, castrated bulls, de-horned cattle. The matter of sexuality and reproduction was a concern; there were no sources of information about a matter so obviously important. Another concern was religion, for the Fishers were nominally Mormon. But when Fishers omnivorous reading habits outstripped the library resources of Rigby, there came religious doubts and problems with the infallibility of the Bible, questions to be answered in some instances (re-phrased in others) only later in the university period. He was graduated from Rigby High School in 1915.
THE UNIVERSITY PERIOD, 191531
The Joseph Fishers sought upward mobility for their children. They would have agreed with Lord Verulam that knowledge is power. Their children, the boys especially, were to make something of themselves by getting the best education possible. In this respect the Fishers were acting out the Protestant ethic. The drive for success, which accounts in part for the fact that both Vardis and Vivian earned their doctoral degrees (Vivian in psychology), can be traced back as far as the Puritan establishment. The university period began with Vardis matriculating at the University of Utah in 1915. To the university he brought many of the unresolved problems of the early years, a limited supply of funds, and high resolve to make his mother proud of him. His experiences as a scholar in Salt Lake City he described thus: As an undergraduate I had been an undisciplined, self-indulgent youth nourished by my own morbid tastes and fantasies. I had been the darling of my teachers in advanced composition and their flattery 2 had gone to my head like my first drink of bourbon. His undergraduate work was interrupted by a brief stay in the air corps, from which he resigned, volunteering to be drafted into the army. With the armistice he returned from Fort Rosecrans to university life, graduating in 1920. One of the problems remaining from the early period was that of rec863
onciling certain sentimental notions of love with authentic human sexuality. In 1917 Vardis Fisher and Leona McMurtrey were married, a union that produced two boys. In 1924 Leona committed suicide, leaving Fisher in the midst of doctoral work at the University of Chicago and with two young sons. In the arduous work of graduate schoolhe had taken the Master of Arts degree in 1922, also at Chicagohe learned discipline: I learned, and I learned the hard waythe way of any self-pitying, narcissistic artist, with a headful of nonsense about genius and inspiration. I squared my neurotic shoulders and pitched in: and in the next three years . . . I found 3 out what discipline means. . . . He completed the Ph.D. degree magna cum laude in 1925 and returned to his undergraduate institution to teach English until 1928. In 1927 the Sonnets appeared, his first published work. The next year he married Margaret Trusler and his second published work, the Idaho novel Toilers of the Hills, appeared. From 1928 to 1931 he taught English at Washington Square College of New York University and then exchanged academe for the life of independent scholarship and creative endeavor. With the exception of three quarters teaching at the University of Montana and service as Writer-in-Residence at The College of Idaho in 1968, Fishers abandonment of teaching was final. A brief assessment of the university period reveals three significant elements. First, Fisher received an education in a demanding graduate center, an education that prepared him for a life of the mind, encouraging his philosophical speculations and confirming his rejection of Mormonism. In addition, the discipline of scholarship became the servant of his maturing creativity. In the second place, his writing reached the public. The third significant element was Leonas death. For this Fisher blamed himself and 4 subsequently identified her suicide as the great crisis of his life.
THE BRIDWELL DAYS, 193134
Although this period of Fishers life was brief, it is an interesting one, quite essential to any attempt to understand him. A published writer, father of two sons, and apparently happily remarried, Fisher returned to Idaho to 5 his fathers ranch near where he himself had once taken up a homestead. But the life of the mind was not neglected, as he published a book a year for three of the next four years, excepting 1933, and began a brief association with the University of Montana at Missoula (the summer of 1932 and the 6 summer and fall of 1933). This was the period of Dark Bridwell and the first two works of his autobiographical tetralogy of Vridar Hunter: In Tragic Life (1932) and Passions Spin the Plot (1934). An attempt to synthesize his academic training at Chicago and his creative impulse begins to show here in
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his borrowing phrases from a sonnet by George Meredith, the subject of his doctoral dissertation, to supply the titles for all four books of the Hunter cycle. And it was generally a time of integration and synthesis when the loneliness and despair following Leonas death and the revulsion he felt toward urban life began to generate powerful intellectual and emotional energy as Fisher found himself back in the western canyon that had so intimidated and alienated him as a child. He had come home again.
THE FEDERAL ERA, 193539
In this five-year period Fisher published five novels: We Are Betrayed (1935; published before Fisher accepted directorship of the WPA writers project) and No Villain Need Be (1936), the two final volumes of the Hunter tetralogy, April ( written after Toilers and before Bridwell but not published until 1937), Forgive Us Our Virtues (1938), and Children of God (1939). In 1937 a son was born; in 1939 the marriage with Margaret Trusler was dissolved. This was a period of growing confidence and continued and expanding recognition. Fisher was asked to direct the nebulous Federal Writers Project for Idaho, producing during his largely solo and certainly virtuoso performance Idaho, A Guide in Word and Picture (1937), The Idaho Encyclopedia (1938), and Idaho Lore (1939). Children of God won the Harper Prize for Fiction in 1939. So in this brief five-year period Fishers industry created a spate of successful works in both fiction and non-fiction. This period ends with considerable doubt on Fishers part about the growing role of government in the lives of the citizens of a nation. His reservations focused upon bureaucratic waste and upon a frame of mind that prompts the eastern part of the nation to view the West as a source of physical and scenic wealth existing to be exploited. He maintained this skepticalsome would say cynicalview of government and the East the rest of his life.
THE HAGERMAN YEARS, 194068
In 1940 Fisher married for the third and last time. Opal Laurel Holmes proved to be a companion, confidante, wife, and helpmate. They settled at Hagerman, Idaho, building with their own hands a house and outbuildings, planting trees and pasture, harnessing one of the valleys thousand springs. For twenty-eight years this was his home. Fishers creative energies flowed unchecked throughout this period, resulting in twenty-two volumes. When he died at seventy-three, he was at work on his autobiography and a book celebrating the natural wonders of the American West. Two facts about this period confront the student of Fisher. One is his return to the quest for understanding the hero of his tetralogy. He did in-
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deed return to those books and that quest, rewriting the four as Orphans in Gethsemane (1960), but only after a monumental excursion into the history of the development of the human race, requiring the reading of over 2,000 7 scholarly books. Of equal interest is the fact that after an extended period of general reader indifference to the Testament of Man series, Fisher began to be recognized again. He was invited to address the Western Literature Association and was named a lifetime member of it. His Mountain Man (1965) was generally well received by reviewers, although neither Newsweek nor Time, a journal not noted for its kindness to this strictly from Idaho writer, observed its publication. His and Opals Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West (1968) was favorably reviewed and widely purchased. Institutional recognition came when he was named Writer-in-Residence at The College of Idaho. The remarks that follow concentrate upon novels selected from each period, with only brief and incidental commentary upon other literary genres within which he worked. Drawing upon his own personal history, upon physical characteristics of the region, and upon the oral narratives of his father and uncles, Fisher has created a simple story in Toilers of the Hills. Dock and Opal Hunter pack a wagon, turn their backs to the settlement and the valley, and go to the hills where land is cheap and population non-existent. They build a log cabin and subsist on bread and water gravy while Dock fights the sagebrush and the elements, trying to get the dry land into production. Neighbors gradually get established, and babies are born and many die. But although there are neighbors, there is little neighborliness, and we are reminded of the women in the Old Norse Njals Saga, who scold the men into hostility. In their third year, Dock and Opal can afford bread and potatoes, and the river yields cutthroat trout. By the time their eighth child is born, Dock has rediscovered the methods of summer fallowing, the key to successful dry farming. The methods work and Dock and Opal have succeeded. The point of view is essentially Opals, and through her sensibility we perceive the dominant imagery, as important to the novel as incident. Great gray hills, soaring hawks, the wind, the pervasive quietnessthese dominate the landscape and impress themselves upon the soul of Opal Hunter; her moods of loneliness and her sense of abandonment and isolation temper the concluding pages in which success is claimed for dry farming. The book demands a reassessment of agrarian literature and belongs within the tradition of naturalistic truth-telling associated with Garland, Norris, and London. It often appears that a predominance of Fishers characters are grotesques in the Sherwood Anderson sense of too singlemindedly pursuing 866
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one goal or being too slavish to one motive or possessing one tiny truth to the exclusion of all others. If that comparison is true and if it proves to be a flaw, Fisher more than compensates by his evocation of the power, the felicity, the awesomeness of nature. Indeed, in all his western novels external nature is handled with respect, at times with loving tenderness, and always with a sense of natures numinousness, part of which man can sometimes feel. It is this aspect of nature in Fisher that refutes the claimin some criticism expressed only as a worrythat western writers tend to be long on landscape but short on character. Landscape and the processes of nature remind us that ecology has rehabilitated nature in literature. By showing that nature does indeed have the force of character, that she may work with or destroy man, and that the most moral kind of art is that which urges natures claim for the intrinsic worth of all her works, the ecologist redirects our thinking toward the necessity of including nature in mans schemes lest she simply exclude man, permanently. Fisherand Owen Wister and A. B. Guthrie and Frank Waters, among many otherssaw in the American West a drama in which nature and man might approach that fine point of equilibrium through which alone mans continued presence might be assured. That balance is reached in Toilers of the Hills when Dock rediscovers dry farming, the only way by which mans efforts and natures fecundity can be brought together into production. Homeostasis is another manifestation of the golden mean. Whether Fisher was acquainted with Knut Hamsuns great novel of a pioneering venture in Norway is not known, but certainly parallels exist between Growth of the Soil (1920) and Toilers of the Hills, and the two can profitably be compared. Both take place beyond the fringes of settlement, one in backwoods Norway, the other in the back country of Idaho. In both, a fierce independence motivates the principal males, Isaac and Dock, but the women, Inger and Opal, long for opportunities to socialize with their own kind. Both Hamsun and Fisher created novels in which folklife provides the basic rhythmic structure on which the melodies and harmonics of plot develop. The sense of folklife is shared in the larger sense that both novels are land-based, with the activities of farm life being determined by the traditional means of planting and harvesting. But it is also true in the smaller and more particular sense of a time and place saturated with superstition, folk wisdom, and proverb. Inger, while pregnant, is tricked by a vicious womanone of those females often found in Icelandic sagasinto looking at a hare. When the child is born, it is harelipped. Knowing the pain of self-consciousness, for Inger is similarly afflicted, she kills the child. Opal Hunter, while carrying her first child, is horrified when before her eyes her husband kills a pup that gets into a kettle of oatmeal: In her body she had 867
felt a stirring pain . . . and she had felt a hot burning in her breast and throat. It was little wonder if her child was melancholy, or anything else 8 terrible or misshapen or unloved. The child does prove to be melancholic, a condition Dock attributes to the zodiacal sign under which the child was conceived. Docks folk beliefs also tell him that one bath every three years is wholesome because he sweats himself clean. Moreover, there is a folk quality to the names of Fishers characters, which are well chosen to stimulate reader response and to show the Mormon predilection for names that reflect genealogy through euphony, rhyme, and alliteration. The Fisher children themselves had such names, as do the characters Quirl Avery, Hype Hunter, Lem Higley, Perg Jasper, Con Wote. With respect to dialect, Fishers ear is accurate. The Mormons swear by saying by hell, by damn, and for hells sakes. Out of becomes outen, shrivel becomes swivel, dubious becomes joobus, shivering ague becomes shiverun ager. Between the Norwegian and Idaho books run two further parallels. There is the matter of the almost indescribably hard work which both men undertake, becoming what Jack London called work beasts. And there is also the fact that through this work, this sacrifice of self, a land and people emerge. As the soil grows and the land becomes productive, people become independent. These two literary naturalists thus seem to validate agrarianism, certainly not the one of which Jefferson dreamed but not altogether a nightmarish one either. Turning to the Bridwell period, we may look briefly at the book giving its title to this phase of Fishers life and then at the rationale underlying the autobiographical tetralogy which begins at this time. Fishers second novel is also regional. Appearing first in 1931, the book was reissued in paper in 1958 by Pyramid Books as The Wild Ones and given a lurid cover. The reissuance, according to an announcement verso on the title page, was done by arrangement with the Claxton [sic] Printers, Ltd. If Fisher needed further evidence of the indifference of the eastern publishing establishment to western mattersa claim he made throughout his lifehe could have found it in this publishers error. To the Upper Snake River country come Charley and Lela Bridwell. Charley is a combination of many contrasting elements: brutality and tenderness, capability and desultoriness, insight and shortsightedness, slovenliness and a liking for bathing and water. But Charleys overriding attribute is laziness. In a sense he is a throwback to the mountain man, notoriously improvident, who took natures bounty for granted. Nor does it seem necessary to make a more than desultory attempt at farming a few acres, raising
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just enough hay for a cow and sometimes a horse, enough fruit for canning, and enough vegetables for the table. A gifted parasite, he borrows relentlessly from his neighbors, using and abusing their horses and equipment and slaughtering beef that does not belong to him. Ironically, his neighbors love him. Three children are born, two boys and a girl, and since Charley passes on to them his view of the world, the three grow up almost as savages. Taught at home, they learn only writing and spelling, developing remarkable skills at the latter but having little or no sense of how to use the words on their spelling lists. It is soon apparent that Jed, the second child, is obsessed by an Oedipal hatred. When he is four, he tries to kill Charley with a stove lifter. But his hatred and cruelty extend beyond his father, as he divides the world into the good and the bad, protecting and loving the one and waging unceasing war on the other. In the course of time the daughter is seduced and impregnated by a sheepherder on whom Charley has earlier played a joke and whom Charley forces into marriage with her. Jed leaves home, and the other son finally follows his example. Two more babies are born to Lela and Charley, and their births force Lela to realize the ambitions which Charleys personality has suppressed for so many years. Encouraged by Prudence Hunters precept and example, she makes something of the Bridwell farm, principally by raising turkeys, as was frequently done by homesteaders and marginal farmers. She hoards the profits and in 1917, after twenty years on the place, takes her two younger childrenafter a violent scene in which the returned and vengeful Jed is nearly killed by his fatherand leaves Charley and the river. The book ends with Charley walking eastward into the gray dawn. . . . By none who knew him was he ever seen again. The Bridwells are richly conceived characters replete with contrasting impulses. Nevertheless, it is through each ones overriding passion that they are all made memorable, and it is upon the basis of those flaws that the 9 ending is justified and necessary. Charleys lazy indulgence and gluttony combined with the fact that he is increasingly out of touch with the times must have their consequences. Add to this his cruelty and warped sense of humor, and those consequences will necessarily be serious. The children also suffer the consequences of their natures. Beths sexually responsive nature necessarily makes her an easy target for the seducer. Thiels problems develop because he is easily led by his younger brother. His lack of will power or force of character send him into obscurity. Jed is driven by cruelty, hatred, and revenge directed at many objects, but the latter two principally at his father. Jed, too, must be driven off the stage because he violates the
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moral order of the universe, the golden mean of human behavior. In the end it is Lela who triumphs. It might be argued that even she becomes a driven person in her desire for financial independence, but the drive toward positive goals usually carries approbation rather than condemnation. With two published novels behind him, Fisher could now assess his accomplishments and project work for the future. In the two novels he had rendered the effects of environment upon the shaping of human life. His parents and neighbors figured in these books, and Fisher himself appeared in a few memorable scenes, in one as a terrified younger boy whom the older Jed threatens to castrate. It may have been in the shaping of that scene that Fisher made one of the major artistic decisions of his lifethat he should undertake the novelistic exploration of how his being born to Temperance and Joseph Fisher in an environment of brutal isolation made him what he was. So he began his autobiographical tetralogy of Vridar Hunter. Fisher was convinced that he had caused the suicide of his first wife (he was probably correct in this, to the extent that any one can cause another being to do something), and the guilt and remorse associated with that conviction were almost more than he could bear. From his psychologist brother he borrowed an insight called autocorrectivism, through which Fisher believed his sanity was saved. This notion claimed that a neurosis is the means by which the normal personality copes with what would otherwise result in psychosis. The neurosis, once recognized, need not be a cause for celebration but it can be appreciated for what it isa striving by the personality to correct itself. As part of his attempt to understand Leonas suicide, Fisher began In Tragic Life, a widely praised novel whose protagonist, Vridar Hunter, grew up in the backwoods Idaho community in circumstances nearly identical with his own. The second volume, Passions Spin the Plot, marked the end of Fishers third period and also his financial dependence upon writing, for he was shortly to be named to a federal post with a living wage. In the Federal period, Fisher finished the tetralogy, did a considerable amount of expository scholarly writing, and finished the period in grand fashion with Children of God, a major and money-producing work. With the $7,500 Harper prize money and the savings made possible by his WPA salary, Fisher established the basis for his subsequent financial strength. We Are Betrayed and No Villain Need Be concluded the tetralogy, but Fisher was obviously never completely satisfied that he had indeed discovered his heros problem in his past. Evidence for this conclusion rests principally on his decision to launch one of the most ambitious literary probes of this century, exploration which resulted in the twelve novels making up the Testament of Man series, the last one of which is a rewriting of the tetralogy
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into one novel, Orphans in Gethsemane, to be discussed in connection with 10 the Hagerman years. To return to Children of God as representative of Fishers best work of the Federal period, we note, first of all, the balanced perspective with which Fisher perceived his subject, the founding and growth of the Mormon church. He set out neither to prove nor disprove Mormon theology and claims about revelation but to dramatize and narrate Mormon history. That history, Fisher believed, reposed in two men, each given roughly onethird of the novel, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and in the establishments growing to maturity in Utah, the final third of the book. The first or Joseph Smithdominated section is called Morning, and it ends with Smiths death. The Brigham Young section, Afternoon, deals with the remarkable success of the transplantation of the saints in Utah. Of the many interesting minor threads of this section, none is more engaging than the role of the avenging Angels or Danites, the armed protectors of Zion, and Porter Rockwell, the gunslinger, who was always ready to do Brighams bidding and sock some offender away. The third part, Evening, considers the implied question of how or whether Zion will survive in view of Mormon surrender to the Federal government. Has the vitality been lost, as the McBride family, representing three generations linking Smith, Young, and the Utah transplantation, feel? This family has been especially prominent in the communal experiment of the church, and the experiments abandonment by the church is a blow to them. Children of God is an engaging book with an excellent balance between incident or event, on the one hand, and character and setting on the other. Fisher leaves no doubt that the new environment with its isolation, its natural wealth, and its great agricultural potential, helps account for the success of the saints. But he also recognizes their industry and the genius of Brigham Young. Fisher, for whom irony was a frequent ally, said in God or Caesar?: I received a Harper award for one of the poorest novels I have written (pp. 24142). In the context in which the remark appears, Fisher is belaboring the manner in which such awards and grants as the Guggenheim are given. It is therefore difficult to know whether he really held his Mormon novel in such low esteem. When Fishers first two novels were assessed, he was hailed as a regionalist along the lines of Thomas Hardy, with the Antelope Hills of Idaho his Wessex, as he says in God or Caesar? (p. 214). With his third novel, he began to be identified with such naturalists as Zola, Norris, and Dreiser (p. 214). In this, the Hagerman period, Fisher was to demonstrate the breadth and depth to which regional writing might legitimately aspire, always striving for the universal beyond the particular. This is particularly
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well illustrated by Fishers momentous quest for understanding modern man, a specific western American man named Vridar Hunter. Surveying his tetralogy, Fisher gradually became convinced that childhood alone does not hold the key to an understanding of the man. The man is not there, Wordsworth to the contrary notwithstanding, but in the entire past of the human species, and to understand him that past must be recovered. It was that task of recovery that set off Fishers most ambitious quest. His series began with ape-man times and carried the human story through crisis after crisis. A brief indication of the titles and central concerns will permit at least a glance at the intellectual platform underlying this series which he called the Testament of Man. Such an undertaking must be selective. Accordingly, Fisher chose those climactic moments in human history when mankind seemed to take a giant step in a certain direction. As he said, Enlightened minds must wonder what the world would be like today if the torrent [that carries us along] had taken another channel at any one of a dozen . . . moments in history. What if Greek values had triumphed in that war more than twenty-one cen1 1 turies ago? In considering the first novel of the Testament, Darkness and the Deep (1943), we are reminded of that superb sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey when a bone weapon hurled high into the air in a moment of ecstatic intuition summons the laws of force and fulcrum which in turn transmogrify the bone into an awesome artifact of space technology. So in this novel we find a protagonist physically weaker than his fellows and sexually frustrated by their strength which keeps him away from the women. But he is more intelligent, and his frustration advances that intelligence, making him into a shaper and user of weapons which make him leader of a family group. The second novel opposes Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon peoples and recounts the discoveries of firehence the title, The Golden Rooms (1944)and art. Perhaps, though, the greatest discovery is that man no longer lives in one world, as Joseph Flora puts it, but two: the physical world and the world 12 of the mind. Fisher explores matriarchy and patriarchy in Intimations of Eve (1946) and Adam and the Serpent (1947); father-son hostility, Hebraic prophecy, desert barrenness, and forgiveness and mercy in The Divine Passion (1948), The Valley of Vision (1951), The lsland of the Innocent (1952), and Jesus Came Again (1956). Three novels of the Christian worldA Goat for Azazel (1956), Peace Like a River (1957), and My Holy Satan (1958)deal respectively with love and compassion as the essence of Jesuss ministry, the distortion of that ministry by Christian ascetics in the desert, and persecution and torture of heterodoxy by the orthodox in the Middle Ages. Then came the rewritten tetralogy entitled Orphans in Gethsemane: A Novel of the 872
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Past in the Present (1960). It is a big novel both physically (1245 pages in the two-volume Pyramid Edition) and in the sweep of its ideas. It is a painful novel, for its protagonist seems both destined and determined to suffer. There are blood and violence in it. But in spite of all this, it is an affirmation of sorts. As with all significant books, this one has many entries. There is, for instance, the challenge of finding the historical prototypes behind their fictional refractions. The Hunter family is obviously the Fisher family. The 13 Bridwells are the Wheatons with Francis Wheaton as Charley Bridwell. David Hawke is Thomas Wolfe. Professors Elmer T. Merrick and Laura Mayfield are Harold G. Merriam and Lucia Mirrielees of the University of Montana at Missoula. Reuben Taylor Rhode is James H. Gipson of the Caxton Printers. Lloyd Bell is the poet Floyd Dell. Governor Don B. Long is Idaho Governor C. Ben Ross. Angus Boden is W. H. Auden. Robin Welsh is Alan Swallow. But such riddling can become a kind of game and the book merely a roman clef. A more profitable approach to the book is an analysis of its structure, which may be described as circular and chronological since it is the chronicle of the life of Vridar Hunter and, secondarily, an accounting, sometimes brief, of the lives of those who influenced him or were touched by him. It is in this texture of human connections that part of the richness of the novel reveals itself, for the protagonist is usually sensitive to his total environment. If the structure is chronological and historical, the perspective on that structure is psychological and ecological. That is, Fisher details motivation and explores the psyche of his characters, but it is in the interplay of character, the web of conflict and influence, that the ethical problems are given voice. And that, properly understood, is the heart of human ecology, which is concerned with the web of human relationships in the totality of the environment. Human ecology is not, therefore, simply a biological term. Between the time of Vridars birth in the Snake River Valley and his 1 4 return to it incurably a mountain man, a man of the American West, the circle of life has been touched by hundreds of people and events. At the center of his early life are his parents, the meaning of whose relationship to him and to each other is for a long time unclear to Vridar. Near the center of his life are his brother and sister, important for reasons similarly obscure. But the relationship at the heart of the tragedy of his life is his love affair with Neloa, whom he marries, by whom two children are born, and whom he drives to suicide. About life being tragic, Fisher was absolutely unequivocal: All of us, with Robinsons Flammonde, have a dark hill to climb; be15 cause life is tragic . . . we fall easily into . . . self-pity. . . . Twice more Vridar marries, and each time the web of circumstances and human connections is complex and rich. 873
To summarize the story is to take yet another path into the novel, and interpretive summary invariably emphasizes point to point correspondence between the lives of Vridar and Vardis. Such a path the biographical critic may take with considerable profit, for any information that illuminates the foreground of a literary work is welcome. Orphans is one of the most intensely autobiographical American novels ever written, reminding the reader that Vardis Fisher and Thomas Wolfe had been colleagues and friends and raising the question of whether these two orphans influenced each other or whether their penchant for autobiographical fiction was a matter of confluence. But summary of a long novel is always difficult and certainly unfair in cases where the feeling for detail and the ability to render scene are strong. This is the case with Fisher, and the matter is complicated by his attempts to evoke images involving all the senses, particularly those of taste and hearing. Vridars life falls into the same five periods identified for Fisher. He, too, was born with a caul on a stormy March night. He early experiences violence, terror, and an absence of expressed parental love and tenderness. His early recollections are of a sheep with its head pulled up and back, its throat butchered open from ear to ear, its blood pouring out; of an enraged father grasping a cat by its heels and crushing it around a post, the squawk of it when it struck, the smell of it, the sight of it as it lay senseless in the yard; . . . the stench of burning hair and hide and the agonized bawling, the branding iron, the knife, the blood. . . . And the nights under downpours, with water and chunks of mud falling from the ceiling to the untanned deer and elk skins of his bed . . . the sound of river waters and night winds, of wolves and coyotes and mountain lions . . . of a horse screaming because of turpentine poured into his bowels by the Bridwell boysIt was life that thousands had lived with zest and appetite, but he had been a . . . child so . . . sensitive that it broke his heart to watch what strong men loved. . . . He had been deeply afraid of his father, even afraid of his mother . . . . (II, pp. 2324) Vridar is late getting into and graduating from high school. He is the protector of his younger brother, Marion (Vivian), who has crossed eyes. In his developing sexuality, he falls in sentimental, chivalric love with Neloa Doole (Leona McMurtrey), suffers guilt and anxiety about masturbating, and, in short, experiences the emotional confusion of adolescence. He goes to college, intensifies his questioning of the Mormon church, has consider-
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able academic success, and marries Neloa only after forcing her to admit she is not a virgin (he is) and after finally and painfully accommodating that fact to his unyielding conviction of the importance of virginity. But he never forgets her fall from innocence and never lets her forget. Neloa becomes pregnant, and Vridar accepts an invitation from Washington, D.C. to become an air cadet, resigning later in protest against the high-society snobbery of the training center. He returns home, is drafted, sent to Fort Rosecrans, and mustered out after the Armistice without ever going overseas. After finishing college, Vridar attends graduate school at Midwestern University in Chicago in summers while teaching at Wasatch College during the academic year. The two important strands of his lifescholarship and marriagebegin to unravel. As he pursues his graduate degree and works on a novel, he becomes aware of an irreconcilable split in himself: the idealist, credulous and self-pitying, and the thinker, ironic and ruthless (I, p. 598). With a fellow student, Athene Marvell, he finds intellectual, then emotional sympathy. When, finally, they are intimate, Vridar forces himself to extirpate the sentimental notion of love that has had Neloa for its object since he was a twelve-year-old Idaho schoolboy. He vacillates between the two women: an unreasoning love on the one hand; a conviction of duty and courage on the other (I, p. 265). As tensions increase, Neloa finds that she is once again pregnant; Vridar is astounded, for he had been scrupulous in his use of contraceptives. Neloa has an abortion, and after she recovers there is a scene in which Vridar forces the truth that she has been intimate with another man, as he had so many years earlier forced the truth of sexual activities from her. His mind returns to earlier scenes in Antelope and Idaho Falls. Their final confrontation ends with Neloa drinking a glass of lysol, and in spite of medical attention, she dies. Book One ends with Vridars vow at the crematorium to work seven years, for their marriage had endured that long, and if at the end of that time he has produced nothing worthwhile, he will join her in death. In Book Two, Vridar finally pulls himself together, finishes the Ph.D. degree magna cum laude and with Athene Marvell, behind whose portrait stands Margaret Trusler, returns to Wasatch College to teach. He continues to write, gets into trouble with the Mormon mouthpieces of the college administration, and takes a position in a New York City college where an aspiring young writer named Hawke is among his colleagues. Here he publishes his first novel. Sick of the city and its ant-swarms of people, its dirt, and its ugliness, he returns to Idaho, married to Athene. He is impelled west, moreover, because he feels too shy to be an effective teacher, because his father and sons are in Idaho, and because he had never known until he went East how much he loved the Westits magnificent mountains, its
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vast forests of Douglas fir, pine, and spruce; its great clean rivers, the strong pungent scent of its campfires, and above all, the boundless semi-arid landscapes smelling of sage (II, p. 169). With this move and the almost total abandonment of teaching, the second period of Vridars life concludes. Vridar works on his fathers homestead near the Bridwell place, still seldom comfortable around his father. But his visits to the river and forests displace his old sense of terror and isolation. A western publisher, Reuben Taylor Rhode, agrees to publish Vridars next novel. Athene comes west to join him, and, now a nationally recognized regional writer, Vridar is invited on two different occasions to teach summer sessions at Montana College in Missoula. As he continues his exploration of his past, Vridar confides to Athene that his books are no good and that it is impossible to explain the man in terms of his childhood. He must go back to the ape, to the cell, to the stone (II, p. 222). The third period of Vridars life concludes when he accepts an invitation to become state director of the WPA Writers Project. The fourth period of Vridars life is memorable for several reasons. In the first place, he puts together a remarkable effort, and Idaho is the first state to publish under the terms of the Project. Hunter is scathing in his indictment of the eastern establishment which frustrates him nearly every step of the way as he takes his job seriously, works a sixteen-plus hour day, and begins to assemble text and photographs for publicationall this on one of the smallest budgets and lowest salaries in the nation. He learns that Washington bureaucrats survive by never finishing a piece of work and by patronizing political strength. But Idaho, a thinly populated western state, must not publish before more populous ones. And to see that it does not, a Washington official is sent to Idaho. Vridar and Rhode, who plans to publish the guide, get the arrogant easterner drunk and ship him home via Union Pacific. This is Vridars response to the frame of mind that sees the West as exploitable, a place to be visited for its pure air, water, and scenery and mined of its resources but to be neither lived in nor taken seriously, for 16 all important matters are resolved east of the Mississippi. In the second place, Vridar writes a prize- and money-winning novel making it possible for him to resign as Project director for Idaho and Regional Editor of the Rocky Mountain States. The second marriage is dissolved, and with Angele he moves to Hagerman, to build a permanent home. Thus he is launched into the fifth and final period of his life. He marries Angele and begins his exploration of hisand ourpast. In the course of that exploration, he sometimes suspends work to take an occasional side path to write a book on a subject or about a problem that has long interested him. But always his big work, indeed his lifes work, is the series. When no one will publish the books and he sinks into despair and
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drink, he meets Robin Welsh, poet-professor-publisher, who is eager to bring the novels out. Vridars story ends as he and Angele on a soft summer night surround themselves with fragrant apples: Until morning they would be here, eating apples and drinking whiskey, breathing woodsmoke and talking; until at last, still looking at the stars and thinking of lightyears, and of the microscopic insect explaining the solar system in a mote of metaphysics, they would turn their faces to the cool waters and sleep (II, p. 513). Identification of theme is yet another way into the study of a novel, and with it the commentary on this novel concludes. It has been previously stated that the book is the story of a quest, and indeed it is, for the protagonist is painfully pursuing self-knowledge. If he is unable to account for himself, for the pain he feels, and for the pain he causes, he may well destroy himself. That knowledge finally comes: fear is the touchstone in understanding mans continuing story. Vridars progression from ape-man to contemporary neurotic has been shaped by fear, subsumed in the legacy from the Judaeo-Christian tradition as the sense of sin and utter unworthiness. Who besides the Jews had so lost themselves in a colossal act of submission and projection until they were all stricken orphans going into Gethsemane to pray! (II, p. 432). Vridar cannot get beyond fear, for he accepts Welshs contention that the universe is essentially unknowable to human beings . . . non-rational rather than irrational (II, p. 569). But it doesnt stop there; Welshs thoughts continue with what is part of the affirmation at the end of the quest: There is no future for the individual being, in some mystical sense. Dust to dust, and the unknowable miracle is that the dust is somehow alive, and that, through the long, long centuries, the dust is somehow alive with consciousness. That this consciousness can occasionally respond to meaning and direction gives the only possible hope for man, and the only possible reason for wanting to be alive, to act, to do anything. But that is reason enough. (II, p. 570) There is also the theme, important though not the principal one, of West-East opposition. Vardis Fisher was an implacable foe of the incestuous, self-aggrandizing eastern literary establishment, refusing to accept its moral, philosophical, and literary commonplaces. Through his protagonist he registers surprise, first, then righteous anger when he learns that members of the establishmentall friendsreview one anothers books as if the writers were total strangers! More than that, he learns that eastern publishers, reviewers, and critics do not really believe anybody in the West
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has anything worth saying, especially about the West itself. To write about the West successfully one had best refurbish eastern stereotypes of it. And that Vridar Hunter refuses to do. Finally there is the theme of the responsibility of the historical novelist. The novelist must know his subject thoroughly, and, equally important, 17 must feel his subjects, must get into the sensibility of his characters. Vridar spends time in a cave when he is in ape-man times, on the desert when he writes of the early Christian ascetics, in a place very much like a dungeon when he writes of the punishment of heretics. Only thus can he sense what such experiences were like, and only by describing those sensations can he make his writing live. Before Fisher began writing his Testament of Man series, he produced notable western books. Of these space permits mention only of City of Illusion (1941), a novel of quick riches and losses in Virginia City, Nevada, with the remarkable Eilley Orrum Hunter Cowan Bowers, self-styled Queen of the Comstock; and The Mothers (1943), a novel of mother force and courage in the Sierras among the Donner party. Tamsen Donner is unforgettable. Pemmican (1956), a novel of the contest for power in the fur trade in Canada, and Tale of Valor (1958), an imaginative and forceful novel of the Lewis and Clark expedition in which the principals become authentic and therefore vulnerable human beings, were done while he worked on the series. As a conclusion to this discussion of Vardis Fisher as a western writer, Mountain Man (1965) poses special problems. Based loosely on two strands of western legend, that of John Livereating Johnston and that of Jane Crazy Woman Morgan, this book projects a nineteenth-century man of feeling, Sam Minard, into an environment in which such a sensibility can most fully realize itself: not a salon or a Gothic pile or a grotto but the Rocky Mountain West. The two strands come together when, in 1846, Sam Minard, an intelligent, educated, music-loving mountain man, discovers Kate Bowden insane with grief and shock over the slaughter of her three children. Her husband has been scalped and carried off on the back of a Blackfoot horse, but not before Kate has killed four of the ten warriors with an axe. From the moment of his discovery Sam feels responsible for Kate. He builds her a little cabin, sees to it that she has food and blankets, and otherwise provides for her as best he can. Word passed to other mountain men enlists their guardianship, and her insanity together with their solicitude assures her protection from the Indians. Sam marries Lotus, a Flathead princess, builds a cabin, and for a brief time they live an idyll, feasting upon the choicest foods nature can provide and loving one another. All that ends when Sam, returning from a trapping expedition, finds his wifes bones mingled with the bones of an unborn child. She has been 878
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killed by Crows. Swearing vengeance upon the entire Crow nation, Minard quickly becomes known as The Terror, not merely killing all of the Crow warriors he can find but cutting off their right ears so that his work will be known. After Sam and a few mountain man friends kill some fifty Blackfeet, the Crows find the body of Kate, who has frozen to death, and build a cairn over her remains. When Sam sees what they have doneit is near the cairn Sam has built for the bones of Lotus and the unborn childhe knows it is time to cease the blood feud. The book ends on a strong note of reconciliation. When Sam enters the lodge of a wise old Crow chief, the two men exchange understanding and smoke pipes of peace. The vendetta has ended. Sam leaves the Crow camp, makes his way past the Oregon Trail whose numbers of emigrants he counts regretfully, then turns and heads 1 8 straight north, back into the valleys and the mountains. Mountain Man is an interesting book, remarkable for its strong story line and dramatic rendering of events. In no other novel is there a greater sense of the beauty and wonder of the American West. And that, as has been insisted on earlier, is no confession of novelistic weakness. Nature, the landscape, and scenic wonder have the ethical force of character; such books as this and The Big Sky, though in most respects vastly different, are vital to a developing sense of responsibility for the West, for they provide a means by which we can compare what the West used to be with what we have done with it. It is an appropriate farewell to the subject of the West, for it is Fishers last novel, and in it he distilled the emotional response most westerners feel for their region. The theme of this book can be described variously, but one way of getting at its ethical significance is to consider the importance of time. Time as theme becomes transparently clear when the brevity of the love of Sam and Lotus is examined. Just so short a time did the American West remain pristine and free after the mountain man entered her. If Lotus can be thought to stand for the values of the primitive West and if Sam represents the essence of the mountain man tradition, then it is appropriate for their union to be short-lived. For a brief season, Fisher quotes Bernard DeVotos Across the Wide Missouri in a prefatory note to the reader, . . . the myth so generously begotten became fact. For a few years Odysseus Jed Smith and Siegfried Carson and the Wingshod Fitzpatrick actually drew breath in this province of fable. Then suddenly it was ail myth again. Wagons were moving down the trails, and nowhere remained any trace of the demigods who had passed this way. In time, Kates insane anguish is foregone. In time, Sams feud is ended. The time of winter and freezing cold is only part of the cycle of a year and is displaced by warmth, flowers, and singing life. There is a kairos moment, a fullness of time, for all things. For some tastes, Sams musical turn of mind is mildly incredible as he 879
bursts into song or plays his harmonica in a land where hostile Indians lurk. For others Sams fondling of the bones of his wife and child and kissing the hair still attached to the skull of Lotus is so gothic as to be repugnant. However, it must be remembered that although Sam is a nineteenth-century man, his sensibilities are those of an eighteenth-century man of feeling, and the Graveyard School of English poetry had earlier created characters such as he. At the beginning of this study, it was suggested that Fisher left a rich legacy of essays. They are far too numerous and too scattered through dozens of periodicals to be assessed here. However, the following is evidence of the quality of his mind and the kind of concern that impelled him to the typewriter. Entitled Vardis Fisher Says, the column appeared in the Buhl, Idaho Herald, Thursday, April 29, 1965, and said in part: Henry Miller years ago wrote a book about this country that he called The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Most likely he did not know what a fine prophet he was, or what a superb irony he put in his title; for it will be air-conditioned. This nation has technological know-how, and so it seems safe to predict that its vast acreages of junked cars and its swarming bedlams of the mentally sick will be air-conditioned. The nations face, if seen from far above, will become more and more a network of freeways and superways, overways and underways, and thousands of abandoned highways or pieces of them; together with the vast sprawl and effluvia and smog of the ever-expanding cities. The politicians, the manufacturers of diapers and toys, and millions more call it progress. Im actually glad that Ill not be here to see it. Those like me are called reactionary because we shudder at the picture of four or five hundred million people in the noise and stinks and crowding of huge cities, who will never know the smell of the clean beautiful land before it was swarmed over; of the wonderfully graceful animal life before it was hogtied and fenced in the illsmelling pens, for their captors to stare at; of the almost infinite variety of wild flowers, and of lovely birds singing everywhere before the sons of Adam chased them off the planet; and the marvelous beauty of the thousands of unpolluted lakes and streams. . . . It is, of course, too early for any final assessment of Vardis Fisher, and in any case final assessments nearly always prove to be both semi-final and arrogant. However, the following may be affirmed. He began as a regionalist and never lost that identity, expanding his vision like a good regionalist be-
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yond the narrow and provincial to become what Robert Frost called a realmist, one who discovers the promise and disappointment, the baseness and nobility, and the joy and pain of the human condition with himself and within his territory. Fisher probed the motives of his characters, dissecting their shifts and evasions, not sparing even his fictional self. Fisher took Ben Jonson seriously and blotted his thousand lines. His blotting resulted in his rejection of the tetralogy, his immense search into the past of mankind, and the novelistic result of that search. Critical opinion may divide when the massive and powerful Orphans is compared with the tetralogy, but Fisher was unequivocal in his own preference. As one who tried to write honestly about the West, either the West he knew or the earlier one he so carefully researched, he is close to the literary tradition of Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, surpassing them both in range of intelligence, depth of perception, and ambition. He came to understand his regions history, its folkways, its dialect, its capacity to excite fear and terror as well as its power to inspire feelings of tenderness and rapture. Future scholars may find that in these he compares not unfavorably with William Faulkner, another realmist. Vardis Fisher left a legacy that will be read, enjoyed, and argued about for years to come, or at least as long as there is a vision or even a memory of the freedom, the purity, and the promise of the American West. He will remain an inspiration for younger writers who sometimes despair in the face of the hostility of the establishmentthe critics and publishersencouraging them by precept and example to realize their noblest ambitions. His call is always God, not Caesar!
LOUIE W. ATTEBERY , The
College of Idaho
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Notes
1. Wallace Stegner, Born a SquareThe Westerners Dilemma, Atlantic 213 (January 1964): 4650. 2. Vardis Fisher, Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him and Other Essays (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1963), p. 107. 3. Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him, pp. 107108. 4. Joseph Flora, Vardis Fisher (New York: Twayne, 1965), p. 20. 5. Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him, p. 122. 6. Letter from Maribeth Dwyer, Information Services, University of Montana, 17 September 1979. 7. Vardis Fisher, What Is the Evidence? Comments on the Testament of Man Series, unpublished lecture at The College of Idaho (Jan. 23, 1968), p. 2. 8. Vardis Fisher, Toilers of the Hills (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), p. 83. 9. It is instructive to note that Fishers own choice as a title for his second novel was Those Strange Bridwells, a title that suggests his awareness of the grotesqueness of the principals of the cast. God or Caesar? (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953), p. 148. 10. Before I had completed the four novels of my tetralogy I felt that I didnt have a good grasp of the thing . . . because I didnt have enough knowledge. What Is the Evidence?, p. 3. 11. What Is the Evidence?, p. 8. 12. Vardis Fisher, p. 8. 13. Tim Woodward, Mystery SolvedThe Fate of Charley Bridwell, Idaho Statesman, 22 November 1983. 14. Orphans in Gethsemane, Pyramid Edition (New York, 1960), vol. II, p. 101. 15. God or Caesar?, p. 89. 16. Time s July 2, 1951 review of The Valley of Vision was headed Strictly from Idaho, and over the years Fisher grew accustomed to questions as to why he chose to live and write in Idaho, of all places! 17. Some readers have pointed to an error of Fishers in describing the milking of a goat, for the animal was presented as if its udder had four quarters like a cow instead of the two proper for the caprine species. It may have been a mistake, or it may have been a deliberate joke aimed at the eastern city dweller who typically knows little of rural life. There are precedents for such humor. One recalls Melvilles phallic jokes which must have passed over the heads of many of his readers. And closer to the mark is Thomas Wolfes delightful joke in Look Homeward, Angel when a stanza of poetry is attributed to Longfellow but is really by Tennyson! As an English teacher, Wolfe was surely aware of what
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he was doing, just as Fisher, who raised sheep, must have known that sheep and goats possess similar milking characteristics. 18. Vardis Fisher, Mountain Man (New York: William Morrow, 1965), p. 372.
Primary Sources (in chronological order) Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna. New York: Harold Vinal, 1927; souvenir edition reissued by Opal Laurel Holmes, Boise: 1981. Toilers of the Hills. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. Dark Bridwell. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931. In Tragic Life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran; Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1932. This and the following three works comprise Fishers Vridar Hunter tetralogy. Passions Spin the Plot. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran; Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1934. We Are Betrayed. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran; Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1935. No Villain Need Be. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran; Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1936. The Idaho Encyclopedia. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1938. Idaho Lore. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1939. Children of God: An American Epic. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939. City of Illusion. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941. The Mothers: An American Saga of Courage. New York: Vanguard Press, 1943. * Darkness and the Deep. New York: Vanguard Press, 1943. * The Golden Rooms. New York: Vanguard Press, 1944. * Intimations of Eve. New York: Vanguard Press, 1946. * Adam and the Serpent. New York: Vanguard Press, 1947. * The Divine Passion. New York: Vanguard Press, 1948. * The Valley of Vision. New York: Abelard Press, 1951. * The Island of the Innocent. New York: Abelard Press, 1952. God or Caesar? The Writing of Fiction for Beginners. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953. * Jesus Came Again. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1956. * A Goat for Azazel. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1956. Pemmican. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956. * Peace Like a River. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1957. * My Holy Satan. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1958. Tale of Valor. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958.
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A Literary History of the American West Love and Death; The Complete Stories of Vardis Fisher. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959. * Orphans in Gethsemane. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960. Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him and Other Essays. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1963. Mountain Man: A Novel of Male and Female in the Early American West. New York: William Morrow, 1965. Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1968.
* Books belonging to the Testament of Man series
Secondary Sources Attebery, Louie W. The American West and the Archetypal Orphan. Western American Literature 5 (Fall 1970): 20517. In its literature and folklore, the American West seems particularly well adapted to the presentation of the orphan. The author examines works by Twain, Guthrie, and Fisher and western folklore for their reflection of this archetype. Chatterton, Wayne. Vardis Fisher: The Frontier and Regional Works. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1972. This excellent survey of Fishers western and regional works provides a brief biographical synopsis, including the information that Fisher wrote about a half dozen novels (unpublished) before Toilers of the Hills. No mention is made of Fishers third quarter of teaching at the University of Montana. Fishers Antelope People poetry is acknowledged as a significant passageway into his regional fiction. Chatterton corrects the record about the Harper Prize: in 1939 it was $7,500. Dear Mr. Fisher/Dear Mr. Schwartz: A Correspondence. The Bookmark: University of Idaho Library 27 (September 1974): 35. This is an interesting exchange of letters between Fisher and bookshop owner Schwartz, during the course of which Schwartz discovers that Fisher, for whom he has high regard, is not the leftist liberal he had thought. Fishers letter of 28 November 1933 from the University of Montana, Missoula, provides a clue that he was then teaching there, as indeed he was. Etulain, Richard W. Western American Literature: A Bibliography of Interpretive Books and Articles. Vermillion, South Dakota: Dakota Press, 1972. Revised Edition, 1982. For works before 1972, this is a standard bibliography in 137 pages. The Fisher material is on pp. 6465 in the 1972 edition, pp. 13840 in the 1982. Flora, Joseph M. Vardis Fishers Story of Vridar Hunter: A Study in Theory and Revision. University of Michigan: University Microfilms, 1962. A careful study of the tetralogy and its revision as Orphans in Gethsemane, this book argues that the revised work is an improvement in nearly all respects, a testimony to Fishers growth as a writer. Glancing comments on other Fisher novels and Floras placement of Fisher in the milieu of the literary scene of the 1930s add to the merit of this dissertation. . Vardis Fisher. New York: Twayne, 1965. This is the most complete, most reasonable assessment available of Fisher and his works. Incorporating material
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from his dissertation yet going beyond its limitations, Flora has written a book that is the beginning point for Fisher scholars. Here are a chronology, a bibliography (both primary and secondary sources), and a clear discussion of Fishers power as a novelist. He chooses not to discuss Fishers power as a poet. Particularly fine is Chapter 6, Americana, in which Flora discusses the works with western themes. . Vardis Fisher and James Branch Cabell: An Essay on Influence and Reputation. The Cabellian 2 (Autumn 1969): 1216. Noteworthy for reminding readers of Fishers long-standing appreciation for Cabell, this essay cites some of the particularities of that appreciation, including Cabells impact on the tetralogy. Grover, Dorys C. Vardis Fisher: The Antelope People Sonnets. Texas Quarterly 17 (1974): 97106. Robinson and Masters in The Man Against the Sky and Spoon River Anthology influenced the ten sonnets referred to as the Antelope People Sonnets. These poems appeared in poetry magazines and anthologies, and except for poetry that appeared in the tetralogy and Orphans, they are all the poems Fisher published, excepting Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna. Grover reminds us that the Antelope sonnets are succinct, clear, and provocative meditations without sympathy or defense . . . the only writing we have in American literature about this part of Idaho in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Kellogg, George. Vardis Fisher: A Bibliography. The Bookmark: University of Idaho Library, Supplement to Vol. 13 (March 1961): 119. This is an excellent bibliography of works by and about Fisher, limited only by the fact that it stops with 1961. Included here are a listing of all foreign and domestic editions of Fisher, books edited by him, his publications in periodicals (nearly two pages), his writings in anthologies, nearly three pages of writings about Fisher, and approximately eight pages listing book reviews. Kellogg updated this work for Western American Literature (see below). . Vardis Fisher: A Bibliography. Western American Literature 5 (Spring 1970): 4564. Following essentially the same format as above, Kellogg brought his excellent bibliography up to date, including a projected (and subsequently finished) doctoral dissertation on Fishers poetry. Milton, John R. The Primitive World of Vardis Fisher: The Idaho Novels. Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 17 (July 1976): 369384. Fishers use of animalism to underscore the nature of primitive man in all of us serves to show that man has this heritage but need not be captive to it. Fishers Idaho novels provide an excellent place for the study of man under the control of senseless fears, according to Milton. Taber, Ronald W. Vardis Fisher: New Directions for the Historical Novel. Western American Literature 1 (Winter 1967): 28596. This is an important essay in understanding Fishers advancement of the historical novel, to which Fisher himself provided the clue when he said in God or Caeser?: Note here the reviewers obvious distaste: Once upon a carefree time, escapists could pick up a historical novel confident of finding . . .sword play and midnight love. Nowa-
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A Literary History of the American West days the historical novel is often as minutely researched as a Ph.D. thesis. If it is historical it has to be (p. 163). Tabers article expands this idea and shows how Fisher, through his research, attempted to recreate the thoughts of his characters. . Vardis Fisher and the Idaho Guide: Preserving Culture for the New Deal. Pacific Northwest Quarterly 59 (April 1968): 6876. In this article the background for and the execution of the Idaho Guide are described. Fishers accomplishments in bringing out the prototype for subsequent guides emerge from a weight of material researched by Taber. Westbrook, Max. The Ontological Critic. In Interpretive Approaches to Western American Literature, edited by Daniel Alhofer and others, pp. 4966. Pocatello, Idaho: Idaho State University Press, 1972. An essay in a particular kind of literary criticism, this wide-ranging piece is especially rich in its exposition of archetypal criticism. In this scheme of things, Dark Bridwell has a place, as Westbrook explains in the closing paragraphs.
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Intellectualoids, Westering, and Thomas Hornsby Ferril

published Westering, the second volume of poetry by a thirty-eight-year-old journalist, sugar company publicist, and poet who, eight years earlier, had won Yales Younger Poets Award with publication of his first volume, High Passage. According to western publisher Alan Swallow, writing in 1964, Westering is probably the best 1 single volume from the belt of states along the Continental Divide. T h e author of this highly praised collection, who had won The Nations poetry prize in 1927, and who would go on to win the Oscar Blumenthal Poetry Prize (1937), the Academy of American Poets Award (1939), the Ridgeley Torrence Memorial Award (1953), and the Robert Frost Award (1960), and who would be named state poet laureate (1979) after publishing three more collections of poetry, is Coloradoan Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Although Ferril and his works have been frequently singled out for honors, and he has been the subject of a recent Public Broadcasting System television documentary, scholarly evaluations of his contributions to American literature have been almost nil or, seemingly, for nought. Ferril is not mentioned, for example, in Spiller et al.s Literary History of the United States, Hyatt Waggoners American Poets from the Puritans to the Present, or Donald Stauffers Short History of American Poetry. It comes as no surprise, then, not to find Ferril represented in, for example, Ellmann and OClairs influential Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. How scholarly disregard has affected the Coloradoan is perhaps hinted at in Ferrils prefatory comments to a 1978 collection of poems by his close friend, Pulitzer Prize winner H. L. Davis. Under no circumstances, Ferril writes, would I undertake critical explication of any poem in this book. How he [Davis] railed against explication by intellectualoids, as he called them, merchandising each others reputations by stud-book ratings of poetsproclaiming why this or that poet was better or worse than some3 body else. The handful of serious articles, pamphlets, and dissertations about Ferril, as well as anthologies containing his poetry and prose, which have appeared over the past fifty years have been written or compiled primarily by westerners, presumably not Daviss intellectualoids. These western scholars have been generally uniform in their favorable judgment of Ferril.
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Yet their chorus has failed to focus national scholarly attention on Ferrils achievements. Neither has it gained Ferril inclusion in important national poetry collections: most of Ferrils work is out of print today or only available in expensive reprint editions. More distressing, these western scholars have even failed to incite much in the way of regional literary excitement over Ferril which might in turn attract national scrutinywith the possible exception of a tiny 1947 tumult when one critic insinuated that Ferril was of eastern stock, genteel, and only a part-time poet. Still irritated twentyseven years later by this scurrilous attack, the leading Ferril scholar was pointing out that Ferril is five generations removed from the East, of impoverished gentility, a full-time good poet, as well as a superb carpenter, plumber, and expert fisherman, always catching his limit even in streams 4 that others find fished out but that defense of Ferril was apparently to no avail. That Ferril is deserving of national recognition for more than his angling ability is clear. His contributions to our national literature are notable. His columns in Harpers and in the Denver weekly newspaper, The Rocky Mountain Herald, which Ferrils father purchased in 1912 and which Ferril and his wife, Helen, published from 1939 to 1972, have been widely praised and frequently reprinted. Ferrils seminal 1930 essay, Rocky Mountain Metaphysics, provides a crucial analysis of aesthetic problems posed by nature for the western artist and provides advice not always heeded. Ferrils insistence in this essay and other writings that art should focus on man transcends strictly regional concerns, as does his poetry. Additionally, his poetry bridges the so-called Two Cultures. Of modern American poets, only Ferril and A. R. Ammons felicitously transmute scientific to poetic fact. Westering, Ferrils most typical and most admired volume, stands out as a unique contribution to our nations literary heritage. The poems of Westering were not the overnight productions of a prodigy. Ferril, born in Denver, February 25, 1896, had begun writing verse as a youngster and published his first poem, characteristically titled A Mountain Thought, at the age of ten in (again characteristically) a newspaper, the Auburn, New York, Citizen. Most of Ferrils later poems were printed in 5 Denver newspapers before they were collected for book publication. Such was the case with Ferrils first volume, High Passage (1926), where thirtyfive of the forty poems in the collection had first appeared in The Rocky Mountain News. Some of the poems in High Passage are of limited success, as might be expected in a first collection. Later, Ferril himself likely recognized these as journeyworks. When choosing poems to be included in his New & Selected Poems (1952), he used only four works from his first volume. Yet, almost all
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the High Passage poems incorporate a new approach to western landscape, pioneering the use of western history, geology, and ecology: intellectualoids might contrast Ferrils High Passage with Colorado versifier Charles Edwin 6 Hewess Songs of the Rockies (1914) to illustrate these points. Both poets utilize the same landscape, developing similar imagery, color symbolism, and themes. But Hewes is conventional and jingoistic in his ideas and language. Even Ferrils weakest poems in High Passage are not these. In his best poemsOld Maps to Oregon, Jupiter at Beer Springs, The Empire Sofa, Science Came West, and the title poem of the volumeFerril treats the West in the evocative and original manner which so characterizes the poems of Westering. The ways in which Ferril treated the West in his second volume were carefully developed in an essay published four years after High Passage, four years before Westering. Rocky Mountain Metaphysics, Ferrils 1930 essay, is a major document in western American poetics, indicating how the western writer might respond to his environment and what his themes might 7 be. Ferril acknowledges the particular attractions which mountains, deserts, and canyons have had for the western artist; but he is quick to add, Landscape is simply a static stage; it requires the movements of people, clouds, storms, the coming and going of vegetation, and most of all, human experience applied to these movements, if it is to be interesting in literature (p. 305). The problem, as Ferril sees it, is how to respond to purple mountains majesty. Usually the mountains suggest, more often dictate, speculation of the supernatural. Theyre likely to make you think about some god, often God, often some sheer abstraction which we might call Causation (p. 306). It is not unexpected, then, to read Ferrils description of a mountain as a great wall behind which something is forever happening. It is mystical (p. 307). Ferrils mysticism is a latter-day transcendentalists. He states later in his essay that the old religions are not ours; we no longer fear Nature in the same way earlier men did (p. 307). In the course of Rocky Mountain Metaphysics, Ferril proposes that scientific reasoning is the New World faith which offers freedom from fear. Science provides, if not wisdom, at least knowledge about nature; and knowing nature is tantamount to knowing the mystical or supernatural. The task of the poet, therefore, is to accurately observe and portray the book of nature. In doing so, he will reveal the divinity within it. Poet-as-priest, again. This act of revelation, according to Ferril, must always be expressed naturally. Gods must not be abstract (p. 307). Why? Mountain gods, or any gods, are interesting if you dress them up and make them act like people, the way the Greeks and Navahos did (p. 309).
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The ideas in Rocky Mountain Metaphysics find poetic expression in Westering, whose title is evocative, bringing to mind the movement of American pioneers, the struggle to survive in an untamed region, and the journey which is all our lives, that inevitable passage to an inevitable sunset. One or more of these meanings may appear in the most memorable poems in the volume: Time of Mountains, Blue-Stemmed Grass, Fort 8 Laramie, Kenosha Pass, and Something Starting Over. Time of Mountains, one of the most ambitious and best-realized poems in Westering, tells of a persons following a canyon river, meditating on the physical processes of life, and having neo-Wordsworthian intimations of immortality. The speaker is walking on an old riverbed, looking at a literal river, and thinking about the metaphorical River of Time in which all things are swept up. As he walks he sees fish in the river and contemplates their evolutionary voyage and his own from some dim primordial time in that sea of life which all rivers flow to and from. Such thoughts illuminate the pageant of life, the order and design of flesh, and thereby reveal a vision of immortality: So long ago my father led me to The dark impounded orders of this canyon, I have confused these rocks and waters with My life, but not unclearly, for I know What will be here when I am here no more. He, not unclearly, has confused his being with his surroundings, for as Ferril sees it, the paradox of existence is that while the individual must die, the physical stuff of which he is made survives. The law of conservation of matter and energy applies. In this sense, all things in the natural world imply divinity, for they may once have been alive (even human) though they are now inert; or perhaps these lifeless lumps of matter are destined to be touched by the spark of life. The speaker asserts he recognizes these possibilities: Ive moved in the terrible cries of the prisoned water, / And prodigious stillness where the water folds / Its terrible muscles over and under each other. This understanding about the eternal, inevitable processes of existence brings some contentment: When youve walked a long time on the floor of a river, And up the steps and into the different rooms, You know where the hills are going, you can feel them, The far blue hills dissolving in luminous water, The solvent mountains going home to the oceans.
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But seeing the river-revealed geologic ages, seeing past life-forms in their respective rooms, is also disconcerting: I stop to rest but the order still keeps moving. The speaker begins to realize the implications of his surroundings, that there is some solace in an ordered universe but that he has little control over the process of time. From the inkling that the order is unstoppable, the persona suddenly becomes aware of his own certain death and his reintegration into the world of matter. I mark how long it takes an aspen leaf To float in sight, pass me, and go downstream; I watch a willow dipping and springing back Like something that must be a water-clock, Measuring mine against the end of mountains. A number of commentators have noted that some of the ideas in Rocky Mountain Metaphysics, Westering, and Time of Mountains in particular, may hark as far back as Lucretiuss De Rerum Natura, a work with 9 which Ferril was familiar. Meditating on the death of the individual, the Latin poet would have us consider for consolation the general, not the spe10 cific: Life lives on. / It is the lives, the lives, that die. In Song of Myself, Whitman, the archetypal transcendental poet, says much the same thing: And as to you life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, / (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.) And Whitman concludes in Section 50, Do you see O my brothers and sisters? / It is not chaos or deathit is form, union, planit is eternal lifeit is Happiness. Ferril, however, is not content merely to appreciate cosmic symmetry or to rest in the assurance that life will continue after his death. His consolations in the poem are three-fold. 1) He has the ability to view existence in the perspective of time and to comprehend the nature of things. 2) His imagination and reason may order that reality (simultaneously perceiving and shaping the great design). 3) He appreciates the ability to comprehend lifes meaning with reason and imagination, for they afford him a vision which allows him to transcend time. These three consolations form the triumphant conclusion to the poem: I, who have followed life up from the sea Into a black incision in the planet, Can bring an end to stone infinitives. I have held rivers to my eyes like lenses, And rearranged the mountains at my pleasure, As one might change the apples in a bowl, And I have walked a dim unearthly prairie From which these peaks have not yet blown away.
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In Westering, Ferrils color symbolism reinforces his philosophy. Purple, lavender, indigo, turquoise, and blue appear in more than two-thirds of the poems, usually as adjectives describing flowers, grasses, mountains, or skies, which, in turn, usually embody Ferrils metaphysical vision. Expressed simply, in blue Ferril sees the realm of the supernatural. This color indicates the orders and cycles of eternal life. Consider the blue delphinium in Fort Laramie, the gentians and turquoise hayfields of Kenosha Pass, the blue hills in Time of Mountains, or in Jim Bridger, the long blue tomb-song for his body, which we learn does not die but is regenerated mythically via history and art (as well as organically). Gold is the color and substance diametrical to blue. It is in no way spiritual, but rather symbolic of earth-bound lust and greed, categorically and futilely this-world. Gold may appear in a poem which lacks its opposite, as in All Years Are Odd as 1849, or it may be juxtaposed with blue, as in Ghost Town and, most dramatically, in Magenta. In at least one poem, Fall Plowing, Ferril uses the color yellow in speaking of autumn to signify death: Trees on the hill are yellow and red, / Dig the grave deeper, summer is dead. The act of digging, mine shaft or grave, is to be associated with the color yellow. Miners neglect their wives and families in their greed for traces of the color (Ghost Town and Magenta), or Americans forget the arts which offer a type of immortality analogous to that in blueand in their short-sighted materialism suffer: You are America, John Sutter, / Stand in your golden agony (All Years Are Odd as 1849). Westering poems are also characterized by their tendency to conclude with floral imagery, as in Fort Laramie, Old Men on the Blue, Kenosha Pass, House in Denver, and Waltz Against the Mountains. Whereas Poe thought the most poignant literary topic to be a beautiful woman expiring, Ferril seemingly delights in portraying a fragile blue bloom against the massive backdrop of a purple mountain, both passing away beneath an azure sky. These flowers may also be seen as the cultural blossoms of civilization caught in time (we recall Jefferss imagery in Shine, Perishing Republic). In Fort Laramie, what was once open range, buffalo, and Indians, and what then became a bustling frontier settlement, is now nothing but flocks of mating pigeons and blue delphiniums growing through rotten planks. Fort Laramie, Ferril writes, is Nature now, as are the western figures mentioned in the poems last stanza: Bill Sublette, Broken Hand, Bob Campbell, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson:
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Dreamers, fighters, cowards, lovers, Here is a plank a blossom covers, Here is Wyoming walking in With a blue flower and a pigeons wing. This motley of Dreamers, fighters, cowards, lovers, serves as the Wests divine pantheon, though dead only fifty to a hundred and twentyfive years: all are involved in Westering, that paradoxically immortalizing physical process. As such, these men and women are doomed to die but alsothrough historical myths, as living characters in the arts, and as biodegraded-yet-regenerated molecules which the speaker in Time of Mountains speaks ofto be reborn. After Westering, Ferril published a revised and retitled version of his 11 1930 essay in The Saturday Review of Literature . The most notable alteration in this revised versionand logical enough, given the poets interests and occupationsis the notion that the Wests pioneer poets were its journal-keeping explorers and scientists, diarists, and newspaper reporters. In Noted, the first poem of Trial by Time (1944), Ferrils third collection of poetry, the speaker aligns himself with these pioneer poets of western flora and fauna, proclaiming himself, in a fashion later adopted by Theodore Roethke, Secretary to the stalks, / Wild blue lettuce, kinghead, yucca, / Sagebrush where my red mare walks. In this poem, the title poem of Trial by Time, and in Solstice, The Prairie Melts, The Long Dimension, Stem of Wheat, and Tomorrow Is Too Plausible Ferril has created successful poems, poems similar in style, subject, and strategy to those of Westering. Yet other poems in the collection are disappointing, especially those which attempt to report on World War II as perceived from Denver. The deficiencies of Trial by Time likely attest to the crisis of faith Ferril underwent as he observed mankind and its acolytes, science and technology, attempt to eradicate themselves from the face of the earth through global warfare. In 1953 Ferrils New & Selected Poems won the Ridgeley Torrence Memorial Award. Published in 1952, this volume includes eleven new poems and is divided into three parts: The Long Dimension, What Keeps on Moving? and American Testament. Eight of the new poems appear in the second section, which is a major addition to the Ferril canon (and may illustrate what might be termed, perhaps unfairly, Ferrils attempt to write warmer or more humane poetry). R. F. Richards, in The Poetry of
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Thomas Hornsby Ferril, points out that the title for the second section was taken from Waltz Against the Mountain in Westering, with its recurring phrase, What keeps on moving if your body stops? Richards goes on to assert that the topic of this section is the smaller span of time, a century instead of an ice age, the short dimension, often merely a persons life. Therefore, it is often about people . . . but the subject can be short time 1 2 itself. As Richards has elsewhere claimed, time is Ferrils only consistent 13 theme. But, although these poems of the second section of New & Selected Poems are about time, more notable here is Ferrils attempt to portray living people, not mere molecular configurations or historical personages. In his earlier works, Ferril proclaimed man superior by virtue of mans ability to perceive and create a transcending vision of existence. In What Keeps on Moving ? he now proclaims the source for those divine abilities: the human heart. Love is the answer to the title question of the section. Love is Ferrils new topic, and he sees it as a constant through the war he had written of in his third volume, a raison dtre for men inextricably caught in the timeless journey of Westering. Color symbolism reinforces the theme of love in What Keeps on Moving? This time, however, shades of blues and golds are not the dominant hues; red, rose, or pink are, as in Out in the Stovepipe Mountains, Remembering a Red Brick Wall in Rensselaer, and Rime of the Passion of the Carpenter, all new poems. That Afternoon, another new Ferril poem, concludes the second section of the volume with a picture of some great modern prime-mover, a pilot, god-like above the earth, tossing a pond around a stone / To make concentric oceans circle in, / Undulating, 14 interlocking, closing / Upon a point of winter like waves or roses. Words for Denver (1966), published when Ferril was seventy, presents forty-four new poems in five sections. In its own way, this is Ferrils Aeneid but, although it deals with the individual and the humane to a greater degree than any of his previous volumes, the western epic is not successful. As a reviewer of Words for Denver in Western American Literature noted, only a slender sheaf of really splendid poems grew out of a genuine and 1 5 original vision. Many discussions of Thomas Hornsby Ferrils life and achievements end with a summary that includes the dedication which Robert Frost penned to Ferril in a copy of Frosts Collected Poems: A man is as tall as his height Plus the height of his home town. I know a Denverite Who, measured from sea to crown, Is one mile five-foot-ten, And he swings a commensurate pen. 894
As a glance at literary histories and anthologies shows, however, the efforts of past scholarsand poetshave been relatively ineffective in focusing deserved attention on Ferril. Because Ferrils contributions to American literature are noteworthy, deserving of national scrutiny and commendation, might not future scholars be urged to focus on a controversial aspect of Ferrils poetry and criticism, thus creating the type of controversy which has proved helpful in establishing other reputations? For example, another western poet, Robinson Jeffers, has not suffered the obscurity Ferril has. And at least one of the reasons for his national reputation has been the ongoing skirmishes between critics, battling over the Big Sur poets supposed inhumanism. Looking back at Ferrils Rocky Mountain Metaphysics, the poems of Westering, and selections from his other collections of poetry, might not high-minded literary provocateurs claim that, if the portrayal of men and women in Ferrils poetry is analyzed, then the limitations of his arti.e., his failure to realize the goals outlined in his essay and his inhumanismare revealed? After all, Ferril admits in his essay that the Westerner has forever been trying to correlate in his writing, not man with manthe great theme of literature but man with Nature (p. 313). Paradoxically, might it not be claimed that Ferril has failed to deal successfully with what he had declared to be literatures great theme: human relationships? Are not his human beings always historical characters or symbolic figures, larger than lifenot lifelike? In viewing all things as subject to the physical laws of the universe, does not Ferril reduce the stature of his humans to that of his mountains? Is not Ferrils poetry epic and scientific and cold?
TOM TRUSKY , Boise
State University
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Notes
1. Alan Swallow, Poetry of the West, South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964): 8283. 2. One Mile Five-Foot-Ten, television documentary on Thomas Hornsby Ferril, aired May 5, 1981 on PBS. 3. Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Preface to The Selected Poems of H. L. Davis (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1978), p. i. 4. Robert F. Richards, Thomas Hornsby Ferril: A Biographical Sketch, Western American Literature 9 (November 1974): 212. Richards is responding to Joseph E. Firebaugh, Pioneer in the Parlor Car: Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Prairie Schooner 21 (Spring 1947): 6985. 5. One might speculate whether Ferrils failure to follow the traditional paths up Parnassuspublication in Little Magazines and by Small Presseshas affected the height of his reputation. 6. Charles Edwin Hewes, Songs of the Rockies (Estes Park, Colorado: EdgertonPalmer Press, 1914). 7. Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Rocky Mountain Metaphysics, in Folk-Say, a Regional Miscellany, ed. B. A. Botkin (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930), pp. 30516. All further references to this work will be parenthetical. My reading of this essay, and of Westering, is that presented in my Thomas Hornsby Ferril, BSC Western Writers Series no. 6 (Boise: Boise State College, 1973). 8. For a cogent discussion of these typical Ferril poems in Westering, and in Trial by Time, see James R. Saucerman, A Critical Approach to Plains Poetry, Western American Literature 15 (Summer 1980): 93102. 9. Ferrils most recent collection, Words for Denver, based on Virgils Aeneid, includes epigrams from Lucretius. 10. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, W. H. Mallock translation. 11. Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Writing in the Rockies, Saturday Review of Literature, 20 March 1937, pp. 34, 1314. This revised essay is reprinted in Rocky Mountain Reader, ed. R. B. West, Jr. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), pp. 418424. 12. R. F. Richards, The Poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril, doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1961. 13. R. F. Richards, The Long Dimension of Ferrils Poetry, Colorado Quarterly 3 (Summer 1954): 2238. 14 This new theme, love, is the topic of many of the poems in Ferrils latest volume, Anvil of Roses, whose title, at least, is a continuation of the red rose symbolism found in his 1952 New & Selected Poems. 15. Nicholas Crome, review of Words for Denver in Western American Literature 2 (Fall 1967): 244.
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Primary Sources 1. Books Anvil of Roses. Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1983. High Passage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926. New York: AMS Press rpt.), 1971. I Hate Thursday. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946. New & Selected Poems. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press (rpt.), 1970. Rocky Mountain Herald Reader. New York: William Morrow, 1966. Trial by Time. Harper and Brothers, 1944. Westering. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934. Words for Denver and Other Poems. New York: William Morrow, 1966. 2. Articles and Essays Drama reviews, criticism, movie reviews. Rocky Mountain News (November 5, 1922December 27, 1925). Editorial, drama and book reviews. Denver Times (June 25, 1919August 6, 1921). Ideas and Comment column. Rocky Mountain Herald (March 18, 1939August 31, 1972). Preface to The Selected Poems of H. L. Davis (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1978). Rocky Mountain Metaphysics. In Folk-Say, A Regional Miscellany, ed. B. A. Botkin (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930), pp. 305316. Western Half-Acre column. Harpers Magazine (October and December 1945 August 1947). Writing in the Rockies. Saturday Review of Literature, 20 March 1937, pp. 34, 1314. Reprinted in Rocky Mountain Reader, ed. R. B. West, Jr. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), pp. 418424. This essay is a revised version of Rocky Mountain Metaphysics. 3. Other Works Ferril, Etc. Public Broadcasting System station KRMA, Denver, production performed by Denvers Third Eye Theater, 1974. One Mile Five-Foot-Ten. Public Broadcasting System television documentary on Thomas Hornsby Ferril, aired nationally May 5, 1981. Thomas Hornsby Ferril Reading His Own Poems. Library of Congress, Division of Music, Order No. LWO 1734 (recorded December 1, 1950). Thomas Hornsby Ferril Reading His Own Poems. Mr. Ferril recalls making this recording July 19, 1951 in Aspen, Colorado, for the Voice of America; the VOA does not. Words for Time. Read on television broadcast Wide Wide World, September 16, 1956.
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A Literary History of the American West Works by Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Manuscript collection, Western History Department, Denver Public Library. Secondary Sources Crome, Nicholas. Review of Words for Denver in Western American Literature 2 (Fall 1967): 242244. Effinger, Cecil. Music in the Poems of Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Colorado Quarterly 3 (Summer 1954): 5966. Firebaugh, Joseph J. Pioneer in the Parlor Car: Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Prairie Schooner 21 (Spring 1947): 6985. Hollister, Marian Eloise. A Critical Analysis of Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Masters thesis, Colorado College, 1950. LeGallienne, Richard. Outpouring of the Newspaper Muse. New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 3 September 1922, p. 6. Richards, Robert F. Literature and Politics. Colorado Quarterly 19 (Summer 1970): 97106. . Science, Ferril, and Poetry. Prairie Schooner 21 (Fall 1947): 312318. . The Long Dimension of Ferrils Poetry. Colorado Quarterly 3 (Summer 1954): 2238. . The Poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1961. . Thomas Hornsby Ferril: A Biographical Sketch. Western American Literature 9 (November 1974): 205214. . Thomas Hornsby Ferril and the Problems of the Poet in the West. Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring 1970): 110116. Roe, Margie McCreless. Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Poet and Critic of the Rocky Mountain Region. Masters thesis, Southern Methodist University, 1966. Saucerman, James R. A Critical Approach to Plains Poetry. Western American Literature 15 (Summer 1980): 93102. Scherting, Jack. An Approach to the Western Poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril. Western American Literature 7 (Fall 1972): 179190. Swallow, Alan. Poetry of the West. South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964): 7787. . Two Rocky Mountain Poets. In Rocky Mountain Reader, ed. R. B. West, Jr., pp. 418424. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946. Trusky, A. Thomas. Thomas Hornsby Ferril. BSC Western Writers Series no. 6. Boise: Boise State College, 1973.
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Bernard DeVoto
died on November 13, 1955, he was one of the most visible and most controversial literary figures in America, and had been for thirty years. Though he had begun as a novelist, it was in other roles that most of his public knew him: as historian, essayist, editor, hack writer, pamphleteer, custodian of the Bill of Rights and the public conscience and the public lands. A literary department store, he called himself, and he was vehement in every department. Readers responded to him with equal vehemence. Many respected and revered him and depended on him for their thinking and their courage in public issues. Some hated him with a passion. All had ample opportunity to know his opinions, for he was not only a frequent contributor to all sorts of magazines, but he was for a short time (November 1936 to March 1938) editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and for twenty years, from 1935 until his death, he wrote the Easy Chair in Harpers Magazine, the oldest and perhaps the most influential column in American journalism. The staff at Harpers loved him as a curmudgeon with a heart of mush; they said he collected underdogs the way a blue serge suit collects lint. John Fischer, the editor of Harpers during DeVotos last years, thought of him as a combat journalist, who charged headlong into any public controversy that got his dander up, and who enjoyed a fight more than any man I ever knew. Malcolm Cowley, who had felt the DeVoto lash early, did not meet the ogre until much later, and to his surprise found him personally a pleasant man. But when he got in front of a typewriter, Cowley said ruefully, how he did like to swing the shellalagh! From the time in the mid-twenties when he published his first essays in H. L. Menckens American Mercury, his career had been controversy. He had broken spears against the progressive schools and the football colleges, against Van Wyck Brooks and the young intellectuals, against the literary censors of Watch and Ward, against the Communists and Popular Fronters, against J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, against Senator McCarthy, the Reece Committee, and other official enemies of civil liberties, against academic historians and southern revisionists, against the beautiful thinking of the literary who hunted in pack, against western stockmen and their political backers. To some he seemed merely contrary: when the public weathervane veered left, he veered right; when it veered right, he veered left. In the 1930s the Daily Worker called him a fascist. By the 1950s, the Worker
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was quoting his Easy Chairs with approval, old antagonists such as F. O. Matthiessen and the editors of New Republic were his somewhat astonished allies, and Senator McCarthy was denouncing one Richard DeVoto as a communist. Early in 1937, pondering DeVotos aggressive editorship of the Saturday Review of Literature, Edmund Wilson found him difficult to label, and rather plaintively called on him to stand and declare himself in the ideological struggles of his time. Who was he? What did he believe in? What did he want? Why was he so angry? Some of the questions were rhetorical, some unanswerable. DeVoto could never have explained why he was so angry, any more than a fish could have explained why it breathed through gills. And Wilson had to know who DeVoto washe had been around for considerably more than a decade, in postures of constant challenge. But there was every reason why Wilson could not understand DeVoto. There were enough differences of background and belief to make them incomprehensible to one another, though Wilson was probably more comprehensible to DeVoto than DeVoto was to Wilson. For DeVoto was a westerner, something easterners have seldom understood, and a belligerent westerner at that. Moreover, he was a shirtsleeve democrat, almost a populista Declaration-of-Independence, Bill-of-Rights, Manifest-Destiny American democrat, inhabiting intellectual territory that the then-reigning arbiters of opinion thought uninhabitable. Born in Ogden, Utah, on January 11, 1897, son of a Mormon mother and a Catholic father, DeVoto had studied first with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart and later in the Ogden public schools, had attended the University of Utah for one year, had transferred to Harvard, had been uprooted from there before graduation by World War I, had gone to OTC and been commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry, had served as a musketry instructor at Camp Perry, Ohio, and after being demobilized had returned to Harvard to graduate, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with the class of 1920. After an interlude in Ogden made disastrous by a nervous breakdown, his mothers death, a collapsed love affair, and his hatred of his native town, he had escaped to a job as instructor of English at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, where he shortly married the prettiest girl in his freshman class, Helen Avis MacVicar, and set out to write his way to fame. By the time Edmund Wilson was asking his questions in New Republic, DeVoto had already left Northwestern for Harvard, and Harvard for New York, and had written four novels: The Crooked Mile (1924), an unfriendly portrait of a western town very like Ogden; Chariot of Fire (1926), about a frontier prophet not unlike the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith; The House of Sun-Goes-Down (1928), a sequel to The Crooked Mile; and We Accept with Pleasure (1934), set in Boston and Cambridge during the Sacco and Vanzetti 900
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trial. Before he was done, DeVoto would publish a fifth novel, Mountain Time (1947) under his own name, and under the pseudonym of John August four others: Troubled Star (1939), Rain Before Seven (1940), Advance Agent (1942), and The Woman in the Picture (1944). Before or after 1937, and under any name, his novels never brought him the recognition and reputation he hoped for, but the pseudonymous books, all serials written for Colliers, subsidized his more important writing. In the preface to The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), the first of his great trilogy of western histories, DeVoto ironically acknowledged the periodic assistance from Mr. John August that had made the book possible. The major accomplishments were still in the future when Wilson called on DeVoto to stand and deliver, but the accomplishments of the past were not to be overlooked. Besides teaching at Northwestern and at Harvardand his teaching had the same challenging provocativeness as his essaysDeVoto had had two years of experience in upsetting applecarts as editor of the previously stuffy Harvard Graduates Magazine (19301932). He had been general editor of a short-lived but admirable series of reprints of lost American classics, the Americana Deserta series. In 1936 he had collected in a book, Forays and Rebuttals, twenty-three of his essays which stood the test of time and a hard re-reading. (This was the first of four such collections; the others are Minority Report, 1940; The Hour, 1951 ; and The Easy Chair, 1955). And he had published in 1932 the book that made him an instant reputation not only as a fierce controversialist but as a student of American society, especially frontier society. Mark Twains America, which he captioned an essay in the correction of ideas, examined Van Wyck Brookss theory, expressed in The Ordeal of Mark Twain, that Mark Twain was stultified by a puritanical culture and a puritanical mother, and reduced by these malign influences from a potential artist to a mere humorist. It demolished Brookss theory with a thoroughness and violence that appalled and infuriated Brookss friends; but it also demonstrated Bernard DeVoto as a social historian of insight, range, and formidable learning, and forecast the historian of the West who was still to be developed in him. In his Foreword, DeVoto had rejected the temptation to explain Mark Twain simply or according to any formula, as he accused Brooks of doing. I do not believe in simplicities about art, artists, or the subjects of criticism, he wrote. I have no theory about Mark Twain. It is harder to conform ones book to ascertainable fact than to theorize, and harder to ascertain facts than to ignore them. In literature, beautiful simplicities usually result from the easier method, and, in literature, the armchair assertion that something must be true is the begetter of unity. There, if Wilson had looked, was the explanation of DeVoto. Throughout his career, while opponents accused him of flipping back and forth, he 901
held to the tests of fact and experience. Viewed in retrospect, his principles reveal themselves as completely consistent. He was a rock in the surf of changing minds, fickle fashions, liberal hesitations, doubts, recantations, and gods that failed. Though his interests moved steadily away from literature toward history and politics and conservation, he distrusted a priori thinking wherever he found it, and his nickname among his colleagues at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where he taught for a good many summers during the 1930s and 1940s, was Ad Hoc. Over a period of three decades, his writings say it in a hundred contexts. In a double editorial in the Saturday Review for February 13, 1937, he said it for Edmund Wilson, who had complained about his lack of articulated ideas. This, he said, is a demand for a gospel, and I have been acquainted with it since my earliest days. I was brought up in a religion which taught me that man was imperfect but might expect Gods mercybut I was surrounded by a revealed religion founded by a prophet of God, composed of people on their way to perfection, and possessed of an everlasting gospel. I early acquired a notion that all gospels were false and all my experience since then has confirmed it . . . I distrust absolutes. Rather, I long ago passed from distrust of them to opposition. And with them let me include prophecy, simplification, generalization, abstract logic, and especially the habit of mind which consults theory first and experience only afterward. In a time which spent much of its intellectual and emotional energy debating whether America would go communist or fascist, and when most of the literary leaned left, that pragmatic, skeptical, equilibristic stance was glaringly unorthodox. Distrusting New York as the nest where all the current orthodoxies were laid and hatched, DeVoto consistently earned New Yorks dislike and disapproval. He refused all the fashionable hooks, however attractively baited. In 1943 he said, Politically, I am a New Dealer on Election Day and a critic of the New Deal at other times. In 1950 he said, I am a half-Mugwump, 60 per cent New Dealer, 90 per cent Populist dirtroads historian. In 1944, in a last charge against accepted literary opinion, he put together some lectures delivered at the University of Indiana under the title The Literary Fallacy, in which he again defended American society from the commonplace assumption that it was a great gas-lighted Barbarity that destroyed its artists. He said instead that its artists had betrayed and misrepresented their society, and called down on his head the wrath of all the literary, especially Sinclair Lewis, whose attack in The Saturday Review of April 15, 1944 will probably persist in our literary history simply by virtue of its ad hominem virulence. Through the literary unrest of the twenties, the leftist temptations of the thirties, the crisis patriotism of the war years, and the demoralizing 902
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witch-hunts of the late forties and early fifties, DeVoto reiterated, in woodwinds, strings, and brass, the declaration of belief to which he had been forced by Wilson; and as the political air darkened, so did the DeVoto analysis. Ideas as systematic constructs, ideas unresponsive to the facts of a nations history and the habits and needs of people, were not merely intellectually offensive but politically dangerous, no matter whether well-meant or ill-meant. (DeVotos one-time intimate and surrogate father, Robert Frost, put it succinctly in a comment on Henry Wallace. Henry, he said, is bound to reform you whether you want to be reformed or not.) To a mind as truculently independent as DeVotos, all dogma, whether in religion, literature, history, teaching, or any other endeavor, suppressed thought. In politics, it was a constant threat to freedom. Passionate political dogmas led to machinegun government; and idealism, whether moral or metaphysical or literary, may be defined as a cross-lots path to the psychopathic ward, Berchtesgaden, and St. Bartholomews Eve. Absolutes mean absolutism. In the pre-war and war years when left-leaning intellectuals had more or less cornered American publications (with the marked exceptions of Harpers and The Saturday Review ), DeVoto was as completely anathema to the political intellectuals as he had earlier been to the literary. He got his revenge, and could not resist airing it, when the faithful began to recant and fall off the Moscow Express, as Malcolm Cowley put it, after the Moscow Trials and especially the Hitler-Stalin pact. In a 1951 Easy Chair entitled The Ex-Communists, DeVoto commented on these born-again democrats: The road to an understanding of democracy crosses the communist east forty. Before you can add a column of figures correctly you must first add them wrong. He who would use his mind must first lose it. Various excommunist intellectuals are offering themselves on just that basis as authorities about what has happened and guides to what must be done. Understand, I am right now because I was wrong then. Only the ex-communist can understand communism. Trust me to lead you aright now because I tried earlier to lead you astray. My intelligence has been vindicated in that it made an all-out commitment to error. In DeVotos view, the ex-communist had arrived, proud of his mistakes, at precisely the place where any non-communist American had stood all along. Where, for Gods sake, was he when they were distributing minds? One thing he could be sure ofhe himself had been more stoutly at the barricades than the twice-born ones. During the war he had repeatedly tried to free the hands of his friend Elmer Davis, then head of the Office of War Information, to disseminate information instead of soothing syrup and propaganda. The way to have an informed public opinion is to inform the public. And in the October 1949 Easy Chair he had capped his 903
long career in defense of civil liberties with Due Notice to the FBI, an essay that made him stronger and more lasting friends than all his controversies together had made him enemies. He would no longer, he said, discuss anyone in private with any FBI operative. If it was his duty to do so, he would discuss anyone, but only in court, and in the presence of his attorney, not for the dubious uses of a system of informers and secret police. I like a country where its nobodys damned business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with. I like a country where we do not have to stuff the chimney against listening ears and where what we say does not go into the FBI files along with a note from S-17 that I may have another wife in California. I like a country where no collegetrained flatfeet collect memoranda about us and ask judicial protection for them, a country where when someone makes statements about us to officials he can be held to account. We had that kind of country only a little while ago and Im for getting it back. That was who Bernard DeVoto was, and had been, and would continue to beas dedicated a cultural patriot as the country has had since Emerson, light years away from the literary and political coteries with their Anglophile, Francophile, or Russophile addictions, and 90 divergent from H. L. Mencken, under whose enthusiastic Booboisie-thumping tutelage he had begun. In spite of its frequent failure to live up to itself and its willingness to listen to siren voices, America was what he believed in. He believed in its political principles and its democratic strength, in its always-tumultuous present and its probably-distracted future, and he was stimulated and invigorated by its past. His enemies called him a Philistine. He did not mindhe even embraced the role. And before he was done he would make three major contributions to the American tradition. 1) His essays on civil liberties and public affairs (see especially those in The Easy Chair) stand re-reading better than the work of any commentator of his time except E. B. White, who for some years shared the pages of Harpers with him and helped make it the most influential magazine of the period. A few of these essays, such as Due Notice to the FBI and Guilt by Distinction, belong among the very best statements of the American gospels. 2) His essays on the West, especially those written during the late 1940s and early 1950s in an almostsinglehanded and spectacularly successful attempt to forestall a grab of public lands by western resource interests, explained the West and the public lands to the rest of the nation as no one else had succeeded in doing, and gave him unquestioned leadership in the modern conservation movement. And 3) his histories, among which one should probably classify Mark Twains America, finally won him the praise and recognition that his novels
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had failed to win him, including the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes and the National Book Award. Before he left a floundering Suturday Review in the spring of 1938 and returned to Cambridge, he had undertaken the curatorship of the Mark Twain papers. Out of an eight-year struggle with those and with the Mark Twain Estate would come a book of critical essays, Mark Twain at Work (1942), as well as two collections of previously unpublished Mark Twain writings: Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), and Letters from the Earth, the latter held up by the scruples of Mark Twains daughter and not published until after DeVotos death. He continued writing the Easy Chair, to which he always gave a high priority. To support himself he called several times on John August. But to satisfy his own deepest needs, to focus his mind, to bring together what he knew and what he believed about America and especially the West, he began work on the history of a critical year, the year 1846, in which, he felt, the continental surge of Manifest Destiny was consummated, and by the end of which the forces that would bring about the Civil War had all clicked into place like cartridges into the magazine of a rifle. Forced out of teaching and editing, he was ready to become a historian. Those who had read him on the subject of Ogden, Utah, might have been surprised. Those who had heard him scorn the literary might be astonished. For the historian in DeVoto, when he finally emerged, was a historian of the West, and he was both literary and romantic. The impulse that had driven him to write novels lingered in him like an embarrassing adolescent acne: he approached the history of the West as an enthusiast. Also, the training he had given himself in the handling of character, action, and scene asserted itself strongly when he began to deal with the historical characters and actions of the westward movement. He wrote history like a romantic novelist. His view of American history was as sweeping as Parkmans. He saw it as a vast panorama, the greatest story in the record of civilized man, shot with lurid colors, strenuous adventures, appalling risks, spectacular follies, broken dreams, outrageous crimes, the loftiest heroisms and the profoundest tragediesa panorama rolled forward by mysterious and irresistible forces, social and political, of which the most potent came to be called Manifest Destiny. And if readers asked how someone who thought of the West as a place first plundered by eastern capital and then vulgarized by its own efforts could be so exhilarated by the story of how it was explored and opened, DeVoto could have answered that in this, at least, he was orthodox. Nearly every western writer of quality since Ed Howe wrote The Story of a Country Town in 1883 has demonstrated the same ambivalence. Willa Cather did, Mari Sandoz did. Bernard DeVoto did it at the top of his voice. The western
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present, this feeling goes, is vulgarized and spoiled. The western past was adventure, high purpose, grand country, unspoiled magnificence, an unparalleled spectacle of civilization at its most daring making contact with the virgin continent at its most splendid. Sure youre romantic about American history, DeVoto wrote Catherine Drinker Bowen. . . . [I]t is the most romantic of all histories . . . If the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or La Salle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when the Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger or the other side of the moon any lights or colors or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln or the morning coat of Jackson, well, I dont know what romance is. Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by chaos out of dream . . . and of our dreams there are two things above all others to be said, that only madmen could have dreamed them or would have dared toand that we have shown a considerable faculty for making them come true. The Civil War, DeVoto often said, was the single greatest subject available to an American historian. For one reason or anotherprobably that he himself derived from neither the North nor the Southhe felt unqualified to write about the great testing of the Republic. But the second greatest subject, the westward movement, he did feel qualified for, by birth, experience, training, and understanding. He saw the West whole, and he saw it, moreover, in context, as part of the nations development. A boyhood in the canyons of the Wasatch, coupled with a long exile in the East, had sharpened his senses to the western landscape and western air and light. Some significant part of his beginning as historian may be traced to nostalgia. That should not minimize the knowledge, the masterful overview, that gave his histories scope. It only allowed him to do what he said The Year of Decision: 1846 aimed to doto realize the pre-Civil War, Far Western frontier as personal experience. In both vision and evocativeness he more closely resembles Parkman than any other historian, though in style they are very different. Like Parkman, DeVoto found a great theme and developed it through several volumes, though he characteristically found his embracing theme inductively, by the kind of accident that after the fact looks inevitable. His trilogy was begun without a plan wider than the first volume, and was written backwards. The Year of Decision: 1846, written first and published in 1943, deals with the year in which westward expansion reached its climax with the seizing of the Southwest and California and the settlement of the Oregon questionwith the completion of the continental nation. Across the Wide Missouri, written second and published in 1947, developed out of 906
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a minor journalistic joba contract to write captions for some newly discovered watercolors of the fur-trade West by Alfred Jacob Miller. It covers the peak fur-trade years 18321838. And the final volume, The Course of Empire, published in 1952, reaches back to the beginnings and beyond the beginnings into the rumor and speculation and fable that preceded and accompanied the first continental explorations; and it ends with the greatest of American explorations, the Lewis and Clark expedition of 18041806, which first brought America to the Pacific. The trilogy, DeVoto said in his preface to The Course of Empire, is to be read as a gloss on a passage in Lincolns Second Annual Message: that the territory of the United States is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more. Read chronologically, with Lincolns remark in mind, the three volumes do have a strong unifying theme. They trace the development of the continental mind and the sense of union that made the outcome of the Civil War inevitable. Tracing that development, DeVoto deals not only with North American geography, but with all the misconceptions out of which it gradually emerged as reality; with the imperial conflicts among Spain, France, England, and Russia; with the effects of European intrusions upon the Indian tribes and cultures; with the growth of the raw American republic which inherited what the empires fought for; with, in short, no less than the discovery and exploration and conquest of the North American continent and the formation of the American nation and the American people. Not a small task for one who described himself as a journalist, a man trained not as a historian but as a novelist, and a man who, without an academic job to support him and without a single foundation grant in his entire life, had to support his family and numerous dependents by his unceasing industry as a pamphleteer and hack. He stole the time for it as he could, between Easy Chairs, magazine articles, serials, public controversies, book reviews, and all the demands of a furious twelve-to-fifteen-hour day, and in the end these were the books that represented and justified him. But no one could call Bernard DeVoto an orthodox historian. For one thing, the romantic novelist in him takes advantage of every opportunity for drama and color. As he told his friend Garrett Mattingly, most historians stop on second because there is some theory in the profession that historians do not hit home runs. DeVoto himself never stopped on second if there was a chance of going to third. Though he would not invent dramatic scenes, he would take advantage of everything his sources offered himas, for instance, he took advantage of the spectacle of the fur rendezvous on the upper Green River in Across the Wide Missouri, and the pitiful flight of the Mormons from Nauvoo, the march of the Mormon Battalion, the ghastly
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camp of the Donner party, and much else, in The Year of Decision. He was able to recreate these scenes with extraordinary vividness, partly because he relied by preference on first-hand accounts, partly because he himself knew the West, partly because he thought like a novelist and his subject was people in action. But also, by trial and error during the writing of The Year of Decision, he had devised a narrative method that he called simultaneity. Faced with the problem of carrying forward all the complex actions of his climactic year, he learned to drive them like a twenty-mule team, with his hands full of lines. The Mormon exodus from Nauvoo; the adventures of young Francis Parkman in and around Fort Laramie; the glory-hunting of John Charles Frmont and Commodore Stockton, and the quiet diplomacy of Consul Larkin, in California; the progress of the Mexican War from bluster to declaration to comic opera to deadly combat that trained most of the officers of the greater war that would follow in fifteen years; General Kearneys march to Santa Fe and on to the Pacific, with its subplot of the Mormon Battalion; the slow doom of the Donner-Reed party rocking toward its climax in the Sierrathese and other strands move, pause, start again, meet, interweave, illuminate one another. It is a virtuoso performance both in the dexterity of its handling and the vividness with which these actions, the men who made them, and the country they were made in are realized. The method devised for The Year of Decision worked even better for Across the Wide Missouri, which, starting as a set of captions and the story of the western excursions of the Scottish sportsman William Drummond Stewart, evolved into a brilliant history of the mountain fur trade during its peak years. The great men of the fur tradeBridger, Fitzpatrick, Joe Meek, Black Harris, the enigmatic Captain Bonnevilleare all there. So are the missionaries who passed through them on their way to Oregon, Marcus Whitman and his opulent wife Narcissa, Henry Spalding who had wooed Narcissa and lost, and had married frail and faded Eliza on the bounce. The two couples shared a tent, not always amicably, all the way across the plains and mountains. And the Indians are thereSioux, Shoshones, Nez Percs, Blackfeet, in their turmoil of incessant war. Tying all this together and giving it depth and color are the Scottish laird and his party, including the painter Alfred Jacob Miller, sketching and making watercolors of all they saw. If Across the Wide Missouri seems now a greater achievement, a more brilliant evocation, than The Year of Decision, put it down to the greater simplicity of the action, the smaller cast of characters, the more manageable scope; but also to the fact that it was the fur trade, above all other aspects of western history, that had fascinated DeVoto ever since boyhood, and to the further fact that the fur trade had mainly taken place, as it were, in his boyhood backyard. His very first essay in history, back in 1926, had 908
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been called The Mountain Men, and it was purely celebratory. His second, the next year, had been a piece on the Platte Valley route of migration called The Great Medicine Road. In more ways than one, Across the Wide Missouri was a culmination, the one book that Bernard DeVoto had been born to write. But it did not quite complete him. His two histories, between them, covered only the years from 1832 to 1846, and though he had looked ahead from 1846 to the consequences of that years fateful decisions, and so did not have to deal with them, he had done little back-looking to the actions that had brought Europeans to North America and finally across the wide Missouri. That story he told in The Course of Empire. It began with the feeling that Lewis and Clark were somehow central to all western history, but as he wrote Garrett Mattingly in December 1948, Theres no reason to write a book about how a well-conducted party got to the mouth of the Columbia and back . . . The only thing worth my writing or anyones writing is a book that says, hey, this seems to have been left out of the picture. What seemed to have been left out of the picture occupied his mind and disturbed his sleep for several years, and the deeper he got into it the more it maddened him. He could not dramatize it as he had dramatized the plains crossing of Narcissa Whitman or the march of the Mormon battalion. There were few distinctive portraits in it, and no room for the blunt judgments of character that had offended some orthodox historians in the earlier books. His whole method had to be adjusted or abandoned. In October 1950, he again wrote to Mattingly: I have, in nomine Patris et Filii, this day got the French out of North America. One year to the day, and three million words, after I began a book that had no intention of getting the French into North America . . . So where are we? With thirteen million words written, or by our Lady some two score million, we have now accounted for 229 years that do not enter at all into my book, and have only forty more years to go, or say an even million words . . . before we reach the beginning of my book and, with a sigh of infinite satisfaction and a suffusing glow of happy realization that only ten million words lie ahead, take up a blank, virgin sheet of paper and write at the top of it Page One. He had, Mattingly advised, a mild case of regressus historicus. And he was writing another kind of history from what he had essayed before. He couldnt expect to skip across the centuries at the same pace, and with the same attention to the roadside, as when he had been walking wide-eyed through a single year. But there was another reason why DeVoto had difficulty with this third volume. He found no way to treat it in terms of characteristic figures and characteristic actions, no way to select from it parts that would stand for the whole. As a historian, he was incurably what he and 999
Robert Frost called a synecdochist. He operated by sampling, and gave his samples vividness. In The Course of Empire he had to deal much less particularly with the whole thing. Or almost did. He was saved by the Lewis and Clark expedition, to which he gave the final 120 pages of a book that had begun with a letter from Columbus to Isabella of Spain. That culminating adventure completed a circuit, found a sort of Northwest Passage, and confirmed in the Americans the growing perception that they were fated to spread their country from sea to sea. Different though it is, The Course of Empire is essential to the continental theme, and the adventure which concludes it is put into the context of centuries. When he had put a final footnote to the task by editing the Lewis and Clark Journals, DeVoto had finished his job as historian and though he had to go on writing the journalism that supported him and his familyas writer. He died of a heart attack in New York City, where he would not have wanted to be found dead, on November 13, 1955.
W ALLACE S TEGNER , Los
Altos Hills, California
The novels which DeVoto wrote under his own name are The Crooked Mile (N.Y.: Balch, 1924), a scathing portrait of commercialism and vulgarity in a western town; The Chariot of Fire (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1926), which records the career of a midwestern religious zealot with echoes of Peter Cartwright, Joseph Dylkes, and Joseph Smith; The House of Sun-Goes-Down (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1928), a novel of post-Civil War migration into the West; We Accept With Pleasure (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), set in the Boston of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial; and Mountain Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), whose background is the medical profession and whose action takes a brilliant young doctor from New York back to the West of his childhood. The four novels written under the name John August are frankly entertainments.
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A much more important contribution are the essays and articles DeVoto published in Harpers (especially in The Easy Chair), Atlantic, The Saturday Review of Literature, and many other periodicals. The best of these he collected in a series of volumes, beginning with Forays and Rebuttals (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), and continuing through Minority Report (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), and The Easy Chair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955). The topics covered in these essays are of the greatest variety, but the successive volumes show DeVotos principal interests moving from education, censorship, and a Menckenesque ridicule of American social habits to literary criticism, often with a psychoanalytical stance, civil rights, politics, and the problems of the public lands. The West, both as history and as present reality, is a consistent preoccupation, and the essays resisting raids on the public lands made DeVoto during the last decade of his life the real leader of the conservation movement in the United States. Collections of essays on restricted subjects are The World of Fiction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), a treatise on the art of fiction; The Literary Fallacy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944), attacking the theory that America is a cultural wasteland that destroys its writers and artists; and The Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), a humorous hymn to alcohol compiled out of several Easy Chairs and other essays. Mark Twains America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932), in which DeVoto thunderously disputed Van Wyck Brookss theory, expressed in The Ordeal of Mark Twain, that Mark Twain was harmed as an artist by the puritanism and commercialism of his society, properly belongs with DeVotos works of western history. But a second Mark Twain book, Mark Twain at Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), contains three penetrating critical essays on DeVotos favorite writer; and he also edited out of the Mark Twain papers, of which he was curator from 1938 to 1946, two volumes of previously unpublished Mark Twain writings: Mark Twain in Eruption (N.Y.: Harper and Brothers, 1940) and Letters from the Earth (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1962). DeVotos crowning achievement was his trilogy of western histories: The Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), a brilliant recreation of a critical year in the West and in the nation; Across the Wide Missouri (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), a colorful account of the peak years of the mountain fur trade; and The Course of Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), chronicling the history of exploration on the North American continent from Columbus to Lewis and Clark. This trilogy, which should be read in reverse order, was capped by DeVotos shortened edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953). The best bibliography is that by Julius P. Barclay in Bowen, Mirrielees, Schlesinger, and Stegner, Four Portraits and One Subject: Bernard DeVoto (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963). The DeVoto papers are at Stanford University.
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A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
that he is, A. B. (Bud) Guthrie, Jr., has a gift for making the rewards of hard work seem like mere good luck. Students of western fiction have suggested that while Guthrie was writing his first important novel, The Big Sky, he worked under a divine afflatus. He accepts the charge. As his landlady Mary Lizzie told him when he was living in her home in Kentucky, he is the blue hens chick. She was invoking a belief in that part of the country that no gamecock can be invincible in combat unless he is the offspring of a blue hen. But that is the literal interpretation. Through long use the figure has acquired broader significance. The blue hens chick is a person favored by the gods. The idea that in a cosmic lottery he has won the favor of circumstance appeals as much to Guthries perception of irony as to his ready and robust sense of humor. The notion appeals also to his modesty as a craftsman. For these reasons he titled his autobiography The Blue Hens Chick (1965). In this extraordinary account he tellssometimes perplexedlyof times when a power beyond his knowing has presided over crucial events. Call it serendipity if we must, or still better managed luck, a phrase that he coined to account for the success of a character in his novel Arfive (p. 305). Whatever its name, one instance of its working is a classic anecdote in western fiction. Guthrie remembers that while working hard to write The Big Sky, he became so involved that some characters selected their own names. Even when his writing ran ahead of his research, the narrative proved historically sound. Though to his knowledge he had never seen or heard the name Deakins, for instance, he gave that name to a main character in The Big Sky. Two years later, exploring Independence Rock in Wyoming, Guthrie found in the register of names inscribed therecarved years beforethe single surname Deakins. The recurrence of these events made him feel at last almost superstitious (p. 186). But Guthrie knows that the offspring of the blue hen survives by fending for itself, and in what he calls the desperate business of freelance fiction writing, he is a survivor of the first magnitude. Supported by a conviction that the only real sin is to have talent without using it, and with a capacity for self-criticism beyond that of most other professional writers, he challenges every word and phrase he creates, until he is altogether satisfied that he has done his best. If not, he rejects the unsatisfactory material and
ONEST SERENDIP
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begins again. His entry in a biographical index of twentieth-century authors ends in good-natured hyperbole that is nearer truth than most of his readers might suspect. While he composes, he says, I bleed. He is satisfied to know that among all the serious writers of western fiction today he is one of the few who live entirely by their writing. For nearly forty years Guthrie has labored to write honestly and with simplicity about the opening, the exploring, the settling, the developing, and from beginning to end the exploiting of the American West. In six chronological novels he has produced a series of panels upon the civilizing of that unboundaried regionof that white space upon the early maps of the trans-Mississippi Westfrom about 1830 to the 1960s. From the beginning he has tried to show that, by the process of winning the West, the frontiersmen and the settlers have been losing it forever. This double-edged process begins in The Big Sky and continues through the series, implicitly to the present day. In The Last Valley, Guthrie sums up in the advice of the far- and clear-seeing rancher Mort Ewing one of the most constant of the dangers: Watch out for progress because you cant backtrack (p. 31). Guthries devotees may think it strange that he was not born a Montanan, but it is fitting that his well-educated parents were seized by an impulse for westering. As a consequence, they brought him to a section of Montana that was almost as deep in the interior West as civilization had yet penetrated. At that time the junior Guthrie had survived for about six months from his birth on January 13, 1901. His survival was remarkable among nine children in a family that lost six of them in various stages of infancy. At least one remained in a small grave in Indiana. But two boys and a girl grew up in the frontier Montana town of Choteau, the diminutive hub of a far-flung ranching community. In The Blue Hens Chick Guthrie writes of the great crystal reaches and the stone-blue heights (p. 3) of that high plains country. The plain descends eastward to form a valley, and the jagged mass of the northern Teton mountains rises precipitously twenty miles to the west. These are not the Grand Tetons of Wyoming but a massive section of the main range of the Rockiesthe Montana Tetons. Other western writers and scholars have noticed the significance of this imposing landscape in Guthries preparation as a writer of extraordinary novels. Wallace Stegner makes the point in his foreword to the Houghton Mifflin Sentry edition of The Big Sky. Here Stegner marks Guthries penchant for bringing his characters into this selfsame landscape, into the novelists back yard. The importance of this special place in the whole range of Guthries fiction is one of the noteworthy characteristics of his work.
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A Literary History of the American West In the last few paragraphs of The Big Sky, Boone Caudill (rightly pronounced KAWdl) s h ares memories in Missouri with the old mountain man, Dick Summers. Far from the West, his only homeland, he speaks of the Montana Tetons and of a mountain with a peak like an ear on its side. This peak is Ear Mountain, known among early settlers as Elephant Ear Butte. For the residents of Choteau this formation is the most prominent feature of the countryside. Save when hidden by cloud or storm, Ear Mountain attracts the eye from almost any point in the countryside. To strangers wanting to find their way along rural roads going West from Choteau, old timers say, Just keep going toward Ear Mountain. As a boy growing up in Choteau, Guthrie lived in almost constant awareness of its presence. Over the years it has dominated the westward view from the Guthries cabin at Twin Lakes, and in their new house among the jack pines, picture windows frame it. Besides the mountains, and just as important to the mountain men, were rivers. In the Rocky Mountain rivers and their tributaries the trappers found their reason for being in the uncharted wilderness. They sought the beaver, whose pelts in season brought good money to cover top hats for aristocratic heads in London. Besides, the rivers and streams meant water for drinking and cooking. Indians located villages there. So the mountain men tended to recall the sequence of their wanderings in terms of rivers they trapped and camps they made and Indians they fought. The reminiscences of mountain men find a chronology in introductory phrases like when I was trapping the Roche Jaune or at our camp on the Marias, or on our way up the Teton, or after we reached the Three Forks. Later, wagon trains and cattle-trailing cowboys marked their progress by crossings they had made. On the eastern slopes of the northern Continental Divide all streams flow into the upper reaches of the Missouri, and mountain men used the Missouri as the main highway from St. Louis into the trappers paradise of the northern Rockies. Lewis and Clark had travelled and mapped this highway by 1806. But before the expedition had come back down, trappers were already paddling upstream. A party of them hailed the men from a canoe and invited Expeditioners to go back to the wilderness. John Colter did. He was the first white man to see the earthly hell of Yellowstone. So heavy was river traffic within the next few years that Colter started twice again down the Missouri to civilization, only to meet other trappers and to go backall the way to the head of the great highway. A bit more than a century later, these events were to be of enormous significance to young Bud Guthrie as he grew up in Choteau, absorbing the history of the region that soon seemed to him the center of my universe. One of the things he learned was that by 1840when Boone Caudill and 914
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his mountain men confreres were supposed to be ranging there for profitable beaver watersthe prosperous years of beaver trapping had been gone for the better part of a decade. So in the northern Rockies the only possibilities for profitable trapping lay in the upper reaches of the Missouri. In big streams that flowed into the Missouri just below the Great Falls, beavers still built their dams. But many had survived earlier traplines, and these canny beasts were up to trap. They would not be caught. The little town of Choteau arose in the heart of this region of rivers, a region otherwise semiarid. At least two, the Sun and the Teton, are local hunting and fishing streams as well as attractive scenic areas. About sixty miles northwest of Choteau, near Big Horn Mountain, the Sun River begins its hunt through mountain canyons and high plains to the Missouri. Close by Ear Mountain the Teton slips through the northern (Montana) Teton Range. Then it flows across Bud Guthries privately owned eight hundred acres of high plains jack pine and through the spacious back yard of his new year-round cabin, The Barn. Within 130 miles of Choteau are cutbanks and canyons of at least half a dozen others, the Two Medicine, the Marias, the northern Blackfoot, the Dearborn, the Jefferson, the Madison, the Gallatin. All appear again and again in early diaries, journals, memoirs, histories, anecdotes, tall tales of mountain men, travellers, miners, cowpokes, and ranchers. The Missouri was an umbilical that connected settlements east of the Mississippi with the untamed West of the explorers, trappers, and fur traders who opened the way for all who followed; and in some intimate way, the life and career of A. B. Guthrie, Jr., swings between the two great but by nature different frontiers that lay at distant places and historically disparate times along the same waterway. One is the Kentucky frontier of the legendary Daniel Boone. A short way downstream from the mouth of the Missouri, the Mississippi laps at Kentuckys western edge. The other frontier is that of the mountain men. It lies at the farthest reach of the Missouri in northwest Montana. Kentucky contributed to the early exploration of the far West more colorful and woods-wise hunters and trappers than did any other region east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio. In Kentucky Captain Clark had recruited the nine young men, most of them Kentucky hunters born of Kentucky hunters, who contributed much to the success of the Expedition of 18041806. Later, among the hunters and trappers who were the vanguard of the mountain men, Kentuckians young and old were widely known. Three of theseEdward Robinson, John Hoback, and Jacob Rezner formed a tight Kentucky brotherhood that served with Andrew Henrys expedition up the Missouri to the Madison and over the Divide into the northern headwaters of the Snake River. Then they guided Wilson Price 915
Hunts expedition down the Snake to the Columbia and beyond to the Pacific Ocean at Astoria. For such frontiersmen, as for any Kentuckians inspired by the local tradition of Daniel Boone, the movement into the western wilderness was a strong temptation. To them the trans-Mississippi West was an extension of the virgin Kentucky backwoods in the time before Boone and his followers had tamed it. The almost untouched wilderness of the Rocky Mountains was the new frontierthe next and last challenge to frontiersmen in America. To the present day, one can hardly travel through a small part of Kentucky without an awareness of the strong westering tradition of that extraordinary land. After two decades in the Kentucky bluegrass, almost any devoted Montanan might feel that, despite the different landscape and climate and a mellow southern culture, his ties with the West had never been broken. If, like Guthrie, such a man brought with him an abiding consciousness of American westering, some part of him would know that Ear Mountain was not nearly so distant from Kentucky as Kentucky had always seemed from Ear Mountain. By the workings of random circumstance, Guthrie came to a region whose pioneer heritage and physical remoteness from the heartland of the mountain West were to instill in him a yearning to know how the early Kentucky frontier became at length the frontier of the mountain men who had prowled the high plains of central Montana. To find the answers he plundered the bookstores of everything he could find about the history of the trans-Mississippi West. By what remote but lucky chance did young Bud Guthrie find himself writing for a newspaper in Kentucky? Why, too, was he content to stay for twenty years in the land of Daniel Boone? However unlikely Kentucky might seem in the context of Guthries early years, in the perspective of an already long life Guthries double decade as a resident of Kentucky appears to have been essential to his development. The original context of his life, however, was the frontier of turn-ofthe-century Montana. Growing up in Choteau as the son of well-educated parents who had transported themselves into a small Montana ranch town that was barely out of its Wild West phase, he lived in an atmosphere of imported culture at home but, outside, among town and ranch children whose values were grounded mostly in hard work and the acquisition of hard goods. But he had little difficulty in reconciling the two sets of values. If more sensitive and more widely read and more appreciative of literature, history, and the arts, young Guthrie was unaware of any social or cultural barriers between him and his friends and classmates, one of whom became his lifelong friend. But Guthries father, a graduate of Indiana University
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and first principal of the county high school in Choteau, appears to have been torn between his deep and instantaneous love for the country and his frustrations with the rawness of the society, along with his inability to effect single-handedly much change in the basic values of his charges. His sons view of mans partnership with all things of the earth began developing even earlier, perhaps, than had the precepts of Methodist fundamentalism heard in childhood. Guthrie can hardly remember a time when he did not wonder about nature. But moral conduct along with primitive religious precepts were imposed upon his mind and enforced through his conscience. They found at best a fragile lodging in his heart, while everything natural became to him a personal discovery. His boyhood finding of Indian and early Spanish artifacts gave him a view of local history as a pageant of eras when human societies had left their mark upon the land without altering its wild, free, and natural beauty. Today he abhors every manifestation of progress that is an affront to the landscape, a pollutant of air and water, or a violation of natural horizons. He lives all the seasons on his rugged acreage of sage and jack pine on the slopes of the northern Tetons. In his little comer on tranquility, he is happy with his wife and step-children. He writes and keeps undisturbed the undisturbed land. On his way to authorship, he was a long time finding himself. But many signs pointed him along the road. From early boyhood he read, and if his reading was not always disciplined, he was perceptive and his range wide. He roamed among the great books of whatever kind and time. But for pleasure he liked gun-and-gallop novels and popular whodunits. In public school and in universities he earned excellent grades, these despite an unhappy freshman year at the University of Washington and a traumatic fear of speaking in public that had descended upon him during a fraternity initiation at the University of Montana. Otherwise he spent a happy and productive three years in this high-country university in his home state, and he graduated with a degree in journalism that he had wanted ever since he was a novice newspaperman and factotum on the Choteau Acantha. Past these classic beginnings for American novelists he spent a quarter of a century as newsman, feature writer, and editor before writing fiction to avoid riding a payroll. Newsmen hold that they are favored to write a mythical Great American Novel, and with The Big Sky and The Way West Guthrie authenticates also a deputy myth. As printers devil on the Choteau Acantha the thornhe learned the inside operations and the problems of owning and running a small country newspaper. In this he was like Mark Twain and other printers devils who eventually made their way into literature.
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Out in the world as a university graduate in journalism, he fronted the hard knowledges that have helped young novelists rise to the best of their order. In Mexico he harvested wheat and rice among peons. To hidden western ranches he went behorsed as a Forest Service census-taker. In a small feed mill in New York State he ground grain and hefted sacks. Then on the Lexington, Kentucky, Leader he found himself by far chance climbing grades from cub reporter to executive editor. Aside from the obvious reasons, the staff remembers him as the editor who kept after young reporters to write short sentences (authors interview with Henry Armsby, Exec. Ed., Leader, 1973). Mortal cancer found his mother, and through timeless shock he tended her at the Mayo Clinic. Under these pressures he began his first novel. Its father was the popular Western; its mother, the formula murder mystery. Together they had carried him through the nights of this awful time. Soothing the hurt he felt but could not show, these pulp-paper tales offered him escape through action and suspense. Both served him well. Why not, he thought, fuse the elements of the cowboy Western and the murder mystery? At that time his idea was original, but for what lay deep in him to write, his models were wrong. Sensing that the book was a mistake, he wrote it nonetheless, and he has fretted about it ever since. In Lexington, he bought and destroyed every copy he found. Today, he is reluctant to think or talk of his first novel, but privately he keeps two copies. As a literary curiosity a single copy is now worth over a hundred and sixty dollars. For the original manuscript Guthrie got a flat fee of four hundred dollars. The straight, clean prose of Guthries later fiction helps explain his shrinking now from the indelible record of his first try. But if some things in that book were bad, others were tokens of his strengths. Only a storyteller could have written that first novel. Only a writer with an ear for dialect and dialogue, one who never spent long with description, one who already knew to build character through talk and action, could have given the book promise beyond its unrefined metal. Most reviewers, those who noticed it at all, blew it away lightly. Guthrie now says of it, A writer has to start somewhere. If his models had betrayed his first experiment, the sound historical sources for a mountain man novel would not. In spite of early embarrassment that could have discouraged others, Guthrie in his embarrassment found the right way. From his path as a searching novelist he had cleared his first deadfall, and in its place was a hard, objective capacity for self-criticism. Whatever his regrets, the writing of his first novel taught him to think as a novelist has to think. Within a year he began to write the novel which
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out of deep interest and long knowledge belonged to him as to no other novelist of that time. More than other children of the high Rockies, he knew Kentucky and its people. As a veteran Kentucky newspaperman he had to know its sections and its cross-sections. He knew those of soft voice and old courtesy whom he found it impossible not to like, but he knew also those who came hunters through the Gap, those who had always lived so, acknowledging no law and owned by no man. With them to that day, nobody owned a man who owned a gun. Ready here to Guthries imagination was a hero-figure for a heroic time. The mountain man hero had already appeared in Ruxtons mountaineer chronicles and in Stewart Edward Whites four-novel series, The Saga of Andy Burnett (19321942). In this series Daniel Boones long rifle was a cohering symbol of four phases of westering that ended in the Spanish America of southern California. But to Guthrie, Whites trappers were nice-ified beyond truth and beyond bearing. Guthrie wanted to paint as true a picture of this near-animal race as lay within the province of fiction, and in this his plan was original. From Kentucky his neophyte mountain man would take his native independence and his dark strain into the last unknown wilderness of the northwest Rockies. He would haul the keelboat up the Missouri, seek beaver, hunt buffalo, try skill and courage against the great white grizzly, slaughter Indians yet marry and live among them until he and his kind had taken it all, until none of it was left. At the age of forty-four, harried by uncertainties, Guthrie started work on The Big Sky. He wrote carefully and better than ever before, but after two or three chapters he knew that he could not let others see the pages. Beyond all, he wanted to put behind himself the blunders of Murders at Moon Dance. But with those horrors hunting him along every trail, he knew it foolish to follow advice he had heard too often from older writers. To sit in a chair and write for ten years would surely settle in him forever the wrongs he had to escape. That the blue hen spread her wing over her chick once again is too easy an explanation, as it has ever been for Guthries life and career. He always gave to circumstance advantages of his own making. At this crucial time, for instance, he had the courage to try himself successfully against a previous rejection. As a result he was awarded a year of free study at Harvard under a Nieman fellowship. There, Professor Theodore Morrison answered his call for a writing tutor and gave him a study carrel in the vast Western American section of the Widener Library. There Guthrie lost himself in the fur trade and made another start on his novel. But this time he had the willing help of Morrison. Ted was such a mild man, says Guthrie now. He never said anything was wrong. He kept saying this part is good
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and that part is good, and after a while I asked myself, Well, if these parts are good, what is wrong with the rest of it? After a while I found out. To Morrison he credits his success. Remembering a line written somewhere by Eugene Manlove RhodesI like a man who pays his debts Guthrie has given much of himself to advise young writers. For a few he has been able to do something of what Ted did for him. Others have disappointed him. But he pays his debts whenever he can. With the Harvard chapters and with help unsought from Morrison, Guthrie was accepted at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference for the summer of 1945. There his life made a U-turn when publisher William Sloane gave him a $5000 advance against his books finish. Having money and promise for spurs, Guthrie wrote the last pages at Lexington in time to see The Big Sky published in 1946. Four years shy of his fiftieth birthday, he became to his lasting surprise a celebrated American author. In writing this novel, as with every other, he put himself through a psychological preparation so thorough that he needed minimal guidance from prepared outline or summary. He is more at ease with his characters when they can move and develop unfettered once he has established them. In writing The Big Sky, Guthrie knew well enough what his young protagonist was in the beginning and what he had to become. Boone Caudill had strong inherited attributes and an upbringing that followed necessarily from them. As the novel moved, he did what he had to do and became what his kind of man had to become under the conditions of his self-made way of life. But Guthrie found that he had little control over the processes by which things came about. He was midwife to his characters, but then they went their own ways. Like other young men of his place and time, Boone Caudill approached manhood after society, law, and custom had overgrown the world of his wild-boy father, who had gotten broody and mean chained to his piece of land. In the way of Boones upbringing, when his boys blood boiled like a mans at slight and insult, he struck with fist and club. One day, barely into his seventeenth year, Boone did both. His fists broke the face of a town taunter. At home his father tried to beat him, and with a stick of wood Boone broke his head. Thinking he had killed one or both, Boone took his fathers old rifle and Indian hide razor strop. An outcast of home and society, he went westward up the big rivers with a party of trappers, into the only place where a mans knife and gun and quick, keen senses made their own law. From this point The Big Sky is the story of three kinds of mountain men. Each chooses the mountain life to make his peace between himself and society, between himself and his universe. They have in common only their preference for living on the knife point of danger, in trade for free 920
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choice of company and free wandering and gratification of appetites under infinite horizons. In the close fraternity of their calling, each is a true mountain man, and by that measure each man assumes heroic proportions. Yet no man of himself is the complete mountain man. To read The Big Sky is to wonder whether any man ever was or could be. In the fiction of the western fur trade, none has come so close the mark as Dick Summers. Smooth-muscled, easy-moving, seasoned by years in the western wilderness, he is cool in a fix but makes the right moves. By the flick of a horses ear, the flight of a bird, the movements of buffalo, he knows danger. Everything possible he passes on to the two greenhorns Boone Caudill and Jim Deakins, whom he takes as partners from 1830 to 1837. Yet Summers knows he is not a real mountain man. His feelings tell him so when he looks into the eyes of an Indian he must stab to save himself. Besides, he yearns to know whether he can be happier as a grayback farmer, and after the 1837 rendezvous he leaves for a farm in Missouri. The warmest person of the three is Jim Deakins, an amiable redhead who admires Boones strength, loyalty, and lack of guile. Otherwise a good mountain man, Jim is too fun-loving, too curious, and too trusting. Weighing the meanings of things, he thinks instead of acting on an instant, as Boone does. But if Boone has imposing size and preconscious reflexes, his Kentucky hunter independence overshadows all. Neither giving nor forgiving, by fear untouched, he is sullen and carries near the surface a streak of unpredictable violence that betrays him at last. Only Jim stays to call him friend, and only an Indian girl can love him more than he understands or deserves. She is Teal Eye, daughter of a Piegan chief. Named for eyes of teal wing blue, she is probably the most admirable Indian woman in western fiction. She marries Boone, cherishes and obeys him, is loyal to him, but bears him a blind and rust-haired son. Crazed by a groundless notion that the boys red hair is of Jims fathering, Boone finds Jim and Teal Eye together in her lodge. Faster than a moments thought that would show them innocent, his gun kills the comrade he had once risked his own life to save. His wife orders him away forever. Now, Boone is a lone wanderer. He has destroyed everything he loved and needed, including the mountains that he and his kind have over-trapped, over-hunted, and opened to the wagon roads of civilization. Today it is a worn thing to praise the bigness, the openness, the spaciousness of this novel. Among the novels of the early West it shows best the power of fiction to be bigger and truer than real people, place, time. For its bigness it has sometimes been called a sprawling book, as though so large and free a thing precludes order. But to see only sprawl is to miss the rounded completeness of its theme of belonging. The theme concerns the 921
place of people in society and in nature, and it is present wherever Boone Caudill is. The boy Boone casts off society and leaves Kentucky to become an emperor of the wild, living happy with Indians until he spoils the wild and the Indians reject him. Back in Kentucky he finds hills and sky too low, underbrush too thick, atmosphere smothery, houses full of little stinks. Peoples lives seem little and boring. He cannot treat a pretty girl like a squaw. So he wanders back into the spoiled frontier, not a civilized being, not a white Indian, not a real Indian. He belongs nowhere. The Way West appeared in 1949, after Guthrie had worked intensely for six months to give his publishers a novel to match his first. The main character is Lije Evans, a big, solid, common-sense Missouri farmer with unsuspected leadership in him. For strong if ambivalent reasons he persuades Dick Summers to leave the farm after eight years and to guide a wagon train to Oregon. Dick is ready, having lost his wife and finding himself thinking old as a farmer. Others join for a mix of motives that are typical of the times as well as advantageous to Guthries purposes. To become a power in territorial politics, Tadlock organizes and leads the train, but later he is deposed by Lije, who inspires higher confidence. The Fairmans want to find a better climate for their sick little boy, but along the way he is killed by a rattlesnake in a tense counterpoint of movements that bring snake and boy together. Weatherby is a sincere if self-righteous Methodist preacher dedicated to bringing God to the Indians. McBee is by any standard a sorry human being, sneaky, mean, and cunning, but with a pretty daughter of superior qualities. Mrs. Mack is a frigid wife whose husband seduces McBees girl and abandons her to Lijes son, Brownie, who loves her and knowingly marries her. A remarkable and spontaneous characterization is that of Higgins, a good-natured splinter of a roustabout who just wants to get where I aint. He is a surprising man, as Guthrie is to realize later. Moving the train through three segments of its trip from Independence to Oregon, the novel is chronological and panoramic. At first the many characters required that Guthrie live inside all of them at once, and he found the shifting viewpoints tiring. But as distances increase and the landscape expands, the focus narrows to the Evans family. Dozens of trail novels have appeared since Houghs The Covered Wagon (1922), but none has so humanized and personalized the experience as Guthries. The worst obstacles are little, grinding, wearing, no-quit things like dust, rain, mud, heat, wind, ruts, broken wagons, ailing animals, river crossings, search for fuel and grass and safe camps. Tidy women cook food over chipsdried buffalo droppings. Jolting wagons make their breasts hurt, and they walk far for private calls of nature.
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Near trails end, Summers knows he is an alien among people who yearn for goods, crops, property, order, permanence. With all their toughness and determination, they are different from the mountain men, who had all their wants, and freedom to enjoy them. Job done, he says to Evans, I just like my country high, and with autumn in the air, he turns back alone to see what is left in the Upper Missouri. The Way West won the Pulitzer Prize for 1949, but Guthries creative energies were understandably drained. He had already revealed his plan to write at least a four-novel sequence upon the western experience, but he had not decided which phase of the experience would follow The Way West. Seven years intervened before his next novel appeared, but it was over thirty years before he settled the final shape of his series. In 1956, Guthrie published These Thousand Hills, a novel of the Montana cattleman era of the 1880s. The fourth novel was Arfive, set in a small Montana cowtown just before World War I. Responding to his publishers, he gave the series a fifth novel, The Last Valley (1975). A sequel to Arfive, it goes from World War I to the end of World War II. Then, wanting to write a sixth novel for the series, he realized for the first time that he had left a forty-year gap between The Way West and These Thousand Hills. So at eighty-one he wrote Fair Land, Fair Land (1982), a sequel to The Big Sky and The Way West. Fair Land, Fair Land opens with Summers walking from the wagon train. Up the Columbia he finds Higgins with the drovers, and since Hig still wants to get where he aint, he goes along with Summers. As they climb, Summers sees everything differently from the old way. Now he cherishes what he had squandered before the settlers began crowding a free, hidden country that seemed uncrowdable. All that remains grows more precious with its fading. Instead of killing a huge dying grizzly, he gives it water and leaves meat along the trail. The bear follows, and its presence makes the two men a legend among the Indians. In the Ear Mountain country Teal Eye is living with her blind son, Nocansee. Recognizing Summers, she takes him into her lodge. For twenty years he lives there with her, part of the mountains and rivers, flowing with the seasons, hunting only to provide. He finds Boone Caudill, now only a buffalo hide hunter going in a stinking hide-wagon to the California gold fields. Attacked by Boone, Summers refuses to press an advantage and is saved by Higgins, who coolly shoots Caudill through the head. Over the years Summers gets a fine son and is married by a Methodist preacher, as is Hig to a pretty Shoshone girl. They have good lives together. But surveyors come, gold strikes bring men and towns, an agency fort is built nearby, soldiers move in. Higgins goes to live with his wifes people, and Summers
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takes Teal Eye to her fathers camp on the Marias. The boy Lije becomes an army interpreter but cannot prevent the soldiers murdering his father and stepbrother in their lodge. Teal Eye escapes and runs away alone. This is a sad, quiet, compelling book about an old mountain mans return to country that he has always loved more than he knows. Nearly fifty, having spent most of his years a mountain man and now regretting that he has guided settlers into the secret wild, he wants only to live out his life in clear air with bright waters in the mountains he loves. Twenty years later, he is one old mountain man who has lived it all and has seen it go finally and forever. He was a good man, and he died in a strange world. Fair Land, Fair Land is a memorial to his way of life and a keening for its passing. After thirty years Guthrie has altogether rearranged a series that we have all, without the least right, taken as a fixture in western literary history. And his series is better for its new order and balance. His quintet is now a hexad that begins with a close-knit trilogy about the westward expansion from 1830 all the way to 1870 or beyond. The hero of the trilogy is Dick Summers, who achieves symbolic force as mountain man, farmer, wagon train guide, squaw man, avenger, gold camp meat hunter, keeper of the wild, Indian spokesman, seer, anachronism, and sacrifice to progress. In closing the door on the trilogy, Fair Land, Fair Land is a strong warning. If in this fair land a few decades can end the unpeopled fastnesses of Dick Summerss world, what cobweb of time sustains the last natural refuge of man in the fading decades of the twentieth century? The trilogy has so tightened the series that the action of These Thousand Hills (1956) follows by only a decade. Though the novel is identified with the trilogy through its antagonist, Lat Evans, son and grandson of Brownie and Lije Evans of The Way West, it now belongs with the later novels. The mountain men and wagon trains are only memories. In a time of farms and ranches, Lat leaves the family place in Oregon, retraces the old trail into Idaho to join a cattle drive going to the open range of central Montana, and lives as trail hand, horse breaker, and wolf skinner on his way to respectability and social consciousness as a rancher in the Teton country. Like all novelists who commit themselves to a trans-era series, Guthrie with These Thousand Hills had reached a historical crux charged with difficulties he could not escape. It was the cowboy era. The spectre of Murders at Moon Dance was with him again, and he must give depth and significance to materials long petrified into a romantic myth. But by using the worn myths to show how they moved beyond themselves into law and legislation, order and social consciousness, he transcended the mythic materials. How could a young, intelligent trail hand, upon his head all the indis-
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cretions of his kind, rid himself of moral stain in order to become the civic and political force he is capable of being? Lat Evans finds that he cannot do so without sacrificing old attachments. But he pays his debt in kindto Tom Ping for saving his life and to the prostitute Callie Kash, whom he had loved and who had given him her life savings to start his ranch. He makes public revelations of his past, and so perhaps damages his aspirations. But he keeps his integrity. His socially prominent wife accepts him for what he is, and in time maybe his public constituents will also. No other novel so effectively portrays the dawn of modern ranching as does These Thousand Hills. Seeing far, Lat knows that stock must be fenced and winter-fed to survive, and he locates his ranch where the chinook keeps grass free of snow. With him and his like the time of open range fades away, and with his trail-hand phase the age of natural heroes is gone. Its last echo is an aged buffalo bull, maybe the last of his kind, vainly making his stand against the wolves. As a protagonist, Lat brings into the series a man-made hero, a man of town and society torn by clashing fidelities. Those to follow are of the same cast. The last two novels, Arfive (1971) and The Last Valley (1975), trace the lives and fortunes of three main charactersProf Benton Collingsworth, a high school principal from Indiana; Tom Ewing, a rancher; and Ben Tate, a newspaperman. All are important people in a small Montana ranch town named for an old cattle brand, R5, recently acquired by Ewing. Meeting first in Chapter I of Arfive, Collingsworth and Ewing help to steer the town through the late stages of its evolution from first lawlessness, then loose law and order, then churches and schools and social sanctions and, finally, a town, not a camp (Arfive, p. 29). Arfive, Moon Dance, Tansytown, and later Midbury are all fictional names for Choteau. The Prof is as capable of quoting Latin as of knocking down the toughest bully. He is impressed with the high skies and far distances of Montana, but his dark moods and sudden rages make him a loved and respected stranger to his wife, May, and his daughter, Mary Jess. Against the odds he gains and keeps the respect of the town. But in time he wears out his wife with his demands on her energies. She has repeated miscarriages and eventually dies in childbirth, leaving him with only an infant son and Mary Jess. In The Last Valley he becomes a lost, lonely old man living with a pretty and intelligent daughter who has been emotionally scarred by his stern morality. At length he dies of cancer of the prostate. Ewing, his strongest ally, is a local rancher of respect and influence. Seeming a practical man, Ewing commands broad knowledges that belie his ranchers exterior. Against his better judgment he saves a young girl from a brothel and persuades the Prof to accept her as a student. When the ar-
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rangement causes trouble for the Prof, Ewing uses his influence to defeat the opposition. The girl, Julie, is a first-rate student. After paying her way through the university, Ewing marries her despite the wide difference in age. The marriage is good for both of them. Together Ewing and the Prof help the town grow from the horseand-buggy time to that of automobiles, indoor plumbing, electric lights, and built-in kitchens. By the end of Arfive there is a sense of greatly accelerating change, of time-compression, of science and machinery as new gods, of progress overwhelming. With the progress young Ben Tate comes into The Last Valley. When he buys the Advocate from old country editor Mack Cleveland, Ben has to learn town and business together. Soon he hires Mary Jess Collingsworth and falls in love with her despite her fear of sex, a fear she loses after several years of marriage to Ben, though she remains barren. Together and with others they have a continuing debate over the value of progress. The town gets sidewalks, natural gas, good telephone service, a library, and a hospital. Automobiles and trucks have mostly replaced horses, but the town stinks of exhaust and is covered with dust. Land is overgrazed and overcropped, timber overcut, bringing erosion and flood danger. The land is now irrigated, but the new dam overflows and creates a long, slow flood that drives the townspeople to high ground. Though built for flood control, the dam has created a worse kind of flooding than the free-running river might have done. By the end of the novel Mary Jess is happy as a free-lance writer, but without children Ben is saddened to know that all he has done will end with him. Now he feels that progress leaves us no retreat (p. 284) and that no one will carry on his fight. But from before his marriage comes his old mistress, Mattie Murchison, to tell him that she had borne a son by him after she left town, a son who is unaware that Ben is his father, but a son who wants to go on where Ben stops. It is an unexpected twist but a satisfying endingfor the novel as well as for the series that has covered over a hundred years of western development, from 1830 to the 1960s. This series, which could well be called The Big Sky Series, is by common assumption Guthries major contribution to American literature. But by 1960 the author had written and published some remarkable short stories, no more than a dozen, but of a quality that more than compensates for modest production. In that year Guthrie brought them together under the title of one of the most successful stories in the collection, The Big It. Expanded from an anecdote in These Thousand Hills, this story is famous for its last line. A sober-faced Indian chief watches an army mule bucking while a small cannon, tied to its back, slips down the mules backside and fires into the ground. The chief, supposed to be impressed by army power and ingenuity, says only, Paleface jackass poop! Ebbie is the touching story of a 926
A. B. GUTHRIE, JR.
lovable female setter clubbed and then put to death by a tortured man whose morals were outraged by the dogs behavior in heat. Most of the stories demonstrate Guthries extraordinary capacity for expanding incidents and anecdotes into short stories. One of the best of these is Mountain Medicine, a fictional treatment of John Colters famous race from the Indians. All the stories are crafted with care and control. The Blue Hens Chick (1965) is now distinguished as a random autobigraphy, though a similar management of chronology had been used before, notably by Mark Twain. But in Guthries hands the technique is peculiarly appropriate to the authors capacity for spinning anecdotes. He uses the anecdote as narrative, as character revelation, as self-discovery, as example, as information, and as mere good fun. For all these purposes the method succeeds, and in the tone of informal talk Guthrie reveals himself as an independent and engaging man, firm but gentle, intelligent but unpretentious. Above all he is a man who loves a good story well told, one who loves to laugh, but one who does not suffer fools gladly. In 1973 he surprised his longtime devotees with a change of pace. Wild Pitch is a short western whodunit and suspense novel that led to a pair of equally well-written and entertaining sequels, The Genuine Article (1977) and No Second Wind (1980). The series becomes a continuing initiation story in which Jason Beard, a rather sheltered high school boy in Midbury, Montana, begins working as a flunky for Sheriff Chick Charleston and grows up year by year as he learns the world from the sheriffs office. In Sheriff Charleston Guthrie creates a character who, like protagonists of his other novels, is a man to match the time and place. Dressed well in cattlemans hat, western shirt, and frontier pants, he is part of the town but apart from it. Pleasant but firm, he manages the most outraged citizen and the most volatile situation with good manners and a cool head. In each of the three novels his rare understanding of human nature leads him to the culprits. Without fully comprehending what is happening to him, young Jase gradually acquires the same qualities. When he first goes to work, he is seventeen, the sheriff in his early forties. As Jase grows older, the sheriff appears to him to be getting younger. In Wild Pitch, Jase cannot understand how a fresh, young girl can show serious interest in so old a man as the sheriff. But in The Genuine Article, only two years later, he feels that a similar prospect is perfect. In the third novel, nearly two years later, he has become a young man almost too wise and mature for his years. Guthrie enjoyed writing these three novels, partly because to do such books an author has to come to grips with his materials quickly in order to tell a story. He agrees with his friend Robert Frosts argument that all true art must first tell a story. Besides, these novels have won him a whole new 927
group of readers, and in general reviewers have been well disposed toward the Chick Charleston Series. In 1973 Guthrie again proved his versatility with Once upon a Pond, a collection of animal tales for children, illustrated by his wife Carol. Main characters are based upon real animals that lived in or near the Twin Lakes ponds and upon stuffed toys that lay around the house. Eastern publishers said that humanized animals were out of fashion, but Guthrie published them through a small but highly respected Missoula firm. A most attractive book, Once upon a Pond has found favor among readers who are unaware that they go against a trend. Through all the fiction, especially through the Big Sky Series, rings the spirit of change, necessary and inevitable change, not good or bad of itself, but hard for those who must bridge the canyon between the gone and the coming. Always through the series flows the Teton or the Breast or the Tansysame river, different namesflowing across the high plains of Montana to the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the great ocean gulf. Always there is the steep pile of mountains to the west and always Ear Mountain reaching above the others like aspiration or eternity, whatever the looker needs to see. And always there is the chinook blowing through the memory or over the snow, baring grass for starving cattle, breathing life into winterkill, singing spring in chilblained hearts. In the sunset shadow of the mountains lives the man whose first important novel gave its name to the country. For a long time, one could drink Big Sky Beer. Universities compete in the Big Sky Conference. Montana vehicle licenses say Big Sky Country. There are Big Sky restaurants, bars, laundries, barber shops, motels, dealerships and on almost past numbering. In a house called The Barn for the loft where he writes, Guthrie lives quietly with Carol, the intelligent and talented wife to whose devotion he owes a resurgence of energies that seemed to him uncertain in 1968. (Since then he has written Arfive, The Last Valley, Once upon a Pond, the three novels of the Chick Charleston Series, and Fair Land, Fair Land. ) When he works, he types all drafts on yellow sheets of paper on a portable typewriter. Save for pages just done, his desk top is always clear. He works intensely for short periods of time now, and is capable of complete concentration. He revises each sentence several times, moving each time toward greater compression, and over the years his work has been characterized by shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, shorter chapters, shorter books. But in each case he has achieved greater complexity in smaller space. More than any other western writers, his prose has the quality of curious felicity, Coleridges term for those writers who can use the limited number of words in any language to create new, startling, fresh-seeming
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A. B. GUTHRIE, JR.
effectsthe sense that words have never before come together in these peculiar ways. The feat is the more remarkable because, as Guthrie has said, I dont use big words. I know them, but I dont use them. The result has been that among the worn trails of English prose he has made new paths.
W AYNE C HATTERTON , Boise
State University
Note
All page references are to the first editions of Guthries books. Unless otherwise indicated, all substantive material has come directly from Guthrie.
Primary Sources 1. The Big Sky Hexad (novels ) The Dick Summers Trilogy: The Big Sky. New York: William Sloane, 1947. The Way West. New York: William Sloane, 1949. Fair Land, Fair Land. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. The Settlement Trilogy: These Thousand Hills. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956; rpt. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979. Arfive. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. The Last Valley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. 2. Western Detective Mysteries Murders at Moon Dance. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943. Guthries first experiment in the genre.
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A Literary History of the American West Wild Pitch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. This and the following two books comprise the Chick Charleston Series. The Genuine Article. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. No Second Wind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. 3. Autobiography The Blue Hens Chick. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. 4. Short Stories, Collected and Uncollected The Big It and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Paperback reprint as Mountain Medicine, Pocket Books, 1961; rpt. Boston: Gregg Press, 1980. Contains The Therefore Hog, The Big It, Independence Day, The Wreck, Old Mother Hubbard, Ebbie, Bargain, First Principal, Last Snake, The Moon Dance Skunk, Mountain Medicine, The Keeper of the Key, and The Fourth at Getup. Loco. Esquire 68 (November 1967): 123, 165. Once upon a Pond. Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press, 1973. Childrens stories. 5. Articles Action, Sir, Action. Saturday Review of Literature, April 12, 1958, pp. 5667. (Review of Owen Wister Out West: His Letters and Journals .) The Badlands Are Still Bad. Saturday Evening Post, November 22, 1952, pp. 34 351 139140, 142143. Characters and Compassion. Writer 62 (November 1949): 359362. DeVotoA Memoir. Nieman Reports, January 1958, pp. 36. The Historical Novel: Tramp or Teacher? Montana Magazine of History 4 (Fall 1954): 18. How to Live at Fifty-Eight Below. New York Times Magazine, January 31, 1954, p. 18. How to Stock a Pond. Atlantic Monthly, June 1949, pp. 9394. I Know Where I Am From. Saturday Review of Literature, November 8, 1958, pp. 1920. (Review of David Lavenders Land of Giants. ) Nothing Difficult About a Cow. Harpers Magazine, January 1953, pp. 7376. The Peter Rabbit Library? Nieman Reports, April 1958, pp. 1718. Rpt. in First Freedom, edited by Robert B. Downs, pp. 284286. Chicago: American Library Association, 1960. Roads Running West. Harpers Magazine, May 1954, pp. 6870. Sheep and Goats. Atlantic Monthly, April 1945, pp. 113114. Snakes for the Squeamish. Atlantic Monthly, February 1948, pp. 8788. The West as a Magnet. New York Times Book Review, April 2, 1950, pp. 7, 24. (Review of Henry Nash Smiths Virgin Land.) The West Is Our Great Adventure of the Spirit. Life, April 13, 1959, pp. 7880, 9394, 9798. What Every Family NeedsA Hideaway from Lifes Pressures. Family Weekly, January 26, 1969, pp. 67.
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Why Write About the West? Western American Literature 7 (Fall 1972): 163164. Wilderness Washington. Saturday Review of Literature, October 18, 1952. (Review of Joseph Kinsey Howards Strange Empire.) Secondary Sources 1. Bibliography Etulain, Richard. A. B. Guthrie: A Bibliography. Western American Literature 4 (Summer 1969): 133138. A good basic bibliography that includes theses and dissertations not found elsewhere. See also the bibliographies in Fords Twayne volume and in the theses and dissertations at the end of this listing, and the valuable Survey of Criticism by Fred Erisman in Erisman and Etulains Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, pp. 168171 (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 1982). 2. Books Ford, Thomas W. A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1968. A pamphlet in The Southwest Writers Series. A good summary of Guthries life and writing to 1967, but largely superseded by Fords Twayne volume. Ford, Thomas W. A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1981. To date, the only booklength study of Guthries life and writing. There are three main tendencies in Guthries most important fiction: (1) ultimately it is not so much regional as universal because it embodies human qualities not restricted to a region, (2) though Guthries historical purpose is big, history is secondary to the fiction, and (3) Guthrie combines in his writing the factual and the spiritual aspects of the westward expansion. 3. Articles and Sections or Portions of Books Astro, Richard. The Big Sky and the Limits of Wilderness Fiction. Western American Literature 9 (Summer 1974): 105114. Because Boone Caudill is isolated from society, the novel is neither nostalgic nor tragic. Attebery, Louie. The American West and the Archetypal Orphan. Western American Literature 5 (Fall 1970): 205217. The Big Sky owes much of its extraordinary complexity and impact to three archetypes: (1) the theme of the lost Eden, (2) the character of the wise old man, and (3) the archetypal orphan. Breit, Harvey. Talk with A. B. Guthrie, Jr. New York Times Book Review, October 23, 1949, p. 39. An important early interview. Guthrie sets forth his aims, purposes, and personal relationship with the Westinformation much used by Guthrie scholars. Guthrie says that (1) he plans to write at least four panels on the westward movement, (2) a good historical novelist cannot rely on history as the main substance of his work, (3) he retains authentic historical backgrounds but uses as few historical personages as possible, preferring to create his own characters, and (4) because Montana has always offered him the vast distances and the solitude that lie at the heart of the West, his section of Montana is the center of his universe.
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A Literary History of the American West Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. Emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Saturday Review of Literature, October 8, 1949, p. 39. The Way West is a better novel than The Big Sky for two main reasons: (1) The Way West successfully moves from a multiple point of view to a single one, that of the Evans family, and (2) its pacing is perfectly attuned to the movement of the wagon train. . When Settlers Began to Take Over. New York Times Book Review, November 18, 1956, pp. 1, 54. Guthries sequence of novels embodies in each novel the peculiar kind of hero demanded by the historical era. Guthrie demonstrates a serious purpose in his use of history and fiction. Coon, Gilbert D. A. B. Guthrie, Jr.s Tetralogy: An American Synthesis. North Dakota Quarterly 44 (Spring 1976): 7380. The first four novels synthesize early American experience and create continuity through recurring narrative elements. Cracroft, Richard H. Half Froze for Mountain Doins: The Influence and Significance of George F. Ruxtons Life in the Far West. Western American Literature 10 (Spring 1975): 2493. Parallel passages show that Ruxtons book has had a direct stylistic influence upon the mountain man novels that were to follow. . The Big Sky: A. B. Guthries Use of Historical Sources. Western American Literature 6 (Fall 1971): 16376. Guthries direct borrowings from historical sources became materials for imaginative fiction. Erisman, Fred. Introduction to Guthries These Thousand Hills. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979. Because the novel is at the chronological mid-point between the first two and the last two novels of the tetralogy it functions as a transition from old to modern West. . Western Fiction as an Ecological Parable. Environmental Review 2 (Spring 1978): 1523. The first three novels of Guthries series indicate that the western novel cannot avoid dealing with the environment. Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel, pp. 6476. New Haven: College and University Press, 1966. Guthries use of history is better than Coopers, and The Big Sky is a better book than the next two novels because its tragic vision transcends the best things in them. Hairston, Joe B. Community in the West. South Dakota Review 11 (Spring 1973): 1726. The first four novels in Guthries series show that each novel develops a different phase in the settling of the West, with the characters forming a more and more complex social system in which the individual must find ways to be responsible for others. Hood, Charles E., Jr. The Man and the Book: Guthries The Big Sky. Montana Journalism Review 14 (1971): 615. Useful and unique material from interviews with Guthrie and with his friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and associates. Kohler, Dayton. A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and the West. College English 12 (February 1951): 249256. An important early article on Guthries stature as one of the best of our historical novelists. The Way West is more complex and its style is better controlled than are the same elements in The Big Sky.
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Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Chapter 5, Guthrie and Manfred: The Historical Inheritance, uses the first five of Guthries novels to conclude that Guthrie has an ironic view of the advances of civilization. Morrison, Theodore. Reader Unburdens and Comes Up with Some Sound Criticism. Nieman Reports, April 1950, pp. 37. The Harvard professor who tutored Guthrie through early chapters of The Big Sky praises Guthries aptitude for fiction-writing and his concern for other writers. Putnam, Jackson K. Down to Earth: A. B. Guthries Quest for Moral and Historical Truth. North Dakota Quarterly 39 (Summer 1971): 4757. To the historian, These Thousand Hills is the most important of Guthries novels because Lat Evans is able to reconcile the frontier life with civilization. Stegner, Wallace. Foreword to the Sentry edition of Guthries The Big Sky. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. An appreciation by an important western writer who knows the Guthrie country intimately. The Big Sky succeeds because its lead character succeeds as both myth and individual. Stewart, Donald C. A. B. Guthries Vanishing Paradise: An Essay on Historical Fiction. Journal of the West 15 (July 1976): 8396. The first four novels in Guthries series present distinct phases in the history of the West wherein civilization gradually destroys a primitive Eden. . The Functions of Bird and Sky Imagery in Guthries The Big Sky. Critique 19 (1977): 5361. Patterns of bird and sky imagery help the novel to achieve more than a superficial coherence. Stineback, David C. On History and Its Consequences. Western American Literature 6 (Fall 1971): 177189. These Thousand Hills is the best of Guthries series because it relies upon action. Sentiment about the past is futile in the face of advancing civilization. Walker, Don D. The Mountain Man as Literary Hero. Western American Literature 1 (Spring 1966): 1525. Like other writers of western fiction, Guthrie had to overcome some difficult problems in his attempts to make a literary hero out of the historical mountain man. . Philosophical and Literary Implications in the Historiography of the Fur Trade. Western American Literature 9 (Summer 1974): 79104. Important among novelists of the fur trade, Guthrie has tended to perpetuate the heroic view adopted by Chittenden instead of the economic emphasis of Phillipss The Fur Trade. Williams, John. The Western: Definition of the Myth. Nation 193 (November 18, 1961): 401406. Among other leading western novelists, Guthrie has written well but has not realized that he has tried to deal with aspects of the western myth as though they were epic. Young, Vernon. An American Dream and Its Parody. Arizona Quarterly 6 (Summer 1950): 112123. Praises Guthrie for the high literary quality of his writing and for his respect for historical detail in the first two novels of his series.
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A Literary History of the American West 4. Theses and Dissertations Academic interest in Guthries work has increased impressively in the past twenty years. During the twenty years between the publication of The Big Sky (1946) and that of The Blue Hens Chick (1965), only one dissertation appeared. But in the twenty years from 1965 to the present, eight others have been done, making nine in all. They are arranged here chronologically by degree. M.A.: (1965) Armand Falks The Riddle of Experience, University of Montana; (1965) Merilyn Kites A. B. Guthrie, Jr.: A Critical Evaluation of His Works, University of Wyoming; (1965) Mildred Mitchells The Women in A. B. Guthries Novels, Southwest Texas State University; (1968) Peter M. Stephans Fact, Interpretation, and Theme in the Historical Novels of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. , North Texas State University; (1968) Charles E. Hoods Hard Work and Tough Dreaming: A Biography of A. B. Guthrie, Jr., University of Montana. Ph.D. : (1957) Francis E. Hodgins, Jr.s The Literary Emancipation of a Region. . . , Michigan State University; (1972) Gilbert D. Coons A Study of A. B. Guthrie Jr. and His Tetralogy, Washington State University; (197273) Jared Rulon Allreds A. B. Guthrie, Jr.: The Artist in the Wilderness, University of Utah; (1974) Charles Eugene Rays An Interdisciplinary Study Based on Four Selected Novels of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. , Middle Tennessee State University.
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Frank Waters
. . . a primary concern of all peoples everywhere is their relationship to their land. This has been the basic source of conflict between the White and Red races on this continent. . . . This theme of their conflicting relationships to their earth has provided something of a thematic continuity in all my books, novels and non-fiction.
1
was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on July 25, 1902. His mother was descended from an aristocratic southern family; his father was part Indian. A major theme in his work, the reconciliation of dualities, resulted, in all probability, from the early necessity of reconciling the opposing forces inherent in his own heritage. The family tradition of miningthe family folly, he calls itdirected that young Waters enter Colorado College as an engineering student. But after three years, he left formal education, supporting himself with a series of jobs ranging from ditch-digging in the Wyoming oil fields to being traffic chief and engineer for the Southern California Telephone Company. 2 In 1925, while working on the Mexican border, Waters wrote his first book, which he subsequently referred to as a stumbling, bumbling, imma3 ture, first attempt. Originally titled The Lizard Woman and published 4 as Fever Pitch , this novel, as Thomas Lyon has pointed out, . . . fore5 shadows, in embryo, important preoccupations of the later novels. T h e primary theme of all Waterss work, the relationship between people and place, is at the heart of Fever Pitch, functioning both to determine the story line and to establish the basis for characterization. Told Conrad-fashion by Eric Dane to a group of men lounging on the porch of a bordertown cabaret, it is a story of the physiological, psychological, and spiritual effect of one of the worlds most desolate environments on Lee Marston, a young American engineer. He has been asked by Arvilla, a mestizo bar-girl, to accompany her deep into the desert of Baja California to assay what is hoped to be a huge deposit of gold. Another American, Jim Horne, guards the strike while awaiting their arrival. After terrible hardships, Arvilla and Marston reach the cursed, wasteland heart, a desert valley enclosed by a circular wall of mountains around whose rim lies coiled the semblance of a serpentine body called the Lizard Woman by the local Indians. The story recounts the effect of this hostile place upon the characters. Quite readable in its own
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right and highly significant for its relationship to the later works, this novel has been reissued (1983) under its original title. In 1927, while working on the Mexican border, Waters completed his first draft of The Yogi of Cockroach Court, perhaps his most misunderstood book. Rewritten in 1937 and again in 1945, it was first published in 1947 and was a total failure. The British agent to whom it was offered refused to present it to any reputable publisher in England because of its salacious 6 nature. There was perhaps a legitimate reason for that initial reaction, for nowhere in his fiction does Waters deal as nakedly with the dualities of human nature as he does in Yogi. But despite the presence of an endnote calling attention to his source for the yogic doctrines in the book, most readers, until its successful reissue in 1972, seem to have focused on the physical action of the lesser characters in the novel, missing the point of the title characterand of the whole book. In this story, the fascination with place continues. Here, in a typical Mexican-American bordertown, Barby, a young half-breed orphan, is taken in by an old Chinese shopkeeper, Tai Ling, whose primary effort in life is to achieve liberation through his yogic practices. Barby falls in love with Guadalupe, a mixed-breed dancer in one of the local cantinas. The interaction of these two characters is observed by the philosophical Tai Ling on the one hand and on the other by Guadalupes American friend, Sal, a percentage girl. The backgrounds of the characters, combined with the bordertown environment which includes open prostitution, gambling, and the sale of drugs, result in the destruction of them all, in one way or another. In spite of their pitiful hopes and ambitions, life for all of them is a downhill slide. In later Frank Waters novels, a benevolent spirit of place provides the constant with which the characters can attune themselves, thus not only making possible a harmonious relationship with their environment but also resolving the conflicting dualities of their nature. But here, the bordertowns negative spirit of place prevents such attunement and actually militates against it. The point of the book, however, lies not in the degeneration of Barby, Guadalupe, and Sal, but in Tai Lings failure, until the very end, to realize the impossibility of separating the principles that guide life from life itself. For while Barby, Guadalupe, and Sal lack the strength and discipline which might have saved them, Tai Ling, who possesses the requisite strength and discipline, fails to see that his personal salvation cannot be effected without recognition of the common humanity which occupies even the negative Cockroach Courtthat is, without a relationship with his environment. In 1932 Waters wrote The Wild Earths Nobility, the first volume of his Colorado trilogy. The trilogy, rewritten in 1971 as the one-volume Pikes 936
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Peak, is the fictionalized story of Waterss grandfather, who came to Colorado in 1872 and made a fortune in contracting and building; then lost it through a series of bad mining ventures. More significantly, however, it is the story of grandfather Joseph Rogier versus Pikes Peak, their conflict taking place on two levels: Rogiers practical mining ventures to reach its [Pikes Peaks] gold deposits and his gradual projection of the physical peak 7 into a symbol of his own unconscious. It is worth noting that in this third novel, place has not yet become beneficent: in Fever Pitch place is aggressively hostile; in Yogi it is negative; and in The Wild Earths Nobility it becomes the focus of Joseph Rogiers projected psychic search. This latter work tells of a first-comer to a strange and alien land and of his inability to come to terms with it. Unlike the final Pikes Peak, the first version of the story concluded with the sixty-year-old Rogier, financially ruined, still contemplating the Peak. Between 1934 and 1938, Waters wrote the first drafts of Tombstone Travesty, finally published in 1960 as The Earp Brothers of Tombstone. While this work is significant as expose, history, and biography, another value lies in the development of a theme to be fully expressed several years later in The Colorado: the failure of all of the conquering European-Americans to make a satisfactory adjustment to the land itself, to the spirit of that land. The Earp Brothers of Tombstone is not just an expose of a band of itinerant card sharks, gunmen, saloon-keepers, and con men, but an indictment of a whole culture based on exploitation, materialism, and violence. Waters suggests convincingly that the psychic insecurities caused by the conquerors inability to come to grips with the physical and psychical heartland of the new continent were projected outward in huge acts of destruction against the animals, the native peoples, and even the land itself. The towering mountain ranges bulked up inside them. The mysterious rivers ran in their blood. The empty deserts ate into them. And finally loneliness engulfed them, even more vacuous than the spaces between the stars above. And as the fear and tension kept mounting within them, they struck out at everything, . . . with a blind compulsion to dominate and destroy.8 Against this background, Waters shows us, through the reminiscences of Aunt Allie, Virgil Earps widow, a true portrait of the western gunman: Appearance and action, both added up to the fear of his fellowmen. The fear of the immeasurable, inimical landscape dwarfing him to an infinitesimal speck, and its haunting timelessness, which over-emphasized the brief and dangerous span of his own life. And the fear of his own fears. A man forever self-conscious, 937
tense and inhibited, he epitomizes more than any other the com9 pulsion of his time and place. And, Waters suggests, it is our own unconscious understanding of such a man that has caused us to make of him a cultural heroto sanctify his role. He suggests that our failure to understand consciously, or even want to understand, this elevation of our own insecurities has resulted in the falsification of past history. He reminds us that the Earp brothers were real people and that . . . all they were and did is a measure of the forces that made them. It is this deeper truth, rather than the fictitious legend grown up around 1 0 them, that belongs eventually to the great American Myth. In Midas of the Rockies (1936), the life of Winfield Scott Stratton provided Waters with the material with which to develop, from a different point of view, his major theme of the effect of land on psyche. It also provided the opportunity for the development of one of his primary skillsthe ability to locate his characters clearly in time and space. With painstaking scholarship and an ability to handle immense physical detail, Waters depicts the society of the time and a solitary prospector outside of that society, who for seventeen years had plodded the Rockies 1 1 with his burro. Waters also shows that prospector after his great discovery, when he has become mining king, multimillionaire, man of affairs, finan12 cier, philanthropist, eccentric, neurotic, hermit. And with the same compassion he had shown earlier toward Tai Ling in The Yogi of Cockroach Court, he also reveals Stratton as a human being whose wealth isolated him from human interaction and communion and whose joy in the search had terminated with discoverywith what Waters calls . . . his one moment 1 3 of utter disillusionment, and his one great moment of fulfillment. The success of this biography is attested by its publication history: 1937, 1949, and 1972. In an introduction for the 1972 edition, Waters himself ponders its success, modestly suggesting, Perhaps . . . it is the story itself that supersedes the manner in which it is told. For it is more than a regional history and the tale of a carpenter who made good in his own home town. It is at once the story of a mountain, a mine, and a man. A story so fabulously impossible and yet so excruciatingly true that it commends itself to the whole of America, the only earth, the only people 14 who could have created it. At the same time that Waters was writing Midas of the Rockies, he was working on Below Grass Rootsthe second volume of the Colorado trilogy. Written at this time, it is no wonder that Below Grass Roots reveals what 15 Lyon has called the documentary urge. But the wealth of detail in this 938
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book is more tightly structured than in the preceding novel of the trilogy, and there is an additional depth and richness in the development of its characters. While in Midas Waters deals with a man pretty much outside of his surrounding society, in Below Grass Roots his characters are very much products of their time and place, permitting the narrative integration of the historical detail. Also, as W. S. Stratton grows increasingly eccentric, so does the fictional grandfather Rogier, who begins to share several of Strattons personality traits. Below Grass Roots depicts Rogiers disintegrating personality and its effect upon the second generation of this family of pioneers. We see Rogiers obsession causing the death of his son-in-law, and his daughter Ona sinking into silent resignation. We also see the boy March growing up amidst these tensions and anxieties. At the end of this volume, Rogier, after a stroke, is a helpless invalid, and we understand that March will have to resolve for himself the family paradoxes he has inherited. The final volume of the trilogy, The Dust Within the Rock (1940), is undoubtedly the closest thing to an autobiography that Frank Waters will ever write. While not as technically successful as the preceding volume, and now long out of print, it contains a wealth of information about the childhood, adolescence, and young manhood of the author. We see young March in grade school, high school, and in college. We see him selling papers as a Fred Harvey boy at the train depot. We see the young engineering student rebelling against sterile academic confines and fleeing to the Wyoming oil fields, to California, and to the primitive interior of Mexico. But most of all we see young Frank Waters attempting to resolve the multitude of conflicts within him. In Mexico, among the most primitive Native Americans, and ironically enough operating a silver mine, March achieves the long-soughtafter synthesis: I am them both, indivisible and intermingled, adobe and 1 6 granite. The fusion of adobe (his fathers people) and granite (his grandfathers people) is also a fusion of all apparently disparate elements within his psyche, and young March sets forth Like a religious exile granted the 1 7 divine concession of a world to be built at his will. . . . Soon after completing The Dust Within the Rock, Waters began his most successful work thus farPeople of the Valley. In it, he achieved for the first time the story of a character in total harmony with her environment. It is the story of a woman whose inner growth and closeness to her land elevate her above her people and, more significantly, above her own past selves. People of the Valley is the story of Maria, who lives ninety years in the isolated Mora Valley of New Mexico. She is the orphaned daughter of an Indian mother and a (probably) Mexican stranger; she has been raised by two old goatherds, who are themselves killed in a flood when she is still a 939
child. Maria grows up wild and free, surviving by instinct and her wits. She bears a succession of children to a succession of men, raising them with the same survivalist techniques. She is simply a natural product of the land. Her reputation as a curandera and seer grows: the people consult her for both her knowledge of folk medicine and her mystical insights. Near the end of her life, the people are faced with the erection of a flood-control dam, which will require them to give up their land, and they come to Maria. At first she opposes the dam: This is the meaning of any dam, that it would obstruct the free flow of faith which renews and refreshes life and 1 8 gives it its only meaning. But she grows to realize that ages, like all life people, plants, animals, and mountainsgrow, mature, then give way to new life. She sees that to oppose the dam would be equivalent to building oneto obstructing the inevitable flow. She is able to say, No man can belong to a time until it has also a faith he can belong to. That is what people do not like about this dam. It has no faith behind it to give it meaning. And so you must accept your own time which has a faith until the new time has also given 19 rise to a faith, and you are ready for it. She finds a temporary solution by securing her people new land in a higher, more remote valley. The story is thus one of the corrupting advance of Anglo technology and also of Marias spiritual growth. In this work we see some of Waterss most serious and mature thought. It is significant that this book was originally entitled The Dam. John Farrar (of Farrar and Rinehart) firmly rejected the title, perhaps seeing that Waters had achieved here more than he had attempted; for the story does rise above the portrait of Maria and the somewhat abstract concept of dams to become a revelation both of the plight of people everywhere when one age begins to supersede another and also of all peoples need for a maturation of consciousness. We are told Maria believed in fulfillment instead of prog20 ress and that fulfillment is individual evolution. And we come to understand that Maria saves her people not so much by securing them land (as important as that is) as by securing them time time to learn to live in the inevitable new age. More importantly, we understand that their salvation is the result of Marias own personal growth, her evolution of consciousness. We see here the first appearance of a major theme that comes to full fruition many years later in Mexico Mystique, the concept of the evolution of human consciousness and the need for that evolution within each 21 individual. Maria herself accomplishes that evolution and illustrates both the necessity and the possibility of such growth in all people.
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But it is in The Man Who Killed the Deer, written in the following year, that Waters is fully able to combine his two major themes of people-land relationship and resolution of conflicting dualities with his ability to handle historical detail. Maria, constantly in tune with her land, had few, if any, internal conflicts. But the central character of Deer, Martiniano, is a young Indian boy who has been forced to leave his pueblo to attend the government away school. There he has been taught a trade, carpentry. He has also been taught white values and thought processes. He is returned to the pueblo, where he finds himself in constant trouble with the tribal leaders. At the pueblo and in the nearby town, there is little demand for his carpentry skills, and it becomes necessary for him to farm his fathers land. Thus, while he is economically dependent upon the land and upon the Indian way of life, he is psychologically estranged from them both. Needing meat for himself and his wife, he shoots a deer. Because he has killed the deer out of season, he has broken the white mans law; because he has failed to ask the deers permission and to perform the requisite ritual after killing it, he has broken the Indians. As his troubles increase, Martiniano finds in the deer a kind of psychological scapegoat, onto which he can project all of his problems. Combined with this story of Martinianos internal conflicts is the historically accurate but fictionalized account of the Taos Pueblos attempt to secure the return of their sacred Blue Lake, which had been confiscated by the government. For over seven centuries, the Indians had been making pilgrimages to this lake, which they believe to be the point of origin of their people. Their right to the land had been confirmed in 1551 by King Charles of Spain; in 1687 by the Royal Council of the Indies; in 1821 by Mexico, upon gaining her independence from Spain; and in 1848 by the United States, after acquiring the New Mexico area. In 1906, a presidential proclamation had converted Blue Lake and the surrounding area into a National Forest. The trial of Martiniano by the white authorities becomes the springboard for the tribes renewed demands for settlement of their land claims. A more significant point of contact of the two stories lies in Martinianos failure to understand the Indians closeness to the land, their attunement to total environment. At the heart of his difficulties with the tribal elders is his sense of individuality, which the elders see as his insistence on the illusion of separateness. Thus Martiniano inadvertently becomes the mechanism for the eventual return of the sacred lake, and at the same time he learns to understand 22 the inseparableness and mutuality of all seemingly discrete matters. T h e
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process of this growth is slow and painful. Yet the story is simply and beautifully told as Waters leads both his character and his reader to an understanding of Martinianos complex problems and to an understanding of what is needed for their resolution. In this work Waters successfully combines his mysticism with the historical accuracy of real people, real time, and real place. The Man Who Killed the Deer was begun in 1940 and finished in 1941. Also in 1941, Waters wrote his first commercial book, River Lady. With Houston Branch, who provided the story idea and the necessary historical research, Waters concocted for Hollywood a tale that would make a typical class B movie. It is a blood-and-thunder story of the upper Mississippi mill towns of the late nineteenth century; and while it is of little literary value, it is of scholarly interest in that it shows Waterss flexibility when writing fiction under the restrictions of both the commercial market and Hollywood demands. The central characters were completely out of Waterss control, having been predetermined by the stars chosen to perform the roles. The setting was one with which he was not familiar. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this book is that it was written at all. Of interest is the fact that it was not a total disaster, for while it has little to recommend it as serious literature, it does entertain, if regarded as a summer afternoons escape reading. Conspicuously absent are any traces of philosophy or mysticismor of any deep thought. But there is a wealth of Branchs carefully researched historical detail and some good writing, Parts of the subplots (which were under Waterss control), especiallythose dealing with the growing up of a brother and sister, are well done and are reminiscent of the family interaction in Below Grass Roots and The Dust Within the Rock. However, one feels that while this book was being written, Waterss heart was in the New Mexico pueblo with Martiniano, and perhaps therein lies the books greatest value. In the way that Midas of the Rockies seems to have functioned as a control for Below Grass Roots, which is the most tightly structured and best written of the Colorado trilogy, so perhaps River Lady may have functioned as a similar control for The Man Who Killed the Deer. Later in 1941, Waters began The Colorado. Part of the Rivers of America series, it is an examination of the history of the people of the great Colorado Pyramid. In this major work, Waters develops his examination of the relationship between the land and its inhabitants on a grand scale. Here a basic tenet is that the life in the total environment of western America cannot be fully perceived by the usual Western-European rationalistic outlook. Rather, a mystical approach-perception through intuitive awareness permits a person to experience an attunement that results in personal psychological adjustment. He then applies this concept to the American people: to the Native Americans, whom he suggests had this appercep942
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tion (which Lyon calls perception squared ), and to the waves of white settlers, who did not. The Indian, psychologically in tune with his perceived environment, is patient, intuitive, introvertive, and respectful of the land. The white is quick, eager, extrovertive, rationalistic, and poweroriented. Waters depicts the conflict between the two as something far deeper than military-political. Rather, it is a psychological conflict deep within the character of both. While the conquering whites are depicted as just thatconquerors of people, rivers, land itselfWaters is careful not to depict the Indian as noble savage. Rather, linking these ideas with his belief in the evolution of consciousness, he suggests that over-emphasis on either point of view is ultimately destructive, and that what is neededwhat is possibleis a synthesis of the apparently opposing points of view into a wholeness in both individual and mankind. (It is significant that Waters wrote most of this work during World War II when he held a government job in Washington, D. C. ) These ideas are developed further in Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism (1947) in which Waters further suggests that the problem is not simply within white orientation or Indian orientation but that the conflicting dualities are present in each individual, in any time or place. The dichotomies are part of human nature, and are part of outer nature as well. Waters suggests that the Pueblo and Navaho Indians have long recognized these conflicting forces which make up the universe and human nature; and recognizing as well the need for internal harmony and harmony with ones environment, they have, for centuries, used ritual to portray the cosmic dualities and to dramatize their equilibrium. Thus the focus of these ceremonies is on universal harmony and on psychic wholeness. In the closing sections of Masked Gods, Crucible of Conflict, Waters postulates that the Indians have intuitively perceived through their necessary closeness to the forces of nature a universe greatly similar to that being discovered by modern science. He cites the evidence of contemporary atomic physics, biology, and astronomy that describes a universe of interdependence, of mutuality a process reality. This is the universe that has been dramatized in dance by the Navahos and Pueblos for centuries. That the Indian view is being approached by modern science Waters sees as hopeful evidence of mankinds achieving the synthesis necessary for its survival and of an evolution of human consciousness already begun. During the same period that Waters was working on Masked Gods, he wrote Diamond Head, the second of his two Hollywood commercial works, with Houston Branch. Written with most of the methods used in the construction of River Lady, Diamond Head is superior to the earlier attempt in at least one respect: the exciting story line is based on historical fact. During the Civil War, the South hoped to paralyze northern industry by destroying 943
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its sources of oilits, whaling fleet. Branch apparently saw the opportunities for an exciting romance of the high seas combined with the glamour of the ante-bellum South; Waters had a freer hand in the creation of his characters, since the actors were not predetermined this time, and in the intricacies of a complex plot and subplots. The result is a well-researched historical romance (typical of the kind then popular in the lending libraries), which was published in British and French editions, as well as American. It 24 suffers from what Lyon has called a shying away from depth. It is, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyable as light reading, and is of interest to the Frank Waters student because of Waterss treatment of such diverse places as the South Sea Islands and the Arctic seas. Waters came to grips with a truly serious challenge in the writing of fiction in 1956 when he began work on The Woman at Otowi Crossing and attempted to dramatize as fiction the themes and ideas that had been maturing in The Colorado and Masked Gods. Based on the life of Edith Warner, who ran a tearoom at Otowi Crossing, just below Los Alamos, The Woman at Otowi Crossing becomes the story of Helen Chalmers, who, in tune with her adopted environment and nearby Indian pueblo, was also a close friend of the first atomic scientists. She herself forms a kind of bridge between the two orientations and value systems. On the one hand, Helen Chalmers understands the passive, intuitive, docile nature of the Indians; yet she herself is a product of, and also understands, the power-oriented, aggressive, rational white world. Early in the novel, a combination of adverse circumstances, fear, 25 worry, guilt, dread, shame, financial failure and the discovery that she is dying of cancer, cause a kind of psychic implosion very much like the mystical moment of enlightenment. A physicist friend later describes it as if . . . her essential inner self, . . . vaporized and transformed into new elements from its old atomic structure, rose slowly in a new spiritual entity to a 2 6 new height of comprehension. In the process of dying, Helen learns how to live. She becomes increasingly perceptive, receptive, sensitive. She is not a great mystic, simply one who knows, a person of insight into the unity and harmony of all life. In terms of Waterss previous works, Helen has become Indianized in her ability to perceive universal relationships and mutualities. Thus, the basic assumption of The Woman of Otowi Crossing is drawn from the conclusion of Masked Gods. Since Helens initial psychic experience occurs early in the novel, most of the story consists of her day-to-day living, running her tearoom with the help of her Indian friend Facundo, against the background of the birth of the atomic age. Through the comprehension of her physicist friends, Waters suggests that their scientific theorizing may also eventually lead them to similar states of heightened self-awareness. 944
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This attempt to portray mystical enlightenment in fiction is successful, 27 one critic calling it a tour de force in fusion. Waters creates an Anglo woman who convincingly demonstrates, as did Maria in People of the Valley, that evolution of consciousness through the synthesis of conflicts is possible. Leon Gaspard, begun in 1958, is Waterss one sustained effort at art criticism. It is also an anecdotal biography of his friend, the great Russian painter, who settled in Taos in 1918. Even in this work, the usual Frank Waters themes emerge, for Gaspards art becomes a kind of metaphor for Waterss perception of conflicting dualitiesthis time as synthesized on canvas. Gaspard was familiar with the nomadic tribes of the Asian steppes, as well as with the Indians of the American Southwest, and his work reflects his closeness to the earth and to the primitive peoples. While Gaspard is not a primitive in the art historians usual sense of that word, he captures the color, form, and subject matterthe visual wildnessof the world of those who live close to the land, and Waters is quick to perceive the harmonic blending of colors and forms that at first glance appear to clash. He praises Gaspard for capturing a now-extinct world of barbaric color, form, 28 and content, the world of the wild as opposed to its domestic counterpart. In 1959, Waters began his Book of the Hopi, living much of the next three years on the Hopi Indian Reservation. His purpose was to record not only the traditional religious beliefs and their accompanying rituals, but also the Hopi . . . instinctive perception of life processes which our ra29 tionally extroverted White observers still ignore. Waters calls it their 3 0 book of talk. The words of some thirty Hopi spokesmen were taperecorded, translated, then edited and organized by Waters, who added his own eye-witness accounts of the rituals as well as a history of the Hopi people. The result is a complete view of both the literal and mystical aspects of Hopi ceremonialism. According to the Hopi, our present world is the Fourth World, the preceding three having been destroyed because of the divisiveness, selfishness, greed, and/or materialism of their inhabitants. In each case a few survivors were permitted to emerge to the succeeding world and were reinstructed in proper behavior. After emerging into the present world, they were instructed to divide into groups and undertake a series of migrations before finally settling down in their chosen land. That the chosen land was in a barren, arid desert is not incongruous, for in the preceding worlds comfort and material wealth were inevitably accompanied by spiritual disintegration. According to Hopi prophecy, our Fourth World is in rapid decline, heading for destruction, after which there will be a turn upward and a new age. The focus of Hopi ceremonialism is on the harmonious unity of all forms of life. Their dances symbolize the interactions of the opposing and 945
conflicting life forces in all creation, perpetuating the primal harmony of 31 cosmic forces and literally holding the world together. To the Hopi, the ultimate evil islike Martinianos in The Man Who Killed the Deer the illusion of separateness. In his introduction, Waters comments: . . . they speak not as a defeated little minority in the richest and most powerful nation on earth, but with the voice of all that world commonwealth of peoples who affirm their right to grow from their own native roots. . . . They remind us we must attune ourselves to the need for inner change if we are to avert a cataclysmic rupture between our own minds and hearts. Now, if ever, 32 is the time for them to talk, for us to listen. The evidence presented by the Hopi elders seems to have confirmed and stabilized Waterss previous theories. More importantly, it seems to have promoted his own increased personal integration. The evidence for the latter is to be found in his next work, Pumpkin Seed Point, the highly subjective story of his personal experience while living among the Hopi. 33 This work, which Waters began in 1965, two years after publishing Book of the Hopi, records the psychic and spiritual growth he had been experiencing through The Colorado, Masked Gods, and The Woman at Otowi Crossing. It reveals Waterss own developed synthesis as he attempts to make personal reconciliation of the multitude of dualities presented by the Hopi teachers. He recognized that the true meaning of the Hopi myths and legends would have to be presented from within, integrated into a personal philosophic system, and in Pumpkin Seed Point he records his experiences as he further evolved this philosophy of fusion. Little wonder that we Whites, with our desperate reliance upon surface physical reality, seldom perceive that in this Indian sub-stream lies an America we have never known, yet embodying the truths of our own unconscious, the repressed elements of our 34 darker, deeper selves. That Waters is not completely successful in reconciling the Indian and white worlds is not surprising. But the record of his attemptand the implications of that attemptare of much importance. As a reader follows Waters through various stages of growth, he is led to the conclusion that Western civilization itself, in order to survive, must find a viable fusion between the two great worlds of industrial-mechanical-rational and the 3 5 organic-spiritual-intuitive, and that the overall movement of our history does seem to be in that direction. Waters suggests that the function of the Hopi teachings can be to show us, by revealing what they have, what it is that we do not. 946
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In 1971, Waters began Pikes Peak, the redaction of the Colorado trilogy. In producing this one-volume work, he found it necessary to cut many pages. The original trilogy totaled 1,511 pages, and Pikes Peaks 743 pages include much new material written expressly for it. Waters eliminated from the earlier volumes much of the unessential material dealing with the familys domestic life, but most of the cutting and rewriting occurs with the material formerly placed in the final volume. The elimination and rewriting of so much of the autobiographical material does sharpen the focus on its central character, grandfather Rogier; and the central conflict between the antagonist Rogier and the protagonist Pikes Peak becomes more clearly the controlling theme. While March still faces the problem of resolving his dual heritage and the tensions left unresolved by his grandfather, the necessary shift in focus from Rogier to young March is here handled with a smoothness and tightness not found in the original third volume. The overall result is the successful blending of a youthful point of view with mature judgment, which focuses on Rogiers self-destructive quest for psychic wholeness outside of himself. It is the story of a man alien to the land, fighting the landperhaps epitomic for the whole white European experi36 ence in North America. Perhaps the greatest historic example of such alienation and its effects is to be found in Waterss next work, To Possess the Land (1972), the biography of Arthur Rochford Manby. Manby was one of the most unscrupulous, intelligent, immoral, and mysterious figures in the history of the American West. He seems to have been a mass of contradictionsa brilliant promoter, a sensitive art connoisseur, and a ruthless land-grabber. This biography, which reads like a novel but which is superbly documented, combines three points of view in presenting the Manby story. In his introduction, Waters suggests that the story can be dealt with as a psychological case study, a western mystery story, or a documented history of the unscrupulous land promoters. While Waters modestly suggests that it would be impossible to construct a book that would synthesize all three points of view, that is precisely what he has accomplished. He begins with the western horror story and, with typical Waters time sense, with the epilogue. Here is related the discovery of Manbys corpse (the body in one room, the head in another) and the immediate appointment of a coroners jury, which decides that Manby had died of natural causes and that his dog had chewed off his head and carried it to another roomwithout spilling a drop of blood. The story builds from that point, and at least one of the three storytelling points of view is constantly presented to the reader. While the psychological approach presents a man completely . . . possessed by his shadow, that negative and usually re37 pressed aspect of the dual nature of each of us, on a larger scale the work 947
is an indictment of all corporations, railroads, politicians, lawyers, and individual land-grabbers who were quick to realize that the U.S. government had no intention of observing the provisions of its treaty with Mexico protecting the land rights of the Spanish Americans. That is, the book presents Manbys personal corruption against a background of political, economic, and social corruption. In Manbys final degeneration we see a historic illustration of the attitude of all white settlers who regarded the land as an in38 animate treasure house to be exploited for their material benefit and perhaps of their inevitable fate also. Almost all of Frank Waterss themes and theories are brought together in his next work, Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth World of Consciousness (1975). Here he synthesizes an enormous mass of knowledge about the people of ancient Mexico, their history, myths, symbols, archetypes, cosmology, and astrology, noting in particular the dualities: The antinomy is expressed in many ways: light and darkness, male and female, good and evil, spirit and matter, instinct and reason, God and Satan, the conscious and unconscious. The conflict between these bi-polar opposites and the necessity for superseding it is the great theme running through the mythology, symbology, and religious philosophy of pre-Columbian Americathe 39 Mexico mystique. He then goes beyond the usual academic integration to relate this material to numerous theosophical systems, to Jungian psychology, to astrology, and to world mythology in general. He suggests that his conclusions tend to show that the ancient civilization of Mesoamerica was basically religious; that its spiritual beliefs still constitute a living religion perpetuated by the contemporary Pueblos of the Southwest; and that this common religious system of all Indian America embodies the tenets of a global belief expressed in terms of Christianity, Buddhism (and other religious philosophies of the East), 40 and in modern Western analytical psychology. A large part of the work is focused on explaining and interpreting the ancient Mesoamerican calendar system which measured time in Great Cycles of 5,125 years, each marking the duration of a world or era. According to the astronomical calculations of the Mayas, their last Great Cycle and the present Fifth World began in 3113 B.C., and its end was projected to 2011 A. D. This date also marks the end of the present great 25,920-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes. At this time, the Aztecs and Mayas believed the present world would be destroyed by a cataclysm and
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replaced by a sixth worlda belief similar to the contemporary Hopi prophecy of the end of the Fourth World. According to Waters, these worlds are but dramatic allegories for the successive states of mans ever-expanding consciousness. Other apocalyptic interpretations also allude to what he calls the coming sixth world of consciousness as a new beginning through a convergence of past and present, 41 East and West, the archaic and the civilized. At that time, Waters hopefully suggests, the resolution of our universal paradoxes will begin at a higher level. Here we have synthesis on a cosmic scale. In the way that Pumpkin Seed Point followed Book of the Hopi, so Mountain Dialogues, another collection of personal essays, has followed Mexico Mystique. These essays deal with what at first glance appear to be incredibly disparate topics, ranging from the next-door neighbors to the nature and meaning of man. The various themes, however, are tightly interwoven emerging, disappearing, and reemerging throughout the selectionsand the meaning of each separate essay thus becomes ultimately dependent upon what has been said both before and after its appearance in the book. Here Waters acknowledges his sources, major influences, experiences, and interests. Continually enlarging his scope throughout the book, he is able to observe with validity toward its end: The nature of the world and [the nature] of man as perceived by the great civilizations of the past in Egypt, India, Tibet, China, and Mexico have already been briefly outlined. Because of its personal nature, Mountain Dialogues reveals more about Waters himself than he has revealed in any of his previous works. At the same time it presents a world view which, while thoroughly that of a western American, is worthy of international consideration. Accompanying Mountain Dialogues has been another major, scholarly workthe editing (in conjunction with this author) of W. Y. Evans-Wentzs Cuchama and Sacred Mountains (1981) for posthumous publication. This work, while not a definitive study of the sacred mountains of the world, is a monumental attempt by the great scholar of Tibetan Buddhism to correlate Eastern religion with that of Native Americans through their mutual reverence of the sacred earth. Having reposed in a Stanford University safe for fifteen years, the manuscript sorely needed updating and restructuring. Frank Waters has provided not only the internal annotation but the Introduction and Addendum needed to frame this work for a 1981 reading audience. Here, once again, Waters observes the opposing views of the whites and the Indians, two entirely different views of nature, two conflicting atti-
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tudes toward the land. He once more reaffirms his faith in inevitable, ultimate synthesis: This reconciliation will take a long time, but it will inexorably take place, in compliance with the spiritual laws governing the 42 evolution of all life throughout the universe.
C HARLES L. ADAMS , University
of Nevada, Las Vegas
Notes
1. Frank Waters, The Western Novel: A Symposium, South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964): 1415. 2. Dates hereafter reflect the time when Waters was first working on a manuscript. A major consideration in Waters scholarship is the fact that he has no compunctions about completing a manuscript and then putting it away for ten, or even twenty or more years before reworking it for publication. (I am aware of one very beautiful novel in cold storage at the time of this writing.) Actual publication dates may be found in the bibliography. 3. Conversation with the author, August 31, 1976. 4. Horace Liveright, who accepted this novel for publication, wrote Waters about . . . your very fine novel to which you have given the ghastly and I think cheap title, The Lizard Woman. He goes on to suggest the possibility of Blood Heat or Painted Waves. It is quite possible that Liveright, while appreciating the value of the manuscript, did not perceive the significance of the title as a place name. (Letter of June 20, 1929.) 5. Thomas J. Lyon, Frank Waters (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 69. Lyon also quite rightly notes, . . . Fever Pitch is not . . . a bad book. 6. Conversation with Frank Waters, January 27, 1974. 7. Frank Waters, reading from Pikes Peak, Crossing Frontiers convocation, Banff, Canada, April 12, 1978. 8. Frank Waters, The Earp Brothers of Tombstone (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960), p. 4.
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9. The Earp Brothers, p. 6. 10. The Earp Brothers, p. 7. 11. Frank Waters, Midas of the Rockies (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937), p. 18. 12. Midas of the Rockies, p. 18. 13. Midas of the Rockies, p. 19. 14. Midas of the Rockies, p. 14. 15. Lyon, p. 135. 16. Frank Waters, The Dust Within the Rock (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1940), p. 533. 17. The Dust Within the Rock, p. 534. 18. Frank Waters, People of the Valley (N ew York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941), p. 177. 19. People of the Valley, p. 282. 20. People of the Valley, p. 134. 21. See also Frank Waters, Fifth World, Ninth Planet in Voices from the Southwest: A Gathering in Honor of Lawrence Clark Powell (Flagstaff, Arizona: Northland Press, 1976), pp. 5562. 22. Lyon, p. 107. 23. Thomas J. Lyon, The Works of Frank Waters, a taped lecture for Cassette Curriculum, Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1974. 24. Lyon, p. 143. 25. Frank Waters, The Woman at Otowi Crossing (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1971), p. 240. 26. The Woman at Otowi Crossing, p. 240. 27. Lyon, p. 131. 28. Gaspards superb portrait of Waters is now in the Adkins collection in Oklahoma. 29. Frank Waters, Pumpkin Seed Point (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1969), p. xi. 30. Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi (New York: Viking, 1963), p. x. 31. Lyon, p. 53. 32. Book of the Hopi, p. x. 33. In 1963, Waters had written Engineering Space Exploration: Robert Gilruth (Brittania BookshelfGreat Lives). Written for juvenile readers, this biography of the director of NASAs manned spacecraft center has been called the worlds dullest book about the worlds dullest mana sound literary judgment. 34. Pumpkin Seed Point, p. xii. 35. Lyon, p. 62. 36. Lyon, p. 133. 37. Frank Waters, To Possess the Land (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1973), p. viii. 38. Waters in The Western Novel: A Symposium, South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964), p. 14. 39. Frank Waters, Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth World of Consciousness (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1975), p. vii. 40. Mexico Mystique, p. ix.
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A Literary History of the American West 41. Jos Argelles, Sacred Calendar and World Order, Shambbala Review 4 (March/April 1976): 13. 42. Frank Waters, The Indian Renaissance, addendum to W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Cuchama and Sacred Mountains, Frank Waters and Charles L. Adams, eds. (Chicago: The Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 193.
Primary Sources ( in 1. Novels Fever Pitch. New York: Liveright, 1930. Republished, Austin: Thorp Springs Press, 1984, with the original title The Lizard Woman. The Wild Earths Nobility. New York: Liveright, 1935. Below Grass Roots. New York: Liveright, 1937. Dust Within the Rock. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1940. People of the Valley. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941; rpt. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 1984. The Man Who Killed the Deer. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942. Often reprinted; translated into German (as Martiniano und der Hirsch, 1959), French (as LHomme Qui A Tu Le Cerf, 1964), and Dutch (as De Man Die Her Hert Doodde, 1974). River Lady (with Houston Branch). New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942. Motion picture: Universal-International, 1949. The Yogi of Cockroach Court. New York: Rinehart, 1947; rpt. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1972. Diamond Head (with Houston Branch). New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1948. The Woman at Otowi Crossing. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1966. Pikes Peak. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971. 2. Non-Fiction The Colorado. Rivers of America Series. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1946. Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1950. The Book of the Hopi. New York: Viking, 1963, 1979. Translated into French (as Le Livre des Hopi, 1978), Swedish (as Livetsvag, 1979), and German (as Das Buch der Hopi, 1980). Leon Gaspard. Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1964. Pumpkin Seed Point. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1969, 1973. Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth World of Consciousness. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975. Mountain Dialogues. Chicago: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1981. (Edited with Charles L. Adams.) Cuchama and Sacred Mountains, by W. Y. EvansWentz. Chicago: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1981. chronological order)
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3. Biography Midas of the Rockies. New York: Covici-Friede, 1937; rpt. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1972. The Earp Brothers of Tombstone. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960. Engineering Space Exploration: Robert Gilruth. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Press, 1963. To Possess the Land. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1973. 4. Short Story Easy Meat. North American Review 231 (April 1931): 300309. Waterss second publication, and his only short story, concerns a prize fight, and a racial encounter, between an intuitive young Mexican and a coldly rational American. Told almost completely from the Mexicans point of view, the story shifts at the last minute to the Anglos, and effectively illustrates Waterss awareness of both points of viewhis sympathy with the intuitive but the inevitable victory of the rational. 5. Articles Relationships and the Novel. The Writer 56 (April 1943): 105107. In one of his few statements on the craft of writing, Waters emphasizes the distinction in fiction between details being connected with a dead fact and related by an emotional tie. Crucible of Conflict. The New Mexico Quarterly Review 18 (Autumn 1948): 273281. This concluding section of Masked Gods, while being somewhat difficult without the preceding 424 pages, functions very well as a separate essay on the similarity of Indian mysticism and atomic theory. The Western Novel: A Symposium. The South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964). In his contribution to this symposium, Waters discusses such topics as the term regionalist and the art of writing in general as well as his own work. Mysticism and Witchcraft. Fine Arts Series. Fort Collins: Colorado State University, 1966. Reprinted in South Dakota Review 15 (1977): 5970. Originally a lecture delivered at Colorado State University while Waters was Writer in Residence, this brilliant essay examines the legitimate mysticism and the perverted witchcraft of the Hopi and then relates these considerations to Anglo-European history, down to the present time. Quetzalcoatl. Versus D. H. Lawrences Plumed Serpent. Western American Literature 3 (Summer 1968): 103113. In this paper originally delivered before the Rocky Mountain American Studies Association, Waters criticizes Lawrence for fictionally restoring the Aztec vulgarization of Quetzalcoatl to Mexico in The Plumed Serpent, and concludes, In the intuitive recognition of spiritual unity, rather than that of racial disunity, lies the future of the world. Words. Western American Literature 3 (Fall 1968): 227234. This paper was originally delivered before the Western Literature Association when Waters was awarded Honorary Life Membership. He discusses the writers responsibility to
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A Literary History of the American West respect the integrity of words, drawing upon such diverse sources as the Bible, Levi-Strauss, Benjamin Lee Whorf and Clyde Kluckhohn. The Man Who Killed the DeerThirty Years Later. New Mexico Magazine (JanuaryFebruary 1972): 1623, 4950. This invaluable follow-up details the history not only of the writing and publication of the novel but of the eventual return of Blue Lake to the Indians of the Taos Pueblo. Crossroads: Indians and Whites. The South Dakota Review 11 (Autumn 1973): 2838. Originally a talk made at the Western Writers Conference in 1973, this article sums up, and provides background for, current white-Indian conflicts. 6. Unpublished sources The University of New Mexico has completed initial cataloguing of the Frank Waters papers. Secondary Sources Adams, Charles L., ed. Studies in Frank Waters, vol. 5: Frank Waters: Western Mystic. Las Vegas: The Frank Waters Society, 1982. This volume contains seven essays presented at the Special Session on Waters held at the Modern Language Association of Americas 1982 meeting. Each essay examines an aspect of Waterss mysticism. . Teaching Yogi in Las Vegas or Cockroach Court Revisited. South Dakota Review 15 (1977): 3742. Originally presented at the 1975 Modern Language Association meeting, this article assesses the novels recent success in terms of its popularity with students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and attempts to explain the novels so-long-overlooked meaning. Argelles, Jos. Sacred Calendar and World Order. The Shambbala Review 4 (1976): 1214. Review of Mexico Mystique. This excellent review of Mexico Mystique relates Waterss book to Fray Diego Durans Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar and Tony Shearers Beneath the Moon and Under the Sun: A Poetic Re-Appraisal of the Sacred Calendar and the Prophecies of Ancient Mexico. Bucco, Martin. Frank Waters. Southwest Writers Series. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1969. This first extended study of Waterss work is limited by the very fact of its date, but shows critical insightand foresight. Davis, June H., and Jack L. Davis. Frank Waters and the Native American Consciousness. Western American Literature 9 (1974): 3334. Originally presented at the 1973 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association meeting, this article examines Waterss attempts to bridge the psychic gap between two vastly disparate cultures (Indian and white) through a detailed analysis of The Man Who Killed the Deer, Masked Gods, Book of the Hopi, and The Woman at Otowi Crossing. . The Whorf Hypothesis and Native American Literature. South Dakota Review 14 (1976): 5972. Originally presented at the 1975 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, this article relates Whorfs
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theory that ones perception of reality is fundamentally shaped by his linguistic system to The Man Who Killed the Deer and to N. Scott Momadays House Made of Dawn. . Frank Waters Mexico Mystique: The Ontology of the Occult. South Dakota Review 15 (1977): 1724. Originally presented at the 1975 Modern Language Association meeting, this excellent analysis of Mexico Mystique relates Waterss concern with dualities to Robert E. Ornsteins left-brain, right-brain studies. Grigg, Quay. The Kachina Characters of Frank Waters Novels. South Dakota Review 11 (Spring 1973): 616. (This issue is dedicated to Frank Waters.) This sensitive interpretation of Waterss fiction, against the background of his nonfiction, explains the central characters of the novels in terms of the Hopi concept of kachina. . Frank Waters and the Mountain Spirit. South Dakota Review 15 (1977): 4549. Originally presented at the 1975 Modern Language Association meeting, this article is a lucid and concise interpretation of the Mountain as image and symbol in Frank Waterss work. Hoy, Christopher E. A Study of The Man Who Killed the Deer. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Colorado State University, 1970. By far the best M.A. thesis written on Waters (and one that deserves to be published in its entirety), this study consists of an analytical application of the concepts of Jung and Neumann to The Man Who Killed the Deer. Two excerpts from it have been published: . The Archetypal Transformation of Martiniano in The Man Who Killed the Deer. South Dakota Review 13 (1975): 4356. . The Conflict in The Man Who Killed the Deer. South Dakota Review 15 (1977): 5157. Kostka, Robert. Frank Waters and the Visual Sense. South Dakota Review 15 (1977): 2730. Originally presented at the 1975 Modern Language Association meeting, this unusual article is an appreciative commentary upon and explanation of Waterss visual sense, by a highly talented artist. Lyon, Thomas J. Frank Waters. New York: Twayne, 1973. Students of Frank Waterss work will find this informative guide invaluable. It is analytical, carefully reasoned, and (with the acceptable omission of some of the commercial writing) quite thorough. . An Ignored Meaning of the West. Western American Literature 3 (Spring 1968): 5159. Originally presented at the 1967 meeting of the Western Literature Association, this is an excellent study of Waters as a writer who fits himself into the patterns of western nature rather than observing from the outside. . Frank Waters and the Concept of Nothing Special. South Dakota Review 15 (1977): 3135. Originally presented at the 1975 meeting of the Modern Language Association, this study of The Woman at Otowi Crossing, The Man Who Killed the Deer, and The Yogi of Cockroach Court suggests that a key to Waters metaphysics and to his psychology of characterization can be found in his advice to tune ourselves to the authentic, wild reality. . Frank Waters. In Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook,
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A Literary History of the American West edited by Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982. This excellent chapter on Waters, organized under the headings Biography, Major Themes, and Survey of Criticism, examines concisely Waterss intellectual concerns primarily in the light of The Woman at Otowi Crossing. Manchester, John. Frank Waters. South Dakota Review 15 (1977): 7380. The author, a close friend of Waters and for many years his neighbor in Taos, New Mexico, has written an intimate, personal view of Waters and his work. An earlier and longer version of this article may be found in Encanto (July/August 1970): 47. Milton, J., ed. Conversations with Frank Waters. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1971. In this transcription of seven taped television interviews, Waters discusses a variety of topics, including autobiographical anecdotes, his own writing, and his personal theories and values. . The American West: A Challenge to the Literary Imagination. Western American Literature 1 (Winter 1967): 267284. This first-rate discussion of the unique problem faced by western writers in utilizing the Wests vast and varied landscapes points out Waterss success in dealing with land in mystical terms. . The Land as Form in Frank Waters and William Eastlake. Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring 1970): 104109. The discussion of the landscape problem is extended and applied to Waterss Colorado trilogy and William Eastlakes Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses and The Bronc People to illustrate that western writers are able to use land as symbol, metaphor, and the source of metaphysics and hence that the expansive land becomes the expansive form. . The Sound of Space. South Dakota Review 15 (1977): 1115. Originally presented at the 1975 meeting of the Modern Language Association, this article contrasts Waterss work with that of Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Harvey Fergusson to show that . . . it is the differences that allow Waters to stand apart, to have special significance, and to be relatively ignored or misunderstood outside the area in which he lives. Peterson, James. A Conversation with Frank Waters: Lessons from the Indian Soul. Psychology Today 7 (May 1973): 63ff. . A Reverent Connection with the Earth. Psychology Today 7 (May 1973): 6667. The first of these two excellent articles is perhaps the best published interview with Waters. The second is Petersons revealing account of the interview. Pilkington, William T. Character and Landscape: Frank Waters Colorado Trilogy. Western American Literature 2 (Fall 1967): 183193. This perceptive analysis (and early appreciation) of the out-of-print trilogy suggests that it ought to be re-printed. The author comments effectively on Waterss use of land as character. Tanner, Terence A. Frank Waters: A Bibliography with Relevant Selections from his Correspondence. Glenwood, Illinois: Meyerbooks, 1983. By far the best piece of scholarship done on Waters to date, this bibliography gives the complete publication history of Waterss writing from 1916 to 1981. Most of Waterss major
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works are introduced by invaluable correspondence detailing each works genesis and development. Tarbet, Tom. The Hopi Prophecy and the Chinese Dream. EastWest (May 1977): 5264. This relatively recent interview was done after Waterss return from The Peoples Republic of China and examines some similarities between Native Americans and the Chinese.
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who came to prominence during or after 1950, Jack Warner Schaefer (1907 ) stands as one of the most versatile and highly regarded. Working in a variety of genres and styles, Schaefer brings to his writing a clear-cut sense of professionalism, a deeply felt commitment to the storytellers craft, and a keen ear for the spoken word. He adds to these qualities a growing sense of concern for the life and environment of the American West, and a sympathetic knowledge of the persons who inhabit the region. His thirty-year career as western author has given rise to a score of books varied in nature, consistent in theme, and unfailingly revealing of ideas and concerns central to the growth of the West. Schaefers own life parallels, in a way, the course of western history, for it reflects a general movement from east to west. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he graduated in 1929 from Oberlin College and traveled east to New York, for graduate study at Columbia University. Soon disillusioned by what he felt was the academic narrowness of the curriculum, he gave up his quest for a graduate degree and turned to journalism. Here he was somewhat happier, working with newspapers in Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia, and try, ing his hand at fiction. The success of his first novel, Shane (1949), led him to other works on the American West. As his involvement with western materials became deeper, he felt the need to go west, and, in 1955, moved to New Mexico. That state has remained his home, except for a brief sojourn in California during the early 1970s. An early decision to avoid doing the same kind of thing over and over just because a first one had been successful gives Schaefers work, nonfiction as well as fiction, unusual variety. Much of his non-fiction is straightforward expositionhis series of travel articles (19551965) for Holiday magazine, or his volume in the States of the Nation Series, New Mexico (1967). Some, though, is more argumentative, intended to revise and clarify the image of western life held by the public; here one finds such works as Heroes Without Glory: Some Goodmen of the Old West (1965) and An American Bestiary (1975). Even more varied are the books for which he is best known, his fiction. Two are short juvenile works: Old Ramon (1960), a moving account of an old sheepherder, a boy, and a dog, and Stubby Pringles Christmas (1964), a comic fantasy involving a young cowboys efforts to get to a Christmas party.
F THE WESTERN WRITERS
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Four, including The Pioneers (1954) and The Plainsmen (1963), are volumes of short stories focusing upon the men and women of the early West; some of the tales are comic, others are poignant, and all convey a sympathetic recognition of human realities. Most of his books, though, are novels. Ranging from Shane and The Canyon (1953) to Company of Cowards (1957), Monte Walsh (1963), and Mavericks (1967), these works present the most extended statement of his ideas. Varying in era from the prehistory of The Canyon to the 1960s of Mavericks, all are set in the western heartland (the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains) and all tell of the people and forces working in the regions settlement. Schaefers status as a significant western author seems assured. His work has enjoyed considerable popular success: Shane has been widely reprinted and has been translated into more than two dozen languages, while Stubby Pringles Christmas has been seen as a prime-time television special. Five of his books have been filmed, and two of the films, Shane and Monte Walsh, have been critically acclaimed. More indicative of his stature, though, is the growing body of scholarly attention being paid to his work. As serious critics and students have become aware of his writings, the depth, breadth, and coherence of his intellectual and artistic achievement have become more apparent. Calling himself a worker in the ancient tradition of taletellers, Schaefer sets comparatively modest goals for himself and his works. He effectively realizes these goals, creating a coherent, consistent view of the changing American West and making an influential contribution to western letters. In developing his tales of the West, Schaefer repeatedly employs a cluster of related themes. Most are present in most of his books, though normally one stands out in a given story; all are perceptible in his early writings; and all undergo expansion and evolution as his art and thought mature. Underlying all of the themes is his essential romanticism. He is a romantic in the optimistic Emersonian mold, concerned with exploring the varieties of individualism and principled action as they flourish in the West. He is, by and large, confident of the ability of the human individual to overcome obstacles personal, social, or natural. If that confidence wavers somewhat in his last books, it is nonetheless at the heart of his more general view of human life and ambition. The simplest of the themes that Schaefer utilizes is that of straightforward individualism. He is, as author, concerned with the solitary individual, the person moving in lonely, independent fashion across the landscape. Given its first and most memorable statement in Shane, the gunfighter seeking to break away from his violent past, this character appears also in such persons as Little Bear, the non-conforming Indian of The Canyon; Jared Heath, the strong-minded sergeant of Company of Cowards; and Monte 959
Walsh, the roving cowboy who outlives his time. Each of these persons, by choice or by circumstance, stands alone; the success or failure of each, though unquestionably affected by events outside him, ultimately depends upon his own self-reliance and competence. Schaefers concern in writing about individualism is two-fold. He seeks, first, to make a statement concerning the importance of self-knowledge. Each of his protagonists must, sooner or later, confront himself for what he is. Shanes words are typical: A man is what he is, Bob, and theres no breaking the mold. The essential self of the person, whatever it may be, must be accepted for what it is, much as an Emerson might insist. This acceptance leads to Schaefers second concern. Having recognized what his essential qualities are, the individual must then go on to live by these qualities as consistently and as honorably as he is able. Thus, Schaefer balances self-knowledge with integrity, suggesting, like Emerson, that the ultimate sin is the violation of ones own self. More complex than simple individualism, yet building directly upon it, is his second characteristic theme. This theme is the nature of the individual in society, for Schaefer, like his forebears Emerson and Thoreau, recognizes the impossibility of wholly divorcing ones self from society. Accepting the reality of the here and the now of which he writes, he proceeds to investigate the many ways in which the person and the society act upon each other. In advancing this investigation, he starts, not surprisingly, with individual integrity. Living up to ones self-responsibility is a traditional, even hackneyed, western motif, but Schaefer goes beyond the stereotype, using the motif not as an end (as in The Virginian ), but as a beginning. No matter how isolated a Schaefer protagonist may be, he must sooner or later face up to his responsibility to the society of which he is a part. Society, for him, is not necessarily a pernicious force; rather, it is a necessary, even inevitable component of life, and must be taken in ones stride. Little Bear, of The Canyon, is a case in point. Unwilling to accept the warlike habits of his tribe, he confronts the essential difficulty: It is fitting that a man do as the customs of his tribe tell him. It is fitting too that no man do what his heart tells him is wrong. That is hard. He must be certain that his heart speaks truth to him. Other characters face similar dilemmas: Jess Harker of First Blood (1953) must balance youthful exuberance and the discipline of his stage-line employer; Ben Hammond of The Kean Land (1959) has to balance frontier freedoms and the strictures of civilized law. Out of the resulting dialectic, though, emerges a synthesis, and both the individual and the society are the better for it. At the heart of that synthesis is Schaefers belief that society and individual are interdependent. Neither, ultimately, can exist without the other.
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In this, too, his Emersonianism is apparent. He is concerned, in many of his works, with establishing a distinct and individual human character and [pitting] him against a specific human problem. That problem, more often than not, is a limited one: the advent of homestead laws; the fading away of the old-style ranch; the necessity of military discipline; or the preserving of a stage lines schedule and traditions. As each character deals with the problem at hand, he comes to understand what he can contribute to the larger society, and what that society can contribute to him. The two, as even Thoreau came to see, are inseparable. The individualsociety relationship is largely an inward one; that is, the society affects the ideas and beliefs of a specific person, and that person, in varying ways, affects the nature and direction of the particular society to which he belongs. Another, outward, kind of relationship also exists, though, which leads to Schaefers third, and most complex, theme. This is the relationship of the individual and the environmentnatural as well as social. Schaefers forsaking of fiction-writing and his moving to literary environmentalism after 1967 are well documented. His basic attitudes, however, are apparent from the start of his first works, and the two-way interaction of society and the environment plays an important part in the progression of his writings. That human society leaves its mark on the land is obvious; Schaefer makes much of this simple truth. A central scene in Shane involves the clearing of ground for a farm and the uprooting of the last remaining tree stump. First Blood tacitly records the criss-crossing of the West by roads and telegraph wires. The Kean Land opens with a somber evocation of real estate development, the parceling-out of homesteads, and the coming of the city. Mines, bridges, and railroads permeate Monte Walsh, and the landscape of Mavericks is laced with interstate highways and overhung with smog. Changed, too, are older ways of life: Brent Keans homestead farm must give way to parking lots and shopping centers, just as Monte Walshs Slash Y Ranch is absorbed into an eastern-based syndicate. Progress comes in a variety of forms, and each exacts its cost. Because humanity advances itself at the expense of the land, Schaefer suggests, it creates for itself a corresponding obligation to the flora and fauna of the region; as the individual and the society are related, so are the society and the environment. This view informs much of The Canyon, as Little Bear comes to know and respect the complex network of the ecosystem of which he is a part. It becomes explicit in Mavericks, as Jake Hanlon realizes that he, too, all unknowing and unthinking, had been a part of that deadly creeping conquest called the advance of civilization. And it forms the essential core of An American Bestiary and Conversations
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with a Pocket Gopher (1978), as Schaefer relates, part straightforwardly, part fancifully, the close ties between humanity and nature, and the ways in which the race has come to abuse those ties. His treatment of these dominant themes is in some ways ambivalent. He is, to be sure, generally optimistic in his view of humanity. Again and again in his works, someone, usually a young person, comes to a new understanding of life and responsibility; from this understanding comes maturity, for maturity, to Schaefer, consists of the ability to see and do what is right right not so much in the eyes of the individual or the society, but right in a greater, broader sense. This optimism appears in even the darkest of his works, Conversations with a Pocket Gopher, for in his Conversation with a Bat he has his winged mentor remark, I have faith that in the long run you will uphold the honor of the mammalian brotherhood, will restore and maintain this world as a better homeland for all of us. The human race canand may yetlearn, grow, and mature. Yet there is an undeniable strain of pessimism present in his work. For all his protestations about the ability of humanity to grow, Schaefer seems at heart not totally persuaded. A degree of this uncertainty is overt: he expresses his doubts outright in his two nature books. But a greater degree is covert, reflected in the nature and fates of his various protagonists. Although these protagonists do, in varying ways, gain the self-knowlege that he holds so vital, they seem less and less able to profit from their knowledge. Thus, while a Shane, a Joe Starrett, or a Jared Heath can use his new understanding to face the world with confidence, later protagonists are less assured. Monte Walsh dies an outcast and a failure in the eyes of all save himself and his best friend, and Jake Hanlons perception of his part in the onslaught of progress comes only as he dies, too late to serve him or his life. The virtuosity of Schaefers writings becomes apparent when one examines them in their order of appearance. Employing a variety of narrative forms, points of view, and stylistic patterns, he produces a body of work solidly grounded in the storytelling tradition, yet going beyond stereotypes and formulas to make a series of revealing points about the human condition. Whatever the plot he unfolds or the characters with which he enacts it, Schaefer remains the concerned, contemplative observer of the human race. He is aware of the foibles and the graces of humankind, and uses his skill to transmit his perceptions to his readers. All of these qualities are apparent in Shane. To the casual reader, the book seems little more than yet another gunfighter Western, cast in a familiar mold. A peaceful valley is tom by strife between two factions; a ruthless cattle baron on the one hand, a group of homesteading farmers on the other. Into this setting rides a stranger, known only as Shane and equipped
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with a mysterious, faintly sinister past. Joining the homesteaders, Shane attempts to become a part of their life, learning the practical skills of the farmer. When the cattle baron resorts to violence, though, the stranger sheds his agrarian shell, resumes his pistol, and, in a climactic shootout, makes the valley safe for domesticity. No more hackneyed, formulaic plot can be imagined. Yet Schaefer transcends the formula, making of Shane a far more complex story than a plot summary indicates. This he does in part through the charactersthemselves, on the surface, stereotypes. On examination, though, the stereotypes appear tempered by other qualities. The cattle baron, Luke Fletcher, is a strong-willed yet oddly sensitive person; his flaw is one of age, for he has been too powerful for too long, and is no longer able to adapt to changing times. Opposing him are the homesteaders, reluctantly led by Joe Starrett and his family. Here, too, are familiar characters: Starrett is a cowboy turned farmer; his wife, Marion, is New England-born; and their son, young Bob, stands by as wide-eyed observer and retrospective narrator. But the Starretts also vary from the formula: Joe acknowledges the once-upon-a-time rightness of Fletchers views, while espousing a more realistic approach to the modern West, while Marion, no school-marmy innocent, is intelligent, forthright, and knowing in the ways of human life. Completing the triangle is Shane himselfsouthern-born and adept with a gun. His significance becomes clear when he is confronted by Stark Wilson, Fletchers hired killer; though himself a practiced gunfighter, he knows, unlike Wilson, that the West is becoming a region of laws and society, no longer having room for the footloose gunmen of the past. That Shane finally takes up his gun is Schaefers nod to the formula; that he uses the gun to clear the way for civilization, then vanishes into the dusk, is Schaefers break with it. Knowing that his time, like Wilsons, is over, Shane mounts up and rides away. His final comment makes the point clear: Theres only one thing more I can do for them now. He has removed an obstacle to progress; now he, too, must disappear, lest he himself become another obstacle. Building his story upon these characters, Schaefer develops themes that recur throughout his later works. He speaks, obviously, of social and civic responsibility: Shane, the individual, risks his life not for personal gain, but for the good of the community that is and the community that will be. He is equally concerned with recording the changing West. The novel is set in 1889, one year before the closing of the frontier, and deals explicitly with the confrontation of old ways (ranching) and new (farming). And he examines most fully of all the matter of self-knowledge, which he here ties to the maturing of the young and the growth of the society. The entire book
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is colored by its retrospective point of view (it is narrated by Bob Starrett, now an adult), and centers upon a single remark of Shanes. Having brutally beaten one of Fletchers cowhands in a saloon skirmish, he says to his victim, Theres only one thing really wrong with you. Youre young. Thats the one thing time can always cure. Shane knows himself, as he knows that his day is gone. Similar self-knowledge is essential for every person, and can come if the individual will but let it. Schaefers versatility is apparent in his second major work, The Canyon. The success of Shane gave him an incentive to continue writing, and he filled the years between 1949 and 1953 with a succession of short stories and the short novel, First Blood. In The Canyon, however, he produced a book that, from the outset, he was certain would have little commercial success. He wrote it, he has said, because it was the book he wanted to write, and because it gave him a chance to develop his arguments that one can create literature out of western material. The result is the book that remains his favoritea compact, clean-cut story using western situations and contexts to speak to some of the most universal of human concerns. The plot of The Canyon is as simple as that of Shane. Little Bear, a Cheyenne Indian, is an outcast from his tribe, for he refuses to take part in their wars. Seeking to clarify his motives for this action, he undertakes an ordeal of solitary fasting, waiting for revelation from the spirits of the plains. The ordeal exacts its toll; delirious from lack of food, he stumbles over the rim of a canyon and falls to the bottom, breaking his leg. As he recuperates from his injury, a prisoner in the sealed-off canyon, he comes to understand himself and the forces of nature. He is a part of a closed ecosystem, and must adapt to his niche, or perish. When he escapes from the canyon, he returns to his tribe, wins a wife, and takes her back to theto himidyll of the canyon. The death of his infant son and a new understanding of his wifes grief, however, cause him to return once more to his tribeno less a pacifist than before, but willing to compromise, at last a man with a fuller grasp of his obligations to self and society. Two characters stand out in The Canyon. One is the badger that instructs Little Bear in the ways of the world, anticipating the voluble animals of the Conversations. Speaking for the realities of nature, the badger points out that life of any sort, like the canyon itself, is a box: Why do you feel that this canyon is a cage. . . ? All men live in cages. . . . They are shut in on all sides by rock walls of custom and the desire for the good opinion of their neighbors. They are bound by the need to provide food for their families. The other is Little Bear himself. A misfit since childhood, he has responded by refusing his social obligations; the tribe will have none of him, so he will have none of the tribe. His stay in the canyon, his conversations
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with the badger, and his new awareness of the human relationships fostered by his marriage change this view. He comes at last to realize that one man cannot change a tribe. But one man can live with a tribe and not let it change him too much. Thus enlightened, he faces his people and his duties with new equanimity. Here, as in Shane, Schaefer uses a simple story to advance a complex argument. He is again concerned with the interaction of the principled individual and the broader society. Little Bear is a person of principle and integrity; there is a case to be made for his stand, but there is also a case to be made for the tribe. Plains Indian life is a closely integrated undertaking, and each member of a tribe must contribute to the well-being of all. Little Bear initially threatens that integration, and only slowly comes to see that he can adhere to his principles yet do his share. Moreover, Schaefer is concerned with the need for peace between the individual and the society. The association is a complementary one rather than an antagonistic one, if only the participants will take time to understand all that is involved. And, finally, he is concerned with self-knowledgethat understanding of self and society that enables Little Bear, like Emersons self-reliant individual, to keep within the midst of the crowd the sweetness of solitude. All action ultimately involves sacrifice. If Little Bear gives up the solitude of the canyon, he acquires a greater satisfaction in his settling into his niche in the tribe. Monte Walsh, Schaefers longest novel, continues the authors experimentation with style and form. Combining Bildungsroman and picaresque tale, it is almost plotless, revealing in its structure and format the short stories from which it evolves. And it, too, comprises familiar incidents, following young Monte from his running away from home in 1872 through his association with the Slash Y Ranch and his years as saddle bum and drifter to his death in 1913. Each specific incident, like those in Shane, has countless western forebears; the aggregate, however, has a freshness that the parts do not suggest, for Schaefer once more uses the microcosm of the West to comment upon the world in general. Lifting the book from the ordinary are its characters. Schaefer assembles a widely varied cast of supporting characters to back up his protagonists. Each contributes a bit to the education of Monte and the advancing of the argument. The aging Cal Brennan organizes the Slash Y, then watches as it is absorbed by an eastern syndicate; his conscientious work as manager illustrates Schaefers views on accepting the realities of the world. Dobe Chavez, Mexican outlaw, finds that roping cattle for a salary is more satisfying than raising hell in bordertown cantinas; a man of competence, intelligence, and integrity, he adjusts to the changing world. Chavez ultimately becomes a
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lawman; Powder Kent, another gunman turned cowboy, dies in a gun battle with horse thieves, and his epitaph, A Good Man With a Gun, marks the passing of a way of life as well as that of a man. Yellow-Hair Hattie, saloon girl and prostitute, initiates Monte into manhood, yet later teaches him the responsibilities of friendship. Even Plug-Hat Platt, the syndicate bookkeeper, adds his part; a man of debits and credits, cash flow and figures, he nonetheless responds to the tightly woven fabric of western life and values. Varied though the background cast is, the book is dominated by its two protagonists, Chet Rollins and Monte Walsh. Monte, to be sure, is the focal point of the action, but he cannot be separated from Chet. The two are complements, each balancing the other. Chet is solid and serious, keeping an eye on the main chance and always a jump ahead figuring a better way. Not surprisingly, he easily adapts to changing times: he buys into a livery stable, expands it to a farm supply, rises to bank director and town councilman, and becomes at last a state legislator. Monte, on the other hand, is the incurable drifter, impetuous and indifferent to the future. Leaving the Slash Y after Chets marriage, he drifts from job to job, an aging remnant of a world no longer his to command, until he dies of pneumonia brought on by a quixotic effort to rescue a trapped mining crew. The two are obviously intended to work together. Yet neither is complete without the other, and if Chet is the more successful (in the eyes of the world), he acknowledges the part that Monte plays, knowing that, without the Montes of old, Its a lonesome lonesome world. Schaefers themes grow from the story in as leisurely fashion as the story itself progresses. He is writing, clearly, of the passing of the old Westthe consolidation of ranches under syndicate ownership, the transition of Rollins from cowpoke to businessman, and the inexorable dying off of the older types make this patent. But he writes, too, of the specific personal qualities that define his heroes. A passer-by, seeing Monte handling a bronc, remarks: He wasnt any drifting saddle tramp. He was a whole man an hed be one wherever he was and whatever he might be doing an right then he was doing what he was born to do. As he notes in Shane, the whole man, even if a remnant of a past time, is a person complete in himself, a person to be admired. The last of Schaefers western novels, Mavericks, continues his elegiac account of the West as it was and the West as it has become. It also continues his variation of style and format, concentrating upon a shorter span of time than any of his other books, yet opening this brief time to encompass almost a century of time past. Cleanly and directly written, it has drawn considerable attention from young readers; however, in content and intent it is very much a book for all. Schaefer himself calls it some kind of
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epitaph, and uses it to mark the end not only of a way of life, but the end of his traditional fiction. Mavericks relates the last days of Old Jake Hanlon, like Monte Walsh a cowpuncher who has outlived his era. As he sits in the silence of his tumbledown adobe house, his mind roams over the events of ninety-odd years of western life. He has rounded up the wild mustangs of the plains. He has, with one horse, won a five-hundred-mile race, and rescued another horse from dray service in Chicago. An old man at last, he has taken to freeing the mustangs still rounded up by market hunters. And, finally, he dies, suddenly and tragically conscious of the part he has played in ending the western life he has loved. As in Monte Walsh, Schaefer supplies a full gallery of characters. Those of the present are somehow lacking: Assistant District Attorney Philip Myers, ambitious and impatient; Sheriff Victorio Montoya, sympathetic but faintly cynical; and Henry W. Harper, son of Jakes old employer, ruefully aware of his own place among the pillow people who use money and influence where an earlier generation used principle. Against this group, Old Jake, with his hard-bitten integrity, stands out dramatically. He is, like Shane, Little Bear, and Monte Walsh, a person who has lived in the old West, and knows it as well as he knows himself. If he has remained true to his ideals, the West has changed, and with that change, he has become an anachronism. Moreover, he comes to realize, he has contributed to that change by helping to civilize the West, so that, he says, I aint no different. . . . Im tarred with the same dirty stick. All that excuses his guilt is that he has acted from principle, not avarice. With Mavericks, Schaefer completes his chronicle of human life in the West. The realization that comes to old Jake he seems to share, for the writing of the book he says led him to see that he was a part of the whole damnable process of so-called civilization which was ruining this world in which we live. The realization is a crucial one. Mavericks is a tale of endings, just as it is a book of the present. Yet it is a book of the past as well, a movingly wistful farewell to a life simpler, cleaner, and closer to the realities of nature than that of the present. Henry Harper speaks for Schaefer in driving home the point. To Jake he says: Something that was mighty good in its own way will be missing when youre . . . gone. But its inevitable. Inevitable, perhaps, but no cause for celebration. The increasing concern with human interrelations, growth of awareness, and environmental responsibility reflected in Schaefers fiction takes a new form in his last two books. These, An American Bestiary and Conversations with a Pocket Gopher, are nominally non-fiction. Both state his own awakening to his place in human society and his relationship with the en-
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vironment. The writing of Mavericks, Schaefer says, awoke within him the realization that he had lost [his] innocencean innocence expressed in his assumption that the human race could be judged in light of those scattered individuals who do manage to attain a high level of decency in living and/or admirable achievement. This, he says, is fallacious. Rather than being judged by its exceptions, he continues, humanity, like any other natural species, should be judged as a whole. If one does this, then one must perforce conclude that the race is more ignoble than noble, and that there is little hope for ultimate human advancement. As a result, he cannot help but see that the course of human history is a sequence of depredations, in which some persons stand out as primary offenders, but in which all, including himself, participate as equally guilty parties. This argument he advances in his two books of nature studies. An American Bestiary is the more orthodox of the two. Twelve expository essays on selected southwestern fauna (armadillo, peccary, mountain lion, gopher, etc.), it embraces Schaefers readings of natural history, his observations of the animals, and his conclusions. Its tone is conversational; he speaks in the first person, and does not hesitate to intrude himself as narrator in the course of the exposition. The descriptions of the animals themselves, moreover, are deliberately anthropomorphic. Warning the reader of his intentions from the outset, he presents the animals as acting in ways that parallel or illuminate human life. The result is an informative, faintly unsettling bookas it is intended to be. Schaefer has two aims in the essays. First, he wants to awaken a desire on the part of his readers to seek out further information, learning more of the fauna that inhabit the region. And, second, he wants to place human activities alongside those of the animal kingdom, so that readers will come to perceive the solitary, individual route of animal progression as opposed to the communal, cooperative route of humanity. An animal, he says, has only its innate qualities plus a small amount of learned experience. It must, therefore, deal with the world in first-hand, simple fashion. Humanity, on the other hand, is equipped with innate qualities plus the fruits of generations of cultural evolution. Thus prepared, the human acts in a culturally determined way, and is largely ignorant of the backgroundand consequencesof his actions. The result, for Schaefer, is a voyage of discovery, undertaken to make amends for [his] past attitude toward [his] fellow creatures. Less orthodox is the Conversations with a Pocket Gopher. Building upon his studies for the Bestiary, Schaefer presents what purport to be chats with six of the creatures included in the earlier bookgopher, shrew, bat, kangaroo rat, jaguar, and puma. Each has its own personality, and each ad-
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vances a particular point of view. The gopher speaks to the matter of land use and ownership; the bat chides humanity for two-dimensional thinking that blinds the race to probable consequences of actions; the zoo-bound puma and jaguar debate weaponry and human specialization. All give Schaefer an opportunity to develop his thesis of human participation in environmental degradation. All over the world other animals are trying to talk to us. Their tragedyand oursis that so few of us even try to learn how to listen to them. The Bestiary and the Conversations show Schaefer at his most pessimistic. Mankind, he says, by devoting itself to the nominal betterment of life by technological development, has too often worked toward an immediate, short-term solution of a problem, rather than pausing to consider the long-range consequences that may result. The outcome has often been disastrous, resulting in erosion, pollution, and nuclear fallout. Yet the works are not wholly dark. Evolution, he suggests, is not necessarily over. If the human race is in constant rebellion against the facts of existence, it is also a relatively recent addition to the mammalian roster, and can be considered an unfinished experiment. The verdict for or against humanity is not yet in, and can go either way. Calling himself a hopeless case, he casts his vote for the ability of mankind to grow and to learn, accepting at last the obligations of the natural world, and arriving at the maturity of which it is capable. Like the characters of whom he has written, he has found his niche and made his adaptation. Too perceptive an observer to ignore empirical reality or to espouse simplistic solutions, he remains too genuine a human being to reject the races potential.
F RED E RISMAN , Texas
Christian University
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Primary Sources An American Bestiary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. The Collected Stories of Jack Schaefer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. (All of Schaefers short stories published through 1963.) Conversations with a Pocket Gopher. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1978. Heroes Without Glory: Some Goodmen of the Old West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Mavericks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. Monte Walsh. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Shane: The Critical Edition. Edited by James C. Work. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. The Short Novels of Jack Schaefer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. (Shane, The Canyon, First Blood, Company of Cowards, and The Kean Land; introduction by Dorothy M. Johnson. ) Secondary Sources Cleary, Michael. Jack Schaefer: The Evolution of Pessimism. Western American Literature 14 (Spring 1979): 3347. Pessimism as a developing theme in Schaefers writings. Erisman, Fred. Growing Up with the American West: Fiction of Jack Schaefer. Journal of Popular Culture 7 (Winter 1973): 710716. Maturation of the individual as a central theme in Schaefers fiction. . Jack Schaefer: The Writer as Ecologist. Western American Literature 13 (Spring 1978): 313. Human and socio-environmental interrelationships in Schaefers work. Folsom, James K. Shane and Hud: Two Stories in Search of a Medium. Western Humanities Review 24 (Autumn 1970): 359372. How the cinematic Shane differs from the novel. Haslam, Gerald. Jack Schaefer. Western Writers Series No. 20. Boise: Boise State University, 1975. The only extended study of Schaefers life and works. . Sacred Sources in The Canyon. Western American Literature 14 (Spring 1979): 4955. The Canyon as a story of breaking through to the primordial power of the universe. Nuwer, Henry. An Interview with Jack Schaefer. South Dakota Review 11 (Spring 1973): 4858. Schaefer discusses his life and work. Schaefer, Jack. A New Direction. Western American Literature 10 (Winter 1976): 265272. Autobiographical account of his loss of innocence. Work, James C. Settlement Waves and Coordinate Forces in Shane. Western American Literature 14 (Fall 1979): 191200. Shane as a dramatization of the Turner hypothesis and Pecks wave metaphor.
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Wallace Stegner
of Wallace Stegner has been many-faceted, and because of his skill in various literary genres and arenas, Stegner has maintained throughout that career an enviable degree of visibility. Furthermore, interest in his work has quickened rather than diminished. Western by birth (Iowa, 1909) and upbringing (Saskatchewan, Montana, and Utah), Stegner has always conceived of West in broad terms intent, as it were, not to let westernness limit or hinder his work. Perhaps because of that determination, from the beginning of his career Stegner has received national recognition, and he has kept that national attention better than most of his fellow writers from the West. While Stegners most important distinction is in the novel, his reputation as historian, short story writer, and essayistwell-deservedhas worked to keep the nation aware of all of his work. He has been published in such periodicals as Redbook, Scribners, Harpers, Atlantic, and Saturday Review of Literature; frequently his stories have made their way into anthologies. Moreover, Stegner has himself been a distinguished editor of anthologies and textbooks. Many of his best essays were collected in 1969 as The Sound of Mountain Water. It has always been a moot question whether a productive creative writer could also be a productive teacher at the same time, and yet there seems to be little doubt that Stegner has always been comfortable around American universities. After taking a bachelors degree at the University of Utah and a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, he taught at Wisconsin and Harvard, and from 1940 until 1971 was responsible for the creative writing program at Stanford, a program he made into one of the most distinguished. Not a writing student at Stanford could have been unaware that his teacher was practicing what he taught. Fittingly, Stegners 1971 novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in the same year that Stegner retired from Stanford. Angle of Repose may well prove to be the most famous work in the Stegner canon; however, the novels written since 1971because of the nature of the main charactersprove the success of the blending of the academic and the western side of Stegner. The late Stegner novels may be his greatest achievement and the biggest dividend of his academic career. Stegner received national acclaim with his first major work of fiction Remembering Laughter, the winner of the Little, Brown novelette contest of 1937. It was an impressive beginning and gave Stegner the visibility he has maintained with a minimum of mishaps. The action of Remembering LaughHE CAREER
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ter is set on an Iowa farm and doubtless gains much of its authenticity from Stegners boyhood experiences on a farm in Saskatchewan. While the germ of the story was an event in the family of Stegners mother, in scope, theme, and impact the novelette is much like Edith Whartons Ethan Frome (1911)a comparison that Stegner found understandable when readers began to make it even though he reports that he had not read Whartons book until after he had written his. Alec Stuart is a man full of energy and laughter, but he is married to a too-stiff Calvinistic wife. When the wifes sister comes from Scotland to live with the couple, Alec naturally responds to the sisters vitalitybut the results freeze the three of these adults in a grim stasis that denies life. Vardis Fisher, who had taught Stegner while Stegner was an undergraduate at Utah, thought that his students first book owed a great deal to his own Dark Bridwell (1931), probably because Alecs vitality and skill with the tall tale reminded him of his own Charley Bridwell and because of the dark end of Charleys life, for Charleylike Alecwas a victim of his wifes Puritan strictures. But there is an optimism in Stegners ending not found in Fishers. Charley loses his children as well as his wife, but MalcolmAlecs son who knows his father as unclecomes to realize the truth of the frustrated lives of his relatives. He will take a different way. Derivative or not, Stegners bookdespite some strain on credibilityhas an appropriate pace and tone. It is a good story and made a beginning worth remembering. Stegner followed Remembering Laughter with The Potters House (1938), probably his weakest and certainly his least-known book. Missing is the sense of place, a sense of the reality that underlay his first book. The potter is a deaf-mute artisan who lives in California (a place that Stegner would later treat with assurance) and who struggles to make ends meet for himself, his wife, also handicapped, and for his family. In an improbable sequence, he loses his wife when he undergoes voluntary sterilization upon his brothers advice. Stegner was on firmer ground when he wrote On a Darkling Plain (1940), the story of Edwin Vickers, a young Canadian soldier returned from World War I who seeks retreat from human involvement on a Saskatchewan homestead. His lungs have been damaged by gas warfare, but it is his spirit that is most in need of recovery. In relating Vickerss condition and his gradual return to involvement in the affairs of mankind, Stegner gained force from the concreteness of his memories of Saskatchewan and of the flu epidemic of 1918, the climaxing development that brings Vickers to the realization that he is involved in all mankind, and with the world where ignorant armies clash by night. Too obvious in its thematic message, On a Darkling Plain does not haunt the imagination in the way that, say, Hemingways
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Big Two-Hearted River does, making the reader ponder the horror of war and the plight of the soldier who must return to the world after war. Stegners novel now seems dated as a fictional account of the aftermath of World War I or as a comment on World War II, which Stegner knew was imminent as he wrote On a Darkling Plain. The novel is a part of Stegners apprenticeship. Fire and Ice (1941), Stegners fourth book, has also dated badly, but it forms an interesting companion to On a Darkling Plain. Unlike the hero of the earlier book, Paul Condon thinks almost exclusively of the lot of mankind and is dedicated to correcting social injustices. He is a fanatical member of the Young Communist League at a large midwestern state university. It is clear to the reader from the beginning of the storyand finally to Paul at the end of the bookthat his radicalism says less about the system of the society than about his neurotic mentality. Paul needs to know himself better before he can be of help to the downtrodden. Fire and Ice reflects the proletarian novel of the 1930s; certainly it shared the weaknesses of many political novels of that era. While Stegner was writing The Potters House, On a Darkling Plain, and Fire and Ice, the novelist in him was also giving artistic energy to The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), a work that would mark the end of his apprenticeship, a work that would build on the experience of his own life and that would take him beyond the short novel to the long novel. Nothing that Stegner had written before was so personal to him or so marked by the texture of his life. Although much of the action takes place in the early years of the century, The Big Rock Candy Mountain has not dated. Panoramic in scope, Stegners novel can be compared profitably to The Great Gatsby, one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, rather than to any book Stegner had yet written. While Fitzgeralds novel was short, compact, tight and Stegners is extensive, both have the American dream as their subject. Furthermore, Fitzgeralds classic plays off East against West and finds greater validity in western innocence and energy. If the reader comes to a knowledge of Gatsby only slowly and mainly through indirection, he comes to know Stegners Bo Masonlike Gatsby, a believer in the attainability of the Big Rock Candy Mountaindirectly and in the fullness of daily life through many years. For most readers, Bo Mason is probably more representative of the twentieth-century pursuit of the golden dream than is Gatsby, mainly because the reader knows Bo in the full context of family life. The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a family chronicle, teeming with the solidity that characterizes such novels. The reader is almost shocked when Gatsbys father enters Fitzgeralds novel after Gatsbys death, for Gatsby seemed to have emerged from his Platonic conception of him-
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self. Not so with Bo. The reader understands Bos flight from his harsh father. With a huge West beckoning him, Bo set out to take from life exactly what he wanted. (Gatsby, of course, turns east.) In a nineteenth-century West, he might have come much closer to achieving that goal. Bo has a creativity that in its way is fully as vital as Gatsbys. The Big Rock Candy Mountain is told primarily from the perspective of Bo Mason and his wife Elsa, but as their sonsChet and Brucegrow older, events also come to the reader from their angle of vision. In its final third, the novel becomes increasingly focused on Bruce, who in life would be Stegner. Criticspreferring the active life of Bo to the more intellectual and melancholy stance of Brucehave usually judged the novel weakest in those final parts. Nevertheless, the portrayal of Bruce served Stegners purpose admirably. By novels end, Bruces parents are both dead, as is his brother Chet. Bruce is a survivor. Most of his life he had viewed his father with hatred and contempt, but he comes to realize how much of his own make-up (his imaginative and poetic side) comes from his father. Bruces affirmative view of life at the end of the novel is convincing because it is hard won. Despite the reservations of some of the novels critics, Stegners portrait of Bruce can be seen as a triumph rather than otherwise. As the young novelist made his plans for writing a chronicle of a familyessentially his familys lifehe must have been mindful of the considerable achievement in the autobiographical novel by another western writerVardis Fisher. The last volume of Fishers autobiographical tetralogy about Vridar Hunter was hardly in print before Stegners first book was published. Stegner was quite naturally interested in the career of his former teacher (he gives an interesting portrait of Fisher, called Paul Latour, in his short story A View from the Balcony). Vridar fights a strong tendency in himself towards a gigantic self-pity, and the tetralogy itselfimpressive as it often is sometimes gives way to this monster that the hero fights. Stegner knew that the didactic impulse sometimes weakened Fishers writing, and Stegner knew that he also had a didactic impulseas the novelettes reveal. Stegner wanted to minimize any pull towards self-pity by making his novel focus on Bo and Elsa for much of the way and to save Bruce for the end when he needed a perspective that would comment on the lives of the whole Mason family. Particularly when The Big Rock Candy Mountain is viewed alongside Fishers Vridar Hunter tetralogy, Stegners artistic choices for the novel seem vindicated. The title of Stegners next novel, Second Growth (1947), relates to both The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Stegners non-fiction book of 1945, One Nation, a study of prejudice operating in America. Bruce Mason sees
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that his fathers life had not reckoned with the West and the America that washis own life would be a second growth. (Bruces choice of the law for his career is a powerful indictment of the life of his bootlegging father.) Having achieved a major success with The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Stegner did not choose a western setting for Second Growth, although he said that his New England story could take place in Carmel or Taos as well as in New Hampshire or Maine. Stegners own western life took him over vast parts of the West, and he purposely avoided exclusive identification with any part. He seems to have always been on guard against provincialism, and the theme of Second Growth warns against inhibiting provincialism and asks for the kind of growth that Bruce envisions at the end of The Big Rock Candy Mountain. While Stegner would not succumb to any restricting provincialism, it was the West that he knew best and that he would continue to study and write about. Because he lived in Utah for a great deal of his youth and young manhood, one of the phenomena Stegner would have to study was Mormonism, although he himself was a Gentile. He would do more than react to twentieth-century Mormonism; he would study Mormon roots. The scholar and the novelist were not at war in him. Mormon Country (1942) is a collection of tales, legends, and sketches that reflect the essence of Mormon life, an essence that Stegner highlights by ending his book with a study of Gentile life in Mormon country. The contrast makes clear Stegners admiration for Mormon strength. Stegners second Mormon book, The Gathering of Zion (1964), recounts the migration of the Mormons from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake City. Stegner gets inside the movement through judicious use of Mormon journals, diaries, letters, and reminiscences. Although Stegners career again paralleled Vardis Fishers when he turned to Mormon materialin The Gathering of Zion Stegner was studying the part of Mormon history Fisher most admired and used for a large section of his Children of God (1939)Stegner chose the historians method rather than the novelists. Moreover, Stegners book might even be construed as his criticism of Fishers famous book. That Stegner would write Mormon books was understandable enough, but that workespecially The Gathering of Zion meant that he thought there was room for another telling of the Mormon trek. An authentic Mormon sense was a useful ingredient for Stegners seventh novel, The Preacher and the Slave (1950); interest in the subject of the novel, Joe Hill, was natural to Stegner, for Hills IWW career brought him from California to Salt Lake City, where he was tried and convicted and duly executed for a double murder. Attacks on Utahs justice were international after Hills execution. For this novel, Stegner chose a method similar
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to that of Children of God and other of Fishers historical novels: he focused directly on the historical figure who interested hima technique limiting to the freedom a novelist usually claims. The problem is exacerbated because of uncertainty about Hills guilt; Stegner, however, assumes Hills guilt but does not portray it. He focuses rather on Hills martyrdom-craving personality and gives voice to objections about Hills weaknesses through his portrait of Gus Lund, the preacher of the title who had befriended Joe in California and had followed him to Salt Lake City after he heard of Joes conviction. Joe Hill is like Bo Mason in being an intense seeker of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but he is not nearly as compelling a fictional character. A figure of history more sympathetic to Stegner was John Wesley Powell, whose career is the subject of Stegners most impressive non-fiction book, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954). Building on the issues and work that went into Stegners Ph.D. dissertation on Clarence Edward Dutton, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is thoroughly scholarly in method as it celebrates the intelligence and vision of Powell, a man who battled the romantic myths that did not hold with western realities but nevertheless all too often prevailed. Powells career embodies the challenge of the West, and the excitement of his geological adventures transcends the selfishness that mars the idealism of Joe Hill or the wasted energy of Bo Mason. Powell is something of a fulfillment of the ideal that Bruce seeks at the end of The Big Rock Candy Mountain. However scholarly and professional Stegners study of Powell, the work is in a fundamental sense personal. Stegner could easily identify with Powell: analysis of Powells career was also a definition of his own. Not long after Stegner finished Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, he began work on a book that would become one of the most famous of modern western autobiographies, Wolf Willow (1962). The book was originally conceived as a study of village democracy in three places familiar to StegnerEast End (Whitemud in the fiction), Saskatchewan; Greensboro, Vermont; and a village on a Danish island. However, the personal becomes more compelling in Stegners quest than the theoretical, and Whitemud and its history and meaning for Stegner became vision enough. The title of the resulting book reveals Stegners point of departure: a remembrance of things past. Wolf willow grew along the banks of the Frenchman River in Stegners Saskatchewan town, and years later its pungent odor returned to him. In evoking that northern plains country at the time of the early years of the century, Stegner evokes the life of the place where Chet and Bruce Mason lived several of their early years. As suggestive as the memories that set the tone are, they do not count for all of Wolf Willow. The careful historian is also present, and Stegner moves from memory to discussion of the history of the 974
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region, and then studies the relationship between the place and people, returning finally at the books end to the decidedly personal as he assesses the limitations of Whitemud. Another means Stegner uses in the book to reveal his boyhood environment is the inclusion of two short stories, Genesis and Carrion Spring. The stories would make a small book by themselves. There is a great deal of weathernot to be taken for granted in Saskatchewanand place in both. Genesis, much longer than its companion, reveals Saskatchewan through the experience of a young English tenderfoot who discovers the realities of work and life as a cowboy on the snowbound prairie. Carrion Spring gives a lesson similar to that John Wesley Powell had stressed: human determination is not sufficient to make a country support every preconceived way of lifea place and climate set their boundaries. In Carrion Spring a man believes that Saskatchewan will support a cattle kingdom, but the climate determines otherwise. After uninterrupted months of harsh weather, a chinook brings the stench of the rotting cattle that have been lost; the price in human terms is accented since the story is told from the point of view of a frontier wife. Many things (it bears the subtitle A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier ), Wolf Willow invites anthologizing (and indeed has been anthologized); but it has also gained favor as a work to be read as a whole, and has twice been put into paperback, most recently by the University of Nebraska Press. Wolf Willow was a long time in the making, and during the time of the writing of its various parts, Stegner was solidifying his reputation as a writer of short stories. During the eleven years that intervened between publication of The Preacher and the Slave and Stegners next novel, A Shooting Star (1961), Stegner saw publication of two collections of short stories that would secure his reputation in the genre, The Women on the Wall (1950) and The City of the Living, and Other Stories (1956). Anyone now looking at the body of Stegners work will be struck with the fact that often these stories were work in progress. Stegner saw larger possibilities for his material, was often thinking of larger units. Several of the stories in The Women on the Wall are about Bruce Mason or about a Bruce-like boy and treat events familiar to the reader of The Big Rock Candy Mountain. These may even be the best stories of the volume, but we may now see them also as Stegners working through the narrative perspective of The Big Rock Candy Mountain resisting the temptation to give the novel to Bruces point of view. In one of the best stories of The City of the Living, The Blue-Winged Teal, a young man named Henry Lerder discovers that his father has feelings for his dead mother that he had not suspected. The reader of The Big Rock Candy Mountain would, of course, think of Bruce, and Henry Lerder is transformed into Bruce in Stegners novel Recapitulation (1979). The protagonist of Maiden in a Tower also turns out to be Bruce in Recapitulation. The Vol977
unteer recounts another significant episode that later helps define Bruces youth in the late novel. The Field Guide to Western Birds introduces Joe Allston, the hero of All the Little Live Things (1967); the novel also incorporates events of the short story. When Stegner broke his long novelistic silence with A Shooting Star, he presented an uneven but still very engrossing work. It is markedly different from any of the novels that preceded it. From the early The Potters House, Stegner had written a great deal about the financially disadvantaged or about seekers who were not successful in financial terms. A Shooting Star is Stegners study of the very richand they are certainly unlike the majority of his other characters. The novel is also Stegners first since The Potters House to have a California setting, and the setting creates a very different (largely symbolic) kind of West. Most of the action takes place in Hillsborough, a place now familiar to many Americans because of Patty Hearsts notoriety. And A Shooting Star is also different from the other novels because it has a heroine as the central character. Sabrina Castro, a descendant of a wealthy eastern family, is married to a rich society doctorand married long enough to convince her that the marriage (childless) has brought her little sense of fulfillment. Sabrina thinks how lucky pioneer women were. Her own efforts to find meaning commence with an illicit affair, and a desperate effort for pleasure on a mindless binge helps define for Sabrina her essential need. The novel charts her course to a second growth, and the reader is invited to evaluate many problems of contemporary life as Sabrina seeks to find a better way. On one side, Sabrina has an archetypically selfish capitalisther brother; Oliver Hutchens wants to develop his mothers estate and make them all richer. Sabrina, more intelligent than Oliver, is aware of the threat he represents to California and to America. Pulling Sabrina away from mere self-indulgence towards action for community responsibility is the middle-class family of a friend, especially the friends husband, Leonard MacDonald. Leonard is a high school English teacher who deems his work important; he and his wife face the challenge of their growing family with realism, humor, and some vision. Sabrinas growth is marked by her decision to accept herself, make her peace with her mother, and to play as responsible a role as she can in the future: she will give birth to the illegitimate child that she carries. Stegner was right when he told interviewers Forrest G. and Margaret Robinson that the novel has a soap opera problem, but the novel raises many of the right issues about the contemporary scene and gave notice of the authors intention to deal with very contemporary life in his novels. His previous western novels had portrayed a period of a slightly earlier America.
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There was no soap opera problem in Stegners next California novel, All the Little Live Things, a novel that took Stegner to the choice ironic voice of Joe Allston, first introduced in the story The Field Guide to Western Birds. Stegners decision to have the novel in first person may be in part a carry-over from the story, but it surely also shows Stegners critical recognition of the value of slanting the events and views satirized in the story through the voice of the crabbed, conservative, but intelligent retired literary agent. Allstonnot a native Californianfinds much fault with modern ways, and the sardonic edge to his voice serves to put the reader on guard. Joe is not completely loveable, and so the reader tends to hold him somewhat at arms distance, wanting to reject his notions whenever possible but fearing that the agent is probably right. The technique makes for an invigorating novel of ideasdemanding more involvement from the reader than did the philosophical discussions of A Shooting Star. First person is an especially significant choice for the novel because of Joe Allstons profession. It is more than a convenient means of getting the story told, for first person makes it seem that in retirement Joe Allston has become what he would not risk becoming beforea writer. Retirement and aging inevitably imply assessment of ones career and life. Joe knows that by becoming a literary agent he took a safer way than he might have, and he feels some guilt about his choice. He has frequently dealt with minds and talents inferior to his own. Finally, of course, Joes retirement is anything but that. He has the time for the work of self-assessment that has often been too painful for him in his active years. Ironically, in retirement Joe Allston becomes as creative as he has ever been. Stegners fiction about Joe Allston gave him an important new subjectaging and retirement. The backward look, the surveying of the pastalways a significant impulse in Stegner becomes the major mode and subject for the characters of Stegners novels after All the Little Live Things. Allstons views doubtless reflect Stegners, but they are never exactly that. Rather, the novel suggests Stegners arguing with himself through Allston. And while Allstons life doubtless mirrors Stegners, Allston is not an autobiographical character to the extent that the Bruce Mason of The Big Rock Candy Mountain is. Most obviously, Allston is unlike Stegner in that Stegner did become a writer. Even though Stegner enjoyed the security of an academic position, he continued to write, but the fiber of Allstons experience probably reflects the authors self-exploration about the road not taken. Would his career have been significantly different if he had abandoned the university? In any event, an important dividend of Allstons narrative perspective is the rich allusive quality of the account. Allusion is to-
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tally natural to Allstons thinking, and allusion works to deepen the ironical emphasis and to lessen the allegorical edge that All the Little Live Things shares with A Shooting Star. California has often symbolized rejection of ones past or selfa desperate search for freedom. It had been so for Allstons son Curtis, whose California life was a defiance of his father and his fathers values. At thirtyseven Curtis was a surf bum, and his death while surfing might have been suicide. Joe thinks the possibility is real, and he feels further that the suicide was a message to him. There are ironies to Joes leaving the East for California, but his leaving represents in part his own uncertainty about his life and the future and the meaning of America. The issues are dramatized for Joe in the lives of his neighbors, especially two of them. A dropout from Berkeley named Jim Peck wants squatters rights on Joes property, and although Joe sees Peck as a Caliban, a Comus, he grants him the space (partly because his wife wants him to) and bears various indignities while Peck runs his University of the Free Mind. Joe recognizes the opportunism behind Pecks indictment of the social order, but he recognizes that many of the themes of Pecks life were also Curtiss. Joes other new neighbor is Marian Catlin, a pregnant young woman who affirms the beauty of the natural order, the beauty of all the little live things. But, alas, Marian is dying of cancer, a fact that leads Joe to dark broodings. These and other philosophical issues are brought into memorable juxtaposition in the violent scene that ends the novel. Marian is being rushed to the hospital, but Peck and his crew block the bridge to the highway. The resulting chaos must have checked the optimism of even the dying Marian. And Joe is led to a new insight into the Pecks of the world: They think it is simpler and less serious than it is. They dont know. They fool around. They havent discovered how terrible is the thing that thuds in their chests and pulses in their arteries, they never see ahead to the intersection where the crazy drunk will meet them. But Allston does not quite surrender to any vision of evil in human nature. Stegners novel is, after all, named for Marians faith, and Joes final admission in the novel is that he will be richer his whole life for this new sorrow. Joe Allstons ultimate task is evaluating himself rather than the society in which he lives, and Stegner made this task the focus of a second novel about Allston, The Spectator Bird (1976). The titles of the two Allston novels get at this important difference. All the Little Live Things, while ultimately a very human book, has something of the dichotomy of an allegory, with Marian and Peck at the poles representing philosophical positions, and
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the title standing for Marians. Joe is the spectator bird found in the title of the second book. While Joe is still an observer of the contemporary scene, the reader is more actively engaged in studying Allston observing. The narrative method, again first person, underscores the emphasis and the increased complexity. Much of the narrative is the journal of the trip Allston and his wife Ruth took to Denmark after Curtiss death twenty years beforeDenmark because Joes mother had emigrated from there and he is in search of his roots. Ruth did not know of the journal her husband had kept on that tripwhen the wounds over Curtiss death were freshand so in time present of the novel (some period after Marian Catlins death) Joe shares the journal with Ruth. The reader becomes engrossed in the study of time present and time past, somewhat in the mode of the confessional, although Joes narrative continues to reveal his sardonic humor and reactionary view of the contemporary world. This new, deeper presentation of Joe Allston won for Stegner the National Book Award of 1977. There are numerous reflections of Joes professional life as a literary agent when the novel is in time present. Joe might, he writes, have written My Life Among the Literary rather than the more honest confrontation of himself that forms The Spectator Bird, and there is a hilarious presentation of the keen satirist of All the Little Live Things when one of Joes writers, Cesar Rulli, comes to visit the Allstons. Rulli has one of his current lady loves with him, for he is sexually liberated, and his fiction depends on the current fad of the sexually explicit. Allstonthe evidence of the book indicates that he went far toward the Ph.D. in English if he did not actually achieve ithas a loftier view of literature than Rulli has; he easily sees all around the popular writer intellectually, but there is also a tinge of envy for the amoral, carefree style of Rullis life. The presentation of Casanova-like Rulli, funny on its own account, is useful not only for defining Joes character, but for anticipating the ultimate emphasis of the Danish adventurewhich turns out to be a love story of a special kind. In Denmark Joe and Ruth live in the home of a Danish countess named Astrid, and Joe and Astrid fall in love during that time. Joe, however, chooses to return to America with Ruth when he realizes what has happened, admitting years later that in every choice there is a component, maybe a big component of pain. In All the Little Live Things Allston quotes from Frosts To Earthward; the lines contrasting life and love from the perspective of youth and maturity are as appropriate to the second Allston book as well. However, the major allusion of The Spectator Bird is not to Frost, or even Marcus Aurelius, the stoic favorite of Allston, but to the Venerable Bede. Joe ruminates near the end of his narrative:
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The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is somethingit can be everythingto have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you cant handle. Thus, The Spectator Bird is not only a reading to Ruth but a celebration of herand a sober appraisal of what life can give to the fortunate. Many of Stegners works present wounded and bitter sons; with the Allston books Stegner moved his perspective to the father. In Allstons case, the father was one who was blessed with a worthy mate. That, the novel says, counts for much in a world where there is a great deal of darkness and evil. The vision of that darkness and evil comes to the reader most tellingly in the depiction of Denmark. Joe confesses: Having no traditions myself, I used to have a romantic view of tradition. Astrids family provides the chief means for the change in Joe. Astrids husband had been a Nazi collaborator; her father and brother had been involved in experiments seeking to create a superior race. In Denmark, the Allstons visit Karen Blixen (better known as Isak Dinesen and meant to contrast with the opportunistic Rulli), who describes the dead count as the Doctor Faustus of Genetics. When Allston finds the living count, Astrids brother, to be a rather likeable fellow, he appreciates how complex evil is. Karen Blixens words give the right perspective: Evil, if it exists, is not all lumpy and ugly like a toad. It is often more attractive than what people call good. Between publication of the books about Allston came the famous Angle of Repose. The Pulitzer winner, like The Spectator Bird, has a double time perspective and a similar narrative voice. The narrator of Angle of Repose is Lyman Ward, a prize-winning professor of history, now in early retirement because of a bone disease that has confined him to a wheel chair. While Ward can take pride in his professional achievement, he can take less pleasure in his present life than can Allston. Wards son Rodman is no beach bum, but he is far from being a source of pleasure to his father. Rodman is a sociologist; the only history he finds important is the history of the last ten years. But Wards sense of failure is keenest at the point of his marriage and thus he is in sharp contrast to Allston in this regard. Wards wife had left him for an affair with his attending physician; Ward now lives in a cottage under the care of a housekeeper. 982
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But the bulk of the long novel Angle of Repose is not given to portrayal of Lymans past or presentalthough the narrative keeps returning to the unsatisfactory present. Unlike Allston, Lyman looks at his present problemhis unsatisfactory marriageby indirection. He studies the marriage of his grandparents Oliver Ward and Susan Burling Ward, a marriage that had also failed but finally rested at an angle of reposethe geological term for the diminished incline that halts a landslide. The marriage and careers of this couple are well worth studying. Stegners models for Lymans grandparents were Mary Hallock Foote, the writer and illustrator, and Arthur DeWint Foote, an engineer. In his 1958 introduction to Selected American Prose, 18411900 Stegner praised Mary Footes presentation of mining camps in California, Colorado, and Idaho as almost the only real ones in local color fictionvery much more real than those of Bret Harte. Stegner might have written a biography of the Footes, or an historical novel such as The Preacher and the Slave. He judged Mary Footes career not important enough for a biography or such an historical novel as The Preacher and the Slave, but he found her letters (long unread in the archives at Stanford University) provocatively relevant to western and contemporary themes. He viewed Marys letters with the novelists eye. Deciding to write a novel based on the letters, he invented a fictional grandson, Lyman, who would interpret those letters. One result of Stegners novel has been to quicken interest in Mary Foote, but a few of her new disciples have faulted Stegner for relying overmuch on Mrs. Footes letters and for distorting the truth about her. In Stegners defense it can be said that documentary presentation of Mrs. Foote was not his goal. Angle of Repose covers a long period of time and is played over a vast landscape, but most of it in the West. Susan Ward is an easterner who cherishes the cultural life of the East; however, she falls in love with Oliver Ward, whose destiny is in the West. The West turns out to be the making of Susan as an artist, but she can never quite recognize what the West has given her or her children. She dwells overmuch on what the West has deprived her of; had she been more a westerner she might have been at least as supportive of her husbands career as he was of hers. Yet while the reader follows Lymans lead in seeing Susan as truly loving Oliver, it is difficult not to find a great deal of betrayal in many of Susans letters back east to her friend Augusta, who with her husband Thomas Hudson is the epitome of eastern refinement. Susans weaknessher half-betrayalis tellingly conveyed in her failure to let Oliver know that she is pregnant with their second child. She delivers the child while visiting in the East. Even though Oliver is not as articulate as the intellectual company that surrounds the Hudsons and he comes to be more taciturn, Susan is also guilty of some reprehensible silences. She does illustrations for an edition of The Scarlet 983
Letter, but she never rebels as openly as Hester Prynne does, nor does she commit adultery. Still, like Hester she must give years of her life to penance for her betrayalsthe many years lived at the angle of repose. Surely those years were lived with costly exaction from Oliver as well. As Angle of Repose ends, Lyman is wondering if he can be more forgiving than his grandfather had been. To have even asked the question suggests the moral worth of Lymans search into the past. Having rejected biography as his approach to the lives of the Footes, Stegner nevertheless had biography on his mind, and three years after the publication of Angle of Repose, his The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto appeared. Stegnerthen in his retirement from Stanfordknew that if anyone should write the biography of his friend and sometime mentor, he was the right person. He could write, in a sense, My Life Among the Literary for Joe Allston. Stegner was deeply aware of the many similarities between himself and DeVoto (also from Utah, also a sometime expatriate of the East) as artists, men, and westerners. The Uneasy Chair is no exercise in hagiography; dealing with DeVotos weaknesses, Stegner was probably reflecting on his own struggles and growth as a writer. The title of his most recent book, Recapitulation, suggests that Stegner might have moved from the biographical into the openly autobiographical. But he chose the form of fiction for returning to matters close to his own life. The title is a tip that the narrative takes the backward look and thus shares a great deal with his other late novels. The work is also distinguished and can take an honored place in the Stegner canon. The book is a powerful vindication of many of Stegners artistic choicesearly and late; it recalls his efforts to transcend the personal in The Big Rock Candy Mountain. (The careers of both Bernard DeVoto and Vardis Fisher taught Stegner how difficult a task this could sometimes be.) The protagonist of Recapitulation is Bruce Mason, with a distinguished career as an ambassador, and also the bulk of his life, now behind him. He is thus like Joe Allston and Lyman Ward, but whereas the first person point of view was the right approach for the Allston books and Angle of Repose, it would probably not have worked as well for Bruce; indeed, there would have been great risks involved since Bruce had been so intensely personal to Stegner. Besides, Stegner had a different structure in mind, a different kind of narrative experience for the reader. Whereas the overriding mood of the other late novels is the contemplative, the meditative, Recapitulation aims for a more cinematic effectthe replay of a movie, removing time present for the immediacy of the experience on the screen. The novel is much more than a summing upit is a reliving of past experience. Discussion of the novel can also serve as a recapitulation of Stegners very remarkable career. As in many of Stegners works, there is important 984
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use of the personal, the autobiographical. Recapitulation will inevitably take the reader back to The Big Rock Candy Mountain, although any reader unfamiliar with Stegners first major novel will not be at a disadvantage in experiencing the later Bruce novel. Stegner was intensely interested in form. Although he is a realist, he experimented throughout his career with different methods. Whereas The Big Rock Candy Mountain is panoramic, Recapitulation is intensive, concentrated. The experience on which Stegner based Recapitulation was, of course, already his when he wrote The Big Rock Candy Mountain. It is instructive to consider Stegners decision to save much of the Bruce material for a later time. He might have chosen to attempt to get everything into have written an autobiographical trilogy or tetralogy, as Fisher had done. Indeed, there are striking similarities between Fishers tetralogy and Recapitulation. The similarities of situation between Bruce and Vridar Hunter are often pronounced, and Stegner doubtless knew this. Vridars years in Salt Lake City anticipate Bruces. Vridars experience in love anticipates Bruces, and by the time he wrote Recapitulation Stegner found it safe, perhaps desirable, to remind the reader (at least those who knew the Fisher work) of the similarities. Vridars beloved and first wife is named Neloa, and she is part Indian. Bruces great love is named Nola; she is also part Indian. Like Neloa, she is not very intellectual, hence not quite suited to the man she loves. Neither man knows what to make of the girl he loves; neither affair comes to a happy ending. In representing the sexual uncertainties of the hero, Recapitulation makes important use of an amoral companion, Bailey, who is very like Forenoon McClintock of Fishers Passions Spin the Plot. In his tetralogy (and in its revision as Orphans in Gethsemane ) Fisher tried to push his readers into sharing Vridars (and his own) world view. In Recapitulation Stegner is more intent on emphasizing the vividness with which the pastin terms of an individuals life span, the distant pastcan sometimes recapitulate. He brings Bruce to judgment in fictional terms, and thereby widens the gap between Bruces life and his own. Recapitulation reveals some failures of Bruces life that were but veiled in The Big Rock Candy Mountain. By worldly standards, Bruce Mason has been markedly successful, but a career is not everything. There has been a loneliness at the core of his life. He did not marry Nola Gordon, nor any one. He is familyless in the extreme from the moment in The Big Rock Candy Mountain when his father committed suicide. It is the death of a distant aunt, his last living relative, that brings him to Salt Lake City for his various recapitulations. Significantly, for pointing up the failure of heart, as the novel ends, Bruce decides against seeking out his old friend Joe Mulder (even though Joe has tried to get in touch with him). Even as Bruce senses what he has missed, we know what Recapitulation has gained from its narrative angle and ar985
rangement. Bruce realizes that he had long had a huge self-pity that made him believe he was sufferings biographer. The reader of Stegners work can applaud his achievement in this new look at Bruce. It is a valuable means of identifying Stegners artistic growth.
JOSEPH M. FLORA , University
of North Carolina
Primary Sources ( in 1. Novels Remembering Laughter. Boston: Little, Brown; London: Heinemann, 1937. The Potters House. Muscatine, Iowa: Prairie Press, 1938. On a Darkling Plain. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940. Fire and Ice. New York: Duell, 1941. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. New York: Duell, 1943; London: Hammond Hammond, 1950. Second Growth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947; London: Hammond Hammond, 1948. The Preacher and the Slave. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950; London: Hammond Hammond, 1951; as Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel, New York: Doubleday, 1969. A Shooting Star. New York: Viking; London: Heinemann, 1961. All the Little Live Things. New York: Viking, 1967; London: Heinemann, 1968. Angle of Repose. New York: Doubleday; London: Heinemann, 1971. The Spectator Bird. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Recapitulation. New York: Doubleday, 1979. 2. Short Stories The Women on the Wall. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950; London: Hammond Hammond, 1952. The City of the Living. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956; London: Hammond Hammond, 1957. chronological order)
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3. Other works Mormon Country. New York: Duell, 1941. One Nation. With the editors of Look. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945. Look at America: The Central Northwest. With others. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. The Writer in America. South Pasadena, California: Perkins and Hutchins, 1953. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier. New York: Viking, 1962; London: Heinemann, 1963. The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964; London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966. The Sound of Mountain Water. (Essays.) New York: Doubleday, 1969. The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Ansel Adams: Images 19231974. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1974. American Places. With Page Stegner. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981. One Way to Spell Man. (Essays.) New York: Doubleday, 1982. Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature. With Richard W. Etulain. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983. Secondary Sources Ahearn, Kerry. Heroes vs. Women: Conflict and Duplicity in Stegner. In Women, Women Writers and the West, edited by L. L. Lee and Merrill Lewis. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Publishing, 1979. Argues that Stegners fiction is in the West but not of it. Arthur, Anthony, ed. Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. A tribute to Stegners place in American literature, this collection reprints important reviews and articles as well as three essays written for this publication. Canzoneri, Robert. Wallace Stegner: Trial by Existence. Southern Review 9 (October 1973): 796827. Discusses Stegners humanistic realism. Eisinger, Chester E. Twenty Years of Wallace Stegner. College English 20 (December 1958): 11016. Presents Stegner as representative contemporary writer who turned from social and political emphases to exploration of self. Etulain, Richard W. Western Fiction and History: A Reconsideration. In The American West: New Perspectives, New Dimensions, edited by Jerome Steffens, pp. 15274. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. Discusses several writers of the Westincluding Stegnerwho have turned to the history of the West for material. Flora, Joseph M. Vardis Fisher and Wallace Stegner: Teacher and Student. Western American Literature 5 (Summer 1970): 12228. Discusses relationship between Stegner and his Utah teacher with focus on Remembering Laughter and The View from the Balcony. Lewis, Merrill and Lorene. Wallace Stegner. Boise: Boise State College, 1972. Useful survey of Stegners work through Angle of Repose. Selected bibliography.
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A Literary History of the American West Milton, John. Conversations with Wallace Stegner. South Dakota Review 9 (Spring 1971): 4571. As a part of a series with western writers, Milton asks Stegner about the special circumstances of the western writer. . The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Milton examines Stegners work in the context of the western novel. Peterson, Audrey C. Narrative Voice in Stegners Angle of Repose. Western American Literature 10 (Summer 1975): 12533. Evaluates the special role of Stegners narrator in his Pulitzer Prize novel. Robinson, Forrest G. and Margaret G. Wallace Stegner. New York: Twayne, 1977. The only book to date on Stegner. Useful for biography, criticism, and bibliography. Robinson, Forrest G. Wallace Stegners Family Saga: From The Big Rock Candy Mountain to Recapitulation. Western American Literature 17 (August 1982): 10216. Discusses the confessional impulse in Stegners work, concluding that Stegners personal involvement in Recapitulation is greater than in any novel since The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
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Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the American Dream

of Walter Van Tilburg Clark in literary history is difficult to establish. Clark is best known as the author of a cowboy novel in which no hero comes galloping to the rescue, The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), in which three innocent men are lynched; it helped to shatter the long-running stereotype of romantic heroesfrom James Fenimore Cooper to Owen Wisterand to launch a new wave of realism in western novels and films. The place of The Ox-Bow Incident in literary history, however, does not foretell the historical significance of the works of Walter Clark. His next novel, The City of Trembling Leaves (1945), is a stylistic medley in which the mountain sprites are given a literal existence and in which the artists eye is centered on adolescent dreams and problems, stories of the struggling young artist, and psychological relations between the domestic and the ideal. The Ox-Bow Incident may nominate Walter Clark for a place in literary history, but The City of Trembling Leaves sends the historian back to unanswered questions. Clarks relation to history itself is also puzzling. He served his writers apprenticeship during the 1930s, but his early work was not fueled by the literary potential of the American depression. There is an occasional mention of hard times, but during the mid-1930s Clark was workingin poetry for the most part, with an occasional successto purge himself of the beginners devotion to ideas, sentimentality, and grand themes. In his mature fiction, almost all of it published during the 1940s, Clark pays no attention to World War II or to the beginnings of the Cold War. Among those serious novels John Milton has called Westerns, as distinguished from the popular stereotype he calls westerns, * the fiction of Clark is consistently judged the best or among the best, and yet it is atypical of the genre it supposedly represents. The difference between Clark and the writers with whom he is classed is a difference in the uses of history. With only a few exceptions, the serious western novel is faithful to a specific place and to a specific historical event or a representative historical experience.
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* Ed. note: Throughout this volume, we have followed an opposite practice, using Western (n.) to denote a book or movie built on the formulas of the popular stereotype, while western (adj.) denotes the general region or direction.
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The fiction of Walter Clark, by contrast, is not characterized by fidelity to specific or representative history. A list of excellent western novels which could serve as fictive chapters in a history of the American West could be a reasonably accurate indication of the genre itself. For illustrative purposes merely, such a list might begin with the following: A. B. Guthrie, Jr., The Big Sky (the mountaineer experience) and The Way West (the wagon train story); Vardis Fisher, The Mothers (the Donner party disaster); Michael Straight, A Very Small Remnant (the Sand Creek Massacre); Benjamin Capps, The Trail to Ogallala (an improvement on the cattle drive story as originally told by Andy Adams in The Log of a Cowboy); Frederick Manfred, Lord Grizzly (the story of Hugh Glass) and Conquering Horse (Indian life in pre-white America); Frank Waters, The People of the Valley (a necessary chapter in the ethnic history of New Mexico); and Harvey Fergusson, Grunt of Kingdom (ranching in New Mexico). Walter Clark, in sharp contrast to writers who clearly are his fictive kinfolks, insisted on numerous occasions that The Ox-Bow Incident was not based on a specific lynching and that he moved geography aboutin The Track of the Cat, for exampleto suit the needs of the story birthed in his imagination. This fundamental difference in the uses of specific history does not suggest, of course, that Clarks peers have been lacking in imagination or that Clark was unconcerned with historical accuracy. The difference is fundamental but certainly not exclusive, not invidious. The western novel as a genreand including Walter Clarkis characterized by historical accuracy; but actual people and events from history are never central to Clark as they are for so many of the best novelists in the American West. Authentic details are included in the stuff of Clarks imagination (note the veiled historical background of Joe Sam in The Track of the Cat, for example); but they are present for verisimilitude, perhaps for a deeper layer of implied meanings, and Clarks central interest is never the general one of the fictivesociologist who creates an imaginative story as a potentially better way of describing the life of a specific place in a former time. To ask on historical grounds for a more specific analysis of the similarity and differences between Clark and his peers is to discover a possible answer to the question of his place in literary history. Clarks use of western history is important in his art because it iseven in The City of Trembling Leaves the essential backdrop of his narrative; but his use of history is atypically off-stage in that he is concerned with what happened after the glorious adventure, after the climax. In The Ox-Bow Incident, for example, set in 1885, Bridgers Wells has declined well past its peak when it was a lively stagecoach stop. The railroad has passed it by. Cowboys still wear sidearms, drink whiskey in the 990
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saloon with stereotypical gestures and ironic toasts, and they still play cards and get into fist fights; but many are balding, paunchy, past their prime, and they have found no way to translate the macho energy of a fading history into the life they are now leading. Winder is obsessed with hate for the railroad that is ruining his freight business. Smith tries to act like a cowboy tough anxious to lynch rustlers but is, in actuality, the town drunk and a coward. Major Tetley, who lives somewhere between the glory that was Rome and the glory that was the Southern Confederacy, is so blind to the actual world that he causes the suicide of his son and then commits suicide himself. Farnleys Hollywood play-acting bitwhen he grabs young Greene by the vest and yanks him up closeis typical of the macho male who lives in a time and place after the climax of history. The resulting frustrations become a distorted but powerful drive toward the sublimated and decadent release of lynch law. The City of Trembling Leaves pushes western history further into the background, but the mountain and desert of Nevada and symbolical touches of history (Bowers Mansion, for example) participate in the twentiethcentury setting. Tim Hazard, like Buck in The Watchful Gods, is fascinated by heroes from the Tristram legend to the contemporaneous football field; and both must learn that what can be achieved today is intertwined with the past. The Track of the Cat is set in 1900 to represent the close of the frontier, an event discussed and debated by Art and Curt Bridges. The Wind and the Snow of Winter, Clarks story of the panhandler, is set in 1940. Clarks historical viewpoint, in short, is at least a trifocal lens: a more or less specific historical West, a date after the historical climax chosen for the setting of a given work, and the vantage point of Clarks own personal time in history. A brief summary of Clarks life helps to explain his preference for a post-historical view of the American West, his effort to tell what happened in the past by writing stories that begin after the historical climax, after the so-called glory days. The biographical outline also helps to explain how he could love the land and value unity, yet write so often of the intellect and the divisive. Born in Maine in 1909, Clark was raised in a home devoted to art and to scholarship. His father, Walter Ernest Clark, served as Head of the Department of Economics at City College of New York, and was awarded the French Legion of Honor for distinguished service in economics and education. His mother, Euphemia Abrams, graduated from Cornell and undertook advanced study in piano and composition with Edward MacDowell at Columbia. When the family did move West, while Clark was still a child, it was to the University of Nevada, where the father served as President from 1917 to 1937. 991
After graduating from high school in 1926, Clark attended the University of Nevada, taking B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and philosophy, with special attention to English literature and European and American philosophies and with a creative masters thesis, a 136-page poetic version of the Tristram legend. During 193133, Clark was back east as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Vermont. There his studies centered on American literature and Greek philosophy and literature, culminating in a second M.A. thesis, this one a critical study of Robinson Jeffers. From then on, academic life intermixed with ranch life, a biographical manifestation of the ambiguity which both fueled and undermined his work as an artist. In 1933, he began teaching high school English and coaching basketball and tennis at Cazenovia, New York, a stint broken in 1940 by a year at Indian Springs, in southern Colorado, and concluded in 1946 by a year at Taos, New Mexico. More ranch life in 1949this time in Washoe Valley, Nevadawas followed by a move to Virginia City and an appointment to the faculty at the University of Nevada. In 1953, he resigned to protest the autocratic rule of the administration. From 195354 through 195556, he headed the creative writing program at the University of Montana. From 195657 through 196162, he taught creative writing at San Francisco State, taking a year off in 196061 to work at the Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, Connecticut. With Virginia City becoming an approximate base in his life, Clark returned finally to the University of Nevada, where he again taught creative writing. During his last years, he undertook the ill-advised task of editing and perhaps drawing a book of some kind from the voluminous journals of Alfred Doten, an early settler and minor entrepreneur. Clark died in 1971. The inescapable and ironic conclusionone argued convincingly by L. L. Lee in his Boise Western Writers Series monographis that Walter Clark, who loved mountain and desert, who enjoyed drinking beer with big-bellied men, who saw the intellect as divisive and often destructive, was himself one more victim of the analytical disease that has plagued so many Americans both actual and fictive. Like young Tim Hazard, he was given to compulsive instead-of talk, factual recitations and rambling journeys of the imagination as an unwanted avoidance of the unity and balance he craved. Like the mature Tim Hazard, Clark came to realize that the Henry Adams he admired and attacked but could not dismiss was a problem for embarrassingly personal reasons (compare The City of Trembling Leaves, pages 42428, and Clarks essay-story, The Writer and the Professor, Chrysalis, Spring 1962). As Adamss multilensed view of medieval and modern history led toward a fragmentation of the self, so did Clarks multi-
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lensed view of the West and the nation lead toward a similar incapacitating intellectualism. Thus the problem of Art Davies in The Ox-Bow Incident his excessive attention to analysis when his final plea to the lynch mob is that the heart should outrank the headis a problem Clark knew from the innermost depths of his own self. And Davies is but one of a kind. Art Croft another of the reading, artistic, or intellectual type Clark liked to name Artreads and writes on winter range until his partner, in macho frustration, has to start a fight with him for something to do. Croft, like Davies, performs a minimal and obviously ineffectual duty which could be rationalized into an appeasement of the conscience but whichand this is also obviouswill not stop the lynching. In The Track of the Cat, Art Bridges is also a reader, an especially spiritual, priest-like, and gentle one; and he will not stop Curt any more than his counterparts in The Ox-Bow Incident will stop the lynch mob. Tim Hazard and Lawrence Black and young Buck, a typically precocious reader, are three more of a breed Clark portrayed with skill and variety. At one extreme are those who have seen the agonizing contrasts of history with such honesty that they are not only incapacitated from action but are, in fact, destructive, perhaps suicidal. Lawrence Black is a perfectionist, an idealist. He is so contemptuous of commercial art that he scorns praise as a vile corruption and destroys his own paintings. His pointless and unprepared-for stroll into the Nevada desert, if not overtly suicidal, as his wife thinks, is at least an invitation to suicide. Art Bridges has lost the ability to communicate between the ideal world and the actual world. He lives primarily in the beautiful spiritual world symbolized by the exotically decorated blue blanket of his childhoodhis image of medieval glories, of original perfection untainted by brutes like Curtand this means that Curt will run the ranch. Art is a good person who earns the readers sympathy, but he is a failed hero; and his wool-gathering immediately after having seen proof of the black painters (panthers) ability for killing borders on the suicidal. And, for the critic who is brave enough, there is a discomforting amount of evidence to support the position that young Buck, at the end of The Watchful Gods, walks into the ocean to commit suicide. Buck, in any case, is in a state of shock from having confronted the unbearable combination of the terrible and the beautiful. Others, most notably Tim Hazard and Hal Bridges, learn to accommodate the traumatic combination of the ideal and the cruel which plagued both Henry Adams and Walter Clark. Art Croft is somewhere between the extremist Lawrence Black and the truly heroic Hal Bridges, and he ends The Ox-Bow Incident with an appropriately ambiguous remark which suggests
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that he has rationalized his way into believing the lynching can be forgotten, or that he realizes, ironically, he will never be able to forget it. In still other cases, with the young heroes of The Buck in the Hills for example, the story ends, and it is difficult to say what has been learned or how the next encounter will be handled. For the purposes of locating Clark in literary history, however, the pattern is sufficiently clear. The question now becomes one of content. Granted Clarks fascination with the Henry Adams problem, granted Clarks decision to set his stories after the historically climactic experience, what is the content of his western version of the confrontation between the ideal and the actual? To move toward a possible answer, we must again consider Clarks works in the context of relevant themes in the literary history of the American West. Narratives of the West are commonly concerned with problems in the spread of what European-Americans call civilization. Families in wagon trains are threatened by savages and by the uncivilized forces of nature. Narratives about ranching, homesteading, and frontier towns feature the dangers of corruption from within the Caucasian community, but the essential effort is still the establishment of a decent civilization in a wild country. Clearly, this expansion of civilization is the expansion of national civilization, and yet it is equally clear that the national relevance is shortcircuited. In hundreds of films and novels, the national effort to settle the West leaves suddenly, once the given task is accomplished, only a regional remainder. Building a railroad from coast to coast is important to mainstream America, but what happens to those who live on land opened by the railroad is then ancillary to the nation as a nation. And stories about what happened after the trail was blazed, after the cattle were delivered to marketConrad Richters The Sea of Grass or Willa Cathers A Lost Lady, for exampleare stories, perhaps excellent ones, of the decline of the good old days in the West, not stories of a national decline. Popular narratives make a special contribution to this curious switch in relevance by ending when the particular task is accomplished or the problem is solved. Wagon train and cattle drive Westerns are typically concerned with getting there, and the stereotypical endingoften aided by purple prose or uplifting musicimplies that life for those who made it was happy ever after. The historical brevity of the most famous stages in western settlementthe mountaineer period, the wagon train period, cattle drives, for exampleand the trap of nostalgia for high adventure in unspoiled country are probably contributing factors in the strange but widespread belief that Americas much-loved stories of the West are nonetheless regional stories isolated from mainstream America.
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The vision of Walter Clark, however, is a distinctly national vision. Clark knew his territory and its historyas a good regionalist must, as a good writer mustbut his narrative intention was not to recreate the act of going to Oregon, getting the cattle to market, or saving little people from corrupt sheriffs and cattle barons. His vision is neither nostalgic nor anachronistic. He does not re-tell the story of western settlement as if it represented somehow the future. Clarks nagging concern for the intellectual ideals of democracy and his aesthetic choice of timesetting his stories after the historical climax combine to shape the content of his literary art. The pot of gold at the end of the American dream wassymbolically, historically, even literallyin the West. The development of the West was to be the development of America. The West was a prime testing ground for American values. Clarks ambition, I am saying, was to tell the people of the East, the West, the nation, what happened. The act of going west was high adventure, but what did it mean after the dramatic journey was over? In 1885, in 1900, in 1940, what role had western settlement played in the American Dream? The aggressive and materialistic side of the democratic experiment is best represented in The Track of the Cat. For Art and Joe Sam, the black painter is the evil that arises when a people dishonor the land that gives them life and exploit natures bounty to gratify the lust of their ego and the ambitions of their pocket book. Slaughter for the joy of it, Art tells Curt, is a thing [that] comes back on you, in time. Curt, of course, is contemptuous of Arts religious attitude toward the land and of the icon he carves each year for Joe Sam. The cat, Curt proclaimssounding like the paradigm of aggressive Americans from the purchase of Manhattan through the invasion of the Black Hills to the contemporary certainty that nature can absorb whatever poison we choose to dump into itis an actual cat killing actual cattle and can be stopped by an actual bullet. We raise cattle, Curt says heavily, making each word count, and well kill whatever kills cattle. What is killing the cattle, what is wrong on the land, is Curt and the materialistic version of the American Dream he represents; but he is right about one thing: he will destroy what is doing the killing, that is, himself. There will always be another Comstock, Curt believes, at least for those who are practical enough to see it and strong enough to go after it. Their present year, 1900, is not the end of the world. Art grants that there will always be something around to exploit, by the powerful few, but for everybody? No. That was a kind of dream, too, a big, fat one, and its over. Weve gone from ocean to ocean, Curt, burning and
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butchering and cutting down and plowing under and digging out, and now were at the end of it. Virginia Citys where the fat dream winked out. Now we turn back. . . . We can start digging into ourselves now; we can plow each other under. . . . Even a good dream, backed up, turns nightmare, and this wasnt a very good one to start with. A belly dream. Walter Clarks central concern is the American Dream and what its culmination in the West proved it to be. It is the story of three major character types: the idealistic dreamer, caught in the spell of truth and unable to compromise with the actual world; the egotistical dreamer, driven by aggressive will and thus also blind to the actual world; anda select few those who respect the religious truth of the natural world and the flawed integrity of the occupants of that world. Art Davies, Art Bridges, and Lawrence Black are three different versions of the fragmented idealist. Major Tetley and most of his followers, Curt Bridges, Harold Bridges, Sr., and numerous minor charactersincluding a good number from the short storiesrepresent the exploiters, those too mean of spirit to believe in the reality of Joe Sam and his black painter. In The City of Trembling Leaves, much of Reno itselfthe garish gambling houses, frustrated youthis a product of the American Dream backed up, turned nightmare. The certain sign of dream turned to nightmarea pervasive danger for all varieties of heroes, heroines, villains, and the in-between majorityis the act of turning in on ones self. We can start digging into ourselves now, says Art Bridges in The Track of the Cat; and this is exactly what Art Davies does in The Ox-Bow Incident. In different ways, Lawrence Black, Rachel Wells (who fights the battle of Rachel vs. Rachel), and Tim Hazard (who fights the same battle) are variations on a theme important according to Clarkfor Americans generally. These variations may serve to suggest, also, Clarks place in American literary history. Herman Melvilles concept of the Divine Inert, for example, is substantively comparable to Clarks portraits of idealistic dreamers who have seen more truth than they can accommodate and who cannot make the compromises required for practical action. Hal Bridges seems a more affirmative figure than Melvilles Bulkington, for Hal is certainly Clarks major portrayal of a hero; but Hal treads his Nevada version of a lee shore, constantly admonishing himself to steer shy of Curts power and not be drawn into Arts dreaming and yet to respect both extremes. Fundamental differences exist, of course, Melvilles white whale suggesting metaphysical meanings while Clarks black painter is probably symbolic of ex-
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ploitation in western settlement; but Clark is clearly a mainstream writer in his concern for ideals whichthough realseem as dangerous as evil. Relevant also are Henry Adams and Henry James, primarily for their concern with the theme of a dream turned back in on itself and for the resulting incapacity for action as a topic of special interest. Clarks occasional use of a style suggestive of Hemingway is not an accident; The Buck in the Hills and The Snows of Kilimanjaro are directly comparable in content as well as style. Numerous character types recurrent in American literature appear also in Clarks writings: William Faulkners Quentin Compson and a legion of self-destructive idealists; Sherwood Andersons portraits of mothers, in Winesburg, Ohio, for example (compare Clarks Mrs. Hazard, for example); and citified people, common in American fiction, who confront the latent primal, and learn or do not learn (paralleled in Clarks short stories The Rapids, Why Dont You Look Where Youre Going? and The Portable Phonograph). Perhaps the major difference between Clark and comparable writers in general termsis his emphasis on the primal and the democratic as well as on the intellectual and materialistic aspects of the American Dream. A helpful illustration of Clarks daring variety begins with a puzzling image in The Track of the Cat. All three of the Bridges brothers dream of mountains and valleys which seem, at a single moment, both familiar and unfamiliar, both home-like and exotic. The specific image, the Andes or the Himalayas, can be read to suggest disorientation, something out of place, a disorder; but the image recurs so often the reader feels a need for more specific analysis. Clarks explanation occurs, curiously, near the end of The City of Trembling Leaves. Lawrence Black has wandered off into the desert courting suicide. Tim Hazard has found him in time, and the two have stopped at a friendly bar inhabited by ordinary people, citizens. Tim, without condescension, entertains the company, and his biggest hit of the evening is one of his own songs, The Sweet Promised Land of Nevada. The lyrics describe God creating the world, but God forgets to finish Nevada, leaving it a Sweet Promised Land with the promise unfulfilled, with primordial mountains and desert a present and grossly tangible reminder that Gods power and energy exist. Gods supposed error with Nevadarepeated, according to the song, with the Himalayas and Andesis of course not an error at all. The mountains of Nevadalike other signs of Gods hand in other parts of the worldseem exotic to those who are out of touch with the nuclear, the center of their world. We do have here a symbol of disorientation, true, but it is specifically a symbol of disorientation in primal terms; and if we remember the settingLawrence Black, the good but destructive idealist who
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cannot force himself to condescend to the world, has been rescued by Tim Hazard, who is ambitious to compose a great symphony but who is playing a folk ballad for just plain folk and is a smash hitthen we can see something of Walter Van Tilburg Clarks very western version of a very American concern with the dreams of democracy.
M AX W E S T B R O O K ,
University of Texas
Primary Sources Christmas Comes to Hjalsen, Reno. Reno: Reno Publishing Company, 1930. The City of Trembling Leaves. New York: Random House, 1945. The Ox-Bow Incident. New York: Random House, 1940. Ten Women in Gales House and Shorter Poems. Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1932. The Track of the Cat. New York: Random House, 1949. The Watchful Gods and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1950. Secondary Sources Andersen, Kenneth. Character Portrayal in The Ox-Bow Incident. Western American Literature 4 (Winter 1970): 287298. (Discussion of character types as determined by their relation to faded myths and traditions.) Bates, Barclay W. Clarks Man for All Seasons: The Achievement of Wholeness in The Ox-Bow Incident. Western American Literature 3 (Spring 1968): 3749. (Argues that Swanson is the novels single whole man.) Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. (Includes a provocative and informative chapter comparing The Ox-Bow Incident to the film.) Cochran, Robert W. Nature and the Nature of Man in The Ox-Bow Incident. Western American Literature 5 (Winter 1971): 253264. (A major essay empha-
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sizing Art Crofts limited but realistic and human morality as contrasted with the fanaticism and destructiveness or ineffectiveness of Art Davies, Major Tetley, and others.) Lee, L. L. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Boise: Boise State College, 1973. (A monograph of exceptional quality, on all counts. Judicious coverage, yet includes a clear analysis of Clarks handling of the American Dream. Selected bibliography.) Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. (Required reading for anyone interested in western American literature. Includes a revised version of Miltons classic essay on the western attitude of Walter Clark.) Portz, John. Idea and Symbol in Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Accent 17 (Spring 1957): 112128. (Wide ranging and yet specific and convincing study of Clark, with special attention to the unitive, the divisive, and the intuitive.) Westbrook, Max. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. New York: Twayne, 1969. (Includes a selected bibliography and references to other bibliographies. Contends that reality for Clark is archetypal.) Wilner, Herbert. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. The Western Review 20 (Winter 1956): 103122. (A superior example of the criticism which argues, basically, that Clark did not succeed as an artist.)
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The Northern Boundary

between the western United States and western Canada was begun in 1818 from the northwesternmost point of the Lake of the Woods; it ran due south for some miles at about the 95th meridian, and then along the 49th parallel to the divide of the Rocky Mountains. Unable to determine the sovereignty over the region from the Rockies to the Pacific between Spanish California at 42 and Russian Alaska at 5440', Great Britain and the U.S. agreed that this Oregon Country, some 360,000 square miles, should be free and open to the nationals of both countries for a term of ten years. Even before the decade was out, in 1827, the two nations indefinitely extended this principle of amicable disagreement, and only in 1846 was the completion of the 49 boundary line from the Rockies to the Strait of Georgia, and thence through the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific, agreed upon. John Cawelti, in The Six-Gun Mystique (1975), analyzed the American Western as a brilliantly articulated game which takes place on a certain kind of board or field whose shape or markings indicate the significance of a particular action. The Canadian border, the northern boundary of the U.S., has almost inevitably functioned for the western American imagination as one edge of this board; the struggles to establish and defend approaches to, or passages across, this edge become significant actions. The border became the Indians medicine line, the unreached goal of Chief Josephs long retreat and Sitting Bulls refuge. Comparable motives for seeking the border are as much aggressively seized possibilities as flight or escape. Discovery of gold on the Fraser River in 1858 and in the Cariboo country in 1860 drew Americans in such numbers as to threaten nullification of the border conventions of 1846. Mormon migration from Utah to southern Alberta beginning in 1887 was motivated as much by rich new soil as by the desire to escape political persecution. The transborder area became variously the stable protection of the Queens justice, or an even more remote and mysterious wilderness, variously freedom in the great woods or exile in the land of endless snow. If the border has functioned as device or setting, its history as a locus of shared exploration and exploitation, of political dispute, commercial rivalry, and free and frequent migration, has also served the western writer as subject. The border is, in this more general sense, some measure of conventional regulation for the human conflicts and collaborations generated by the common occupation of a region by two
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(and more) nations and now reflected in the literature of both. In his meditation on the boundary line in Wolf Willow (1962), Wallace Stegner writes: For the 49th parallel was an agreement, a rule, a limitation, a fiction perhaps but a legal one, acknowledged by both sides; and the coming of law, even such limited law as this, was the beginning of civilization in what had been a lawless wilderness. Civilization is built on a tripod of geography, history, and law, and it is made up largely of limitations. Stegner is right, but it is also true that students of the American West must resist one such limitationthe temptation to become not only a regionalist, but a nationalist, chauvinistically forgetting that the history of western continental literature often ignores the political boundary and grows from its roots deep in common experience, a common language, and the common heritage of British and European culture. The history of the northern continental interior prior to the drawing of the international boundary is the history of the fur trade, dominated by the Hudsons Bay Company which from 1670 held charter to Ruperts Land: the drainage of the Hudson and James Bays, the Red River valley, and the valleys of the north and south branches of the Saskatchewan River. The Companys monopoly was repeatedly challenged by independent traders who organized in 1783 as the North-West Company, which remained in often violent competition, especially on the Red River and the Columbia, until the two companies merged in 1821. Many of the most interesting early narratives of travel and discovery came from these Norwesters, and among the best is Travels and Adventures in Canada (1809) by Alexander Henry the elder. Born in New Jersey, Henry was one of the first whites to penetrate the Canadian prairies, reaching the valley of the Saskatchewan by 1776; so vivid are his accounts that Francis Parkman borrowed almost verbatim from them for The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851). Another Yankee prominent in the fur trade was Peter Pond of Connecticut. Soldier, mapmaker, and explorer, Pond opened the Athabaska country, and penetrated as far as Great Slave Lake. He left what has been called a fascinating, but amazingly illiterate journal, the remnant of which, edited by R. G. Thwaites, is in Wisconsin Historical Collections (1908). Two other Yankees in the fur trade are Daniel Williams Harmon and Alexander Henry the younger, nephew of the senior Henry. Harmons Journals of Voyages and Travels (1820) and the younger Henrys narrative in New Light on the Early History of the Greater North West, edited by Elliott Coues in 1897, are notable largely as records of the encounter of lingering Puritan morality with the sexual customs of the trade frontier. Harmon, for example, refused the traders practice of abandoning Indian wives, returning with his to Vermont and formal marriage. Harmon is the subject of The Grand Portage (1951), a novel by Walter OMeara. These Yankees were in distinguished company including 1001
three Bay traders, Henry Kelsey (the first white to recordand in doggerel verseseeing the Canadian prairies), Anthony Henday (the first to record a sight of the Rockies), Samuel Hearne (the first to reach the Arctic Ocean by an overland route), and, preeminently, the Norwester Alexander Mackenzie, the first to travel the river given his name to the Arctic and the first to cross the continent to the Pacific. Mackenzies Voyages from Montreal through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in 1789 and 1793 (1801) reveals clearly the intrepid character of the Scots who were so often in the forefront of Canadian development. Poe borrowed from Mackenzies Voyages for his unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman. The pioneering explorations by land that established British claims to the Northwest were completed by the perilous descent of Simon Fraser (born in Vermont in 1776) by the river bearing his name to the Pacific in 1808. A definitive text of all of Frasers known Letters and Journals was edited by W. Kaye Lamb in 1960. Perhaps the most valuable source of sheer information about the early Northwest is the work of David Thompson, who spent twenty-eight years there as explorer, map-maker, naturalist and pioneer ethnographer of the Indians. In addition Thompson had considerable skills as a storyteller and his shrewd portraiture, sense of humor, and ear for dialogue make his records, collected and edited by Victor G. Hopwood in 1972 as Travels in Western North America, 1784812, a constant delight. The contemporary Canadian poet, John Newlove, has drawn on Thompsons work for his poem, The Pride. On his third and last expedition, the great British explorer James Cook found the harbor of Nootka on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1778, which became for the subsequent quarter century a crossroads of trade, particularly in the fur of the sea otter, and a center for international political struggle. The founding figure for Canadas west coast is George Vancouver, who meticulously filled in the details of Cooks outline of the coast from Oregon north; Vancouvers Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, 179095 (1801) is useful to the geographer but of slight narrative interest. Victor Hopwood, author of the admirable chapters on early explorers in the Literary History of Canada, describes how the Americans secured their first toehold claim in the Northwest: Against Vancouvers great accomplishments must be placed his failure to recognize the mouth of the fabled River of the West, passing it in April 1792 with the comment, not considering this opening worthy of more attention. Within two weeks Robert Gray in the Columbia entered the estuary and named the river for his ship, making the outstanding American discovery on the west coast of America. The several accounts connected with Grays discovery are collected in Voyages of the Columbia to the Northwest Coast (1941) by F. W. Howay. One literary curiosity of this period is the diary of John Jewitt, a blacksmith captured 1002
after the massacre of his Boston shipmates by the Nootka Indians in 1803. Jewitts account was enlarged in 1815 as Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt, a lively and exotic Pacific Indian captivity story to be compared with the more familiar ones of the Atlantic frontier, and more noteworthy because Jewitts editor and collaborator was Richard Alsop, one of the Connecticut Wits more noted for eastern sophistication than western adventure. American enterprise in the Pacific trade centered in John Jacob Astors fort on the Columbia, established in 1811 and captured and purchased by the Norwesters in 1813. Washington Irvings accounts in Astoria ( 1836) owe a debt, only grudgingly acknowledged by him, to at least two Canadians among what he called the scribbling clerks of the Pacific Fur Company: Gabriel Franchres Relation dun voyage la cte du Nord-Ouest de lAmerique ( 1820; translated into English, 1854) and Ross Coxs Adventures on the Columbia River (1831). Another Canadian, Alexander Ross, in AdVentures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River (1849), has left a markedly less reverent account of Astors enterprise than Irvings. Not surprisingly, the events surrounding Astoria have become a staple for the historical novel; Gilbert Wolf Gabriels I, James Lewis (1932) and John Jenningss River to the West (1948) are typical. Despite Astors bold moves, the Oregon country was under the effective control of the British until well into the 1840s. Any student of the literature of this period should be familiar with the several publications of the Hudsons Bay Record Society, particularly the letters and journals of George Simpson, after 1839 governor-in-chief of the Hudsons Bay territories; Simpsons skills as an administrator incorporated the Columbia into the largest and most efficient system for producing furs the world had known. The Society also published the records of Dr. John McLaughlin, chief factor at Fort Vancouver, whose accomplishments in the area earned him the occasional title of the Father of Oregon. The Society has also published Peter Skene Ogdens Snake Country Journal in two volumes covering the years 18241827. Ogdens colorful adventures as a Bay trader include his successful rescue of the survivors of the Whitman massacre in 1847, a task dependent on his shrewd knowledge of the regions Indians. He may have been the Fur Trader whose Traits of American Indian Life and Character (1853) attempted to correct sentimental portrayals of the noble savage, although the work has also been attributed to his contemporary, Duncan Finlayson. Ogdens exploits figure in Don Berrys delightful informal history of the unequal contention between the American and Canadian fur traders, A Majority of Scoundrels (1961). A darker view of the effect of the fur wars on the Indians is presented in Vardis Fishers novel, Pemmican (1956). 1003
A Literary History of the American West The Bay Companys control of the Oregon country was terminated by what the historian John Bartlet Brebner, in his invaluable North American Triangle: The lnterplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain (1945), calls the most remarkable anomaly in the occupation of North America the unpredictable American leap across the empty western half of the continent in order to settle Oregon and thereafter to try to goad Great Britain into withdrawing from the Pacific Coast. This exploit was effectively accomplished in five years, 18411846. This wave of migration, moved in part by the reception of Irvings Astoria and Adventures of Captain Bonneville (first titled The Rocky Mountains, 1837), began with missionaries, whose enterprise had been earlier and successfully resisted by the fur traders. The Canadian-born Jason Lee in 1834 established a Methodist mission in the Willamette valley, and another was begun near Walla Walla in 1836 by Dr. Marcus Whitman. The American Jesuit of Belgian descent, Pierre Jean De Smet, undertook a mission to the Flathead Indians in 1841 and his experiences on both sides of the border have been collected as Life, Letters, and Travels (1969). Another observer who recorded the twilight of the fur empire was the Canadian painter, Paul Kane, who travelled the Northwest between 1846 and 1848; his lively but unpretentious accounts in Wanderings of an Artist (1859) should be compared with George Catlins rather more ornate Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841) . There are several interesting accounts from those who first travelled the Oregon trail beyond Fort Laramie, the point reached by Francis Parkman as recorded in The Oregon Trail (1849). These include narratives by John B. Wyeth, John Townsend and Joel Palmer, included as volumes 21 and 30 of Reuben G. Thwaitess monumental thirty-two-volume collection of Early Western Travels 17481846 (19047), and the Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer (1880) by Peter H. Burnett, later the first governor of California, who went to Oregon in 1843. But these early accounts pale before the number of modern novels which together make the agricultural settlement of the Oregon country the most frequently used subject associated with the northern boundary. The political contention over the boundary which culminated in President Polks assertion, in his inaugural address of 1845, that our title to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestionable, and in the subsequent U.S.-British conventions that made it so, is the subject of several more or less bellicose fictions, beginning with Emerson Houghs 5440 or Fight (1909) and including June Wetherells The Glorious Three (1951), Bill Gulicks The Land Beyond (1958) and Janice Giless The Great Adventure (1966), which has Captain Bonneville assigned to spy on the British. More substantial fictional treatments of the move-
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ment of the agricultural frontier into the Northwest are prefigured by H. L. Daviss Pulitzer Prize novel, Honey in the Horn (1935). Set in 19061908, the novel portrays a community still in the period of homesteading, but already mature in its traditions and diversities; the character of Uncle Preston Shiveley, in his dual roles as historian and romancer, underlines Daviss sense of complexity in recovering the local past. Daviss 1957 novel, The Distant Music, is a more conventional portrait of three generations of settlement in the region. A. B. Guthries The Way West (1949), Ernest Haycoxs last book and one of his best, The Earthbreakers (1954), and Don Berrys Trask (1960), which shows the title characters transformation from mountain man to farmer, are all worth serious attention. While the 49 boundary was largely the result of the consolidation of the American agricultural frontier, it was further challenged by the discovery of new mineral wealth. The rush for free gold in California in 1848 launched the exploitation of the Cordillera range northward culminating in strikes in the Yukon and the Klondike in 1898. Americans followed the gold in such numbers that their presence did much to prompt the formal establishment of the colony of British Columbia in 1866 and then the confederation of the eastern colonies in 1867, the root of modern Canada as it labored to prevent American annexation. The literary exploitation of the mining frontier was international. The English-born, Scots-educated Robert Service is most famous for his ballads finally issued in 1907 as The Spell of the Yukon, but his novel The Trail of 98 (1910) was equally popular. Jack Londons The God of His Fathers (1901) and Smoke Bellew (1912) are based on his experience in the gold rush. Hamlin Garland travelled the area, reporting it in The Trail of the Goldseekers (1899) and The Long Trail (1907). Canadians contributed works like Clive Phillips-Wolleys Snap: A Legend of Lone Mountain (1890) and Frederick Nivens The Lost Cabin Mine (1909). The most authentic treatment of the subject in Canadian fiction is William Henry Jarviss The Great Gold Rush (1913). The Reverend Charles Gordon, who under the pseudonym Ralph Connor acquired an international reputation as a novelist, wrote about mining in the Selkirk Mountains in Black Rock (1898), and Mary Hallock Foote in Coeur dAlene (1894) describes labor troubles among the miners of Idaho. The growth of the lumber industry in the Northwest has also been a transborder subject for the novelist. Canadian works include Bertrand Sinclairs Big Timber (1916) and preeminently Martin Allerdale Graingers Woodsmen of the West (1908); Grainger, a miner, logger, and eventually Chief Forester of British Columbia, has left one of the most effective pictures of west coast life. American novels include Ernest Haycoxs The Adventurers (1954), which sketches the early exploitation of timber in Oregon,
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Archie Binnss The Timber Beast (1944) touching the industrys embroilments with the IWW, and Ken Keseys Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), a vivid story of three generations of Oregon loggers. One of the so-called forgotten proletarian novels of the 30s is Robert Cantwells The Land of Plenty (1934), which deals with unrest among the lumber mill workers in the Grays Harbor area. The white writer early discovered the particularly rich and exotic cultures of the coastal and intermountain Indians of the Northwest, and Canadian writers at least have exploited the subject in ways that give point to Edward McCourts remark that in Canada, Alberta is the far west, British Columbia the near east. Franz Boas of Columbia University was the first ethnographer to record the coastal Indian cultures, and after 1902 his work, and that of his students, began appearing in publications by the Smithsonian Institutions Bureau of American Ethnology. The French-Canadian anthropologist, Dr. Marius Barbeau, was also active in the field and his novel, Mountain Cloud (1944), is based on the folklore of the coastal tribes. Pauline Johnson, daughter of an hereditary chief of the Mohawks and an English mother, was popular on both sides of the border for public readings of her sentimental lyrics of Indian life, collected in 1912 as Flint and Feather; in 1911 she published Legends of Vancouver, short stories recounting tales and rituals of the Squamish Indians, collected with the aid of Chief Joseph Capilano. The intermountain Indians became subjects for two Montana writers, James Willard Schultz, who married into a Blackfoot tribe and published several stories of their people, and Frank Bird Linderman, a prolific collector of folklore in such works as Indian Old-Man Stories (1920) and Kootenai Why Stories (1926). Schultzs memoirs appeared in 1907 as My Life as an Indian, and Lindermans recollections were edited in 1968 by H. G. Merriam as Montana Adventure. The Indian trickster figure known as Old Man or Coyote has been used to superb advantage by Sheila Watson in The Double Hook (1959), set in the Cariboo country and often celebrated as the most interesting of Canadian experimental novels. Howard OHagan in Tay John (1939) makes his novels title character, a half-breed raised among the Shuswap Indians, something of a mythic hero, and Alan Fry in How a People Die (1970) gives an elegiac portrait of the deterioration of native culture among the coastal tribes. A.M. D. Fairbairns Plays from the Pacific Coast (1935) dramatizes tensions between whites and the Haida Indians, and George Ryga has written several plays about the situation of the Indian in western Canada, most importantly The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, first performed in 1967. More generally, the writing of British Columbia has retained much of the exotic in its tradition. Malcolm Lowry, author of the celebrated Under 1006
the Volcano (1947), lived in a beach shack near Vancouver between 1939 and 1954, did some of his most vigorous writing there, and left a work-inprogress set in the area, October Ferry to Gabriola (1970). Robert Harlows Scann (1972) is an eccentric but ambitious effort by its title character to chronicle his intermountain town on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Jack Hodginss collection of short stories, Spit Delaneys Island (1976), and his novel, The Invention of the World (1977), are wonderfully comic tales of some remote settlements on Vancouver Island. This coastal willingness to experiment with subject and technique is present even in the quieter work of the late Ethel Wilson, whose novels, Hetty Dorval (1947) and Swamp Angel (1954), and two novellas published as Equations of Love (1952) effectively combine sympathetic observation with a cutting satiric edge. Two American expatriates now resident and writing in British Columbia are Jane Rule who, from her first novel, The Desert of the Heart (1964), has contributed several sensitive studies of unconventional love, and Audrey Thomas. Thomass well-crafted collection of short stories, Ten Green Bottles (1967), reveals the kind of quirky yet engrossing intelligence which may well characterize much of contemporary writing in British Columbia; certainly this judgment can be tested against the anthology of Writings of the Canadian Northwest, edited by Gary Geddes as Skookum Wawa (1977). Recent poetry in the Northwest reveals intermittent transborder activity. A visit by Robert Duncan to Vancouver in 1961 sparked considerable interest in the Black Mountain group (especially Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson) among younger Canadian poets like George Bowering, Frank Davey, Lionel Kearns, Fred Wah, and Daphne Marlatt; such interest prompted dark murmurs of American neo-colonialism, but generated the lively magazine Tish, which published until 1969. In 1964 Robin Skelton of Victoria, later founding editor of The Malahat Review (1967), edited Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest comprising work by the Americans Kenneth Hanson, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, William Stafford, and David Wagoner, and dedicated to Theodore Roethke, a fitting tribute to a poet who has been a principal influence along the boundary. In 1975 Stafford reciprocated by including Skelton and Earle Birney, the dean of western Canadian poets, in Modern Poetry of Western America, an anthology Stafford edited with Clinton Larson. The ranks of British Columbia poets have included American expatriates like Stanley Cooperman, Robin Blaser, and J. Michael Yates, who in 1970 edited an anthology of the work of some fiftyfive poets as Contemporary Poetry of British Columbia. Modern poetry in western Canada might be dated from the establishment in 1941 by Alan Crawley of Contemporary Verse: A Canadian Quarterly, which published until 1953. Crawleys associates included Dorothy Livesay (the remarkable doyenne of Canadian poetry whose first book 1007
appeared in 1928 and most recent, The Woman I Am, in 1977), Anne Marriott (whose first book, The Wind Our Enemy, 1939, evoked the hard conditions on the prairies during the 30s), Doris Ferne, and Floris Clarke McLaren, whose Frozen Fire (1937) is notable for its impressions of the coastal landscape. The title poem of Earle Birneys first book, David and Other Poems (1942), a narrative of the tragic dilemma faced by a climber in the Rockies, has come to be regarded as a Canadian classic. Roy Daniells knows both the prairies and the coast, and his Deeper into the Forest (1948) reflects both regions. Wilfred Watsons Fridays Child appeared in 1955, and he has remained with the avant-garde ever since. Among younger British Columbia poets of interest are Red Lane, Patrick Lane, Tom Wayman, and the resolute and irrepressible experimentalist, Bill Bissett. Finally, mention should be made of the quarterly Canadian Literature, edited since 1959 at the University of British Columbia with the distinguished man-of-letters George Woodcock as its first editor; it is an indispensable tool for the student of Canadian letters, east and west. The agricultural settlement of the high plains, the last frontier common to experience on both sides of the border, began in 1812 with the Red River Settlement on the 116,000 square miles lying athwart the 49th parallel and granted by the Bay Company as a proprietary colony to Lord Selkirk. Selkirks efforts to populate the colony with a mixture that included Scots crofters, Irish laborers, and eventually Swiss mercenaries alienated the North-West Company and the English and French half-breeds (called Mtis), who saw the settlement as destructive of both the fur trade and the buffalo hunt. Alexander Rosss last book, The Red River Settlement (1856), details the hardships of the early settlers and foreshadows the violent subsequent history of the area. The historian Alvin C. Gluek has studied the complex interaction between the two nations in the region in Minnesota and the Manifest Destiny of the Canadian Northwest (1965). Selkirks estate reverted to the Bay Company in 1836, and in 1869, when the Company sold its vast territories to Canada, the Mtis, led by the charismatic Louis Riel, violently resisted what they saw as the final threat to their rights. The events leading to the Red River Rebellion, including the role played by Americans pressing for annexation of the region, prompted the first serious novel of the prairies, Alexander Beggs Dot It Down: A Story of Life in the North-West (1871), which contains some satiric portraits of those involved; Begg recounted the same story more soberly in his history, The Creation of Manitoba (1871). The Rebellion failed and Riels subsequent adventures included a sixyear period of exile in the United States, where he became a citizen in 1883. He returned to Canada in 1884 to lead the final efforts of the Indians and Mtis to seek redress of their grievances, efforts which erupted in the armed 1008
North West Rebellion of 1885. Riel, despite his U.S. citizenship, was tried and hanged for treason in 1885. The standard biography of Riel is G. F. G. Stanleys Louis Riel (1963), but his career is also becoming the stuff of legend. John Coulters play The Trial of Louis Riel (1967) is now performed annually in Regina with the jury drawn from the audience. Rudy Wiebes The Scorched-Wood People (1977), a novel centering on Riels career, examines the interplay between history and myth-in-the-making, a work prepared for by Wiebes earlier novel, The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), which sensitively recreates the consciousness of a Cree leader reluctantly drawn into the North West Rebellion. Riel was executed in the year which saw the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This long-anticipated transcontinental link, its expectation celebrated in George Grants exuberant chronicle, Ocean to Ocean (1873), was finally memorialized in a long narrative poem, Toward the Last Spike (1952), by one of eastern Canadas principal poets, E. J. Pratt. With the railroad and improvements in the new technology of dry farming came the final waves of agricultural immigration. Soon Canadian novelists were recording the process of civilizing the raw prairies in ways to compare with their American counterparts described by Roy Meyer in The Middle Western Farm Novel (1965). Nellie McClung brought her enthusiasm for Christian reform, especially for womens rights and temperance, to bear in Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), novels like Painted Fires (1925), about the introduction of a Finnish girl into the Anglo West, and two autobiographical works, Clearing in the West (1935) and The Stream Runs Fast (1945). Laura Goodman Salversons The Viking Heart (1923) recounts the movement of Icelandic settlers to Gimli, Manitoba, and When Sparrows Fall (1925) the hardships of Icelandic and Norwegian pioneers on the U.S. shore of Lake Superior. Martha Ostenso, born in Norway, raised in the States, wrote Wild Geese (1926) from experience during six years residence in Manitoba. More general studies of the human costs exacted in subduing the prairies are Robert J. C. Steads trio of novels, Neighbours (1922), The Smoking Flax (1924) and Grain (1926), and Frederick Philip Groves five prairie novels, of which A Search for America (1927) and Fruits of the Earth (1933) are the most impressive. Groves autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), together with D. O. Spettigues scholarly detection of the past deliberately concealed by Grove, published as FPG: The European Years (1973), form an authentic case study of the crisis of personal identity often the subject of Canadian prairie fiction. Winnipeg was the first substantial urban center of the prairies and its rich ethnic mix is reflected in such novels as Ralph Connors The Foreigner (1909) about the Slavic community of north Winnipeg and Adele Wisemans The Sacrifice (1956) about the Jewish community. Ann Henrys play, Lulu Street (1967), concerns the dramatic Winnipeg 1009
General Strike of 1919. A major talent associated with Manitoba has recently emerged in the work of Margaret Laurence; her novels The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966) and The Diviners (1974) are set in the imaginary prairie community of Manawaka, and are the most impressive of the studies of female independence which have marked recent Canadian fiction. In 1925, Sinclair Lewis wrote that he intended to set the novel which became Mantrap (1926) in Saskatchewan, but that Im going to invent a whole new region up there. Sinclair Rosss As for Me and My House (1941) is comparable with Lewiss Main Street (1920) in its dramatization of the repressive effects of western small town life on sensitive people, but it is considerably more convincing in its depiction of Canadian rural life than Lewiss 1926 invention. Rosss novel should also be compared with Wallace Stegners On a Darkling Plain (1940); while Rosss protagonists are virtually destroyed by village life, Stegners central figure, a Canadian World War I veteran seeking therapeutic isolation as a Saskatchewan homesteader, finally discovers his need for community. W. O. Mitchells portrait of a prairie boy in Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) has been compared with Twains Huck, and the comparison is strengthened by Mitchells gifts as a raconteur and humorist, evident in his radio series which was popular on both sides of the border, published as Jake and the Kid (1961); Mitchells Vanishing Point (1973) is the more sombre story of a difficult love affair on an Alberta Stony Indian reserve. Paul Hieberts Sarah Binks (1947), a mock-biography of the Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan, is a marvelous send-up of both the literary pioneer and academic criticism. The full range of contemporary poetry from the prairie provinces is reflected in Twelve Prairie Poets, edited by Laurence Ricou in 1976, and in Draft: An Anthology of Prairie Poetry, edited by Dennis Cooley; among those included, three show a particularly intense feeling for regional experience: John Newlove, one of the finest lyric poets in Canada, whose recent books include Moving in Alone (1965) and Lies (1972); Robert Kroetsch, whose The Stone Hammer Poems (1975) contains some tart comic versions of the Old Man legends; and Eli Mandel, whose several volumes beginning with Fuseli Poems (1961) often take unexpected mythological turns. Prairie drama is well represented in Prairie Performance, edited by Diane Bessai in 1980, an anthology of short plays by eight regional playwrights including Gwen Pharis Ringwood, who has written impressively for the theatre since the 30s, the versatile W. O. Mitchell, and Ken Mitchell, whose Cruel Tears (1975) is a prairie folk-opera version of the Othello story written in collaboration with the country and western group, Humphrey and the Dumptrucks. If Canada has a wild West, it might be found in Alberta, but, as Dick Harrison has argued in Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction (1977), the literary record raises doubts. The central figure in Al1010
berta fiction is more likely to be the clergyman than the cowboy (as in Ralph Connors The Sky Pilot, 1899), the mountie rather than the gunfighter, as in Connors Corporal Cameron (1912). The North West Mounted Police arrived in Alberta in 1874, before the main waves of immigration and late enough to profit from American mistakes, particularly in Indian policy; the NWMP maintained order largely by eradicating the whiskytrading forts which dotted the famous Whoop-Up trail between Fort Benton on the Missouri and Fort Macleod on the Oldman River, a story told in Paul Sharps lively history Whoop-Up Country (1955). The mounties real achievements were soon magnified in the popular fictions of both nations; Dick Harrison has culled twenty-two of these in Best Mounted Police Stories (1978), one by James Oliver Curwood, who deserves special mention as the writer perhaps most responsible for Americans popular images of Canada. Curwood was born in Michigan in 1878 and wrote some twenty-six novels, most of them about Canada, before his death in 1927; no fewer than 122 Hollywood films have been based on Curwoods novels or short stories. The search for a West, real or imagined, is a major theme in a trio of novels by Robert Kroetsch: The Words of My Roaring (1966), The Studhorse Man (1968), and Gone Indian (1973), in part the story of Jeremy Sadness, born in Manhattan and now trying to track in Alberta the western myths of his boyhood. It is appropriate, finally, to return to the work of Wallace Stegner, for in a way analogous to the wanderings of the Mason family chronicled in The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), this sketch has crossed and recrossed the international boundary in order to trace the literary fabric of its life. As Stegner reports in Wolf Willow (1962), his boyhood summers were spent on a farm astride the boundaryI trapped Saskatchewan and Montana flickertails indiscriminately, and spread strychnine-soaked wheat without prejudice over two nations. But, as Stegner also reminds us, Undistinguishable and ignored as it was, artificially as it split a country that was topographically and climatically one, the international boundary marked a divide in our affiliations, expectations, loyalties. And he continues: It exerted uncomprehended pressures upon affiliation and belief, custom and costume. It offered us subtle choices even in language (we stooked our wheat; across the Line they shocked it), and it lay among our loyalties as disturbing as a hair in butter. Again Stegner is right, but the very differences in these two literatures of the west, adjacent and closely interwoven as they are, seem even more reasons to study them together.
M ORTON L. ROSS , University
of Alberta
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Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. An argument by an important contemporary poet and novelist that Canadian letters are characterized by such patterns as survival and victimization. Brebner, John Bartlet. North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain. New York, 1945; rpt. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966. A comprehensive, but convenient and readable history of international relations. Davey, Frank. From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature Since 1960. Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1974. Particularly useful on western writers. Harrison, Dick. Across the Medicine Line: Problems in Comparing Canadian and American Western Fiction. In The Westering Experience in American Literature, edited by Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee, pp. 4856. Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1977. Describes differences in the treatment of such topics as justice and the individuals sense of community. , ed. Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1979. Papers read at a conference in Banff, April 1978, of historians, literary scholars, and writers from both sides of the border, a seminal occasion for transborder study of the two Wests. . Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1977. A study of the difficulties in treating prairie experience by means of conventions and techniques imported from elsewhere. Klinck, Carl, ed. Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Remarkably comprehensive survey with sections including philosophical literature and scientific writing. McCourt, Edward. The Canadian West in Fiction. Rev. ed. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1970. The pioneer study, largely descriptive, which first appeared in 1949. Mandel, Eli, ed. Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Essays on Canadian culture by such authors as West, McDougall, Frye, and McLuhan. Morton, Arthur S. A History of the Canadian West to 187071. 2nd ed., edited by Lewis G. Thomas. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1973. The standard history. New, W. H. Articulating West: Essays on Purpose and Form in Modern Canadian Literature. Toronto: New Press, 1972. Includes searching essays on western poets and novelists. Ricou, Laurence. Vertical Man/Horizontal World. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1973. A study of the complex relationship between man and land in western Canadian fiction. Stephens, Donald G., ed. Writers of the Prairies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1973. Nineteen essays on western Canadian novelists by various hands.
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Smith, Dwight L., ed. The American and Canadian West: A Bibliography. Santa Barbara, California: A.B.C.-Clio, 1979. Detailed annotations and a very comprehensive subject index makes this very useful. Story, Norah. The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. An encyclopedia particularly useful for the details of Canadian history. Wiebe, Rudy. Western Canada Fiction: Past and Future. Western American Literature 6 (1971): 2130. A spirited answer to an essay by Donald Green in WAL (Winter 1968); Wiebe argues for the range and vigor of contemporary western Canadian fiction.
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Part Three
REDISCOVERING THE WEST
INTRODUCTION
The land is largely settled, the water must be filtered, and the sky vacillates between startling blue and grainy brown, yet exploration continues. If nature itself seems diminished by development, and survival appears uncertain, exploration nonetheless continues, with a richer cast and an enlarged literary perspective. The West has become less a dream, more a place, or collection of places, with pressing problems, limited potentials and high drama. It is in process of rediscovery. The process itself has been far from pleasant because westerners, like other Americans, have seen national leaders assassinated, observed fellow citizens brutalized because they sought to exercise constitutionally guaranteed rights, viewed in living color a disillusioning war and its domestic effects, created smog and breathed it; they have also been forced to recognize that they live from moment to moment threatened by nuclear catastrophe. Illusions have been cut away by forces as inexorable as acid rain. Like it or not, western writers have had to face the problems of survival in the late twentieth century. If they dont enjoy the luxury of dwelling in an imagined past, they may with reason hope that the actual historic West has prepared them for the present. One writer who seems to symbolize contemporary western literary exploration is William Eastlake (treated at length in Part Two of this history), whose fiction has as much in common with absurdist, post-modern expression as with traditional western writing. His work preceded that of other revisionists such as Tom Robbins, John Nichols, Sam Shepard, and Richard Brautigan. Moreover, if his early writing seemed to lean toward Jack Kerouacs vision of a harmonious, multi-racial society in the West, a society based on Mexican, Native American, and hip or counter-cultural white values, it quickly evidenced a hard edge that had been tempered by Eastlakes varied experiences in the previous three decades and that would achieve a startling maturity (and an occasional shrillness) during the 1960s. The opening lines of Eastlakes first published novel, Go in Beauty (1956) Once upon a time there was time. The land here in the Southwest had evolved slowly and there was time and were great spaces. Now a man on horseback from atop a bold mesa looked out over the violent spectrum of the Indian Country into a gaudy infinity where all the colors of the world exploded, soundlessly. Theres not much time, he said.
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contrast the temporal assumptions of white Americans with the great scheme of nature. They also revealed to readers at the time the emergence of a writer who broke paradigms, who guided his audience on an oblique journey. Like Lewis and Clark, Eastlake stands at a thresholdbut not of discovery, of rediscovery, and a distinguished cadre of younger writers has followed his lead. This explorer was no innocent youth when his first novel was published. Born in 1917, Eastlake, like many others in his generation, had been scarred by the Great Depression and bloodied by World War II. Unlike many others, however, his vision extended beyond the past to a present that required judgment on new terms, and a future whose terms seemed unimaginable. Willing to face the possibility of nuclear devastation and environmental degeneration, William Eastlake was and remains a modern man coming to terms with modern conditions. Because he has long since lost his own navet, Eastlake insists that readers test theirs, taking an unflinching look at the contemporary West and the world of which it is a part. This second awarenessthe West as part of a larger and interrelated worldis a salient characteristic of contemporary western writing. Like Eastlake, many present-day authors are so talented that their discomforting ruminations cannot be simply shrugged off. Among other signals of literary maturity, Eastlake was one of the first western writers to introduce ethnically diverse casts, to express deep concerns over possible ecological disaster, to pose serious questions concerning American foreign policy, and to introduce both the ironic humor and the sometimes harsh language of contemporary letters to western writing. As another contemporary giant, Wright Morris, has pointed out, truth is the business of fiction and of art in general. A much earlier American genius, Emily Dickinson, had poetically advised to tell the truth but tell it slant. Eastlake and many younger writers as well have told the truth but told it slant, for slant often seems the only acceptable way of dealing with todays world. Irony, for example, is frequently Eastlakes tool as he winds his radical views into revisionist fiction; two white men hunting eagles engage in the following conversation: Eagles and Indians at one time controlled this whole country, Drago; you couldnt put out a baby or a lamb in my grandfathers time without an Indian or an eagle would grab it. Now we got progress. Civilization. That means man is free to go about his business. Build a dam in Indian Country. Motorboats. Varoom varoom varoom! Thats the music of progress, Drago. It is? (Dancers in the Scalp House, p. 25) 1018
Like many of his issue-oriented peers, Eastlake wields a needle more effectively than a bludgeon. The pioneers, for example, he has described as . . . unimaginative, tough, stupid clods, romanticized reactionaries, ready to kill or debase the last of the Indians, cut down every tree in sight, overgraze and till land that should not have been tilled. . . . Such hyperbole is, unfortunately, a characteristic of some revisionist writing, yet the underlying impulse to demythologize the past in order to better understand the present is defensible. Historically, many of the most stimulating western writers have been transplanted easternersOwen Wister, Helen Hunt Jackson, Nathanael Westand at least some of their work has been the product of disillusionment, of their own discoveries that the actual West and the West they expected were not the same. Eastlake, born and raised in New Jersey, fits the pattern, but he has found more than he expected: more beauty, more space, but also more danger of losing those things. He has also added a provocative element with his suggestion that places seek their writers, rather than vice versa, and he has been but one of a large number of easterners who have offered varied, sometimes innovative views of the contemporary West: Gerald Locklin, Edward Abbey, Gerald Rosen, among many others. Finally, it is the questing of Eastlake and his peers, not their conclusions, that is most important, their questing and their willingness to employ contemporary philosophy and literary techniques to examine a region always in danger of romanticization. The fiction of William Eastlake exemplifies many of the most important directions of recent western writing: harsh, modern language; fluid characterization; non-linear plots; magical realism; a necessary degree of irreverence. Beneath the flippant tone that he and more than a few of his contemporaries sometimes employ dwells a reverence for the land and a desire to shock westerners and non-westerners alike into survival. Activism not angst is their advice. Eastlake concludes Dancers in the Scalp House this way: The undiscovered country is . . . the ease and wonderment at lifes mysteries. It is the only country that abides. In seeking his undiscovered country, William Eastlake helps guide the rediscovery of the West. Unlike Eastlake, many of the most admired authors from earlier generations had retained links to the original discovery of the West, to the classic frontier, and their work reflects its vigor and navet. Moreover, a large number of critics and scholars sharpened their own tastes on similar experiences in literary fashions produced in response to those fading realities. Contemporary writing, like contemporary life, may offend them. For example, one respected critic recently asserted that There is no one coming up in Western letters who is even close to indicating that he or she will one day be in the same league with Clark, Waters, Fergusson, or Stegner. 1019
Since it is impossible to project how important any author may become, who is to say that the large and increasingly heterogeneous mix of contemporary writers doesnt include individuals who evidence as much promise as the four mentioned above? More to the point, however, is that present-day authors do not write like earlier artists, nor do they view their region in the same ways their predecessors did. Frequently they approach old subjects in new fashions or from novel perspectivesRichard Brautigans packaged trout stream, Wayne Udes omnipresent coyote, or Joan Didions freeways to nowhereand they have expanded the range of both expression and subject matter in their continuing rediscovery of region. They have also affronted more than a few traditionalists: Black cowboys? Cluttered cities? Uppity women? Hippy communes? Polluted streams? Drugs? Sex? Rock n roll? Where will it all end? Many modern writers are attacked not for their art but for the world they reflect. Critics are doomed to respond to change rather than initiate it, especially in an electronic age when change seems constantly to accelerate for, as has always been true, artists create reality as they explore it. A major factor in the recent intensification of literary exploration has been the nationalization of American culture. No longer dominated by the East Coast corridor, national values and expressions are undergoing a homogenization that, in turn, has created an awareness of endangered sectional uniqueness and led to awakened local sensibilities. Regional anthologies, regional literary magazines, and regional book reviews are being published in increasing numbers, most featuring a distinct sense of place, many examining specific western subregions and suggesting that wed best know what were losing before allowing it to be lost. In Goodbye to a River (1960), written on the cusp of rediscovery, Texan John Graves points out: . . . The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were even connected with him withers into half a man. . . . It is, I think, necessary to know in that crystal chamber of the mind where one speaks straight to oneself that one is or was that thing, and for any understanding of the human condition its probably necessary to know a little about what that thing consists of. One product of such knowledge is a West not defined by the illusions or desires of outsiders, but by western experiencesand illusionsa West reexplored by westerners. Writers, who in an earlier time might have believed that the stuff of truly memorable literature was somehow limited to Europe or the eastern seaboard, recognize that their own perceptions and the places that shaped them offer universality; the short stories of Raymond Carver, for example, touch modern people, whether or not they share his West Coast roots. James D. Houstons Preface to California Heartland (1978) 1020
eloquently expresses the philosophy behind this generative regionalism: The region is real. It can be any region. Somewhere between the freeways and the fast-food chains, somewhere out behind the interchangeable supermarkets of America, the regions are still there. . . . The place can give shape to the writing. And the writing in turn helps us see and grasp the place. A number of other interrelated developments have emerged from contemporary exploration. The first is a recognition that the traditional West may itself be a fiction, the creation of myth-peddling popular writers and slick cartographers unconcerned with local realities. What actually exists is a series of related but distinct subregions, many Wests: coastal Californias westernness is distinct from South Dakotas, which is in turn different from northern Arizonas. If regions are distinct, so are experiences, values, and styles: all westerners dont wear Stetsons and ride pintos. As a result, writers have tested western stereotypes of late, and found greater complexity and richness than previously acknowledged. In works such as Abbeys The Brave Cowboy (1956) or Max Evanss The Rounders (1960), traditional roles are examined in unromantic, modern arenas; Thomas Bergers Little Big Man (1964) plays against myths, planting an elbow firmly in readers ribs; Goin a Buffalo by Ed Bullins (1968) and Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez (1978) use the stage to explore dramatic aspects of non-white life; Houstons Gasoline: The Automotive Adventures of Charlie Bates (1980) and Peter Gents North Dallas Forty (1973) look closely at contemporary urban scenes, the former surrealistically, the latter naturalistically; the poetry of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel (The Carousel Would Haunt Me, 1973) uses twangy, country speech, while William Barneys verse (The Kildeer Crying, 1979) employs a haunting formality. This list could be very long indeed, but the point is that variety itself seems to be the most prominent characteristic of writing from the West. If many contemporary writers are irreverent, they are also imaginative and more conceptually open than their predecessors, expanding vistas while questioning assumptions. Like their nineteenth-century counterparts, they are actually creating a West, as much upon shards remaining from other artists versions as upon social and physical reality. In the midst of such churning, a complex of questions endures: Where is the West? What is western? Who is western? In a sense, this volume is an expanded definition of the region and its literature, of what it has meant and what it means. No single mode of defining is adequate because change and diversity also endure. West as place: trans-Appalachian West, transMississippi West, regions and subregions; West as time: the census of 1890, for example, marks the end of the frontier; West as terrain: Walter Prescott Webbs arid land in the rain shadows of mountains is one instance; West as legend: We too are symbolic frontiersmen, contemporary novelist Larry 1021
McMurtry has declared; West as myth: the continued popularity of shootem-up Westerns exemplifies this; West as style: recently, the urban cowboy and cowgirl craze; even West as East: California begrudgingly acknowledged to be a national cultural avatar. Again, variations might fill many pages. The questions remain complicated and the answers varied, even threatening, because they are the products of dizzying change that can obfuscate valuable historical perspectives. In any case, autochthonous literature is burgeoning. As Delbert Wylder has observed of recent western fiction, the variety is amazing. . . . [it] demonstrates a surprising amount of both versatility and vitality. Such vitality is in part the product of growing confidence that has followed independence from traditional literary taste-makers with their urban, East Coast biases, and a recognition of the importance of regional expression. American culture, in escaping the clutches of European yearning, continues moving west, and no group has been quicker to grasp this phenomenon than artists. The old sense of regional persecution that once led westerners to cast hooded eyes toward eastern literati wafts away like yesterdays smoke signals. East Coast publishing, for example, no longer seems dominant. Neither do reviewers and critics from that region. As a result of the nearly logarithmic growth of presses and literary magazines in the West, as well as the founding of the Western Literature Association in 1966, both art and criticism have swerved away from the older national paradigm. After reading the work of such native western critics as Wylder, J. Golden Taylor, John R. Milton, Max Westbrook, Don D. Walker, Ann Ronald, and William T. Pilkington, for instance, the observations of an auslander such as Leslie Fiedler, while interesting, seem inconsequential. Moreover, the Civil Rights Movement that rocked America in the 1960s has led to considerably expanded perceptions within the region, giving the lie to the mythic all-white West that never was. Within the last decade, readers have begun to catch increasingly revealing glimpses of the West as experienced in various ethnic perspectives, from womens vistas, through counter-cultural visions. The cast grows richer. Regional small presses, many of which originated in the radicalism of the late 60s and early 70s often bring an underlying pugnacity to their tasks, a willingness to confront and challenge old assumptions, as demonstrated by the very title of Gary Elders Foreword, Circular introduction to his revisionist collection of stories, The Far Side of the Storm: New Ranges of Western Fiction (1975). Writes Elder: Something about the West has always been portentous in the American sense. Prodigious marvels and ominous prophecies, 1022
great dreams and the betrayal of reality, the signification of some place always Out There, try again, the myth stuff for renewal. Or betrayal. Out There the forest, unused; Out There the land, free; Out There the savage world, to take; Out There the Pacific shore, peace. . . . The mindwarp of the sixties strung Out There to the frontiers of the mind. John Kennedy assayed the weft of that country beyond the new frontier and was lost Out There as surely as Jed Smith was. Lost Out There. Whatever their weaknessestrendiness, cronyism, elitism, a tendency to confuse difference with innovationsmall presses and their periodical equivalents, little literary magazines, are offering a no-holds-barred reexamination of western life through western letters. It has been suggested that, beyond location, many such enterprises are traditionally western in their very robustness, spontaneity, and contentiousness. Nonetheless more than a few traditional critics would as soon ignoreif not eliminate them. As one reviewer wrote of Elders unconventional collection, If this is current Western fiction at its best, perhaps a new storm is due and newer ranges should be sought. Such disagreement is itself valuable, of course, for it marks a serious questioning of literary and cultural values. That alternative publishing constitutes a new and promising range is not argued. As Milton has observed concerning big business publishing today, without a well-known name, or without a relative in the publishing house, a good craftsmanan artist in the true sense of the wordhas no chance. What results, according to James Sallis, is that alternative outlets, for many years our literary underground, . . . are close to becoming our only ground. While it is certainly true that commercialism seems to have overwhelmed art at most major publishing houses, the rise of gifted westerners such as Carver, Houston and Didion illustrates that their doors are not entirely closed. Nor is all sweetness in the world of alternative presses and magazines. Milton, for example, who edits the prestigious South Dakota Review, points out that many little magazines and small presses are cruel jokes. While most editors would agree, each would probably assemble an idiosyncratic list of offenders. This is illustrated by the fact that many reject out of hand journals such as South Dakota Review that are sponsored by colleges. Major paperback publishers have continued producing popular Westerns at a rate resembling the breeding tempo of gerbils, and for good reason, according to C. L. Sonnichsen, a natural and normal hunger for a heroic past. At a time when the present seems nearly out of control to many, the fantasy West remains a source of comfort. But it is more than that, Michael 1023
Marsden has argued; Louis LAmour and company celebrate the possibilities of the American condition. Marsden further suggests that popular Westerns motivate the human spirit to win the West again, but this time to win it as it should have been won, with respect for human dignity and human rights. The very tone of Marsdens remarks reflects the new vision of the West that pervades contemporary scholarship. What emanates from contemporary publishing, then, alternative or otherwise, is a richer, more heterogeneous, less innocent region in which a warrior tradition reemerges as political activism and injustices are aggressively attacked or, sadly, aggressively defended. Although revisionist zeal often leads to overcompensatory behaviorwriters of little accomplishment, for instance, lauded because they represent a trendy group in the final analysis it is important that all perspectives be considered so that their underlying sense of purpose and place might be understood. Linda Palumbo demonstrates the former when she writes: . . . Art is work; its working papers are literature. Tired, sometimes depressed, often horrified, yet capable of feeling thrilled, amused and awed nevertheless, women writers in the small western presses embrace the ambiguity and paradox in their lives in the hope that through cultivating these qualities we can hope to change the world. The intimate relationship of artistic perception to locale, as well as the growing recognition of the value of particular regions, is captured by Larry McMurtry when he acknowledges, I can never be sure whether home is a place or a form: The Novel or Texas. Indeed, there are now more forms and more places and more faces, all of them components of an enriched literary West. With the emergence of writers like Sam Shepard, Preston Jones, and Luis Valdez, even western drama is on the move. Little wonder Wylder suggests that western writing has come of age. It is clear that contemporary artists are discovering a new West built on the old, a West that can face the threat and promise of the present, face them with verve and a belief that life is not only worth living but worth fighting for. Without rejecting the past, westerners are no longer trapped in it. In fact, many of the finest authors are recreating it to include previously ignored realities while rejecting illusions previously cherished, and doing so most effectively when stressing local history rather than an all-engulfing myth. Wallace Stegner, now the dean of western writers, once advised: In the old days, in blizzardy weather, we used to tie a string of lariats from house to barn so as to make it from shelter to responsi-
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bility and back again. With personal, family and cultural chores to do, I think we had better rig up such a line between past and present. Writers are rigging the line, and a few are even extending it into the future. Rediscovering the West, they are discovering themselves.
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Part Three
SECTION I
Earth Tones: Ethnic Expression in Western American Literature
Introduction
and class B movies created an illusion widely held until the recent pastthat the historic American West was a lily-white enclave, pale-faced sheriffs throttling slightly darker villains and winning the hands of fair-skinned maidens. In fact, from the tribal cultures that preceded Europeans to America, through the explorers and settlers upon whom our mythos was built, to the varying individuals still streaming onto and across this continent, the West was and remains not only multi-ethnic, but possibly the most socially and culturally heterogeneous region in the United States. Blacks, for example, accompanied Columbus and served with Cortez, so it is not surprising to find among the earliest European explorers of the West the names of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, credited with founding Chicago, and Esteban (Stephen Dorantes), who early covered much of the Southwest. By the period of the cattle kingdom, Philip Durham and Everett Jones have shown, more than five thousand Negroes played a part and did a job. Afro-Americans were not unique in having contributed to the opening of the West, nor were non-whites the only ethnics in the region. To the extent that a group was or is hyphenated in the popular view-identified with its place of originwhether by appearance, society, or language, it becomes in effect a culture within a culture. One of the most sensitive treatments of this enduring American phenomenon came from Colorados Carey McWilliams, whose Brothers Under the Skin (1964, rev. ed.) remains a classic text. Paul Horgans The Heroic Triad (1970) is another important demonstration of western multi-ethnicity, although it treats only the Southwest. Today the illusion of the West as a European-American outpost, an idea that grew a century or more ago from the doctrine of Manifest Destiny,
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ETHNIC EXPRESSION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
may still be found in the work of even highly respected authors. Joan Didion, for example, has written that her hometown, Sacramento . . . is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried, ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent. Who runs out? Westward-moving Europeans, perhaps, but not AsianAmericans; for them the West is not the continents end, but, paradoxically, a verdant eastern opening full of new possibilities. And Asians have contributed mightily to Americas West, physically constructing much of it as they have culturally enriched it. Frank Chin in his play The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972), confronting the unjust reality that has allowed even recent European immigrants to call multi-generational Americans Chinamen, writes: . . .The strong Chinese family . . . Chinese culture. . . . The reason there was no juvenile delinquency was because there was no kids! The laws didnt let our women in . . . and our women born here lost citizenship if they married a man from China. And all our men here, no women, stranded here burned all their diaries, their letters, everything with their names on it . . . threw the ashes into the sea . . . hoping that much of themselves could find someplace friendly. Clearly, being born in America has not been enough to make one American in the eyes of many people, and that grim paradox is the foundation of much writing by non-whites in the West. Literature, especially contemporary literature, has tended to be brutally frank in its revelation of injustice. Whether it is Lawson Fusao Inadas Before the War (1971), Wallace Thurmans The Blacker the Berry (1929), or Vine Delorias Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), the lingering question remains, How long must this be tolerated? Even the terms used to symbolize ethnic groups in America can contribute to problems, since many designations remain controversial and less than consistent. Some, for example, are national: Armenian-American; others are continental: Asian-American; one is religious: Jewish-American; another is chimerical because it hides complexities of racial blending by emphasizing one component: Black American. Within each group, struggles over race, politics and social class may also be reflected: Chicano, Hispanic, Hispanoamerican, Spanish-American, Latino, Latin-American, AmericanMexican, Mexican-American, etc. The terms employed in this section are 1027
traditional and are not used to make implicit judgments but to offer relatively clear distinctions between groups. It would be naive indeed, however, not to acknowledge the part language has played in racismNigger, Greaser, Spic, Wop, Kike, Chink, Slopeand its centrality to that lingering, bitterly ironic question: How long? The group generally called American Indians has asked that question with special poignance. There were, of course, really no Indians; rather, the land was inhabited by Cherokees and Cheyennes, by Pomos and Mojaves, cultures as diverse as the Europeans who overwhelmed them. They were literary people all, employing sacred, oral literature in every aspect of their lives. Songoral poetryA. Grove Day pointed out in The Sky Clears (1968, rev. ed.) was a way of tapping . . . superhuman force, and was used to obtain success in almost every act of Indian life. The sacred interdependence they felt with nature was revealed in chants such as the following from the Yokuts: . . . My words are tied in one with the great mountains, with the great rocks, with the great trees, in one with my body and my heart . . . And you, day, and you, night! All of you see me one with the world. Oral tales were often used to educate youngsters, validating existence by providing mythic explanations for existing reality. They were used, too, as Jarold Ramsey points out in Coyote Was Going There (1977), as a chief source of the continuity of. . . culture. Such tales were not only ritualized, they were also frequently humorous, revealing the universal human concern of their tellers. All understanding of Native American literature must begin with an examination of its oral roots. Long before eloquent Indian writers developed, white writers found potent material, usually tragic, in the destruction of native cultures; as a result, no other western ethnic group has been so much written about. From Helen Hunt Jacksons Ramona (1884), through Laughing Boy (1929) by Oliver LaFarge, to the more recent and controversial Hanto Yo (1979) by Ruth Beebe Hill, the list is long and in places distinguished. The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942) by Frank Waters, Jack Schaefers The Canyon (1952), and Theodora Kroebers Ishi in Two Worlds (1962) have been especially and deservedly praised. 1028
Among distinguished writers from various native cultures, Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) was the first: Indian Boyhood (1902) remains his most popular book. John Joseph Mathews in WahKon-Tah (1932) revealed candidly conditions in which Indians were forced to live: Ho, big inspector, you have come to bring us beef, I believe . . . You have sent us horns, bones, and hide of this beef, maybe now you have come to bring meat. He turned with a quick movement and left the store. The inspector turned to the trader and asked, What did he say? He said you had sent the horns, bones and hide of the issue beef; when were you going to send the meat. The inspector laughed unnaturally . . . (p. 49) Four years later DArcy McNickle produced another early high point in Indian writing with The Surrounded, offering one more unromantic revelation of how it feels to lose a continent. Not until the recent past have major novels by Indians been acknowledged. N. Scott Momadays House Made of Dawn (1968) and Leslie Marmon Silkos Ceremony (1977), for example, have been much admired. Not all critical praise has been so well earned, however, for many reviewers are apparently only now discovering the wonders of Indian literary expression and, with overcompensatory zeal, are praising anything published by a Native American author, practicing a kind of reverse discrimination. In any case, Indians have few peers as singers of poetry, so it is not surprising that much of their finest literature has been poetic. Momaday and Silko, for example, are accomplished poets, as are James Welch, Simon Ortiz, Ray Young Bear, William Oandasan, Alonzo Lopez, Norman Russell, Peter Blue Cloud, Tom Greasybear, and Harold Littlebird; the list is long and growing as more and more talented younger poets are published in journals such as Blue Cloud Quarterly, A Magazine, and South Dakota Review. Typical is Anita Endrezze, who penned the following sensuous lines in Learning the Spells: A Diptych: Her nails flint a red-starred sky. Her skin is rain on wet clay. I root into that dark earth like the snout of a white-eyed pig. Many books by and about Native Americans skirt the edges of poetry in both their language and their subjects, for traditionally verse was reserved for sacred topics. Volumes such as John G. Neihardts Black Elk Speaks (1932) force an expansion of traditional literary categories to include 1029
a reality that is mythic as well as empirical. Also falling into this range are the books of Carlos Castaneda, which link Indian and Chicano sensibilities. Increasingly being viewed as fiction of a particularly imaginative sort, Castanedas Don Juan series (The Teachings of Don Juan, 1971, et al.) reflects the strong Indian influence within what Jos Vasconcellos called La Raza Cosmica, the cosmically blended race. Like Indian literature, Mexican-American writing emanates from a rich oral tradition; folklore has been and is of great importance. The two most distinguished novels written to date by Chicanos, Toms Riveras . . . y no se lo trag la tierra (1971) and Rudolfo Anayas Bless Me, Ultima (1972), both of which are very good indeed, cannot be fully understood without reference to the oral literature that remains a base of cultural identity. From the tales of la llorona, through the corridos from the southwest border, to such contemporary forms as the actos (dramatic sketches) by Luis Valdez, public and private expressions have mingled to produce uniquely Chicano art forms. Rivera has described Chicano literature as a fiesta of the living. Perhaps the major reason for the importance of folk expression is that Chicanos, unlike any other ethnic group, are a constantly expanding people with first-generation migrants from across the border daily reinforcing traditional values. A negative product of such cultural intimacy is an inability to distinguish between folk expression and crafted art that has led some Chicano nationalists to criticize such works as Richard Vasquezs novel Chicano (1969) or Valdezs play Zoot Suit (1978) because they appeal to too wide an audience. Raymund Paredes has pointed out that the Chicano experience is essentially cultural rather than racial, and the core of that culture is the Spanish language. Many of the finest Chicano writers prefer to employ the language of Mexico. Rolando Hinojosa (Estampas del valle otras obras, 1973), Miguel Mndez (Peregrinas de Aztln, 1974), and Rivera have been the most accomplished American writers in Spanish to date. Carlota Crdenas de Dwyer has shown that such work is, predictably, more Mexican, while work written in English (Vasquez, John Rechy, Jos Antonio Villarreal, among others) shows greater accommodation with Anglo values. More commonly, though, Chicano writers have employed a stimulating mixture of English and Spanishquite similar to the language spoken in barriosin their work. Prose writers such as Mario Surez and Anaya, as well as a battery of exciting contemporary poets, have forged new linguistic limits; Jos Montoya, for example, has written in La Jefita: Reluctant awakenings a la media Noche y la luz prendida PRRRRRRINNNNNGGGGGG! A noisy chorro missing the basin. 1030
Poetry by Chicanos has been especially strong, and a list of gifted poets would be impractically long here. A reading of Tomas Ybarra-Fraustos The Chicano Movement and the Emergence of a Chicano Poetic Consciousness (New Scholar 6 [1977]) will provide perspective. Two memorable poets must, however, be mentioned: Rodolfo Corky Gonzalez, whose unpolished yet powerful epic poem, Yo Soy Joaquin, stands as an early landmark of modern Chicano writing, and Gary Soto, whose finely crafted verse (see The Elements of San ]oaquin, 1977) has earned him recognition as among Americas finest. Like Chicanos, Asian-Americans are diverse. Three major groups have contributed significantly to our national literature: Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos. During the 1850s, Chinese from the southern provinces arrived in some numbers on the West Coast. A generation later, Japanese most from either Hiroshima or Hawaiibegan their influx. Filipinos in large numbers entered the Wests migrant labor force about the time Mexicans did, following World War I. Of the three, Japanese-Americans, the only group that was not essentially all-male, produced literature right away. The poetry and essays of Yone Noguchi, the haiku of Sheishi Tsunieshi, and the eclectic output of Sadakichi Hartmann had all emerged by the turn of the century. What also emerged at about that time was W. R. Hearsts powerful Yellow Peril campaign of systematic racism that finally bore its most bitter fruit with Executive Order 9066 and the internment of American citizens during World War II, an event that writers have not forgotten. Three of the most moving books dealing with Asian-American experiencesMine Okubos poignant Citizen 13660 (1946), John Okadas uncompromising No-No Boy (1957), and James and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houstons eloquent Farewell to Manzanar (1973)deal with the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans. Today, with younger, more radical writers beginning to dominate AsianAmerican expression, a different view of America is being offered. The new perspective is most clearly expressed in Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974), which disdains much earlier writing, attacking especially assimilation and stereotyping. Write the editors, what America published was, with rare exception, not only offensive to Chinese and Japanese America, but was actively inoffensive to white sensibilities. In any case, when in the not-too-distant past large numbers of ChineseAmerican writers emerged, a surprisingly high percentage of them were women, and they evidenced no such anti-assimilationist attitude. Virginia Lee (The House That Tai Ming Built, 1963), Betty Lee Sung ( Mountain of Gold, 1967), and Jade Snow Wong (Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1950) all produced widely read books, often fictionalized biographies, as did Pardee Lowe (Father and Glorious Descendant, 1943) and Louis Chu ( Eat a Bowl of 1031
I
Tea, 1961). The first true novel by a Chinese-American was Diane Chans The Frontiers of Love (1956). Contrasting with older styles is the brilliant contemporary voice of Maxine Hong Kingston (Woman Warrior, 1976; China Men, 1980), as well as Shawn Wong ( Home Base, 1979) and playwright Chin, who has explained, I dont want to be measured against the stereotype anymore. The generations of Japanese-American writers seem somewhat less divided, possibly because their forced internment quietly radicalized artistic sensibilities. As a result, even the work of such early writers as poet Toyo Suyemoto and short story writers Hisaye Yamamoto and Toshio Mori continues to be admired. As pointed out earlier, literature and literary societies have been vital to Japanese-American culture from its beginnings, so spokespersons have continually developed. John Okadas perspectivePretty soon itll be just like it was before the war. A bunch of Japs with a fence around them, not the kind you can see, but itll hurt just the same was little different from that of such contemporary authors as playwright Momoko Ito and poet Lawson Inada. Counterpointing such work is the more assimilationist tone of books like Daniel Okamotos American in Disguise (1971) and Bill Hosokawas Nisei: The Quiet Americans (1969). Filipino-American writing burgeoned early with the books of Carlos Bulosan (especially America Is in the Heart, 1946), the stories of Bienvenido Santos, and the poetry of Jos Garca Villa. Recently, however, little work by Filipino-American artists has found print, although a small renaissance featuring Al Robles, Oscar Pearanda, and Sam Tagatac seems to be developing. The editors of Aiiieeeee! explain: The Filipino-American writers slow emergence in the American literary scene has been stifled mainly by the fact that it is only now that the Filipino writer is beginning to recognize his Filipino-American experience. Afro-Americans, while they have contributed significantly to western history, have not yet produced much regional literature. The best known black western writer has been that exceptional Texas folklorist J. Mason Brewer (The Word on the Brazos, 1953; Worser Days and Better Times, 1965; etc.). If we do not respect the past, he wrote in 1963, the future will not respect us. Brewer did indeed respect the past and give it life for his readers. Two earlier westerners, Sutton E. Griggs and Oscar Micheaux, had paved the way for Brewer, and one of his contemporaries, Wallace Thurman, a product of Salt Lake City, wrote in 1929 a strong novel of a Negros move from West to East, The Blacker the Berry, that also revealed intraracial prejudice. Oklahomas Ralph Ellison is generally conceded to have produced a major American novel in Invisible Man (1952), and a white Texan, John Howard Griffin, produced in Black Like Me (1961) one of the most remarkable volumes dealing with Americas racial relations. Among younger authors, the poetry of 1032
Eugene Redmond, Wanda Coleman, and Sherley Anne Williams, the plays of Ed Bullins, and the fiction of Ishmael Reed, Al Young, and Ernest Gaines, Californians all, have received considerable praise. Of course, not all ethnics in the West have been non-white. In the Midwest, for example, the Norwegian-language writing of O. E. Rlvaag, especially Giants in the Earth (1927), is considered a great contribution to both Norwegian and American cultures. Armenian-Americans, who number only about half a million, and whose large-scale immigration didnt begin until after World War I, have probably produced more high-quality writing per capita than any other group. Indeed, if only William Saroyan had emerged from Armenian America, the U.S.A. would have been well served indeed, especially by such works as My Name Is Aram (1939) and The Time of Your Life (1941). Saroyans rich literary output has been supplemented by the work of Khatchik Minasian (The Simple Songs of Khatchik Minasian, 1950), Leon Surmelian (98.6, 1950), David Kherdian and James Baloian (editors of Down at the Santa Fe Depot, 1970), George Mardikian ( Song of America, 1956), plus the short stories of Katherine Manoogian, the poetry of Mary Matosian Morabito, Aram Saroyan, and James Magorian. William Saroyan, nonetheless, remains the dominant figure. Another European immigrant group, the Basques, have contributed considerably to the Wests sheep industry, and their singular experiences seem to make them perfect literary material. Basques made their first significant appearance in the West during the California gold rush, and by the turn of the century they had become prominent not only in that state but in other areas of the ranching West. Despite their use as characters by nonBasque writers in America, Richard Etulain has pointed out that the Euskadunak remain immigrants in search of a literary interpreter. The nonBasques who have used them as characters in western writing have often employed negative stereotypes. Only one Basque-American writer has established himself to date, Robert Laxalt, whose Sweet Promised Land (1957) and In a Hundred Graves: A Basque Portrait (1972) offer a solid foundation for future Basque-American writers. Another interesting volume, Louis Irigaray and Theodore Taylors A Shepherd Watches, a Shepherd Sings (1975) provides further evidence of the wealth of literary material awaiting expression. The development of literary traditions within various ethnic groups in the American West has followed a general pattern. In its earliest stages, literature is oral and employs the native tongue rather than English. This folkloric stage tends to be candid, discussing exactly what concerns members of the group, albeit with some artistic circumspection and often great charm. The corridos of the Southwest are prime examples of this early development. 1033
Eventually written literature in the native languagemost often the product of periodicals and presses specializing in the old tonguebegins to supplement oral forms, although it rarely replaces them totally. O. E. Rlvaags Giants in the Earth is a high point of foreign language western American literature. As migrants become more comfortable with their adopted land and its language, especially as their progeny are educated in an English-language school system, more and more literature written in English appears; often the three literatures (native oral, native written, and English written) exist side by side, and reflect differences between generations as well as degrees of assimilation. Typically, as this initial English-language stage develops, writers are less frank than they might have been using the language of the old country; much of such literature deals with genteel or noble figures victimized by the intolerance of the host society, but refusing to become embittered. Daisuko Kitagawas Issei and Nisei: The Internment Years (1967) or Oscar Micheauxs The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913) exemplify this stage. The pattern has varied beyond that point depending upon a groups specific experiences. If a group has been victimized by continued racism as Asian-Americans have been, it might produce revolutionary literature demanding justice and liberation or graphically tracing the effects of discrimination. One unquestioned effect of racism is to make a group continually aware of its ethnicity, so a strong sense of what might be called AsianAmericanness, through a glass darkly, is found for example in Aiiieeeee! : An Anthology of Asian American Writers, which epitomizes narrowly ethnic responses. Jeanne and James Houstons Farewell to Manzanar, on the other hand, exposes the results of racism without the angry tone of Aiiieeeee! and has been more widely read by a general audience, thus arguably producing the greater impact. Both books are, of course, written in English for an English-reading audience. At the other extreme, a group, especially a white group, may simply blend into the dominant majority after a generation or two, retaining exactly as much ethnic awareness as it chooses. Scandinavian-Americans have managed this process and produced fine literature in the bargain. But even theylike all other groups to varying degreesundergo a cultural crisis; at some point their literature, like their lives, becomes more American than Scandinavian, and a sense of betrayal develops. Writes Christer Mossberg: Major novelists, such as Simon Johnson, Ole Rlvaag, and Sophus Winther wrote when the Scandinavian group as a generative subculture was disintegrating: perhaps this cultural crisis explains the special intensity underlying their fiction. The same generalization might be applied to William Saroyan and the Armenian-American culture that pro1034
duced him or to Italian-American John Fante, who produced memorable novels set both in his native Colorado and in Los Angeles. While their situation is indeed special, a particularly stimulating example of this kind of cultural crisis may be found in the writing of MexicanAmericans. Unlike other ethnic groups in the West, many Chicanos arent migrants; but there is also, as noted previously, a large migrant group continuing their move into what were once the northern reaches of Mexico; there is also the reality of the growth of functional bilingualism throughout the Southwest. All these factors contribute to a unique literature being produced by Chicanos, and the pattern of their writing exemplifies all the stages listed above, plus a significant response to the cultural crisis Mossberg discusses. Chicano writers have produced and are producing work in English (Pocho by Jos Antonio Villarreal), in Spanish and English as separate texts (. . . y no se lo trag la tierra by Toms Rivera), in a blend of both languages (Bernabe by Luis Valdez) and in Spanish ( Peregrinas de Aztln b y Miguel Mndez), reflecting rich variations of assimilation and cultural nationalism. Because of their unique situation, Mexican-American authors need not accept total assimilation or total nationalism as their only alternatives; they are increasingly able to shape the culture they enter, and that fact makes their art perhaps the most promising now being produced west of the Mississippi. Etulain has noted that, in general, before the Second World War, groups such as Blacks, Chicanos, Indians, and Orientals were not treated sympathetically in western American literature. As characters, they have tended to be negatively stereotyped by white writers, though an occasional noble savage was tolerated. More recently, white writers have produced complex non-white characters. Non-white writers, while they were few in the early days, nonetheless offered a different view both of their own group and of the West generally. Etulains generalization, with some reservations, might also be applied to white ethnics in the West, for they too were often victimized by stereotypes, though rarely as brutally or as persistently as non-whites. It is also true, as already noted, that due to appearance it had been much easier for whites to slip unnoticed into the mainstream if they wished. In any case, social realities in America since World War II have led toward more accurate, more humane presentations of all ethnic groups in western writing. Despite the spectre of overcompensation that always hovers near revisionist expression, a more candid view of who did what in the Wests development has emerged, moving perceptions away from the fabled West that never was, and offering artists an even richer literary potential. Most importantly, ethnics are no longer merely being written about. 1035
The single most important product of new perspectives has been the emergence of significant numbers of gifted, committed authors capable of ignoring stereotypes and projecting their cultural identities and personal realities on the Wests dynamic stage.
State University
Ararat. Winter 1977. See special section on Armenian-American writing, featuring articles by Nona Balakian, Ara Baliozian, Souren Manuelian, and Harold Bond. Chang, C. J. Chinese and Literature. East/West (part 1, March 18, 1970; part 2, March 25, 1970; part 3, April 1, 1970). Examines images ofchinese-Americans in literature written by and about them. Chin, Frank. Chinamen, Chinks and the CACA. East/West (part 1, Feb. 11, 1970; part 2, Feb. 18, 1970). Suggests that Chinese-Americans are different from Chinese and from Americans, and that literature can reflect such uniqueness. Day, A. Grove. The Sky Clears. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968. Pioneering study of American Indian poetry, it remains among the finest and most thorough. Durham, Philip, and Everett Jones. The Negro Cowboys. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965. The first major study of blacks in the West. Valuable resource. Etulain, Richard. The Basques in Western American Literature. In AngloAmerican Contributions to Basque Studies: Essays in Honor of Jon Bilbao, edited by William A. Douglass, Richard W. Etulain, and William H. Jacobden, Jr. Reno: Desert Research Institute Publications on the Social Sciences, 1977. Most complete survey of Basques in western American writing now available. Han, Hsiao-Min. Roots and Buds: The Literature of Chinese Americans. Ph.D. dissertation (unpublished), Brigham Young University, 1980. A thorough survey of images of Chinese-Americans as reflected in literature produced by writers sharing that heritage. Hancock, Joel. The Emergence of Chicano Poetry. Arizona Quarterly 29 (1973). A good general survey of Chicano poetry to date.
1036
Haslam, Gerald. The Light That Fills the World: Native American Literature. South Dakota Review 11 (Spring 1973). An introduction to both oral and written literature by Native Americans. . Literature of the People: Native American Voices. CLA Journal 15 (December 1971). Examines the range of literary expression by American Indians. . The Other Literary West. Arizona Quarterly 38 (Autumn 1982). Explores ethnic writing by westerners, offering some generalized observations about the nature of such art. . Por la Causa: Mexican-American Literature. College English (May 1970). First major scholarly article to examine Chicano writing and offer insights into its special qualities. Katz, William Loren. The Black West. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973. A documentary and pictorial history that includes a number of literary figures plus a section on black western presses. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Does exactly what the title promises, provides a sense of social forces operative in AsianAmerican writing. MELUS. Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, consistently the finest publication in the field, this despite a tendency to become bogged in trendy political disputes. Highly recommended. Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldura, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, Massachusetts: Persephone Press, 1981. Includes selections by a number of non-white western women. Mossberg, Christer Lennart. Scandinavian Immigrant Literature. Boise: Boise State University, 1981. Finest survey of this important literary group, and offers strong evidence that ethnic expression is not merely a non-white phenomenon. Paredes, Raymund. Exclusion and Invisibility: Chicano Literature Not in Textbooks. Arizona English Bulletin 17 (1975). Surveys oral and folk literatures, as well as their progeny. . The Promise of Chicano Literature. In Minority Language and Literature, edited by Dexter Fisher. New York: Modern Language Association, 1977. An interesting study of the direction of modern Chicano writing. Rivera, Toms. Chicano Literature: Festival of the Living. Books Abroad 49 (1975). A noted novelist offers an insiders view of Mexican-American literature. Tachiki, Amy, et al. Roots: An Asian American Reader. Los Angeles: U.C.L.A. Asian American Studies Center, 1971. Invaluable resource book touching all major Asian immigrant groups to date. Wu, William R. The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 18501940. Hamden, Connecticut: The Shoe String Press, 1982. Readable and comprehensive, this book surveys some 130 novels and stories in which Chinese characters appear. Ybarra-Frausto, Toms The Chicano Movement and the Emergence of a Chicano Poetic Consciousness. New Scholar 6 (1977). Another good general survey, this one stressing what is unique in poetry by Chicanos.
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Western American Indian Writers, 18541960

HE LITERARY HISTORY of western American Indian writers begins in the 1850s with the publication of the works of John Rollin Ridge, the first significant Indian man of letters and the first to make the Far West the major subject of his writing. Encompassing articles, fiction, and poetry, the range of Ridges literary achievements exceeds those of his eastern and midwestern predecessors, who wrote primarily autobiographies, histories, and interpretations of oral literature. The grandson of the highly respected Cherokee leader Major Ridge and the son of John and his white wife Sara Northrup, John Rollin (182767) accompanied his family on the Cherokee Removal from their native Georgia in 1837. Two years later, both Major and John Ridge were assassinated for their roles in bringing about the sale of tribal lands. Twelve-year-old John Rollin witnessed the murder of his father. Shortly thereafter, the family moved from Indian Territory to Arkansas. At age fourteen, Ridge was sent to Great Barrington School in New England, remaining in the East for four years until illness forced him to return home. Late in his teens, Ridge shot a man, presumably in selfdefense, and fled in 1850 from Arkansas to the California gold fields. There he began to contribute regularly to such San Francisco periodicals and journals as Golden Era, Hesperian, and Pioneer, writing under the name of Yellow Bird, the literary translation of his Cherokee name Cheesquatalawny. Ridges most famous work is The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), the first novel published by an American Indian. This fictionalized biography established Murietas image as a folk hero and precipitated the flood of stories, dramas, and films that have kept him such a popular figure in the folklore of California and Mexico. Ridges portrayal of Murieta as a social outcast hero who defeats his enemies by using both his keen mind and blazing pistols links the book both to Gothic romances and Byrons narrative poems in English literature and to the frontier romances and dime-novel Westerns of American literature. Murieta is characterized as a handsome gallant who only became an outlaw to revenge himself against the Anglos who beat him, raped his mistress before his eyes, hanged his brother, and stole his land. Though fearless in killing his enemies, Murieta is gentle with fair maidens in distress. The novel vividly portrays the anti-Mexican prejudices of gold-hungry Anglos eager to dispossess Mexicans of their landa situation all too familiar to Ridge, whose Cherokee people were similarly dispossessed. His half-Indian hero
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WESTERN AMERICAN INDIAN WRITERS, 18541960
achieved the revenge for the outrages against his family and people that Ridge often plotted but never executed. The novel is a forerunner of the western local color movement, which in the coming decades was to bring acclaim to such writers as Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Ambrose Bierce, and Samuel Clemens. In addition to basing his plot on the recent California manhunts for bandits known only as Joaquin, Ridge also filled his novel with descriptions of local places and landscapes, such as those portrayed in his Shelleyan poem Mount Shasta. That Ridge chose to deal indirectly with the injustices experienced by Indians reflects the literary taste of the period. As whites determination to occupy Indian land in the West increased, their interest in Indians as subjects for serious literature decreased. By the 1850s, the reading publics fascination with the Noble Savage had faded. Even a revered figure like King Philip (Pequot) was satirized in John Broughams Metamora; or the Last of the Pollywogs (1847). Although Longfellows Hiawatha (1855) achieved great popularity, it also became a favorite subject for parody. The Indian became a staple of popular rather than of serious literature. This shift in popular taste undoubtedly explains the lack of emphasis on Indian subjects in Ridges works, for his letters reveal his commitment to the cause of the Cherokee people. Though Ridge never published another novel, he continued to write for journals and, during the fifties and sixties, remained a minor member of the San Francisco literary circle. His collected Poems (1868), published after his death, reveal his interest in the local color movement. Rainy Season in California, though strongly influenced by James Thomsons Seasons, colorfully describes the impact of a rainstorm on the hills and valleys. His Humboldt River is a powerful description of this Nevada river, whose banks were strewn with the bones of dead pioneers. One of his best poems is the Arkansas Root Doctor, a colorful character sketch, using dialect. The only poems in this collection to reflect his Indian background are the sentimental Cherokee Love Song and Stolen White Girl. Included in Ridges Poems is an autobiographical account of his life to age twenty-three. From the 1850s to the 1890s, most of the works written by Indian authors were histories of woodland tribes from the East and Midwest. The history of literature written by American Indians parallels the history of white migration across the country, which resulted in policies that forced Indians onto reservations and sent their children to white-run schools. Not until the 1880s and 1890s did Indian authors from western tribes begin to publish their recollections of these experiences. The last half of the nineteenth century saw the end of the nomadic life that had been followed by some of the Indians of the West. As public demand for Indian land increased, the government abandoned its policy of 1039
separatism that had led to the removal of eastern and midwestern tribes to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) and to other locations in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Instead, the government adopted the policy of pacifying Indians and placing them on reservations. To protect the hordes of settlers migrating to the California gold fields, the government built new forts to guard the Platte River route in the northern Plains. As a result, new western routes were opened that brought whites into conflict with Plains Indians determined to defend their territories. Weakened by four epidemics of smallpox between 1835 and 1860 and a cholera outbreak in 1849, the western Indians stood little chance of permanently holding back the waves of white migration. The end of the Civil War in 1865 enabled the government to devote greater attention to the final pacification of the western tribes. The 1870s saw one tribe after another defeated in desperate battles against white invasion. Almost all of these tribes were subdued by the end of that decade. Settlement on reservations and the extermination of the last buffalo herd in 1885 ended the traditional life of these Indians. Hostile government policies and public attitudes created a climate generally unfavorable to the development of Indian literature during this period. White audiences were far more interested in reading the accounts of explorers, settlers, and gold miners who conquered the West than they were in reading of Indian suffering brought about by this conquest. In 1883, however, the voice of the vanquished tribes of the far West was heard when the fiery Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Thocmetony; ca. 184491) strode across the lecture platforms of America to castigate whites for their unchristian treatment of her people, the Paiutes. With the publication of Life 1 Among the Piutes; Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), Winnemucca became the first Indian woman writer of personal and tribal history. Born near the Sink of the Humboldt River in Nevada, Winnemucca was the granddaughter of Truckee, whom she claimed was chief of all the Paiutes, and daughter of Old Winnemucca, who succeeded his father as chief. Because Winnemucca and her family followed Truckees policy of peaceful coexistence with whites, she spent much of her life serving as a liaison between the Paiutes and whites in her peoples native Nevada and in Oregon, where they moved to escape white encroachment on their Pyramid Lake Reservation. After the end of the Bannock War of 1878, in which many Paiutes participated after leaving the Malheur Reservation in Oregon, Winnemucca accompanied her father and her brother Naches to Washington, D.C., to obtain from Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz permission for the Paiutes to return to the Oregon reservation. Unfortunately, the government provided neither supplies nor transportation for the tribes return. Winnemuccas disillusionment with federal Indian policy and with its agents aroused her to take the Paiute cause to the public. Encouraged by the 1040
success of her first lecture in San Francisco in 1879, she toured the East delivering more than three hundred lectures. Both her lectures and her book Life Among the Piutes strongly supported the General Allotment Act, 2 then under consideration by Congress. By the time the bill was passed in 1887, much of the land on the Malheur Reservation to be allotted to the Paiutes had already been seized by whites. Winnemucca, who earlier had witnessed white seizure of lands at the Pyramid Lake Reservation, lost faith in the power and desire of the government to protect Indian land. Consequently, in 1884, she returned to Nevada to found a school for Paiute children that was located on her brothers farm near Lovelock. Forced by ill health and lack of funds to abandon the school in 1887, she died four years later. Life Among the Piutes is among the most imaginative personal and tribal histories of the nineteenth century. Winnemucca uses the narrative technique of mixing personal experience and tribal ethnography and the authenticating device of including letters from well-known whites to document her moral character and achievements, both methods used by earlier Indian autobiographers. But whereas these writers made conversion to Christianity and the spiritual journey central to their narratives, Winnemucca never alludes to these. Her central theme is Indian-white relations, a secondary theme in the narratives of earlier writers. The impact of white contact on Paiute life is depicted through Winnemuccas descriptions of her experiences as a child and adult. Especially moving is her description of her terror when as a small child she was buried alive temporarily by her parents to hide her from whites, who were reputed to be cannibals. Winnemucca reveals far more of her childhood and of her adult personality than do earlier writers. Both in her valuable Paiute ethnography and in her exciting accounts of her service as a liaison between Paiutes and whites, Winnemucca emphasizes the roles played by women in traditional Paiute culture and by Winnemucca herself in achieving peace for her people. Her own role was unusual for any woman in her day. Her daring exploits as she raced back and forth between enemy lines, risking rape by white males or murder by hostile whites and Indians, rival those of the heroines of the dime Westerns of the period. Winnemuccas style is particularly effective because she dramatizes important episodes. Margot Liberty suggests that Winnemuccas recreation of 3 dialogue derives from the quotative style of Northern Paiute narratives. The technique enables Winnemucca to dramatize scenes in which she successfully confronts government officials about their unjust treatment of her people. She displays considerable narrative skill in her dramatization of her grandfather Truckees death in 1859, in which she weaves together the threads of autobiography, ethnography, and Indian-white relations that dominate the book. She also uses her considerable oratorical power to 1041
arouse the sympathy of her audience, demonstrated in her final exhortation for justice for Indian people: For shame! for shame! You dare to cry out Liberty, when you hold us in places against our will, driving us from place to place as if we were beasts. . . . Oh, my dear readers, talk for us, and if the white people will treat us like human beings, we will behave like a people; but if we are treated by white savages as if we are savages, we are relentless and desperate; yet no more so than any other badly treated people. Oh, dear 4 friends, I am pleading for God and for humanity. Winnemuccas Life Among the Piutes was the only book she ever published. However, in 1882, the year before this volume appeared, she published an article on Paiute ethnography entitled The Pah-Utes, which appeared in The Californian. By the time Winnemucca wrote her personal narrative, the spiritual confession and missionary reminiscence, which so strongly influenced the personal narratives of eastern and midwestern Indian writers, were no longer dominant. The Plains Indians, who were prolific writers of autobiographies, followed Winnemuccas lead in describing life before and after the coming of the white man and the forced settlement of Indians on reservations. The Plains writers forcefully depict the cultural changes faced by their people, particularly by their children sent away from their families to distant schools run by whites who deprived the children of their Indian names, languages, religions, and customs. Their autobiographies and those by writers of other western tribes, most of which appeared from the early 1900s through the 1930s, are valuable contributions to our knowledge of the impact on Indian people of the conquest of the West. They are also important contributions to the literary history of the local color movement and of regional writing. One of the best of the autobiographies written at the turn of the century is The Middle Five (1900) by Francis LaFlesche (Omaha, c. 18571932). Describing his experiences and those of his friends at a Presbyterian Mission School in Bellevue, Nebraska, LaFlesche authentically portrays the nature of the Indian boy. He movingly depicts the adjustments the boys faced when they entered the school and their happiness when permitted the old free lifea recurrent theme in the autobiographies of LaFlesches contemporaries. One of the first Indian scholars, LaFlesche devoted most of his writing to the new field of anthropology. Among the works he co-authored with Alice Fletcher are such important studies as The Omaha Tribe (1911) and The Osage Tribe (192130). Indians contributed significantly to the collection, translation, and interpretation of their oral literatures between the 1890s and 1930s. Among these anthropological writers were William Jones (Fox), Ella Deloria (Sioux), John N. B. Hewitt (Tuscarora), William Morgan (Navajo), Archie Phinny (Nez Perce), and Arthur C. Parker (Seneca). 1042
The best-known Native American writer early in the twentieth century was Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa; Sioux, 18581939). In his lifetime, Eastman moved from the tepees of the Santee Sioux to the drawing rooms and lecture halls of America and England. Eastman was at least one-quarter white: his maternal grandfather was Seth Eastman, a white New Englander, and his maternal grandmother was at least one-fourth French. After the 1862 Minnesota Sioux Uprising, four-year-old Eastman was taken by his grandmother and uncle into the northern Dakota Territory and into Manitoba to avoid white reprisals. His father Jacob Eastman (Many Lightnings) was imprisoned for his part in the conflict. Eastman was isolated from white contact until age fifteen, when his father returned and put him in school in Flandreau, Dakota Territory. For the next seventeen years, Eastman attended several schools, eventually graduating from both Dartmouth College and Boston University Medical School. Eastman began his career as agency physician at Pine Ridge in November 1890, just as the Ghost Dance religion swept through the reservation. He cared for the survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre, which occurred the same year. During this period, he met and married Elaine Goodale, a Massachusetts author and teacher on the Great Sioux Reservation. Although Eastman settled his bride at Pine Ridge, he soon resigned his post after a policy dispute. When he failed to establish a medical practice in St. Paul, Eastman spent the next two decades in a variety of positions pertaining to Indian affairs. Increasingly estranged, Elaine and Charles separated after a beloved daughter died in 1921. Elaine remained in the East, where the family had lived for many years. Charles moved to Detroit to live with their only son, eventually purchasing a small wooded property near Desbarats, Ontario, where he built a cabin. In January 1939, after a tepee in which he had been living caught fire, Eastman suffered smoke inhalation and later contracted both pneumonia and a heart condition. He died on January 8. Eastmans literary career began in 1894, when an autobiographical sketch was published. During their years together, Eastman and his wife collaborated on the composition of his books, as he acknowledged in From the Deep Woods to Civilization. After their separation, Eastman never published again, while Elaine continued to publish poetry, essays and fiction. Eastmans first book, Indian Boyhood (1902), was begun for his children for 5 whom he wished to capture the spirit of the freest life in the world. T h e book combines personal experiences, character sketches, and Sioux tales, history, and ethnography. It ends with the arrival of his father, just released from prison. Eastman published the second part of his autobiography in From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). Here he reveals a sense of Indianness strengthened by his 1910 field work with the Ojibwa in the north1043
ern Minnesota forests. Eastman openly questions the superiority of the white way and expresses some of his frustrations in coping with the white world. Of his years at Dartmouth (188387), he comments that it was here that I had most of my savage gentleness and native refinement knocked out of me. I do not complain, for I know that I gained more than their 6 equivalent. Eastman forcefully criticizes government Indian policy, especially its indifference to the suffering of the Sioux, which he felt led to the spread of the Ghost Dance religion. In all his works and lectures, Eastman tried to serve as a bridge between Indian and white cultures by showing his white audience the world views, customs, literature, and history of the Indians so that white Americans might appreciate and emulate Native American virtues. His most fully developed statement of his religious philosophy is contained in The Soul of the Indian (1911), in which he emphasizes that Indian faith needs neither creeds nor temples and that it was never forced on the unwilling. In The Indian Today (1915), Eastman surveys Indian history, contributions to America, achievements, reservation life, and problems, as well as discussing government policy towards Indians. His most historical book is Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918), a collection of short biographies, primarily of Sioux leaders, based on anecdotes told Eastman by these leaders or their contemporaries. The book shows Eastmans recognition of the importance of oral history and of the need for whites to learn about the role played by Indians in American history. Eastmans books for children were extremely popular. Two of these contained traditional legends, slightly revised to suit the taste of young readers: Red Hunters and the Animal People (1905), which also includes stories based on the common experiences of Indian hunters, and Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales (1909). The latter was issued also under the title Smoky Days Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold (1910). Old Indian Days (1907), divided into stories about warriors and about women, is more explicitly imaginative than are most of the books written for children. Other Sioux writers were inspired by Eastmans success. Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa; 18761938) published two collections: Old Indian Legends (1901), her recreation of Sioux myths, and American Indian Stories (1921), which reprints her short stories about her people and her autobiographical essays published in 1900 and 1902 by the Atlantic Monthly. These are the only literary works Bonnin wrote. During most of her life, she was a tireless worker for Indian rights. In 1916 Marie McLaughlin, also influenced by Eastman, published Myths and Legends of the Sioux, with a short autobiography. Next to Eastman, the most widely read Sioux writer was Luther Standing Bear (OtaKte), a member of the Teton or Western Sioux. Though 1044
Standing Bear claimed to be an Oglala, he may actually have been a Brule. Standing Bear was born in the same decade (c. 1868) and died the same year (1939) as Eastman. Both belonged to the generation of Sioux that witnessed the beginning of reservation life and the education of Sioux children in white ways. Standing Bear was a member of the first class of Carlisle Indian school, established in 1879 by Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer, to educate and civilize young Indians. By 1884, Standing Bear returned to the reservation to teach school and later to marry. Frustrated by agency restriction and the difficulties of earning a living on the reservation, he eagerly signed up with Buffalo Bills Wild West Show, which toured the United States and England in 1902. He was badly injured in a train wreck in 1903, which prevented his participation in a second tour. Although selected as tribal chief in 1905, Standing Bear found reservation living so intolerable that he left in 1907 to appear in various shows in the East. His experiences made him determined to sell his allotment and seek citizenship, which he did in 1907. By 1912, he had settled in California, where he acted in movies, lectured, and aided Indian causes. Standing Bear did not begin his writing career until late in life, when he was persuaded to set down his experiences in his popular autobiography, My People the Sioux (1928). Written with the assistance of the western historian E. A. Brininstool, the book gives a simple but straightforward account of the life of the Western Sioux and of their adjustments to reservation living. Especially moving are the descriptions of Standing Bears early experiences at Carlisle. The impact of the book was heightened by the fact 7 that it was published the same year as the Meriam Report on the problems faced by reservation Indians. In 1933, Standing Bear published Land of the Spotted Eagle, which was written with the assistance of Melvin Gilmore, curator of ethnology at the University of Michigan, and Warcaziwin (or Wahcaziwin), author of several later articles on Indian affairs. Though enlivened by personal anecdotes, this book focuses far more on Sioux beliefs, customs, and life than on autobiography. The impetus for the work was Standing Bears return in 1931 to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, after an absence of sixteen years. In this book, Standing Bear forcefully criticizes federal Indian policy. He describes his Carlisle experiences with much greater bitterness than he did in his autobiography. In the last two chapters, Later Days and What the Indian Means to America, Standing Bear powerfully states his feelings about the damage done to Indians by whites and about the need for the country to recognize the contributions of Native Americans. In addition to these two books, Standing Bear also wrote My Indian Boyhood (1931), directed to children, and Stories of the Sioux (1934), a collection of tales. Writers of other tribes followed the example set by Eastman. The most 1045
adventure-filled autobiography to appear during World War I was Joseph Griffiss Tahan: Out of Savagery into Civilization (1915). Griffis was born around 1854 to a white father, the famous scout California Joe, and a half8 Osage mother, Al-Zada. At age four, he was captured by Kiowas, who killed his mother. Subsequently he was reared by a Kiowa stepfather and a Cheyenne stepmother. In 1868, while young Griffis and his stepmother visited her parents at the Washita River, Custer attacked, massacring 103 women and children. Both Griffis and his stepmother were taken prisoner by the troops, for whom his own father had served as chief scout. Identified as a white captive, Griffis was separated forever from his stepmother and placed on a ranch. He quickly escaped and embarked on a series of daring escapades as a member of a ragtag Indian band, an outlaw, army scout, hobo, and petty thief. Eventually Griffis made his way to Canada, where he converted to Christianity, joined the Salvation Army, and then married a white woman. Griffis went on to become a Presbyterian minister in the East. Later he moved to Oklahoma, where he left the ministry to become a lecturer. Aside from the description of Griffiss exploits, the autobiography contains material on Kiowa life as well as a vivid account of the Washita massacre. In addition to this book, Griffis also was the author of Indian Circle Stories (1928), a collection of tales from various Oklahoma tribes. The only Pueblo Indian to have a book published in the first half of the twentieth century was James Paytiamo, whose Flaming Arrows People: By an Acoma Indian appeared in 1932. Beautifully illustrated by Paytiamo, the book describes his childhood as well as Acoma culture and beliefs. It contains several myths, including that about the kachina for whom he was named. Few Native Americans wrote poetry at the turn of the century. Among these was Alexander Posey (18731908). Poseys mother, whose English name was Mary Phillips, was a full-blood Creek and a member of the politically powerful Harjo family. His father Lewis claimed to be one-sixteenth Creek. Posey, who did not learn English until he was twelve, attended Indian University at Bacone before becoming an educator and journalist in Indian Territory. Highly respected for his integrity and for his knowledge of both Creek and English, Posey served on almost every council and convention held in the Territory. His efforts on behalf of the Creek nation left him little time to devote to his poetry, much of which was written between May 1896 and October 1897, shortly after his marriage. All of his poetry printed in his lifetime appeared under the pseudonym Chinnubbie Harjo, the Creek trickster hero. Two years after Posey drowned, his wife supervised the publication of The Poems of Alexander Posey (1910), which contained a memoir. The majority of the poems are romantic tributes to nature. Poseys reading of Burns is reflected in his When Molly Blows the Dinner-Horn, which celebrates the coming of evening in the manner of Cotters Saturday 1046
Night, and in Happy Times for Me an Sal, which employs dialect and a variation of the Burns stanza. The most memorable poem is On the Capture and Imprisonment of Crazy Snake, January 1900, an angry protest against the treatment of Chitto Harjo, a fierce opponent of allotment. In addition to being a poet, Posey was also an accomplished satirist. Especially popular were his Fus Fixico Letters, which appeared during the early 1900s in the Indian Journal at Eufaula. Although Poseys bent toward satire was partially inspired by Burns, whom he greatly admired, the immediate inspiration was probably Peter Finley Dunne, whose famous characters Mr. Dooley and Mr. Hennessee first appeared in the late 1890s to amuse and instruct the nation with their discussions of politics, delivered in Irish brogue. Posey uses the names of Creek elders, such as Hotgun, Tookpafka Micco, and Wolf Warrior, for his characters. In Creek-style English, Fus Fixico dutifully reported their opinions on corruption and abuses of allotment in Indian Territory. Poseys Fus Fixico Letters were widely reprinted. Both in these satires and in his witty newspaper columns, Posey established an Indian model for humor. Some years later, a fellow Oklahoman, Will Rogers, would receive even greater recognition as a political satirist. Like Posey, Rogers (Cherokee, 18791935) was a member of a family prominent in Indian Territory. Young Will, however, chose not to follow the path of his father Clement Vann Rogers, who was a prosperous rancher and banker as well as tribal senator. Instead Will left school in 1898 to become a cowboy and eventually an entertainer, performing rope tricks. By the beginning of World War I, Rogers had become a regular on the vaudeville circuit, reaching his greatest successes as a stage performer in the Ziegfield Follies of 191618 and later in 1922 and 192425. Rogerss famous line, All I know is what I read in the papers, became the preface for his witty commentaries on the national scene, which endeared him to his audiences. His first two books, both published in 1919, consisted of these commentaries plus other material: Rogers-isms: The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference and Rogers-isms: The Cowboy Philosopher on Prohibition. The popularity of Rogerss humor led to a weekly column, which the New York Times began syndicating in 1922. Four years later Rogers accidentally developed what was to be his most influential written mediumthe daily telegram. These brief reports to the nation began with a cable to the Times during a London trip in 1926. Rogerss trenchant remarks in his short telegrams eventually ran in 350 newspapers. During the 1920s, he published a series of books based on these columns and on his observations during his many trips abroad: Illiterate Digest (1924), Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President (1926), Theres Not a Bathing Suit in Russia (1927), and Ether and Me (1929). In his writing and in his stage and movie performances, Rogers adopted 1047
the role of the wise innocenta semiliterate cowboy whose bad grammar and hyperbole gained him instant rapport with the average American. Rogers represented to them the embodiment of an American hero, unabashed by president or prince, always ready to do verbal battle with the hypocrites of big business or government in order to defend the underdog. Rogers never betrayed their trust. In return, the American public made him the most popular humorist of his age, a popularity that continued after his tragic death in a plane crash during a tour of Alaska in 1935. During the 1920s, American Indian writers turned to the novel, which became a favorite form for later writers. In the nineteenth century, only Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi, 183099) followed the example of John Rollin Ridge by writing fiction. Pokagons O-g-mw-kwe Mit-i-gw-k, Queen of the Woods (1899), the first novel about Indian life written by an Indian, was published a few months after his death. The first novel published by an Indian woman was Co-ge-we-a, the Half-Blood (1927), written by Mourning Dove (Humishuma; Cristal McLeod Galler; Okanogan, 18881936) in collaboration with Lucullus McWhorter. Born in a canoe while her parents were crossing the Kutenai River near Bonners Ferry, Idaho, Mourning Dove completed only the third grade and a brief stint at a business school, where she learned to type. At age thirteen, she took over the rearing of her younger siblings after their mother died. Much of her adult life after her marriage was spent as a migrant worker in Washington. Her only novel, Co-ge-we-a was completed eleven years before it was finally published. In this novel, Mourning Dove introduces a theme that dominates American Indian fiction of the 1930s and of the last decade. The half-Indian heroine Co-ge-we-a is drawn away from a mixed-blood cowboy suitor by the smooth talk and fancy ways of a crafty easterner bent on getting what he thinks is her fortune. Though she initially rejects her mixed-blood suitor because accepting him would mean living Indian, she gradually recognizes the importance of the values both he and her aged grandmother represent. The strongest parts of the novel deal with the heroines interaction with her grandmother and her humiliations suffered as a mixed-blood. The novel is also a Western, using such conventional devices as a ranch setting and a cast of rough cowboys whose hijinks and colorful language lighten the plot. The belated publication of Co-ge-we-a, which suffers from inconsistent point of view and sometimes implausible plot, caused little critical stir. Consequently, Mourning Dove took the advice of McWhorter and turned to collecting the legends of the Okanogans, which were published in Coyote Stories, edited by Heister Dean Guie (1933), and in a revised version called Tales of the Okanogans, edited by Donald Hines (1976). The most controversial Indian writer of the 1920s was Sylvester Long 1048
or Buffalo Child Long Lance (18911932), whose exploits in life rivaled those in his fiction. Acclaimed in the United States and Canada as a writer, movie actor, and athlete, Longs reputation as an author rests today on Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928). An instant success, the book was widely accepted as an authentic description of a Blackfeet Indian and his people at the turn of the century. Although the books title implies that it is an autobiography, it is actually fiction. Long was born in North Carolina of mixed Catawba, Lumbee, white, and black ancestry. Although both parents were of mixed Indian ancestry, the family, except for Sylvester, identified as black. After leaving a black school at age twelve, young Long, who looked Indian, joined a Wild West Show, where he met Cherokees and learned a bit of their language. At age eighteen, he was admitted to Carlisle Indian School as a Cherokee, changing his name there to Long Lance to quiet some of the attacks on his ancestry. A skilled athlete and excellent student, he graduated at the head of his class in 1912, subsequently attending Dickinson College for a year. He later won a scholarship to St. Johns Military Academy, near Syracuse, New York, and applied for admission to West Point. In 1915, he enlisted in the Canadian Army, attained the rank of staff sergeant in the overseas Expeditionary Force, and was wounded twice. Following his release from the army, he became a reporter for the Calgary Daily Herald, for which he wrote many articles about the Indians of western Canada. In 1922, he was adopted as an honorary chief of the Blood Indians, a branch of the Blackfeet Indians (erroneously called the Blackfoot Confederacy). His articles were so successful that he became a free-lance writer and a popular member of the American celebrity circuit. As a result, he was asked to star in The Silent Enemy, a silent film about Indians sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and released in 1930 by Paramount Pictures. His second picture was to be a talking film about an Indian flyer during World War I. Unfortunately, in 1932, before the film was completed, Long was found dead of gunshot wounds in the home of a wealthy female friend. His death was ruled a suicide. Long Lance is a well-written, rousing adventure story which includes not only ethnographic details about Blackfeet child-rearing customs and tribal life but also well-developed character portraits of various tribal members. The stories about such topics as training to become warriors, war parties, horse-breaking, loyalty of Indian dogs, and two white boys reared by Indians are written in a spare, fast-paced style designed to hold the interest of both children and adults. In 1933 Longs friends collected his journalistic pieces in Redman Echoes: Comprising the Writings of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and Biographical Sketches by His Friends. A far more prolific writer was John Milton Oskison (18741947). One-eighth Cherokee, Oskison was born in Indian Territory. After gradua1049
tion from Stanford in 1898 and postgraduate study in literature at Harvard, Oskison worked as an editor and feature writer for the New York Evening Post and for Colliers Magazine. He was also a free-lance writer on finance and on Indian affairs. During World War I, Oskison served with the American forces in France. During the twenties, he wrote the novels Wild Harvest (1925) and Black Jack Davy (1926), as well as the fictional biography entitled A Texas Titan: The Story of Sam Houston (1929). Both the novels are southwesterns, dealing with the surge of white settlers into Cherokee land near a town called Big Grove in Indian Territory. Neither novel demonstrates the ability to develop characterization and sustained plot that Oskison reveals in his best novel, Brothers Three (1935). Like the two previous novels, Brothers Three is set in Indian Territory and includes Indians in minor character roles. Here, however, the major characters are part Indian. Each of the three parts of the novel describes the struggle by one of the brothers to break away from the farm established by their hard-working father Francis Odell and his quarter-Cherokee wife, Janet, and the utter failure of each to prosper by using family capital for investments. The prejudice against mixedbloods is introduced in the characterization of the shiftless poor whites who arrive to lease land from the Indians after allotment and who look down on the Odell boys and any child slightly tainted by Indian blood. Oskisons growing interest in his Indian heritage is evident in the preface to Tecumseh and His Times (1938), dedicated to all Dreamers and Strivers for the integrity of the Indian race, some of whose blood flows in my veins (p. iii). The most accomplished Native American writers to emerge in the 1930s became known more for their historical and biographical works than for their fiction: John Joseph Mathews and DArcy McNickle. Mathews (c. 18941979) was one-eighth Osage, a descendant of the union of a trader and an Osage woman. His grandmother, born of this union, and her husband John Mathews settled in 1872 on what was then the Osage Reservation, where both Mathewss father and he were raised. Mathews served in the American Air Force during World War I. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1920, Mathews completed a B.A. at Oxford University in 1923. He then returned to the Blackjacks region of his childhood, near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, where he lived until his death. In addition to working as a writer and rancher, Mathews served for many years on the Osage Business Council. Mathewss first book WahKon-Tah (1932) was such a critical and popular success that it became a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection. Using the journal of Major Laban J. Miles, the first government agent for the Osage, Mathews colorfully portrays Miless struggles to bring civilization, education, and agriculture to the Osage and their equally frustrating struggles to retain the old ways while adapting to the new. The concluding chapter of 1050
this book, which covers the period 18781931, introduces a young, jazzage Osage, ashamed of his backward parents but dependent both on them and on the agency for moneythe prototype of the hero of Sundown (1934). In this novel, the protagonist, Challenge Windzer, is the son of a full-blood Osage mother, a quiet traditionalist, and a three-quarter-blood father, a strong advocate of allotment and an avid reader of Byron. As a passive hero who rejects his ancestral past without feeling at home in the whitedominated present, Windzer is the forerunner of similar heroes created by Momaday, Welch, and Silko over thirty years later. Windzer has been cut off from his Indian roots by white education and by Air Force service during World War I. Returning home from the war, Windzer inherits enough money from the family oil leases to undermine his desire for either education or work. By the end of the novel, neither Windzer nor his two boyhood Indian friends, who dropped out of the university to become an alcoholic and a peyote ritualist respectively, have bridged the gap between Indian and white cultures. Sundown is Mathewss only novel. Talking to the Moon (1945) is Mathewss most sophisticated work. Clearly influenced by Thoreau, Mathews describes his return to the Blackjacks region to build a cabin and live in harmony with nature. He uses the Osage divisions of time by moons as a framework for his imaginative blending of myth, history, and personal experience. The book contains some beautiful descriptive passages and some memorable character portraits of the Osage people. Mathewss next book was a biography entitled Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W. Marland (1952). Almost a decade later, Mathewss major work was published: The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961). This lengthy history of the Osage is a primary source of information about the tribe. A contemporary of Mathews, DArcy McNickle is a far more polished novelist. McNickle (190477), who was half Flathead or Salish, attended government boarding school in Oregon, graduated from the University of Montana, and attended Oxford and Grenoble Universities. His first book was The Surrounded (1936), which remains one of the finest novels by a Native American writer. The plot focuses on the identity crisis faced by Archilde Leon and the violent consequences of cultural conflict. The protagonist is the son of a Flathead woman renowned both for her Catholic piety and for her adherence to Indian ways, and a Spanish father who, after forty years of living among Indians, has no understanding of their world view. When Archilde takes his mother on a last ritual hunt, he sets in motion a chain of events which entraps him. A shot he fires in the air brings both his brother Louis, a horse thief who has just killed a deer out of season, and the game warden. As Louis reaches for his gun, he is killed by the warden, who is then struck down with a hatchet by the mother. Later, when 1051
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Archilde is persuaded by his lover Elise LaRose to escape to the mountains, they are found by the sheriff. As Elise shoots the sheriff, Archilde is once again the passive onlookersurrounded by people and events he cannot control. This highly sophisticated novel demonstrates McNickles ability to develop memorable characters, write believable dialogue, use irony, and incorporate Salish oral traditions. Both in style and in characterization of the hero, The Surrounded reveals the influence of Hemingway. Chronologically, the novels written during the thirties by Oskison, Mathews, and McNickle belong with the regional and social novels popular then. In this age of the proletarian novel, writers like John Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, and Pietro di Donato graphically described the battle of the immigrant and migrant groups against American big business and the class structure it supported. The novels by Oskison, Mathews, and McNickle bear little relationship to the proletarian novel. Oskisons Brothers Three belongs among the social novels tracing the establishment of family farms and the economic history of a specific region. Both Mathewss Sundown and McNickles The Surrounded focus on cultural rather than on class conflict. Significantly, the two novels were published during the time that the government enacted and began to implement the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which guaranteed Indian tribes the right to self-determination. For Indians, the thirties represented less a period of economic disaster than of brief security from the assimilationist policies of the federal government. Eighteen years after the appearance of The Surrounded, McNickles second novel was published. Written for young people, Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize (1954), describes the culture of the cliff dwellers of the pre-contact Southwest and the adventures of Salt, a teenage boy who journeys to Mexico to find a hardy strain of corn which his people can grow to prevent famine. McNickles last novel was Wind from an Enemy Sky, which appeared posthumously in 1978. Here McNickle moves from the clash of two cultures within the individual to that between groups. The plot contrasts the responses of two brothers to government pressure to alter traditional Indian life style. Henry Jim, the elder brother, left the tribe thirty years ago when his younger brother was selected principal chief. He also gave the tribes medicine bundle to a local priest, who in turn gave it to a wealthy contractor and art collector. Subsequently Henry Jim became a successful but lonely rancher regarded by the government as its masterpiece. At the end of the novel, Henry Jim dies a natural death surrounded by family and friends with whom he has been reunited. Bull, on the other hand, is a fierce conservative who keeps his people as far away from white contact as possible. He dies a violent death resulting from conflict over a dam that has cut off the Indians water and violated a holy place. When the contractor of the dam offers the Indians a nude South American statue of gold instead of the 1052
medicine bundle, Bull kills him and the government agent. An Indian police officer then kills Bull. McNickles forty years of experience in Indian affairs since the publication of The Surrounded have strengthened his belief in the continuing inability of the representatives of the two cultures to communicate their vastly different world views to one another. With the exception of his biography Indian Man: A Life of Oliver La Farge (1971), McNickles other books have been histories: They Came Here First (1949); The Indian Tribes of the United States (1962); Indians and Other Americans, with Harold E. Fey (1970); and Native American Tribalism (1973). In addition to being an author, McNickle cofounded the National Congress of American Indians and served as the first director of the Newberry Library Center for History of the American Indian. The only Indian dramatist to achieve critical acclaim during the 1930s was [Rolla] Lynn Riggs (18991954). Descended from Cherokees on his mothers side, Riggs was born on a farm near Claremore, Oklahoma, which was then Indian Territory. After graduation from Oklahoma Military Academy in 1917, Riggs entered the University of Oklahoma in 1920, where he continued to write poetry and began to write plays. Cuckoo, his first play, was produced at the university in 1921. To recover from an illness, Riggs subsequently went to New Mexico. His second play, Syrian Knives, was produced there in 1925. A year later Riggs moved to New York to devote himself to writing. His first play to be produced on Broadway was Big Lake (1927), which was not a success. Two of his best plays were folk dramas set in Oklahoma and written during a 1928 Guggenheim Fellowship year in Paris; Borned in Texas, produced under the title Roadside (1930), and Green Grow the Lilacs (1931). The comedy Roadside deals with the attempts of a high-spirited, brawling cowboy on the run from the law to win the love of a sharp-tongued but warm-hearted Oklahoma woman. The play was a greater critical than financial success. Green Grow the Lilacs achieved both. Full of down-to-earth humor and lively cowboy songs, this play has been etched into the American consciousness through its adaptation into the hit musical Oklahoma! (1943) by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Although the musical plot closely follows that of the play, Riggs did not participate in its preparation. Both plays exemplify Riggss ability to capture Oklahoma dialect and folk culture, which has received critical acclaim. His ability to evoke a natural lyricism and authentic atmosphere has also been acclaimed. Riggss only play to deal with an Indian subject is the tragedy Cherokee Night (1936), which poignantly portrays the sense of loss of tribal culture suffered by mixed-blood Cherokees who grew up around Claremore during the period 18951931. His first attempt to write a play with a contemporary setting was Russet Mantle (1936), produced in New York. This satirical 1053
comedy examines the dilemma faced by modern couples choosing between financial security and romantic love. Praising the play as a wise, fresh, and incorrigibly ridiculous human comedy, critics acclaimed it as the best thing Riggs had written. Although Riggs continued to write plays, he never equalled the success of these early works. Riggs also published a volume of poetry entitled The Iron Dish (1930) and served as a free-lance screenwriter on such films as Garden of Allah and The Plainsman. In 1942, he enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army, and settled in New Mexico after the war. He later served as a guest author and as director of drama at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa. During the 1940s and 1950s, the few Indian authors who published turned once more to the genres of autobiography and cultural history used by earlier authors. In 1942, Land of Nakoda: The Story of the Assiniboine Indians appeared, written by James L. Long (First Boy) and illustrated by William Standing (Fire Bear). A project of the Montana Writers Program, the book was later published by Oklahoma University Press under the title The Assiniboines: From the Accounts of the Old Ones Told to First Boy (1961). Because Long gathered from Assiniboine speakers materials on mythology, oral history, and culture, which he translated into English, the book is an excellent source of information on this far-western branch of the Sioux. Equally good is Ella Delorias study of Sioux cultural change, Speaking of Indians (1944). Deloria (18881971), a Yankton Sioux enrolled on the Standing Rock Reservation, was trained by Franz Boas and did much of her research among the western Teton groups on the Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, and Rosebud Reservations. Written for study by church groups, Speaking of Indians is a highly readable introduction to North American Indians as a whole and to the Sioux in particular. In her analysis of traditional Sioux culture, Deloria focuses on the roles of kinship, the social system within the tepee and camp circle, praying for power, education by precept and example, and the economics of giving to have. Though she shows how this scheme of life that worked changed under the reservation system, she emphasizes that the Sioux value system continued to be based on traditional culture. In 1959 two autobiographies by southwestern Indians were published: Jason Betzinezs I Fought with Geronimo and George Webbs A Pima Remembers. Betzinezs book is a fascinating blend of oral history and autobiography. The manuscript, which he wrote but which historian Wilbur S. Nye edited, appeared when the author (b. 1860) was ninety-nine. Betzinez was a Warm Springs Apache, close kin to the Chiricahuas; Geronimo (Gayahkla) was his cousin. His book is a valuable document of Apache oral historyespecially for its account of the wanderings of the two bands between 1876 and Geronimos surrender in 1886. So feared were the captured Apaches that 1054
they were held as prisoners of war from 1886 to 1913 at various forts in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Between 1887 and 1897, Betzinez attended Carlisle Indian School, where he became a dedicated convert to the white mans way. After he moved to Oklahoma to be reunited with his people, Betzinez watched sadly as Carlisle friends returned to the old ways, unable to withstand being branded as outcasts who no longer loved their people. When the Apaches were permitted to move in 1913 to the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico, Betzinez chose instead to accept an allotment of land in Oklahoma. At age fifty-nine, he married a former missionary who was white, and lived out his days devoted to Christianity and hard work. George Webbs book also combines oral history and autobiography. Fearful that Pima traditions were being forgotten, Webb (b. 1893) wrote A Pima Remembers both to teach young Pimas about their heritage and to educate non-Indians about the contributions of Pimas to American life. With simple charm and good humor, Webb recounts his boyhood experiences and discusses Pima life, history, and tales. American Indian authors of the forties and fifties reminded their readers of the distinctiveness of tribal cultures; of Indians long, hard struggle to retain their lands and cultures; and of the anguish caused by the conflict between Indian and non-Indian world views. Unfortunately, these reminders went unheeded. After World War II, the federal government abandoned the principle of self-determination set forth in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and adopted instead the recommendation of the Hoover Commission in 1949 that reservations be terminated to facilitate assimilation of native people into the dominant society. During the fifties, the government not only terminated several tribes but also relocated large numbers of Indians from reservations to cities. Over the next two decades Indians fought these and other policies affecting self-determination with lawsuits and demonstrations. Out of the turmoil of the sixties emerged a new generation of American Indian writers, led by Vine Deloria, Jr., and N. Scott Momaday. The publication of their work ushered in a renaissance of American Indian literature during which Indian writers developed in unprecedented numbers.
A. LAV ONNE B ROWN R UOFF , University
of Illinois at Chicago
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Notes
1. 2. The standard spelling of Paiute is followed rather than Winnemuccas various spellings of Piute or Pah-Ute. Research for this chapter was supported by a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The General Allotment Act of 1887 was designed to break up Indian reservationsa goal supported by both reformers and opportunists. Under this act, Indians who took their land in severalty became citizens of the United States and were subject to all its obligations. Far from turning Indians into prosperous owners of private land, though, the Allotment Act introduced an era in which Indians lost their land by fraud and by force. By 1934, 60 percent of the land owned by Indians in 1887 had passed out of their control. See Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Indian in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) pp. 24243. Sarah Winnemucca, in American Indian Intellectuals: 1976 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, ed. Margot Liberty (St. Paul, Minnesota: West, 1978), pp. 4041. Sarah Winnemucca, Life Among the Piutes (New York: Putnam, 1883), pp. 243 44. Rpt. Bishop, Calif.: Sierra Media, 1969. Charles Eastman, Indian Boyhood (rpt. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1972), p. 20. Charles Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), p. 67. Secretary of the Interior Herbert Work requested the private Institute for Government Research to examine the needs of Indian communities. Directed by Dr. Lewis Meriam and supported by funds from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., experts in such fields as law, education, and health studied these communities, publishing their report in 1928. Their report not only proposed improvements in medicine and education but it also recommended the creation of a longrange planning division and much closer scrutiny of proposals for further land allotment. Although there is some controversy over whether Griffis was actually Indian, his family is convinced that he was. All his life he identified as Indian. His son, Joseph K. Griffis, Jr., indicated in a personal interview on 6 April 1982 that his father listed him as Indian on his birth certificate.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7
8.
Bibliographies Brumble, H. David III, comp. An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian Autobiographies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. An excellent guide with suggestions for further reading.
1056
Littlefield, Daniel, and James Parin, comps. A Biobibliography of Native American Writers, 17721924. Native American Bibliography Series. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1981. Comprehensive guide with brief biographies of the authors. This series publishes bibliographies of many Indian tribes and many topics pertaining to American Indians. Marken, Jack, comp. The American Indian: Language and Literature. Arlington Heights, Illinois: AHM, 1978. Although incomplete and unannotated, this is a good listing of traditional literatures and anthropological/linguistic studies. Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, and Karl Kroeber, comps. American Indian Literatures in the United States: A Basic Bibliography for Teachers. New York: Association for Study of American Indian Literatures, 1983. Designed to introduce teachers to classroom texts, scholarly editions, cultural backgrounds, and criticism. General Studies Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Studies in American Indian Literature. New York: MLA, 1983. Best guide to the field; emphasis on written literature. Essays, course designs, review of scholarship, bibliography. Chapman, Abraham, ed. Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations. New York: New American Library, 1975. Literature and criticism; includes essays by several Indian writers. Larson, Charles R. American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. Only book-length study of American Indian novelists, 18991978; stronger on plot summary than criticism. Liberty, Margot, ed. American Indian Intellectuals. 1976 Proceedings of American Ethnological Society. St. Paul, Minnesota: West, 1978. Contains biographies of Charles Eastman, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Francis LaFlesche, Sylvester Long (Long Lance), John Joseph Mathews. Oaks, Priscilla. The First Generation of Native American Novelists. MELUS 5 (1978): 5765. Surveys novelists of the 1930s.
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American Indian Fiction, 19681983

INCE THE 1960s, a growing number of American Indian writers have been publishing fiction. Principal among them are N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Simon J. Ortiz, and Gerald Vizenor. Others who have published fiction or are presently engaged in writing fiction include Linda Hogan, Geary Hobson, Opal Lee Popkes, Anna Lee Walters, Mary Tall Mountain, and this writer. Momaday set off this boom, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for his novel House Made of Dawn, and that book, along with his mixed-genre work The Way to Rainy Mountain, opened the gates to a flood of writing by American Indians. House Made of Dawn is the first non-linear, non-chronological, ritual novel written by an American Indian, and it is these characteristics that link the novel with Native American oral traditions, pointing to the possibility of fusion between narrative forms thought to be incompatible prior to its publication. Certain changes had to occur in American writing before American Indian thought and culture could become realistically accessible to nonIndian readers. Until non-Indians could think and write in non-linear, associative, synchronistic and non-rationalist modes, American Indian ritual literature in contemporary forms was not publishable, even if it could be transmitted by more usual methods within American Indian communities. For while ritual literature, either of the old-time, traditional variety or the new literary kind, is accretive rather than associative, achronistic rather than synchronistic, and ritual rather than mythological or historical, the new fiction of Europe and America provided a close enough analog to tribal literatures for writers to begin developing a new tribal literary tradition. Essentially, Indians dont think the way non-Indians do: this distinction is partly one of tribal consciousness as opposed to the consciousness of urbanized, industrial cultures, but it is also a distinction between new world and old world thought, between systems based on wholeness and those based on division and separation. One might argue that the distinction is one of inclusiveness and exclusiveness, and in certain ways this is a convenient generalization. One might also suggest that gynarchical systems (systems heavily influenced by the presence of powerful female god-figures and culture-bearers and engenderers) differ in fundamental ways from patriarchal systems. One writer has described that difference as being the difference be1 tween a New World god who is hungry and an Old World god who is angry.
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AMERICAN INDIAN FICTION, 19681983
Whatever the reasons for the differences, American Indian tribal narratives reflect a sense of events as occurring in an extended, circular, unified field of interaction. This alters plotting, which in traditional American Indian narratives is developed with the drama of constantly expanding meaning in mind. The European-American pattern of tying significance to conflict resolution and thus to causation is largely an incidental feature in tribal narrative, where developments are dependent for their meaning on ritual rules of ordering. These internal rules of order have more to do with the interaction of thoughts, spirits, arcane forces and tradition than with external elements such as personality, politics or history. Generally speaking, American Indian tribal narratives are achronistic (function without regard to chronology) and ahistoric. Until American fiction could be accommodated to this mode, American Indian fiction was necessarily concerned with unredeemed and unchangeable forces of alienation, colonization, genocide and hopelessness (as the works of the early writers John Rollin Ridge, John M. Oskison, John Joseph Mathews and DArcy McNickle are), and subject to fractured structure, style and overall meaning (as are the novels of Simon Pokagon and Mourning Dove). The accretive method that characterizes oral-tradition narratives displays a tendency to develop events on several levels of significance at once; physical, social, and psychological events are unified through connections embedded in tribal ritual traditions. Perhaps the universal importance of the number four in Indian cultures reflects this understanding: one must experience events in four contexts before they are properly assimilated and one can be said to have acted properly. Contemporary American Indian fiction usually gives attention to cultural conflict, but every novel and short story deals with Indian-white relations only in addition to other themes. This is in accordance with the traditional narrative structure that underlies contemporary American Indian fiction. Indeed, because of these traditional understandings, cultural conflict often is secondary to the main event, and is incorporated into the stories because the writer needs to satisfy non-Indian readers who can and generally will understand the significance of that theme. Most of the novels and short stories written by American Indian writers in the contemporary period consist of four stories within one, and are to be variously understood by Indian and non-Indian audiences. House Made of Dawn, for example, can be read as a sociological novel; certainly it is most often read that way by non-Indians (and least often read that way by Indians). At this level, it is a story about a young Indian man fallen between two chairs, who can neither accept his Indian life nor exchange it for a white one. This story is nicely arranged into a conventional EuropeanAmerican plot structure, replete with rising tension, growing conflict, a 1059
satisfying crisis and final resolution in which Abel, broken in body and mind, returns to Walatowa to finish his life in a noble manner. But there are other tales told in House Made of Dawn. One of them is the ceremonial story whose resolution depends on the protagonists success in learning certain things and returning to the people with that knowledge so that they might benefit and prosper. This tale is concerned with the spirit world and its relation to the human as understood by the Navajo. In it, each event is a test from which Abel is to learn something useful to take to his people. The arcane tale of earth, sky, moon, sun, and season is another tale incorporated into House Made of Dawn. This narrative was pointed out by a Pueblo medicine man who read the book, and while its structure is not easy to discern, it is the bedrock on which the other narratives or, to be accurate, the other novels, are erected, and it abides by its own structural rules that are as ancient as the phenomena and forces it depicts. This narrative is related to the running ceremony that begins, ends and centers the various novels contained in this superb book; and it is a story close to the Pueblo tradition, concerned with the sufferance of evil, the existence of impenetrable mystery and with what is given to the sun. Finally, there is told the tale of a half-Walatowa youth who is haunted by deathlonely, alienated, inarticulate, and half-crazed because he cannot belong to himself or to his people. This is the psychological novel, more familiar to literary critics, and its resolution depends on his personal growth into manhood. It is about imbalance, about misunderstanding the nature of power, about war and its consequences, and about the need for purification and the ultimate acceptance and recognition of what is. Each of these tales or novels must be understood in its singular significance as well as in its interworkings with the others if the novel is to be adequately comprehended. And as each is pursued as though it alone were the novel, the events, the symbols and the eventual outcome are understood differently. Similarly, Leslie Marmon Silkos Ceremony (1978) has a structure that is accretive, associative and multidimensional. The sociological narrative is perhaps the most accessible to the uninitiated reader. The protagonist is easily seen as tom between two ways of life and unable to belong to either. Like Abel in House Made of Dawn, Tayo is haunted by loss, rejection, and battle sickness. Conflict between white and Indian is a factor in this version, supported by a kind of self-conscious militance not emphasized in House Made of Dawn. The spirit story which is an essential part of Ceremony is reinforced by Silkos use of a clan story from Laguna. It runs parallel to the main narrative and symbolizes the real import of the action. Like Silko, Momaday opens 1060
and closes House Made of Dawn in the traditional manner, and also includes traditional material in the body of his book. And, like Silkos clan story, the House Made of Dawn prayer forms the focal symbol for the various stories being recounted in the single novel. This inclusion of whole portions of traditional ceremonial material works to clarify the Indian version of these novels, while it enables the reader to locate critical issues accurately. The novels of James Welch (Blackfeet-Gros Ventre), Winter in the Blood (1974) and The Death of Jim Loney (1979), are perhaps a more northerly approach to the American Indian contemporary novel. In both these books, Welch combines European and traditional American Indian structures, using a fragmented series of numbered vignettes to organize various aspects of his multiple narratives. Silko and Momaday use a similar device, which enables the writers to compose narratives that will satisfy non-Indian audiences while reflecting accurately an American Indian view of human experience. The preoccupation with mystical and paranormal experience in Indian life is more muted in Welch than in the work of southwesterners like Silko and Momaday, but such experience is nonetheless an integral part of both of his novels. For they are stories about loss and loneliness, alienation and grief; they are also stories about the paranormal world of spirits, visions, and occult forces impinging on the world of human beings; and they are, inevitably, stories about the interrelationship between the human (both personal and social), the spirits, and the physical universe of animals, plants and seasons. Read four times, once for each story, the underlying unity and coherent structure of each of the four tales becomes clear, as does the underlying unity of the entire book. The narrator of Winter in the Blood, who is not named, is haunted by the evil of his grandmothers beauty. The curse laid on her extends to her descendants, resulting in the deaths of her daughters, husband, and eldest son Mose. The narrator himself is blighted and robbed of purpose. He is prevented from experiencing his own strength because his mother and grandmother are strong women, and because his knee was permanently maimed in the accident that also resulted in his brothers death. In The Death of Jim Loney, Welch explores more directly the ramifications of assimilation and its accompanying loss of tribe, personal history, and place. Like Tayo in Ceremony and Abel in House Made of Dawn, Loney has no ancestors, no close relatives who accept and nurture him, and no tribe. Alienation in the psychological and sociological sense is the most noticeable theme of this novel, but there are more tales here, as in Winter in the Blood, than meet the unpracticed eye. Loney is destroyed by dreams and visions as much as by loneliness and liquor. And with no tribal matrix to fit the dreams and visions into, his doom is inevitable. 1061
Like the tales from the oral tradition, contemporary American Indian fiction shifts from real to surreal readily, while the underlying unity of person, setting, and action is maintained. The circular associative progression of events as they impinge on the characters and interact with them is clarified through the use of accretive, fragmental structuring. Significance becomes clear that in chronological linear structures would remain obscure and exotic. Gerald Vizenor approaches the problem of bicultural literature differently from the others; he chooses to fuse post-modern fiction to the oral tradition, using trickster-narrative themes, symbols and structures. The match is particularly happy. His novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart is a story within a story. Saint Louis Bearheart is an Indian who has worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs since he was released from a brutal Indian school years before. At the time of the American Indian takeover of the Bureau offices, Bearheart has completed a novel, called Cedarfair Circus, Grave Reports from the Cultural Word Wars, which he allows a young woman who is participating in the sit-in to read. The manuscript is about an Anishanabe shaman, Proude Four, who, with his wife Rosalie and a number of pilgrims who join them along the way, journeys from Wisconsin to New Mexico. They make the journey during a period of collapse in the United States due to oil shortages that bring the country to a complete halt. Along the way they encounter a number of traditionally conventional figures such as the Gambler, the Mad Saint, the Murderous Monsters, and various healing and helping spirits and clowns. The kind of fiction Bearheart fits into, one with no meaning beneath the surface, of absurd and bitter humor, gratuitous violence and meaningless pornography, is particularly suited to the trickster narrative and allows the underlying ritual and traditional nature of the novel to shine through. Bearheart is not in itself a ritual, any more than are the other novels written by Native Americans, but like them it is a ritual narrative, and as such represents one of the more adventurous excursions of modern Indian fiction writers into bicultural prose. Structuring a narrative is a problem for the contemporary western American Indian writer, and this difficulty has been approached in somewhat differing ways by the various writers. Two most interesting experiments are Momadays The Way to Rainy Mountain and Elizabeth CookLynns Then Badger Said This. Momaday employs three literary forms to tell the story of his pilgrimage to his homeland. By combining scholarly mainly historicalvignettes with personal narrative and traditional Kiowa tales, Momaday creates a coherent account that illuminates the Kiowa experience as it is reflected through his own experience and biculturation. Cook-Lynn uses essay techniques blended with traditional Sioux nar1062
ratives which are paired with poems, allowing each to illuminate the other. This multiple-genre technique allows her personal voice to sound through the voices of the Siouxtheir history, their experience, and their insight, so that the reader can see how the writer is both herself and her people. The unique accomplishment of these experimental books and their sister novels is the intricacy of their structuring, necessitated by the imperatives of writing for two different peoples and through two different literary traditions. While the work of Native American writers displays notable Indian characteristics, its important to remember that writing fiction is not a traditional Indian pursuit. While the more interesting and clearly defined experiments in multicultural fiction are to be found in the longer works described, the short stories written by contemporary western American Indian writers face the same challenges. While their stories are about Indians, and thus most accurately portray Indian points of view and experience, the short story is itself a non-Indian form. In short fiction, Indian writers such as Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma), Leslie Marmon Silko, and Opal Lee Popkes (Choctaw) must use an essentially alien form to shape and articulate Indian experience. The Native American who sticks to the well-made story is courting disaster. Again, the oral tradition is a useful device in resolving the difficulty. For it is the tales, narratives and anecdotes that make life meaningful; their recurrence, their ordinariness, and their familiarity allow an individual to know ones proper place in things, and to be secure in this knowledge. These stories, which may ostensibly be about mythical heroes and heroines from the distant past as in Silkos Yellow Woman, or which may be told in the no-holds-barred parlance of a good gossip session, as in Ortizs collection Howbah Indians, lend themselves very well to the short story form. A good example of short stories made from everyday stories told over coffee and oven bread is the treatment of the Nash Garcia killing which occurred in western Valencia County, New Mexico, in the early nineteen fifties. Silko and Ortiz, both children living in the area when the murder occurred, chose to write about this event when they were grown. Momaday also used this event centrally in House Made of Dawn, though he was older when it happened and relied more heavily on printed sources than did either Silko or Ortiz. Each writer, however, took the same event, probably as gotten from personal sources, and shaped it to the needs of the story being written. As a result, this same event takes on three different significances, as it is filtered through each writers point of view, sources, and intent. Silko emphasizes witchcraft and writes in a lyrical tone which makes the event signify not murder but ritual killing; Ortiz tells a hard-hitting, straightforward as-told-to story that makes the event another in a long 1063
series of things that happen around Acoma. Momaday fragments the original events and reweaves them into his narrative, blending the arcane and the political so that both and neither are comprehensible, or can be romanticized or oversimplified. By blending realism and ritualism he makes the events signify spiritual and personal transcendence. Similarly, Ortizs story Kaiser and the War is based on an event which occurred in Acoma country during his youth. This story displays a kind of wry and cynical humor regarding the white mans world that is characteristic of Acoma, and of Ortiz. Though the tale is tragic, it is also very funnythough much of the humor is that of an Indian jokeoften unfunny to those who are not Indian. Kaiser is also called Hitler, though why he should be called either is not clear. Maybe its because he was crazy, or thought to be, especially by those whose daughters found him attractive, or maybe because he became a real American by being institutionalized. Kaiser was put in jail because he refused to join the army and then decided to join after all. He was kept there after the war because he just went crazy one day and tried to kill someone. Maybe he was called Kaiser because he didnt laugh or joke or sing or sit around and listen to old stories after he got out of prison, or maybe it was because of the gray suit he wore continually, even when it was torn and soiled and people accused him of putting on airs. He did plan to have one last Indian laugh, though. Just before he went up to sheep camp, where he died, he instructed his sister to send the suit to the government. She didnt, though, because she couldnt figure out which part of the government he meant: the law, the state pen or the Indian Affairs. The cutting humor of Ortiz also marks the work of Opal Lee Popkes. Her story Zuma Chowts Cave is enormously successful though it does take liberties with the short story form, shifting main character, time and point of view several times. By this device and a well-developed ability to tell an Indian story in a way that is accessible to non-Indians as well as to Indians, Popkes pokes fun at time-honored concepts about the inevitable assimilation of the noble red man, and demonstrates how irrelevant such concepts are to one like Chowt or his wonderful daughter. Similar triumphs are evident in a study of most of the fiction being written by American Indians. Some concentrate on urban landscapes, while others are rural in their focus, but the direction of contemporary American Indian fiction is clear: through their craft writers are building a bridge between the worlds of Indian and white that each can safely use to reach the other. Through careful combining of western fiction and traditional Indian narrative the work is progressing satisfactorily, as those who have read the present crop of stories and novels can attest.
PAULA G UNN A LLEN , University
of California, Berkeley
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Note
1. William Brandon, The Last Americans: The Indian in American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 57.
Much contemporary Native American writing appears in publications from small presses. To be practical this bibliography is largely limited to publications readily available. The Hobson, Rosen, and Ortiz books listed under Anthologies are excellent and inclusive collections of, respectively, contemporary poetry and short fiction. Anthologies Bruchac, Joseph III, ed. The Greenfield Review 9, Special Issue nos. 3 and 4 (1981). Poetry and some fiction, essays and reviews. Fisher, Dexter, ed. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Contains an excellent sampling of contemporary American Indian womens poetry, narrative, essays, and fiction. Hobson, Geary, ed. The Remembered Earth. Albuquerque: Red Earth Press, 1979. The largest collection to date of contemporary Native American writing. Arranged according to regions of the United States. Weighted toward poetry, but contains some short fiction, essays, and drama as well, and an excellent introduction. Green, Rayna, ed. Thats What She Said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Poetry and fiction of American Indian women. Niatum, Duane, ed. Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Ortiz, Simon, ed. Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature. Tsaile, Arizona: Navajo Community College Press, 1983. Possibly the finest and widest selection of short stories, with such diverse writers as Silko, Vizenor, Haslam, Allen, Hogan, and Walters. Rosen, Kenneth, ed. The Man to Send Rain Clouds. New York: Viking, 1974. A good collection of Native American short fiction. Books by Individual Authors 1. Novels Allen, Paula Gunn (Laguna/Sioux). The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. Albion, California: Spinsters Ink, 1983. Bedford, Denton R. (Minsee). Tsali. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1972. Momaday, N. Scott (Kiowa). House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. McNickle, DArcy. Wind from an Enemy Sky. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977.
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A Literary History of the American West Nasnaga/Roger Russell (Shawnee). Indians Summer. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Pierre, Chief George (Colville). Autumns Bounty. San Antonio, Texas: Nay lor, 1972. Silko, Leslie Marmon (Laguna Pueblo). Ceremony. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Vizenor, Gerald (Anishanabe). Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. Minneapolis: Truck Press, 1978. Welch, James (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre). The Death of Jim Loney. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. . Winter in the Blood. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. 2. Short Stories Ortiz, Simon (Acoma). Howbah Indians. Tucson: Blue Moon Press, 1978. Four short stories not available in the Rosen anthology. Vizenor, Gerald. Earth Divers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. 3. Mixed Genre and Collections Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth (Sioux). Then Badger Said This. New York: Vantage, 1977. See text for description of book. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Seaver Books, 1982. Fiction, personal narrative, poetry. Vizenor, Gerald. Word Arrows. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. Narratives and personal essay.
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Coyotes Sons, Spiders Daughters Western American Indian Poetry 19681983
poetry necessarily reflects in form or content the Indian culture of its maker. Poets, free to celebrate their heritage proudly these days, are also exercising their freedom to choose whether to explore in their art that part of their human experience which is Indian. But even if they no longer feel bound to write of cradleboards and Alcatraz, or to make heavy use of invocation and repetition, certain techniques and themes have special resonance for contemporary western American Indian poets. Most American Indians, even though they are acculturated, have grown up close to living oral tradition, in places where secular stories and local gossipand, in many instances, formal recitals of origin stories, trickster tales, war narratives, and the likestill remain an important part of family and community life. Contemporary western American Indian poetry continues that narrative tradition. Simon Ortiz, for instance, a full-blood whose family is deeply involved in the religious life of Acoma Pueblo, incorporates oral formulae and a strong sense of tale-teller and audience into some of his poetry, calling loving attention to the pleasures and importance of repetition and of telling it right. He and others like Leslie Silko (Laguna), nila northSun (Shoshone-Chippewa), Ted Palmanteer (Colville), Carroll Arnett (Cherokee), and Marnie Walsh (Sioux) also make poetry out of community anecdote and gossip, often writing in a colloquial Reservation English rich in idiomatic vocabulary and speech rhythms. As in this short poem by Walsh, they display an unselfconscious ease with and respect for the speaking voice that too seldom graces dialect poetry:
OT ALL AMERICAN INDIAN
we all went to town one day went to the store bought you new shoes red high heels aint seen you since
1
Humor of a wryly mocking flavor is another characteristic of traditional literature that endures in contemporary American Indian poetry. Much of the laughter wells up inevitably from the ironies of Anglo-Indian relations,
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even, or perhaps especially, when encounters are marked by fearsomely earnest good intentions, as in the reply of Carroll Arnett to the fair lady anthro who asks whether the patch in the blanket has ritual significance: Yes mam it surely does it symbolizes that once upon a time there was a hole 2 in the blanket Like the ritual clowns at many western tribal ceremonies, poets make fun not only of other peoples sacred objects and mistaken ideals, but of 3 their own as well. Like the clowns, these poets make humor the charm against rigidity and pretentiousness. Take, for example, James Welchs (Blackfeet-Gros Ventre) playfully self-mocking vision of himself as a lustful savior of his peopleor of one of them, anywayin Arizona Highways: Eulynda. Theres a name I could live with. I could thrash away the nuns, tell them I adopt this girl, dark, seventeen, silver on her fingers, in the name of the father, son, and me, the holy ghost. Why not? Mormons do less with less . . . 4 now I see my rolereligious. Much American Indian humor derives from a consciousness of the complex interrelatedness of things, of the delightfully multiple significance of events. Consider, for example, Geary Hobsons wonderful one-liner: Buffalo Poem # 1 (or)
ON HEARING THAT A SMALL HERD OF BUFFALO HAS BROKEN LOOSE AND IS RUNNING WILD AT THE ALBUQUERQUE AIRPORT SEPTEMBER 26, 1975
roam on, brothers . . .
The poem is a genuine wish for buffalo liberation. It is also a sidelong glance at the parallel histories and interrelatedness of buffalo herds and tribal peoples, and at officialdoms comic consternation when confronted by freeroaming creatures, however mild-tempered and outnumbered those crea1068
WESTERN AMERICAN INDIAN POETRY, 19681983
tures may be; Hobsons buffalo are related in more ways than one to the ghost-dancing Sioux of Wounded Knee. Surrealism is another contemporary mode that accords with older American Indian ways of seeing and saying. Most western tribes value dream and vision as sources of knowledge and power; sacred and secular oral literature and written autobiography have all incorporated dream and vision. More than any other single movement in modern mainstream literature, surrealism has made contemporary poetry congenial to young American Indian poets. For example, Richard Hugo probably attracted such brilliant American Indian students as James Welch and Roberta Hill not only because of his regional bias and notoriously seductive line rhythms, but also because of his inclination to write in dream-vision form. In any case, much recent American Indian poetry is marked by surrealism, by images that shift and blend, and by ordinary objects and beings suddenly invested with extraordinary significance and power. These techniques, of course, are common to much contemporary Anglo poetry as well. But to an even greater degree than most poets, American Indian writers often seem to take for granted that such power is not merely symbolic. Dream and vision are not surreal, not beneath, above, beyond, or at some remove from reality. They are not interesting mental distortions of reality, nor are dream images Freudian or Jungian shorthand for circumstances and states of mind. They are reality, not something that stands for it. Dream and vision, of course, are sources of subject matter as well as technique for American Indian poets. In a cycle of poems scattered throughout Duane Niatums Digging Out the Roots, the speaker seeks to heal himself of the spiritual wounds dealt him in childhood by his fathers desertion. Ultimately, he learns release and acceptance through a dream, a dream he has been preparing himself to experience throughout a number of earlier poems in the cycle, much like a Klallam elder seeking a vision. When the dream does come to him, he apparently accepts its validity: . . . Ill try Salmon Berry Womans feathered charm, gift of a recent dream. Your father, she said, 6 Leave him in owls cave without light, shadow. But in contemporary poetry, as in many traditional accounts of visionquests, the vision may be failed. The seer may misinterpret, or doubt, or overlook entirely what he is meant to see. Many of the poets seem to share the prayer of Black Elks Lamenter: Oh Wakan-tanka, help us all to be always attentive! In Getting Things Straight, James Welchs speaker 1069
watches a hawk stoop and miss its kill. The speaker then wonders if the hawk sees any pattern to its existence, or if it only feels confronted by a monotonous rolling succession of days filled with hunger and anger. He thinks of a titanic ancestor, the last giant, who, after experiencing some unnamed final vision atop Heart Butte, Came back to town and drank himself to death. Finally, the speaker wonders whether the luckless hawk 7 may be his own vision That there are meaningful visions is certain, but Welch is unsure about what knowledge the hawk embodies, and even about whether that knowledge, whatever it may be, is particularly addressed to him. Scott Momaday (Kiowa-Cherokee) is especially absorbed in the questions that can haunt acculturated American Indian poets like himself, questions about the validity of vision. In his essay The Man Made of Words, he describes reading over his own manuscript of The Way to Rainy Mountain, and feeling unexpectedly overwhelmed by the doubt common at times to all creators: his words seem merely gabble, neither fitting nor meaningful. Suddenly Ko-sahn, an old woman Momaday once knew who figures importantly in the Rainy Mountain narrative, literally comes before him, stepping out of the language. When he protests to this presence that she is not actually here, she gently rebukes him, and goes on talking quietly for a while about the absolute reality of the events narrated in the Kiowa emergence storiesevents she, a nineteenth-century woman, has seen in her minds eye, in her bloods memory. Then, says Momaday, she turned slowly around, nodding once, and receded into the lan8 guage I had made. And then I imagined I was alone in the room. Momaday and a number of other contemporary poets are far enough removed from primary ceremonial experience to question, at times, the validity of a given vision. But, as in the passage above, the questionings are usually depicted as weaknesses, as failures of understanding or courage; doubts are likely to end in affirmations. Other traditional themes besides visionary experience continue to occupy the new generation of western American Indian poets. Poems about nature, for example, are common, as indeed they are in almost any body of poetry. The poems usually embody traditional Native American philosophy, viewing the natural world as a vibrantly conscious and spiritually significant whole in which humanity participates. But in contrast to the Native American nature poetry being written twenty years ago, contemporary poems are no longer likely to be limp rehashes of the powerful phrases of the great chants like Nightway, asserting simply and often that the speaker walks in beauty, and depending for their force upon the mere limitation of tradition. Many of the contemporary poems, while preserving the old meta1070
physical attitudes, are fresh, sophisticated, and highly unsentimental. Here is Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) on the proper way to deal with mosquitoes: When one hums silently around my ears bends its knees upon my arm I will be still as a stone at the edge of water 9 watching my blood carried into air. The destruction of nature is of course a frequent concern in the poems, but lately there are few didactic outcries against Anglo earth-rapers. Although their rage and regret are very real, many poets are finding their strength in subtlety. In Deer Hunting, Geary Hobson quietly juxtaposes accounts of Anglo and Cherokee hunters dressing their kills; with understated poignancy, the Last Wolf of Mary Tall Mountain (Koyukon) trots panicked through an apocalyptic urban landscape to seek out the speaker: I heard him snuffle at the door and I watched he trotted across the floor he laid his long gray muzzle on the spare white spread and his eyes burned yellow his small dotted eyebrows quivered yes, I said 10 I know what they have done Growing up with doubled visionbeing at once American and American Indianis another rich theme for these poets, all of whom, whether they like it or not, have been influenced by two cultures, and many of whom are breeds by blood as well. Recent poetry tends less toward flat condemnations and rhetorical rejections of the larger culture, and more toward attempts to come to human terms with this doubled experience. Still, all the poets affirm more strongly the tribal part of their heritage and its traditional emphases upon sharing, reverence for life, close family and tribal ties, and the ceremonial significance of all human actions, from hunting, cultivating, and eating, to loving, birthing, dreaming, and creating. Contemporary poets often voice wistfulness and longing for a fully native past, for older ways they themselves can seldom fully experience. In contrast to contemporary Anglo poems about family, which often center upon personal psychological conflict between relatives, a number of western American Indian poems deal movingly with cultural alienation from 1071
beloved older people. In A Hunting Story by Leslie Silko (Laguna), the quarry the speaker so passionately seeks is her own grandfather, separated from her now not only by his death but by the incompleteness of the communication between them even during his life. Though the poem ends with a haunting sense of his presence evoked through the sensuous powers of memory and love, powers that transcend all separations, her earlier image of trying to resuscitate the dying old man suggests the futility not only of trying to revive him, but also of breaking through to him: It might have been possible then except you clenched your teeth I could not push through 11 with my breath or fingers . . . Again, nila northSun (Shoshoni-Chippewa), in her cycle of poems about gramma, tells of the old womans growing bewilderment over her grandchildren, even though she herself has urged her own daughters to marry white men from the cities: gramma thinks about her grandchildren theyre losing the ways dont know how to talk indian dont understand me when I ask for tobacco sad sad theyre losing the ways ... how could we grandchildren learn there are no rabbits to skin in the city we have no gramma there to teach us the ways you were still on the reservation asking somebody anybody please 12 get me tobacco More than almost any other American Indian poet, northSun unflinchingly acknowledges her own acculturation, even celebrates it a little, while valuing the ways gramma has been unable to pass on. The title of the poem quoted above the way and the way things are, neatly sums up the conflict and northSuns perception of the impossibility of fully reclaiming a lost heritage. 1072
But northSun and many of her contemporaries also have visions of at least tenuous compromises, possible returns, means of affirming ones native self and center that are neither phoney nor hopelessly romanticof ways to be validly Indian within the context of the way things are. Joy Harjo (Creek) writes of an apparently quixotic 3:00 a.m. expedition to an airport, seeking a flight to Hopi Third Mesa. The airline personnel may think her deranged, but she discovers within herself the seriousness of her half-joking sortee: . . . I remembered that time Simon took a yellow cab out to acoma from albuquerque a twentyfive dollar ride to the center of himself 3 am is not too late 13 to find the way back In a lighter and more immediately practical vein, in the Prayers for a New Home section of his recent collection On Mountains Breath, Harold Littlebird (Laguna) recounts the joys and the ironies of being an educated Pueblo Indian finally in midlife learning with some difficulty how to lay adobe and mix whitewash, while he and his patient friends listen to old tapes, hour after hour, Hank Williams and war dance songs from Rocky Boy and Bismark 14 and feast on sweet corn and Coors. I once heard a confident Anglo critic tell Luci Tapahonso (Navajo) that a poem of hers mentioning Navajo children watching the Flintstones on T.V. couldnt qualify as a really Indian poem. In her Hills Brothers Coffee, she quietly makes clear how parts of Anglo culture like storebought brand-name brew can be incorporated into the warm heart of Navajo family life: My uncle is a small man in Navajo, we call him little uncle my mothers brother. He doesnt know English but his name in the white way is Tom Jim. He lives about a mile or so down the road from our house.
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One morning he sat in the kitchen drinking coffee I just came over, he said, the store is where Im going to. He tells me about how my mother seems to be gone everytime he comes over. Maybe she sees me coming then runs and jumps in her car and speeds away! He says smiling. We both laugh just to think of my mother jumping in her car and speeding. I pour him more coffee and he spoons in sugar and cream until it looks almost like a chocolate shake then he sees the coffee can. Oh, thats that coffee with the man in a dress, like a church man. Ah-h, thats the one that does it for me. Very good coffee. I sit down again and he tells me some coffee has no kick but this one is the one. It does it good for me. I pour us both a cup and while we wait for my mother, his eyes crinkle with the smile and he says yes, ah yes, this is the very one. (putting in more cream and sugar. ) So I usually buy hills brothers coffee once or sometimes twice a day I drink a hot coffee and it sure does it for me. These poems and others offer the possibility of accepting some of what the Anglo world offers, and using it as a means to help preserve spiritual integrity, the possibility of keeping at ones center native values, native places, even though native languages may be lost, and some ways are not recapturable. Finally, a related theme in many recent poems by both men and women 1074
is that of a heritage still exuberantly alive. Old stories and the presences who move through them are not dead anthropological data; not only do the stories remain meaningful for the values they speak of, they are still quite literally happening, even though names and outer circumstances may be changed in a world of superhighways and fast food chains. Simon Ortiz delights in discovering Coyote multitudinously reincarnated, rattling off his slick stories, making deals in barrooms and Greyhound bus stations, fooling and being fooled, and somehow, like the spirit of the peoples he embodies, still beautifully surviving. Ortiz certainly means to affirm his whole peoples survival through Coyote, but sometimes it seems most particularly a male survival figured forth in that shaggy, fast-talking entity. In the last few years, a growing number of feminist American Indian poets are perceiving and invoking the old strengths of women gods and heroic women still at work. Pocahontas, Ramona, Little White Dovethose uncomplaining martyr-maidens so beloved of, and often invented by, Anglo culture are pale heroines indeed compared to the motherspirit Joy Harjo hears speaking in the voice of a certain mountain, rumbling prophetically in an old language about a new order for women: It is the ground murmurring, and Mt. Ste. Helens erupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning inside her mothers belly 16 waiting to be born to begin another time. Paula Allens Sacagawea in The One Who Skins Cats is a far cry from the woman in high school history texts helpfully pointing Lewis and Clark on their way through the river-veins of her own mother-continent. Allens Sacagawea knows people say that, because of her, The Indian lost our place, but her response is a shrug: We was losing it anyways. She is the survivor who has weighed and takes responsibility for the choices she has made: I didnt lead em, you know. I just went along for the ride, and along the way I learned things a Chief should know, And because I did my own Snake people survived. ... And what I learned I used. I used every bit of the whitemans pride to make sure my Shoshone people would survive in the great survival sweepstakes of the day. Maybe there was a better way to skin a cat, 17 but I used the blade that was put in my hand 1075
Allens Sacagawea remains her own woman, well at easea tough, witty, wise, uncompromising realist. In terms of their own craft, for western American Indian poets of both sexes, the stories of Grandmother Spider and equivalent beings are perhaps the most vital. Grandmother, another poem of Allens, suggests the enduring power of those stories. In the poem, Grandmother Spider, having miraculously spun all creation out of her own body and thought, tactfully withdraws, but her actions and her spirit reverberate in the poet herself, and in all of Grandmothers children, male and female, who choose to be makers and healers: After her the women and the men weave blankets into tales of life, memories of light and ladders . . . After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rug 18 and mend the tear with string. Clearly, Grandmother numbers among her children the writers I have named in this essay.
P ATRICIA C LARK S MITH , University
of New Mexico
Notes
1. Marnie Walsh, Bessie Dreaming Bear: Rosebud, So. Dak. 1960, in The Remembered Earth, ed. Geary Hobson (Albuquerque: Red Earth Press, 1979), p. 369. 2. Carroll Arnett, Powwow, The Remembered Earth, p. 127. 3. For a discussion of the role of ceremonial clowns among southwestern tribes, see Barbara Tedlocks fine essay The Clowns Way, in Teachings from the American Earth, ed. Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock (New York: Liveright, 1975), pp. 105118. 4. James Welch, Arizona Highways, in his Riding the Earthboy 40 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 18. 1076
5. Geary Hobson, Buffalo Poem # 1, The Remembered Earth, p. 99. 6. Duane Niatum, In New York City, in his Digging Out the Roots (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 34. 7. James Welch, Getting Things Straight, Riding the Earthboy 40, p. 53. 8. N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words, in Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: New American Library, 1975), p. 99. 9. Linda Hogan, Mosquitoes, The Remembered Earth, p. 55. 10. Geary Hobson, Deer Hunting, The Remembered Earth, pp. 9697; Mary Tall Mountain, The Last Wolf, The Remembered Earth, pp. 414415. 11. Leslie Silko, A Hunting Story, in Southwest Womens Poetry Exchange, ed. Carol Merrill, No. 2 (April 1976), n.p. 12. nila northSun, the way and the way things are, Diet Pepsi and Nacho Cheese (Fallon, Nevada: Duck Down Press, 1977), p. 13. 13. Joy Harjo, 3AM, in her What Moon Drove Me to This (New York: I. Reed Books, 1979), p. 43. 14. Harold Littlebird, Building a Dream, in his On Mountains Breath (Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982), unpaginated. 15. Luci Tapahonso, Hills Brothers Coffee, in her Seasonal Woman (Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982), pp. 2930. 16. Joy Harjo, For Alva Benson, and for Those Who Have Learned to Speak, in her She Had Some Horses (New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1983), p. 18. 17. Paula Gunn Allen, The One Who Skins Cats, in Sinister Wisdom, ed. Beth Brant, no. 2223 (1983), pp. 1217. 18. Paula Gunn Allen, Grandmother, in her Coyotes Daylight Trip (Albuquerque: La Confluencia, 1978), p. 50.
Much contemporary Native American writing, especially poetry, appears in publications from small presses. I have tried to be realistic in this bibliography and limit it to publications readily available. The Hobson book listed under Anthologies is an excellent and inclusive collection of contemporary poetry. Anthologies Fisher, Dexter, ed. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Contains an excellent sampling of contemporary American Indian womens poetry, narrative, essays, and fiction. Hobson, Geary, ed. The Remembered Earth. Albuquerque: Red Earth Press, 1979. The largest collection to date of contemporary Native American writing. Arranged according to regions of the United States. Weighted toward poetry, but contains some short fiction, essays, and drama as well, and an excellent introduction by Hobson.
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A Literary History of the American West Niatum, Duane, ed. Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Another good anthology; more poems by fewer writers than in the two anthologies listed above. Books by Individual Authors Allen, Paula Gunn (Laguna). Shadow Country. Los Angeles: Native American Series, U.C.L.A., 1982. Harjo, Joy (Creek). What Moon Drove Me to This. New York: I. Reed Books, 1979. . She Had Some Horses. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1983. Hogan, Linda (Chickasaw). Calling Myself Home. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1979. . Daughters, I Love You. Denver: Loretto Heights College Publications, 1981. Littlebird, Harold, On Mountains Breath. Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982. Momaday, N. Scott (Kiowa). The Gourd Dancer. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Niatum, Duane (Klallam). Ascending Red Cedar Moon. New York: Harper & Row, 1969, 1973. . Digging Out the Roots. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. northSun, nila (Shoshoni-Chippewa). Diet Pepsi and Nacho Cheese. Fallon, Nevada: Duck Down Press, 1977. Ortiz, Simon (Acoma). Going for the Rain. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. . A Good Journey. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1977. Rose, Wendy (Hopi). Hopi Roadrunner Dancing. Greenfield Center, New York: The Greenfield Review Press, 1973. . Academic SquawReport to the World from the Ivory Tower. Marvin, South Dakota: Blue Cloud Quarterly, 1977. Silko, Leslie (Laguna). Laguna Woman. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1974. Tapahonso, Luci. Seasonal Woman. Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982. Walsh, Marnie (Sioux). A Taste of the Knife. Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1976. Welch, James (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre). Riding the Earthboy 40. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
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Early Mexican-American Literature

ALTHOUGH MEXICAN-AMERICANS have often been described as a voiceless and expressionless minority, their literary heritage is rich and varied. It dates from the late sixteenth century when the Spanish conquistadores pushed northward from the Mexican interior to colonize what is now the southwestern United States. This was Spains greatest literary agethe era of Cervantes and Lope de Vegaand the Spaniards planted their literary traditions wherever they went. In 1598, Juan de Oate led five hundred settlers into New Mexico, and to commemorate the occasion one of the partys officers, Marcos Farfn, composed a play describing the Spaniards reception by gracious Indians anxious to hear the word of God. Farfns drama, now unfortunately lost, was doubtless crude, but its performance within a fortnight of Oates arrival on the Rio Grande suggests something of the vigor of literary activity among a people struggling to conquer a continent. Folk drama flourished in New Mexicoand to a lesser extent throughout the Spanish-speaking Southwestuntil the late nineteenth century. Many of the earliest works were autos (religious pieces), often composed by priests and used by them for instructional purposes among the Indians. Spanish-American folk drama ranged from simple, unpolished pieces to sophisticated works such as the celebrated Shepherds play which manifests the influence of Caldern and Gngora. A number of plays popular in the Southwest came from Spain and gradually underwent change to conform to an American environment. One early drama from New Mexico, for example, featured the abduction of the Christ child by Comanches. Some dramas, like Farfns, were southwestern creations but the largest number of plays presented in the Spanish-speaking Southwest originated in the Mexican heartland and diffused northward through oral tradition. Other types of literary folklore prospered in the region. Legends, treating a variety of topics such as witchcraft, miracles, and lost treasure, are of special significance. One of the oldest and most popular legends in the Spanish-speaking Southwest is La Llorona (The Weeping Woman), who was first noticed in Mexico City in 1550, dressed in a white shroud-like garment, wailing along the streets. The source of her despair varies from one version of the legend to another. La llorona sometimes appeared as a pathetic figure who, jilted by her lover, murders her bastard children and then, driven mad by the monstrousness of her action, runs wildly through
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the streets calling after her victims. In other accounts, she is a ghostly villain who, having been executed, returns to avenge herself on men and small children. A true synthesis of Spanish and Indian traditions, la llorona has become an important cultural symbol and the prototype of numerous female figures in Mexican and Mexican-American fiction. The custom of folksong also contributed significantly to the establishment of a literary tradition among the southwestern Mexicans. In a familiar pattern, the types of folksong that took root in the regionthe romance, copla, and dcima, for examplewere originally Spanish forms which were modified by Indian and mestizo influences. This process took place with extraordinary speed: thirty years after the Conquest, Mexican Indians were composing romance -like ballads of their own. The traditional forms of Spanish balladry thrived in the Southwest until they were superseded in mid-nineteenth century by a Mexican type, the corrido. The name derives from the verb correr to runand the corrido does just that; it is a fast-paced narrative ballad, usually with a theme of struggle, adventure, or catastrophe. It often appears in a stanza of four eightsyllable lines, but exceptions are common, for the story, not the form, is its key element. Nowhere did the corrido flourish more than in lower borderlands of Texas. There, the animosity between Anglos and Mexicans, which coalesced in the Texas Revolution of 1836 and has persisted into the present century, created the perfect conditions for the emergence of a corrido tradition. Most of these ballads were composed anonymously in rural areas and made their way to city printing shops on both sides of the border. A few apparently first appeared as broadsides and were then transformed through oral transmission. Frequently, only the lyrics of the corridos were printed or transmitted, in which cases the ballads survived as a kind of folk poetry. The literary folklore of the Mexican-American, four hundred years in the making, is extensive, and comprises not only drama, legends, and songs, but such elements as tales and proverbs. This body of workwhich is primarily in Spanishserves as the repository of much of MexicanAmerican history and culture. Folklore thus ties the Mexican-American to his origins and serves as the core of his literary sensibility. MexicanAmerican writers have regularly employed folkloric materials as the building blocks of their fiction, believing that the most distinctive and enduring cultural values are not found in genteel society but in the traditions of the common people. Legends and corridos have been especially fruitful sources of fictional themes. Legends are, perhaps, the most literary of folk narratives, since they are often infused with a sense of realism and evince such devices as plot, characterization, dialogue, and figurative language. The corrido has these qualities as well, being, in a sense, a legend set to music. The corridos great attraction to the fictionalist lies in the proven appeal of its 1080
EARLY MEXICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE
stories; no other type of folklore treats more vividly events that have stirred the imagination of the Mexican people. This is not to say that the early settlers of the Mexican Southwest did not create literature in the conventional sense. Travel narratives, such as those of Cabeza de Vaca and Castaeda, appeared in the early colonial period. In 1610, Gaspar Prez de Villagr, a classical scholar from Salamanca and a companion of Oate, published his History of New Mexico in thirtyfour Virgilian cantos. During the next century, Francisco Palu, a Franciscan priest, composed his four-volume Historical Memoirs of New California. Other residents of the Southwest wrote a good deal, not belles lettres generally, but diaries, descriptive narratives, and light verse. Because of a long-standing negligence, our understanding of the literary culture of the Mexican Southwest is still extremely fragmentary, and awaits a thorough investigation of appropriate archives and the numerous Spanish-language newspapers and literary journals of the region. No doubt a large body of literature remains undiscovered. The great divide in Mexican-American history is the year 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended twenty-one months of warfare between Mexico and the United States. According to the treaty, Mexico ceded half its national territory to the United States: the present states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and half of Colorado. The Mexican residents of these areas had the choice of migrating southward across the new boundary or accepting American citizenship. Only two thousand people left their homes, while some eighty thousand remained, thus becoming, in the most literal sense of the term, Mexican Americans. Although a distinctive Mexican-American literary sensibility was not to emerge for several generations, the signing of Guadalupe Hidalgo, more than any other event, required that the southwestern Mexicans begin to rethink their relationships to the old country and to the United States. Considering the history of Anglo and Mexican Americans, no one could have expected affairs between the two peoples to be harmonious. The bitterness that persistently marred their relations had its origins in the English-Spanish hostilities of the sixteenth century. The Anglos believed that Mexicans were lazy, priest-ridden, treacherous, and cruel; for their part, Mexicans regarded Anglos as arrogant, ruthless, and avaricious. To arouse their suspicions further, southwestern Mexicans had watched the unfolding of an American scheme of penetration and expropriation in their territory since 1807, the year of the Zebulon Pike expedition. As the number of Americans in the country increased dramatically, particularly after the opening of the Texas settlements and the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, Mexican 1081
concern turned to alarm. The inevitable conflicts between the two groups soon became a major theme in the Mexican literature of the Southwest. The southwestern Mexicans disliked Anglos in the lump, but the Texans were regarded as the worst of the breed. After their successful revolution of 1836, Texans sought to extend their domination over other Mexican territories. One result was the Santa Fe Expedition of 1841, an inept attempt to liberate New Mexico by some three hundred Texans. The invaders set out from Austin and immediately fell into disarray, lost their bearings and supplies, and finally staggered into New Mexico, tired, hungry, and dispirited, with hardly a thought of conquest. The Mexican forces in the area, having gotten wind of the intrigue, quickly pounced upon the Texans. The episode was the stuff of low comedy, a point not wasted on a nameless New Mexico playwright who within five years of the expedition composed the play Los Tejanos.The surviving manuscript is incomplete but instructive nonetheless. The play opens in the Texans camp with a General McLeod attempting to gather intelligence for an assault on Santa Fe. An Indian prisoner leads the Texans to the hideout of Jorge Ramrez, a well-connected New Mexican who pretends to be a traitor. Ramrez offers to direct McLeod to Santa Fe, and the Texan accepts eagerly, never noting the Mexicans obvious duplicity. Later, as the astonished McLeod is led away by his Mexican captors, Ramrez snarls at him: Die, you dog! Now you are going to pay for all the evil you had planned . . . This will teach you not to trust the New Mexicans. Whenever you hear them bark at foreigners they always bite them. We see in this play the outlines of a pattern which would appear, in several variations, in later Mexican-American works. Anglo and Mexican American are locked in conflict. The Anglo, usually an arrogant bully like McLeod, disdains his opponent and so takes the contest lightly. The Mexican-American (or Mexican), on the other hand, plans carefully, plays on his foes prejudices and beats him, often through the use of trickery. Such a sequence of events, of course, is not restricted to Mexican-American literature but occurs in virtually all minority writing. The member of a minority, deprived of material goods and sophisticated technology, relies on his wits to survive in an oppressive society. His key advantage over his adversary is greater understanding. The trickster knows his enemy intimately, while the oppressor, thinking in stereotypes, knows little of his. A figure like Jorge Ramrez, created just as the Anglo-Americans were commencing their appropriation of the Southwest, assured Mexicans of their ability to survive the changing order. Nowhere was the enmity between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans more intense than in the border regions of South Texas. Guadalupe Hidalgo had guaranteed Mexican-Americans full rights as citizens but, in fact, they 1082
were frequently stripped of their property and subjected to severe discrimination. The Mexican-Americans expressed their resentment of this treatment in the large number of corridos that sprang from the region. The ballad makers found one of their earliest heroes in Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, a member of an old Rio Grande family who endeared himself to the border Mexicans in 1859 when he shot the Anglo marshal of Brownsville for pistolwhipping a vaquero. This incident stirred in Cortina memories of other Anglo outrages, and he consequently launched a campaign of reprisal. Because the border Mexicans admired any man who fought for his rights, Cortina became an instant hero. Corridos about him were apparently composed promptly after his Brownsville skirmish, and others appeared as Cortina continued his war against the gringos. The folklore record provides ample evidence that the newly created Mexican-Americans believed they would survive Anglo encroachment, whether by guile as in the case of Jorge Ramrez or through greater courage and physical superiority as with Cortina. But the unanswered question was: at what cost, measured not only in human life but in cultural terms? A dcima from New Mexico, composed in the face of growing encroachment by Anglo-Americans, contains this lament: Nuevo Mxico infeliz Qu es lo que nos ha pasado? (Unhappy New Mexico What is it that has happened to us?) Here, then, are the basic components of a nascent Mexican-American sensibility: ethnic pride and a strong belief in the groups durability, coupled with a vague but fearful realization that survival required cultural compromise, some as yet indeterminate loss of Mexicanness. Just as the seventeenth-century narratives of Indian captivity may be said to constitute the earliest examples of Anglo-American writing, so the corridos of border conflict may be said to compose an incipient form of Mexican-American literature. The forms and the language of the ballads are conventionally Mexican, but the themes, the intensity of sentiment and the level of cultural awareness associated with these themes represent a departure from Mexican models. A striking feature of the folklore from central Mexico in the generation after Guadalupe Hidalgo is that relatively little attention is given to the Anglo-American, the Mexicans presumably being concerned with such matters as the rebuilding of a defeated nation, the social upheavals associated with the reforma, and the French occupation. These issues were familiar to the Mexican-Americans of Mxico de afuera (Mexico Outside), but their primary concerns lay elsewhere. 1083
Bad feelings in the South Texas borderlands reached their peak after the turn of the century, and the corridos document these animosities fully. The best known ballad of the period is Gregorio Cortez which is still heard in Mexican-American communities throughout the United States. Cortez was a Mexican-born vaquero who in 1901 killed Sheriff Brack Morris of Karnes County. Morris had tried to arrest Cortez and his brother Romaldo for horse-stealing, a crime of which both men were innocent. Gregorio protested the arrest and Morris fired, wounding Romaldo in the mouth. Gregorio then shot the Anglo gunman dead. Realizing that his chances for a fair trial were slight, Cortez fled with hundreds of sheriffs, Texas Rangers, and civilian Mexican-haters in pursuit. Cortez made it to the border city of Laredo before he was captured. Corridos are frequently reliable sources of history, but the Cortez ballads are more valuable for what they reveal about the psychology of border Mexicans. The hostility expressed towards Anglos is intense and the balladmakers clearly sought to rebut stereotypes which Anglos held. In AngloTexan mythology, the Mexican is a poor marksman and is stupid and cowardly: in sum, hardly a match for an Anglo-Saxon. The Texas Mexicans knew these attitudes well and were deeply stung by them. In the corridos, it is Cortez who is the crack shot, so expert a horseman that trying to overtake him is like following a star. At one point in his flight, Cortez is surrounded by over three hundred Rangers, whose faces are whiter than poppies : Cuando les brinc el corral, segn lo que aqu se dice, se agararron a balazos y les mat otro cherife. Deca Gregorio Cortez con su pistola en la mano: No corran, rinches cobardes con un solo mexicano. (When he jumped out of their corral, according to what is said here, they got into a gunfight, and he killed them another sheriff. Then said Gregorio Cortez, with his pistol in his hand, Dont run, you cowardly rinches [Rangers], from a single Mexican.)
The Gregorio Cortez of the ballads is certainly more heroic than the historical figure. He represents an attempt by Mexican-Americans to reclaim the most admired qualities of vaquero culturehorsemanship, marksmanship, courage, and endurancewhich Anglo-Americans had appropriated. The corrido Cortez is, quite simply, a John Wayne in brownface. Despite the cultural drift that Mexican-Americans in Texas were experiencing around the turn of the century, they still considered themselves 1084
Mexicans and were likewise designated by Anglos. The Rio Grande was regarded less as a political boundary which separated two countries than as a water-giving artery in an arid land which drew Mexicans on either side to its banks and held them in a common culture. In the days before the United States Border Patrol, travel across the river was an easy matter. Mexicans born on the southern bank could move to the other side and experience little change. But all the while, as we can see in the corridos after 1900, the pressures of Anglo-American culture were intensifying and the cries of Mexican allegiance occasionally turned shrill, a ballad-maker here and there trying too hard to make his point as in the Corrido del norte: Nac en la frontera de ac de este lado, de ac este lado puro mexicano, por ms que la gente me juzque texano yo les aseguro que soy mexicano de ac de este lado. (I was born on the border though here on this side, though here on this side Im a pure Mexican, even though people may think Im Texan I now assure you that Im all Mexican from here on this side.)
The corrido ends, significantly, with a repetition of the same stanza. Throughout this period, Mexican-Americans were changing more than they knew or, rather, than they admitted; they clung to their culture in the face of forces that were inevitably altering it. Some of these alterations were perceptible by the 1920s. Certainly, the Spanish of the Mexican-Americans had been modified bysome said infested withpochismos (Americanisms). Even worse, some MexicanAmericans preferred English altogether. This did not sit well with the tunesmith who composed Los mexicanos que hablan ingls (The Mexicans Who Speak English) with something less than sympathetic humor. As many Mexicans saw it, the abandonment of Spanish was akin to pulling ones finger out of the dike: the whole culture was bound to crumble eventually. One of the frequent complaints among Mexican males in the United States concerned the domineering character of American women. This cancin from New Mexico obliquely suggests that pochis (Americanized Mexicans) are likely to have absorbed more of American culture than merely the language: Me cas con una pochi para aprender ingls y a los tres das de casado yo ya le deca yes. (I married a pochi so that I could learn English and after three days of marriage, I was already telling her yes.) 1085
Some degree of acculturation was accepted as inevitable by most Mexican-Americans, but the ballads describe a character universally held in contempt: the Mexican who completely rejects his heritage. A wellknown corrido from Los Angeles in the 1920s entitled El renegado (The Renegade) tells the story of a Mexican immigrant who quickly embraces American values and begins to forget where he came from. The corrido denounces this most miserable creature and proclaims that a good Mexican never disowns the dear fatherland of his affections. This ballad serves as an interesting complement to the Corrido del norte. While the tejano ardently proclaims his allegiance to Mexico despite his American origins, the Mexican-born composer of El renegado recognizes the easy temptations of American life, particularly its materialism and status consciousness. The bitter denunciations of the renegade also help to explain the adamant patriotism of the Corrido del norte. But El renegado is also interesting in its own right, expressing the pain of dislocation felt by many Mexicans forced to leave their homeland during the revolutionary period. Thousands of campesinos came north because the fighting had all but destroyed the countrys agriculture. Other immigrants were political refugees. Many Mexicans, from every social class, left because they found the prevailing atmosphere of random violence intolerable. But in no sense did the immigration movement represent a widespread rejection of Mexican culture. These people saw themselves as exiles, and many dreamed of returning home. In the meantime, they held as best they could to their traditions and deplored those who did not. The corrido tradition has declined somewhat in Mexico de afuera since 1930, the victim of commercialism, over-exposure, and cultural changes. Recent Mexican-American ballads have commemorated powerfully such events as the assassination of President Kennedy, but generally they lack the epic quality of earlier compositions. Still, corridos, even more than other folklore genres, have played a critical role in the establishment of a Mexican-American literary tradition in a time when conventional literary works were relatively scarce. The corridos have provided to MexicanAmerican writers not only themes and stories but a cultural and narrative stance, a way of transcending the prevailing gloom of American minority experience. Better than any other art form, the corrido celebrates and vindicates the Greater Mexico experience. For several generations after Guadalupe Hidalgo, the literary record of Mexican-Americansor what we have of itshows a considerably slower movement towards a distinctive perspective than does the folklore. The corridos, for example, as early as the 1860s focused on cultural conflict with the Anglos as the fundamental fact of the Mexican-American experience; 1086
much of the conventional literature, on the other hand, is nostalgic and oddly detached from contemporary issues, as if the present reality were too difficult to confront. Moreover, when writers did choose to treat current issues, their tone was seldom either proud or defiant, but rather tentative and subdued, even submissive. Although the southwestern territories were never as culturally isolatedeither before or after the coming of the Angloas scholars have generally claimed, opportunities for formal education were scarce until well into the twentieth century. Before 1848, schooling, except in its most rudimentary form, was limited primarily to the privileged classes. After the region was absorbed by the United States, education for Mexican-Americans did not greatly improve for reasons of discrimination and differences over curricula and control of schools. But for those Mexican-Americans who had the tool of literacy, writing was a highly popular activity. MexicanAmericans kept diaries, journals, and books of personal verses to which several members of a family might contribute. For those writers interested in a larger audience, there were Spanish-language newspapers throughout the Southwest that published creative works; from 1848 to 1958, over three hundred and fifty such newspapers were issued for varying periods of time. Of the published material, verse was by far the most popular form of literary expression. A large portion of the newspaper poetry was printed anonymously, a custom which dates from the early days of Spanish colonization. But whether anonymous or signed, versifying was so widespread an activity in the Spanish-speaking Southwest that in 1884, the exasperated editor of La Aurora in Santa Fe, apparently reeling under the weight of unsolicited submissions, composed a brief essay entitled Remedies for VerseMania. Much of the newspaper poetry was virtually indistinguishable from folk verse and followed traditional Spanish forms such as the cancin and dcima. Early Mexican-American newspaper poetry generally focused on such themes as love, religious piety, love of the Mexican homeland, and the beauty of nature. Closely attuned to literary movements in Mexico and Spanish America, Mexican-American poets followed the fashions of romanticism and modernismo in turn. So strong were these southern influences that Mexican and Spanish-American poetrynotably the works of Amado Nervo, Manuel Gutirrez Njera, and Ruben Darooften dominated the literary pages of Mexican-American newspapers. Not surprisingly, much of the newspaper verse was of low literary quality. The lyric poetry particularly was flawed by a lack of originality, sentimentalism, and an almost pervasive inability to restrain romantic impulses. Early Mexican-American poets composed odes to clouds, turtle doves, and virgins; they endlessly professed their unrequited love; and they solemnly celebrated devotion to the Church. Francisco Ramrez, the young 1087
editor of El Clamor Pblico in Los Angeles from 18551859, published his own verse and rhapsodized about angels of love and enchanting nymphs. Another poet from the same newspaper, Jos Elas Gonzlez, wrote these lines. Tu cabellera es de oro; Tu talle esbelto, ligero; Eres mi bien, mi tesoro, El dolo que venero. (Your long hair is golden, your figure well-shaped, lithe; you are my love, my treasure, the idol I venerate.)
Occasionally, such poetry was genuinely moving and displayed an impressive range of language, but for the most part, despite its great popularity in its time, early Mexican-American lyric verse now seems precious and effete. Unquestionably, early Mexican-American poets did their best work when they treated realistic subjects drawn from their immediate environment. In such verse, the emotion is less stylized and more authentic, the sensibility and control of subject less derivative and more distinctive. El Clamor Pblico, for example, in 1856 published an anonymous poem that powerfully indicts the United States Supreme Court for dispensing justice unequally. More than a generation later, a talented New Mexico poet who signed his work X.X.X. considered such issues as the quality of the territorial educational system and the impact of the Spanish-American War on his people. He complained eloquently about the numerous delays in granting New Mexico statehood and observed that the federal government treated the territory like a ragged beggar. Throughout the Southwest, nothing inspired Mexican-American poets so well as the numerous manifestations of Anglo prejudice. They lashed out at the destruction of their heritage and the inhumanity of yanqui capitalism. In these instances, the device of anonymity proved especially useful to Mexican-American poets. It offered protection from reprisal and, more importantly, gave their verses a quality of universality, as if each poem were a nameless cry from the collective consciousness. Prose appeared in Mexican-American newspapers less frequently than poetry but still in abundant quantity. The preferred prose form was the plumada or estampa, brief essays and fictional pieces. Occasionally, longer works were serialized. Folk materials were much in evidence, usually legends, folktales, and fables of a romantic nature. Didactic essays were also common, warning against alcoholism, indolence, and unwarranted flattery. Historical essays aimed generally to increase familiarity with the Mexican homeland. As with the poetry, much of the prose was by occasional and anonymous authors although some writers published widely in various periodicals under their names. Most notable was Julio Arce, the editor of His1088
panoamerica in San Francisco, who under his own name and the pseudonym Jorge Ulica published hundreds of sketches treating such issues as cultural assimilation and Anglo prejudice. Longer prose works appeared infrequently. In New Mexico, Eusabio Chacn published two short novels in 1892, El hijo de la tempestad (Son of the Tempest) and Tras la tormenta la calma (Calm After the Storm), but otherwise, extended fictions were virtually non-existent. Personal and historical narratives were less rare. Andrew Garcia, a tejano who settled in Montana among the Nez Perce, chronicled his experiences in a work not discovered until 1948 and published as Tough Trig Through Paradise, 18781879. Other Mexican-American authors took up pens to justify their peoples culture and challenge the historical biases of Anglo authors. Mariano Vallejo, a member of one of Californias most prominent families, composed a history of his state in which he sought to demonstrate that the californios were not indigents or a band of beasts. Vallejo submitted his work in five volumes to H. H. Bancroft in 1875 but it went unpublished. Bancroft regarded the old man as a writer who too often mistook his imagination for his memory. Until the twentieth century, virtually all of Mexican-American literature appeared in Spanish. Juan Segun, a native Texan who served the cause of Texas independence at the Alamo and San Jacinto, published his Personal Memoirs (1858) in English and one can cite other English pieces here and there, but generally early Mexican-American writers regarded as one of their primary responsibilities the preservation of their native language. But after the turn of the century, Mexican-American authors began to place stories and essays in journals intended for Anglo readers. The differences in audience dramatically affected the nature of the literature itself. Mara Cristina Mena published a series of Mexican stories and sketches in The Century and American magazines during the 1910s. Mena was a talented story-teller whose sensibility unfortunately tended towards sentimentalism and preciousness. She aimed to portray Mexican culture in a positive light, but with great decorum; as a consequence, her stories seem trivial and condescending. Mena took pride in the aboriginal past of Mexico and she had real sympathy for the downtrodden Indians, but she could not, for the life of her, resist describing how they washed their little brown faces . . . and assumed expressions of astonishing intelligence and zeal. Occasionally, she struck a blow at the pretensions of Mexicos ruling class, but to little effect; Menas genteelness simply is incapable of warming the readers blood. In trying to depict and explicate Mexican culture to an American audience, Mena was undone by a strategy that would enervate the work of other Mexican-American writers. She tried to depict her characters within the boundaries of conventional American attitudes about Mexico. She 1089
knew what Americans liked to read about Mexico so she gave it to them: quaint and humble inditos, passionate seoritas with eyes that were wonderful, even in a land of wonderful eyes, a dashing caballero or two with music in their fingers. Her characters existed in a country Mena described as the land of resignation. Menas portrayals are ultimately demeaning and if one can appreciate the weight of popular attitudes on Menas sensibility, one can also say that a braver, more perceptive writer would have confronted the life of her culture more honestly. The fact that virtually all Mexican-American authors before 1900 wrote only in Spanish severely restricted their potential readership; Menas work signalled the emergence of a new generation of Mexican-American writers that would reach a larger and different audience. Unfortunately, many of the early Mexican-American authors in English depicted their culture as fatuously as had Mena. In confronting the prevailing Anglo stereotypes of their people, the early writers in English tended not to denounce them but to assent to the least negative of such images. Their Mexicans are not swarthy, treacherous greasers, but charmingif artificialcreatures, very much in the popular tradition of Bret Harte, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Gertrude Atherton. Undoubtedly, a good dealif not mostof this sort of characterization can be attributed to public perceptions and editorial control; it has only been in recent years, after all, that Americans have recognized honest expressions of minority consciousness. Historically, the very term Mexican has had so pejorative a connotation in the United States that a number of Mexican-American writers shrank from it and, ultimately, from their true heritage, creating in its place a mythical past of unsullied Europeanism. New Mexican writers particularly venerated and exaggerated the Spanish component of their heritage. For example, the folklorist Aurelio M. Espinosa determined in the early twentieth century that the oral traditions of New Mexico were essentially Spanish and had survived virtually untouched by other influences, whether Indian, mestizo, or Negro. It was only a short step to conclude that all of existing New Mexican culture was essentially Spanish: as one writer put it, an echo of Spain across the seas. The Mexican-American literature in English that emerged from New Mexico during the 1930s evokes a past that, while largely imaginary, is presented with rigid conviction. Much of the fiction is closely related to the oral traditions that Espinosa and his followers collected so assiduously. The writers described a culture seemingly locked in time and barricaded against outside forces. Here the New Mexican Hispanos passed their lives in dignity and civility, confronting the harsh environment with a religiosity and resolve reminiscent of the conquistadores themselves. But although the people struggled, they moved as if to a waltz and lived in villages with names like 1090
Rio Dormido (Sleeping River). A story by Juan A. A. Sedillo begins this way: It took months of negotiation to come to an understanding with the old man. He was in no hurry. What he had the most of was time. He lived up in Ro en Medio, where his people had been for hundreds of years. He tilled the same land they had tilled. His house was small and wretched, but quaint. The little creek ran through his land. His orchard was gnarled and beautiful. Other New Mexican writers also stressed the continuity of the culture. But like the old mans cottage, it had fallen into decadence that was perhaps quaint, but irreversible. There is something profoundly disturbing about this body of work. It seems a literature created out of fear and intimidation, a defensive response to racial prejudiceparticularly the Anglo distaste for miscegenationand ethnocentrism. The New Mexican writers retreated from the contemporary world into nostalgia, and it is a striking quality of their work that there are so few Anglos in it, as if each one were a gross impertinence. The problem is that their literary past is so pathetically unreal and self-deceptive. Nina Otero Warren, a chief advocate of New Mexico Hispanicism, defended the oppressive system of peonage by explaining that the peons were not slaves, but working people who preferred submission to the patrn rather than an independent chance alone. In the same work, she observes that Hispanos lived close to the soil and to nature. They cherished their traditions, inherited from Spain and adapted to their new life. Theirs was a part of the feudal age, when master and men, although separate in class, were bound together by mutual interests and a close community of human sympathy. Much of this life remains today. In sum, the body of early Mexican-American literature that has survivedboth in Spanish and Englishis less interesting than the folklore and certainly less representative of the collective spirit. The vigor, the tone of defiance so typical of the corridos is lacking in the written materials. What we find instead, generally, is a rather ingenuous hopefulness, a submissiveness, and a contrived and derivative romanticism. The reason for this dichotomy may be that, until about 1940, most Mexican-American writers came from relatively privileged backgrounds, from families of position and property that had a considerable stake in cultural and political accommodation. The oral traditions in this period, on the other hand, were essentially a proletarian form of expression, articulating the sentiments of those who had little capital and few material goods to lose. These people sought to preserve their culture and were ready to defend it, as the expres1091
sion went, con la pistola en la mano. All in all, an interesting twist to the stereotype of the humble Mexican as a docile, meek individual. A landmark in Mexican-American literary history was reached in 1945 with the publication of Josephina Nigglis Mexican Village, an unduly neglected work consisting of ten related stories that constitute a literary chronicle of Hidalgo, a town in the northern state of Nuevo Leon. The major character in the book is Bob Webster, an American-born product of a liaison between a Mexican woman and an Anglo who rejects his son when his Mexican blood manifests itself rather too clearly. Deeply hurt, Bob runs off to Europe, eventually fighting with the French during World War I. But his loneliness is relentless, and in desperation he travels to Hidalgo, the village of the Mexican grandmother who had raised him, to satisfy a nostalgia of the blood. To the villagers, he seems an incongruity: his dark skin and fluent Spanish clash with the foreignness of his name. Yet, Webster feels a sense of belonging in Hidalgo, the stories of his grandmother running through his mind and tying him to the people and the land. At the end of Mexican Village, Bob has been fully assimilated into the community, even to the point of taking his mothers name. Through Webster, Niggli suggests that few Mexican-Americans are truly detached from their origins. Their cultural memoriesas in Bobs case, often received as folklorereside in the back of their minds, ready to emerge. In treating Mexican culture, Niggli intended not only to describe it but to create a fictional ambience that itself imparts a sense of the culture to the reader. No device served this end more effectively than the extensive use of folkloric materials. For example, Niggli introduces each section of Mexican Village with a proverb which is related to the theme of the story; the characters themselves also have a fondness for dichos. In addition, Mexican folksongs reverberate throughout the book. Niggli recounts legends of noble bandits and buried treasure typical of the oral traditions of northern Mexico. One of the major characters in the book is Ta Magdalena, a bruja (witch) who can dispense a remedy or a curse for any occasion, depending on her inclination. Several of the fictional situations in Mexican Village are variations of well-known folktales. One episode features a daring young man who sneaks into a rival town to romance its prettiest girl, a modification of a Mexican tale in which the devil assumes a disguise, descends to earth and dances with an innocent young woman. Like Mara Cristina Mena, Niggli simulated the flavor of Spanish by reproducing in English its syntactical and idiomatic qualities. Although Mexican Village was composed in English, it intentionally reads like a translation. Sometimes Niggli uses literal translations such as the family Castillo to achieve the effect of Spanish; she also renders into English distinc1092
tively Mexican expressions: arrogant boys are called young roosters; Ta Magdalena speaks affectionately of Grandfather Devil; another character trying to emphasize his honesty swears by the five wounds of God. Mexican Village stands as a major transitional work in the development of Mexican-American fiction. In its sensitive evocation of rural life, its emotionalism, and affectionate portrayal of exotic experiences and personalities, the book culminated the romantic tradition in Mexican-American writing. But Mexican Village also pointed forward to an emerging school of realism, confronting such issues as racism, the oppression of women, and the failure of the Mexican Revolution. Before Niggli, no writer of fiction in the United States, with the exception of Katherine Anne Porter, had so vividly depicted the fundamental tensions in Mexican life: the sometimes volatile interaction of Spanish and Indian cultures, the profound sense of history and traditionalism pulling against the fascination with that which is modern and voguish. But Nigglis greatest achievement was to delineate an important aspect of Mexican-American experience and to create a distinctive ambience for its presentation. After Niggli, Mexican-American writing changed significantly just as the Mexican-American population itself changed, largely as a result of the impact of World War II. Shortages in the domestic labor force brought on by military demands were alleviated by the importation of thousands of Mexican workers, many of whom settled permanently in the United States. The war also triggered a shift in occupational and residential patterns. Mexican-Americans left agricultural work in small communities for factory and service jobs in large cities, particularly Los Angeles and San Antonio. The participation of Mexican-Americans in the military services provided many with their first intimate contact with Anglo-American culture. Military experience undoubtedly heightened the expectations of many Mexican-Americans. Having risked their lives for the United States, they demanded more of its institutions in return. In sum, the Second World War pulled Mexican-Americans closer toalthough clearly not intothe American mainstream. By the late 1940s, Mexican-Americans had established a cultural identity distinct from that of their brethren south of the Rio Grande. Whereas an earlier generation had fought in Chihuahua and composed corridos about Pancho Villa, the present generation fought in the Philippines and composed corridos commemorating Douglas MacArthur. In 1947, Mario Surez began to publish a series of stories in the Arizona Quarterly. The stories are about the people of El Hoyo (The Hole), a barrio in Tucson, and Surez describes the residents not as Mexicans or Mexican-Americans, but as Chicanos. Surez explains that Chicano is simply the short way of saying Mexicano, but it is clear the term suggests something more. The Chicanos are an embattled minority, in some ways 1093
reminiscent of Steinbecks paisanos of Tortilla Flat but drawn less in caricature and with greater understanding and compassion. In Surezs stories, they appear as an assortment of individuals who combine Mexican and American characteristics to marvelous effect. Although El Hoyo is physically a part of Tucson, culturally it is a world unto itself where different principles obtain. One of its leading citizens is Seor Garza, a barber who operates his business according to the unshakable conviction that a man should not work too hard. When business gets too heavy, Garza closes his shop and escapes to Mexico. Garza is not lazy but simply does not assign a high importance to the making of money. As Surez writes: Garza, a philosopher. Owner of Garzas Barber Shop. But the shop will never own Garza. Surez understood that the merging of Mexican and American cultures was a delicate process, particularly in a fast-paced urban environment with its bewildering array of institutions. In Kid Zopilote, Surez depicts the transformation of Pepe Garca, a young man from El Hoyo who, during a summer in Los Angeles, is exposed to the zoot-suit craze and comes away much impressed. The Mexican zoot-suiters, or pachucos, had affected an elaborate life-style based on a bizarre combination of Mexican and American traits. They spoke a patois of English and Spanish, creating terms such as returniar and watchiando. Pepe is especially impressed by the camaraderie of the pachucos and so becomes one himself, much to the horror of his tradition-minded mother. Under the influence of his new friends, Pepe takes to smoking and selling marijuana and is eventually arrested. In the jailhouse, the police destroy his zoot suit and shear his magnificent pompadour. When Pepe is released, his humiliation is so great that he stays at home and practices his guitar. He becomes a quite proficient musician, but when his hair grows long and meets in the back of his head in the shape of a ducks tail, he puts down his guitar and returns to the street. As Pepes uncle observes, a zopilot ea buzzardcan never be a peacock. Surezs most poignant treatment of the acculturation process appears in Maestria. This story features Gonzalo Pereda, a master of the art of raising fighting cocks. One day he is presented with a young rooster from a friend in Chihuahua and Gonzalo nurtures the bird, called Killer, with special affection. After a few victories in the pit, Killer is badly beaten. Gonzalo nurses the bird back to health, but ironically sees Killer choke to death on a piece of liver. Writes Surez: Like Killers plight, it might be added, is the plight of many things the maestros cherish. Each year they hear their sons talk English with a rapidly disappearing accent, that accent which one early accustomed only to Spanish never fails to have. Each year
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the maestros notice that their sons Spanish loses fluency. But perhaps it is natural. The maestros themselves seem to forget about bulls and bullfighters, about guitars and other things so much a part of the world that years ago circumstance forced them to leave behind. They hear instead more about the difference between one baseball swing and another. Yes, perhaps it is only natural. Surez was the first truly Chicano writer. He was comfortable with the term itselfas many still are notrecognizing its symbolic importance and understanding its slight suggestion of self-depreciation. In Surezs fiction, the Chicano is a truncated variety of Mexican in a cultural sense, but he is no less a dignified and individualized human being. Surez portrayed sympathetically the maestros and their yearning for the old days, but did not himself linger long in a mournful nostalgia. He was compassionate towards those pachucos like Pepe Garca who were badly confused by the process of cultural transformation and so lapsed into grotesque exhibitionism. But Surezs favorite Chicanos were characters like the barber Garza who retained their fundamental Mexicanness and yet thrived in American culture. These Chicanos were not marginal men, but cultural hybrids who prided themselves in their ability to function successfully in two worlds. Another distinctive Mexican-American writer to emerge in the 1950s was Arnold Rojas, whose first book was published when he was fifty-seven years old, and who has chronicled the life and lore of Californias vaqueros in a series of seven works that are acknowledged to be regional classics. Beginning with California Vaqueros (1953), through Vaqueros and Buckaroos (1979), Rojas has produced a remarkable series, the best known of which is These Were the Vaqueros: The Collected Works of Arnold R. Rojas (1974). An avid reader whose formal education did not progress beyond the third grade, Rojas worked as a vaquero on the great ranches of the San Joaquin Valley for half a century, and his books capture the world of those proud horsemen. He is a rare literary talent who seems to have blossomed without instruction, once encouraged to write. He is . . . a first class natural-born story teller, points out Arthur L. Coleman, whose self-teaching has left his narrative style as unspoiled as the clear range air and the content as authentic. Rojas has a tale-tellers rambling style and has used it to illuminate the importance of Mexicans in the Wests cattle industry. The vaquero was a westerner, a Californian, he asserts. His influence went north and east while the cowboy never got west of the Rockies. These are two cultures and their ways are very different. Some of his work is similar to J. Mason Brewers and J. Frank Dobies, but he is not a trained folklorist; rather, he writes as if he were regaling a campfire audienceone sketch, a stretcher, telling how a cowpoke was nearly beaten to death by the wild swinging of 1095
his own pocket watch while he battled a bucking horse, the next seriously discussing the Arabic roots of Mexican horsemanship. He is at his best telling tales, at his worst when he ventures into history. His material blends fact and fiction, and his forms are Spanish rather than classic short stories: estampas, cuentitos, y chismes. Although as an author and, to a degree, as a man, he harks to an earlier time, Rojas has been an important figure in Mexican-American writing because of his uncompromising pride in his heritage and his tolerance of the diversity implicit within it. He was publishing books defining the seminal role of Mexicans in the West long before el movimiento developed. In California, at least, his writing was one foundation upon which the ethnic pride of the 1960s was built. When his collected works were published in a single volume in 1974, the old horseman placed his own work in perspective: I started as a skinny kid, and the men I admired were the vaqueros who wrote this book. It is a prescient statement, for if his style has been to a degree polished by his reading, his content directly reflects the hombres del campo with whom he rode; it is in the work of Arnold Chief Rojas that the vaqueros have found their collective voice. An interesting contrast to Mario Surezs work, to return to fiction, is Pocho, a novel by Jos Antonio Villarreal published in 1959. The work has the usual first-novel defects: a certain lack of control, an awkwardness of style. But Pocho is flawed in other ways, owing to the fact that it was the first Chicano novel. (Mexican Village, not properly a novel in any case, belongs to an earlier Mexican-American period.) Villarreal wrote essentially for an Anglo-American audience and understood, given the prevailing ignorance of Chicano life in the United States, that he was working in something of a cultural vacuum. He had no antecedents, as it were, no one on whose work to enlarge, and so he tried to tell the whole of the pocho experience himself. Inevitably, the novel is thin in places, hurried in others. Occasionally, it bogs down in excessive explication. The opening chapter of Pocho follows the movements of Juan Rubio, a colonel in the Mexican Revolution who, after killing a rich Spaniard, is forced to leave the country and accept a life as a migrant farm worker in California. Here his son Richard is born. The Rubio family eventually moves to Santa Clara during the Depression; at this point, the novel becomes Richards story. Richard is a bright, curious child but he quickly discovers that opportunities for Mexicans are not great. He is humiliated by a teacher for his accent and he finds the Catholic Church a suffocating force, the priests being concerned with little more than suppressing the assumed hypersexuality of their Mexican parishioners. Richard is not encouraged by his par1096
ents in his quest for knowledge: his mothers education is limited and she is, in any event, too much in the Churchs thrall. Juan, the father, is preoccupied with the disintegration of his familys cultural values and with his own hopes of returning to Mexico. Richard is thus left to go his way alone, and the journey is a painful one. The basic conflict in the book is between Richards powerful sense of individuality and the burden of ethnicity, imposed by himself, his family, and the community. The issue is complicated by the rapidity of cultural change that engulfs the Rubio family and finally destroys it: Juan runs off with a young woman while his wife, Consuelo, remains at home, vindictive and full of self-pity. As for Richard, he finally realizes that his foremost responsibility is to seek his own identity; as a result, he joins the Navy, knowing that for him there would never be a coming back. Villarreals subject is important and sensitive, but his treatment is flawed by a habit of oversimplification. He attacks, for example, the Catholic Church and the oppression of women in Mexican culture by drawing his targets so broadly that they are all too easy to hit. The reader discovers, for example, that the Church does nothing of redeeming value and that Mexican women are mindless automatons, created to fulfill mans pleasure and to raise children. As a young novelist, Villarreal simply lacks the insight to deal effectively with his materials. In treating Consuelos pathetic effort at liberation, Villarreal observes: Although he loved his mother, Richard realized that a family could not survive when the woman desired to command, and he knew that his mother was like a starving child who had become gluttonous when confronted with food. She had lived so long in the tradition of her country that she could not help herself now, and abused the privilege of equality afforded the women of her country. In the same scene, Villarreal offers this limp analysis as Richard surveys the wreckage of his family life: What was done was beyond repair. To be just, no one could be blamed, for the transition from the culture of the old world to that of the new should never have been attempted in one generation. Although Richard is well-developed and credible, some of the other characters in Pocho are caricatures. From the moment Juan appears in the novel, we know we are in the presence of a true macho. He strolls through Ciudad Jurez, thinking back to his days with Pancho Villa and carelessly wonders how many men he had killed there. Later the same day, Rubio kills another man, calmly shooting his victim as he lies writhing on the floor of a cantina. Consuelo, before her collapse, is the epitome of woeful Mexican motherhood. And there is the Marxist who becomes very middleclass when he finds Richard in bed with his extremely pretty wife. Despite its flaws, Pocho stands as a major work in Mexican-American literary history. Appearing as it did just before the 1960s, it served as the 1097
most immediate and accessible reminder to an emerging group of Chicano literary activists that their experiences were significant and legitimate subjects of fiction. If Villarreal was not the best writer to handle MexicanAmerican concerns expertly, he nevertheless helped to delineate them and to portray the frequently tenuous place of Mexican-Americans in the culture of the United States.
RAYMUND A. PAREDES , University
of California, Los Angeles
Fiction Chvez, Fray Anglico. From an Altar Screen. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. . New Mexico Triptych. Paterson, New Jersey: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1940. Niggli, Josephina. Mexican Village. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1945. . Step Down Elder Brother. New York: Rinehart, 1947. Surez, Mario. El Hoyo. Arizona Quarterly 3 (1947): 11215. . Kid Zopilote. Arizona Quarterly 3 (1947): 13037. . Maestria. Arizona Quarterly 4 (1948): 36773. . Senor Garza. Arizona Quarterly 3 (1947): 11521. Ulica, Jorge. Cronicas Diabolicas. San Diego: Maize Press, 1982. Villarreal, Jos Antonio. Pocho. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Travel and Historical Narratives Garcia, Andrew. Tough Trip Through Paradise, 18781879. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. Otero, Miguel. My Nine Years as Governor of the Territory of New Mexico, 1897 1906. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1940. Segun, Juan N. Personal Memoirs. In Northern Mexico on the Eve of the United States Invasion, edited by David Weber. New York: Arno Press, 1976.
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Warren, Nina Otero. Old Spain in Our Southwest. 1936; rpt. Chicago: Rio Grande Press, 1962. Poetry Arellano, Anselmo. Los pobladores nuevo mexicanos y su poesia, 18891950. Albuquerque: Pajarico Press, 1976. Campa, Arthur L. Spanish Folk-Poetry in New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1946. Chvez, Fray Anglico. Clothed with the Sun. Santa Fe: Writers Editions, 1939. . New Mexico Triptych. Paterson, N. J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1940. Meyer, Doris L. Anonymous Poetry in Spanish-Language New Mexico Newspapers (18801900). Bilingual Review 2 (1975): 25975. Drama Campa, Arthur L. Los Comanches: A New Mexico Folk Drama. The University of New Mexico Bulletin 7 (1942): 542. . Spanish Religious Folk Theatre in the Southwest. University of New Mexico Bulletin, Language Series 5, no.1 (Feb. 1934): 571, and 5, no. 2 (June 1934): 5157. Cole, M. R. Los Pastores: A Mexican Play of the Nativity. Boston: American Folklore Society, 1907. Espinosa, Aurelio M., and J. Manuel Espinosa. The Texans. New Mexico Quarterly Review 13 (1943): 299308. Folklore Espinosa, Aurelio M. Romancero nuevomejicano. Revue Hispanique 33 (April 1915): 446560; 40 (June 1917): 21527; 41 (December 1917): 67880. Hanson, Terrance L. Corridos in Southern California. Western Folklore 18 (1959): 20332, 295315 Heisley, Michael. An Annotated Bibliography of Chicano Folklore from the Southwestern United States. Los Angeles: University of California Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology, 1977. Lucero-White Lea, Aurora. Literary Folklore of the Hispanic Southwest. San Antonio: Naylor, 1953. Paredes, Amrico. A Texas-Mexican Cancionero. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976. . With His Pistol in His Hand. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958. Rojas, Arnold R. California Vaqueros. Fresno: Academy Library Guild, 1953. . Lore of the California Vaqueros. Fresno: Academy Library Guild, 1958. . Last of the Vaqueros. Fresno: Academy Library Guild, 1960. . The Vaquero. Santa Barbara: McNally & Loftin, 1964. . Bits, Bitting, and Spanish Horses. Goleta, Calif. : Kimberly Press, 1970. . These Were the Vaqueros: The Collected Works of Arnold R. Rojas. Shafter, Calif. : Charles Hitchcock, 1974.
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A Literary History of the American West . Vaqueros and Buckaroos. Shafter, Calif.: Charles Hitchcock, 1979; ad. ed. 1981; 3d. ed. 1984. Taylor, Paul S. Songs of the Mexican Migration. In Puro Mexicano, edited by J. Frank Dobie. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1935. Critical Studies Austin, Mary. Folk Plays in the Southwest. Theatre Arts Monthly 17 (1933): 599610. Englekirk, John E. Notes on the Repertoire of the New Mexican Spanish Folk Theater. Southern Folklore Quarterly 4 (1940): 22737. Meyer, Doris L. Early Mexican-American Responses to Negative Stereotyping. New Mexico Historical Review 53 (1978): 7591. . The Language Issue in New Mexico, 18801900: Mexican-American Resistance Against Cultural Evasion. Bilingual Review 4 (1977): 99106. Both of Meyers essays provide a useful introduction to the political flavor of much nineteenth-century Spanish-language newspaper literature, largely poetry, particularly as it appeared in New Mexico. Paredes, Raymund A. The Evolution of Chicano Literature. In Three American Literatures, edited by Houston A. Baker, pp. 3379. New York: Modern Language Association, 1982. Useful introduction to history of Chicano writing with emphasis on its relationship to folk traditions. Tatum, Charles M. Chicano Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1982. First book-length study of Chicano literature, with emphasis on contemporary genres, such as the novel, short stories, and poetry. Other Sources The periodical literature of Mexican-Americans up until 1959 remains virtually uncollected. The best collections of Mexican-American newspapers are located at the Chicano research libraries at the University of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses. A highly useful bibliography of Mexican-American newspapers is Herminio Ros and Lupe Castillo, Towards a True Chicano Bibliography: Mexican-American Newspapers, 18481942, in El Grito 3 (1970): 1724 and 5 (1972): 4047.
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Contemporary Mexican-American Literature, 1960Present

EXICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE grew dramatically in the 1960s, fueled largely by an unprecedented surge of ethnic pride and a renewed awareness that literary works could be political and cultural instruments of great power. This is not to suggest that Mexican-American writers of the period neglected esthetic quality but rather to emphasize that they regarded themselves as participants in an historic campaign of social activism. Luis Valdez, for example, founded the Teatro Campesino to win public support for California farm workers. Mexican-American poets created bilingual verse to celebrate their dual heritage, and writers of fiction undertook to demolish long-standing stereotypes of Mexican-American inferiority. While it is certainly proper to view these literary activities as part of the broad phenomenon of minority expression associated with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, it is important to note that MexicanAmerican writing has always evinced a distinctive character. This distinctiveness rose out of careful efforts to reproduce the patterns of MexicanAmerican speech, to either appropriate or emulate folk traditions, and to utilize Latin American narrative forms and techniques. Undoubtedly, the single event of the 1960s which most clearly galvanized Mexican-American ethnic consciousness and pride and consequently spurred considerable literary productivity was the effort of Csar Chvez to establish a strong farm workers union. Chvez and FilipinoAmerican Larry Itliong had begun to organize the predominantly Mexicanand Filipino-American ranks of California farm workers in 1962. Three years later, he and Itliong stunned the agricultural industry by calling a series of strikes in the fields around Delano, the most notable of which was a prolonged action against the growers of table grapes. Chvezs strike attracted national attention and helped to arouse interest in a wide range of Mexican-American issues. Thus did the movimiento get underway. As indicated before, the most significant literary result of the farm workers struggle was the formation of the Teatro Campesino in 1965. Luis Valdez, its founder, came from a family of farm workers and had returned to his hometown of Delano with the idea of exercising his talents as a playwright, director, and actor on behalf of Chvezs union. The collaboration proved immediately productive. For Valdez, the farm workers cause pro-
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vided a rich source of dramatic material while Chvez benefited from the fund-raising and polemical skills of the Teatro. The early performances of the Teatroand these occurred in every imaginable setting from open fields and flatbed trucks to university auditoriumswere built around a series of actos, ten to fifteen minute improvised skits that dramatized the circumstances of the farm workers. Rooted in the traditions of commedia dellarte and Mexican carpa presentations and influenced by contemporary agit-prop techniques, the Teatro managed simultaneously to entertain its audiences and prod them toward social awareness and action. Working generally without either sets or props, the Teatro addressed sensitive political issues unambiguously, even reductively. Typically, the Teatro utilized caricatures and stock characters (many easily identifiable because of signs hung around their necks) to delineate issues: the leering, villainous Patrn (Boss or farm owner) who pretends to be the friend of workers; Super Sam, the arrogant and brutal Anglo cop; the Coyote, a Mexican-American labor contractor who exploits his own people; and, of course, the humble but dignified farm worker who, against all odds, comes to understand his oppression and then fights valiantly to bring justice to the fields. By 1967, the Teatro Campesino had begun to enlarge its focus beyond strictly farm worker issues. That year, the Teatro first performed Los vendidos (The Sell-Outs), a humorous and devastating depiction of MexicanAmerican assimilation. No saco nada de la escuela (Im Not Getting Anything out of School) traces the failure of the American educational system to respond to the special needs of Mexican-American students. By the early 1970s, the Teatro was creating actos which denounced the Vietnam War. In Vietnam campesino and Soldado razo (Chicano Soldier), infantry duty in Vietnam for the Mexican-American is presented as another form of exploitation, deadlier than, but closely related to, the oppressiveness of farm labor. The most ambitious project undertaken by Luis Valdez and various members of the Teatro Campesino was Zoot Suit, a full-scale commercial production which had a long run in Los Angeles in 197879. The play was based on the notorious Sleepy Lagoon episode of 194243 and its aftermath. A young man had died mysteriously as a result of injuries suffered near a popular East Los Angeles swimming hole. In the most blatant kangaroo-court circumstances, seventeen Mexican-American youths were subsequently convicted of manslaughter and assault. After the trial, antiMexican sentiment in Los Angeles intensified and resulted in a number of attacks on flamboyantly dressed Mexican-Americansso-called zootsuiters or pachucos by policemen and servicemen. As Valdezs most sustained work, Zoot Suit betrays deficiencies of struc1102
CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE
ture and characterization but is otherwise a considerable achievement and a landmark in Mexican-American writing. Subtitled A New American Play, Zoot Suit represents Valdezs attempt not only to reach beyond an ethnic audience but to thrust Mexican-American experience into the center of American history. The major figure of the play is El Pachuco, the archetypal, ultimate zoot-suiter who swaggers in and out of the action and offers wise and cynical observations from the sidelines, a sort of Greek chorus reinvented as Chicano hipster. El Pachuco revels in his distinctiveness and outrageousness but pays a heavy price: he is, inevitably, beaten and stripped of his drapes by Anglo sailors. The play suggests that Anglo-Americans, never notably tolerant of conspicuous ethnic behavior, resented the pachuco with particular vehemence during wartime. The American Way of Life was being threatened externally by the Germans and the Japanese and now the puchuco, in his refusal to accept assimilation, was perceived as an internal menace. The character El Pachuco is finally vindicated, however. Near the end of the play he reappears, dressed as gaudily as before, his spirit of defiance intact, and ascends to mythic stature. It is the secret fantasy of every vato, he proclaims, to put on the zoot suit and play the part of the pachuco. As Valdez presents him, El Pachuco symbolizes the MexicanAmericans insistence on maintaining his ethnic identity even as he accepts his obligations as a citizen of the United States. The most poignant irony of Zoot Suit is that even in the face of widespread bigotry and degradation, the pachucos were willing to fight for their country. In the wake of the Teatro Campesinos early successes, MexicanAmerican literary activity grew rapidly. In 1967, Quinto Sol Publications began operations in Berkeley with the express purpose of providing an outlet for Mexican-American writers. Two years later, Quinto Sol issued El Espejo (The Mirror), an anthology which clearly indicated the distinctiveness and vitality of Mexican-American literary expression. Writing for a Mexican-American publisher and directing their works at a predominantly Mexican-American audience, the writers of Quinto Sol were disencumbered of the heavy load of literary explanation and justification of some earlier writers who, with few options, composed their works for Anglo readers. The new generation of authors strove to create a distinctive body of Mexican-American (or Chicano) literature, one that evoked and preserved its cultural experiences without condescension and which was founded in its own oral and belletristic traditions. The Quinto Sol writers reaffirmed their ties to Mexico and Latin America and celebrated their aboriginal heritage. They appropriated Aztec philosophy and imagery and found particular usefulness in the concept of Aztln, the ancestral home of the Aztecs thought to be located somewhere in the American Southwest. The idea of Aztln, either explicitly or implicitly, became the controlling 1103
metaphor for the Quinto Sol and later activist Mexican-American authors who regarded themselves not as immigrants or members of a deprived minority but as heirs to traditions which formed the core of southwestern culture. Some scholars quibbled that the concept of Aztln was historically insupportable, but they missed the point; its importance was mythic and symbolic, providing Mexican-American writers with a powerful sense of place and continuity. They could describe their experiences from Texas to California so vividly and securely precisely because they believed that their people had always been there. The Quinto Sol writers recognized the plasticity of language in conveying the distinctiveness of their culture and thus utilized, in their poetry and fictions, a variety of linguistic techniques. Earlier Mexican writers had rendered their works in either conventional English or Spanish while others such as Josephina Niggli had tried to reproduce the flavor of Spanish in English, occasionally employing the original Spanish for special effect. The results of these techniques were often quite satisfactory but they failed to capture Mexican-American speech effectively. The Quinto Sol writers used not only conventional Spanish and English but various regional dialects of both languages and combinations of all of these. They employed characteristic Mexican-American neologisms such as wachar (to watch), vato (guy or dude), and troca or troque (truck). Many of them sought to utilize Mexican-American street languagesometimes called cal as a fully expressive literary idiom. Linguistic experimentation was one of the most striking characteristics of Mexican-American literature of the late 1960s) particularly in poetry. Among the various poets whose work first came to widespread attention in the publications of Quinto Sol was Jos Montoya, a Californian with a certain ear for Mexican-American speech and a profound understanding of Mexican-American culture. Probably his best-known poem is El Louie, a haunting elegy to a friend from the streets, a pachuco named Louie Rodrguez who is found dead in a rented room, presumably of alcoholism. The poem begins with these lines: Hoy enterraron al Louie And San Pedro o sanpinche are in for it. And those times of the forties and the early fifties lost un vato de atolle.
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Kind of slim and drawn there toward the end, aging fast from too much booze y la vida dura. But class to the end. The power and poignancy of the poem derives from Montoyas ability to shift from Mexican-American Spanish to English, locating in one idiom or another the precise phrase necessary to evoke a desired response. Significantly, the poem begins in Spanishthus fixing the special ethnic quality of the work. The second line opens in English but moves to a word, san pinche, which conveys a compelling image in Spanish but is virtually untranslatable into English. The succeeding chronological references are straightforwardly rendered, these also followed by a vivid, distinctive phrase in Spanish, un vato de atolle, whose meaning can only be limply approximated in English as the great dude. The last Spanish phrase in the la vida dura translates easily as the hard life but because it is presented in Spanish calls attention to the specific nature of a MexicanAmericans circumstances. El Louie demonstrates how a poems esthetic and perceptional qualities can be greatly enhanced by the poets bilingualism and biculturalism. America, we discover from El Louie, looks and sounds different from the barrio. Quinto Sol published not only a large variety of innovative poetry but prose as well. One of the earliest and most accomplished prose works issued by Quinto Sol was Toms Riveras . . . y no se lo trag la tierra (And the Earth Did Not Part). This collection of fictional anecdotes and sketches which together may be regarded as composing, in D. H. Lawrences phrase, a fragmentary novelfocuses on Mexican-American migrant workers of South Texas during the 1950s. Whereas an earlier Mexican-American writer, Jos Antonio Villarreal, had depicted a Mexican-American family that was all but blown apart by assimilationist pressures, Riveras work proclaims a peoples vitality despite almost unspeakable hardships. . . . y no se lo trag la tierra opens on a note suggestive of several Latin-American writers, especially Borges and Garca Mrquez, in that it obscures the boundary between reality and fantasy: That year was lost to him. Sometimes he tried to remember, but then when things appeared to become somewhat clear his thoughts would elude him. It usually began with a dream in which suddenly he thought he was awake, and then he would realize he was actu-
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ally asleep. That was why he could not be sure whether or not what he had recalled was actually what had happened. Imagined or not, the events described (primarily by an anonymous narrator) have the ring of painful truth. In the opening sketch, a young farm worker is shot through the head by his foreman; later we see children searching for food in a garbage dump; still later, two children burn to death in a migrant workers shack. Rivera describes all these events in a spare, detached manner, very much in the style of Juan Rulfo in El llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames). Structurally, . . . y no se lo trag la tierra consists of twelve sketches (representing the months of the narrators lost year), each introduced by a brief anecdote, and an introduction and closing. The book resembles a literary collage of Mexican-American migrant-worker subculture. The narrative device of anonymity enhances the representational quality of the work; Rivera, for the most part, is not depicting distinct individuals but an assortment of poor people bound in a common experience. . . . y no se lo trag la tierra is a profoundly humanistic work. In one sketch, the nameless young protagonist of the book goes out at midnight to summon the devil, first by cajoling him, and then, in desperation, by hurling invectives. The devil never appears, of course, and in the following story, the boy is so embittered by a series of family tragedies that he proceeds to curse God, a sacrilege which should result, or so his mother has told him, in his being swallowed up by the earth. But, surprisingly, the earth feels firmer than it had before and the boy suddenly felt himself capable of doing and undoing whatever he chose. In Riveras fictional world, there is neither God nor Satan, only human will. Rivera is no apologist for his fictional Mexican-Americans, nor for their culture. In his remarkable sketch La mano en la bolsa (His Hand in His Pocket), Rivera presents don Lato and doa Boni, two grotesques of unsurpassed vulgarity and cruelty; in a later piece he introduces a Chicano con man who collects money for portraits but never delivers them. Like other Mexican-American writers, Rivera vigorously attacks the Catholic Church for its exploitation of the poor and its preoccupation with the human potentiality not for good but for evil. Still, Riveras main interest lies in characters like the nameless boy who finally discovers that knowledge and wisdom can be salvaged from any experience: Suddenly he felt very happy because . . . he realized that he hadnt lost anything. He had discovered something. To discover and to rediscover and synthesize. To relate this entity with that entity, and that entity with still another, and finally relating everything with everything else. That was what he had to do, 1106
that was all. And he became even happier. Later, when he arrived at home, he went to the tree that was in the yard. He climbed it. On the horizon he saw a palm tree and he imagined that someone was on top looking at him. He even raised his arm and waved it back and forth so that the other person could see that he knew that he was there. In . . . y no se lo trag la tierra, the nameless young protagonist must learn that the gift of life, even in the harshest circumstances, is to be profoundly cherished. In the work of Rolando Hinojosa, another writer who got his career underway with Quinto Sol, this perception serves not as a climactic insight but as a fundamental premise. In the beginning of Generaciones y semblanzas (Generations and Biographies), the narrator explains: These are no legendary heroes here. These people go to the toilet, they sneeze and blow their noses, they raise families, know how to die with one eye on guard, and they yield with difficulty like most green wood and thus do not crack easily. Those seeking heroes of the caliber of El Cid, say, can very well go to Hell and stay there. Its true that there are several ways of being heroic. Its no laughing matter to work from day to day, putting up with any damn fool who shows up along the way. One thing should be clear however: to endure is not to ignore things or to deceive oneself. Bearing ones burden doesnt mean that one is a blind fool unaware of whats really going on. People suspect that living by itself is heroic enough. The rest of it, bearing whatever life brings, is heroic as well. Hinojosas work differs from Riveras in other ways as well. While Riveras tone is serious and generally melancholy, and his sense of outrage simmers just beneath the surface of his narratives, Hinojosas fictions are humorous and ironic: he regards the gamut of human behavior from saintliness to depravity with compassion and tolerance. Furthermore, Hinojosa sweeps over a much broader range of Mexican-American experience than Rivera, speaking through the voices of various characters, some named and others anonymous. Hinojosas works vibrate with the sounds of barrios and colonias: family gossip, conversation about Anglos, children chanting Mexican rhymes. As one of his narrators describes the activity of the writer, Hinojosa without anyones leave, goes out into the street and takes a little bit from here and there. Despite these differences, however, Hinojosas work also resembles Riveras in certain ways. Both use South Texas heavily as settings and both render their works in a combination of conventional and pocho Spanish. Like Rivera, Hinojosas most successful prose form is the sketch, some of 1107
A Literary History of the American West which are no longer than two paragraphs. In this regard, as Herminio Ros has pointed out, Hinojosa seems a kindred spirit of Julio Torri who, in popularizing the estampa in Mexico, argued that the greatest defect in literature was excessive explication. In an opening note to his Estampas del valle y otras obras (Sketches of the Valley and Other Works), Hinojosa writes: The people who appear and disappear in these sketches, as well as the events that occur in them, may not be real. The writer writes and tries to do what he can. Explaining all this is the function of others . . . Hinojosas two most successful works, Estampas and Generaciones y semblanzas (a title first used by the Spaniard Fernn Prez de Guzmn about 1450), provide a vivid portrait of Belken County, a fictional locale in the Rio Grande valley of South Texas. Several families in Belken, notably the Buenrostros, can trace their presence there to the eighteenth century. As the reader follows their experiences across several generations, he is presented a mosaic of border Mexican-American culture. The dominant characteristic of Hinojosas Mexican-Americans is a dignified fatalism, an understanding that man is not always the keeper of his destiny. His characters struggle against economic and political oppression but recognize their human limitations. In a sketch entitled Thus It Was Fulfilled, the anonymous narrator, on the occasion of a friends premature death, observes: There are people born that way, branded and singled out as if someone were saying: youre going to be that way, you this way, and you this other way; in short, as always, man proposes and God disposes. Hinojosas Mexican-Americans aim not to conquer but to endure, to endure with courage and dignity. Together, Rivera and Hinojosa exemplified many of the best trends among the Quinto Sol writers. Like Montoya and some other poets, they sought to demonstrate that Mexican-American speech was not a linguistic barbarism but a sophisticated language capable of conveying the full range of emotion and action. In embracing Latin-American literary principles and techniques, they helped to reinforce the cultural ties between their people and other Latinos. But the major achievement of Rivera and Hinojosa was to reaffirm the primacy of the common people as the guardians and transmitters of Mexican-American culture. In communicating this view to their readers, both writers infused their stories with folkloric elements. Their use of plain and proverbial language (especially in the case of Hinojosa), their focus on ordinary experiences, their use of multiple and anonymous narrators, and their deliberate deemphasis of authorial control give their works a spontaneous, proletarian quality, but one that springs from a specific ethnic consciousness. One of Hinojosas sketches, appropriately entitled Voices from the Barrio, ends with this observation: The barrios can be called el Rebaje, el de las Conchas, el Cantarranas, el Rincon del Di1108
ablo, el Pueblo Mexicanoreally names dont matter much. What does count, as always, are the people. It is a rather self-evident principle of Mexican-American writing that those authors who compose in Spanish are likely to follow Latin-American literary conventions and styles while those who write in English will likely follow Anglo-American trends. Rudolfo Anaya, one more novelist of the early Quinto Sol group, writes in English but nevertheless manages to convey a distinctly Mexican-American perspective. His first and most satisfying work, Bless Me, Ultima, is a moving portrait, reminiscent in some ways of Joyces Portrait of the Artist us a Young Man, of a boy, Antonio Mrez, coming of age during the 1940s in a remote village in central New Mexico. The novel focuses on Antonios attempt to forge an identity in an environment of conflicting cultures and expectations as represented by the two branches of his family: his fathers people who are ranchers and horsemen, a restless, powerful clan who cherish the rugged life on the high plains of New Mexico; and his mothers familythe Lunaswho are sedentary, traditionbound, rigidly Catholic farmers. Antonio is the last of four sons and the others have not turned out well, having gone off to war and returned jaded and contemptuous of their heritage. To guard against a similar calamity, Antonios parents entrust him to Ultima, a curandera (healer) of immense wisdom and compassion. Antonio discovers that Ultimas greatness derives from her accumulated understanding of her peoples experience, their values, and customs. While other characters in the novel seem confused and disheartened, Ultima retains an unshakable sense of identity and purpose. Her gift to Antonio is the lesson of honoring ones culture without being trammeled by it, of using ones cultural identity as the foundation for the development of an individual spirit. Build strength from life, Ultima counsels Antonio and, indeed, his life under tutelage becomes a storehouse of cultural riches. At the end of the novel, with the mushroom clouds of the White Sands nuclear tests looming above the southern horizon, Antonio rejects the confining traditionalism of the Lunas in favor of the Mrezs doctrine of personal freedom. Like other Mexican-American writers, Anaya creates a distinctive cultural ambience primarily through the use of folklore. (The language of Bless Me, Ultima, except for an occasional word or phrase, is conventional English.) The narrator, Antonio, refers frequently to cuentos of witchcraft and to legends of la llorona and the Virgin of Guadalupe that he hears throughout his childhood. He describes in great detail Ultimas healing powers which derive from traditional Mexican folk medicine. Occasionally, Anaya modifies conventional folk traditions or creates a kind of pseudo-folklore for his fictional purposes. For example, the owl is usually a symbol of evil in Mexican folklore, the nagual (companion) of witches. But in Anayas work, 1109
the owl is the guardian spirit of Ultima. The effect is to dramatize Ultimas powers and the air of mystery surrounding her, for although she exercises her magic primarily for the good of the community, she is quite capable of pronouncing curses on her enemies. Anaya also creates the legend, of the Golden Carp, a symbol of benevolent pantheism reminiscent of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Anaya virtually immerses Antonio in oral tradition, by way of suggesting that for the Chicano, folklore is the foundation of a cultural identity. Antonio learns as much. Ultima told me the stories and legends of my ancestors, he explains. From her I learned the glory and the tragedy of the history of my people, and I came to understand how that history stirred in my blood. Bless Me, Ultima is a deeply moving work of genuine excellence, certainly one of the finest Mexican-American novels published to date. Not the least of Anayas accomplishments is his rejection of the contrived Hispanicism that enervated the work of earlier New Mexican writers. Anaya portrays the mestizo element of New Mexican culture positively; indeed, he attributes Ultimas power precisely to her mastery of both Spanish and Indian traditions. The heyday of Quinto Sol was quite brief; despite the successful promotion of writers such as Montoya, Rivera, Hinojosa, and Anaya, by the early 1970s Quinto Sol was itself splintering and other publishing houses were springing up to challenge its preeminence in Mexican-American literature. But Quinto Sol had lavishly accomplished its goal of stimulating Mexican-American literary activity and pushing it along various diverse trajectories. Just how diverse Mexican-American literature had quickly become is exemplified by the appearance of two remarkable books by Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. Acosta is doubtless the most bizarre and fascinating figure to emerge on the Mexican-American literary scene since the 1960s. A friend of Hunter Thompson, Acosta had appeared in Thompsons Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as Dr. Gonzo, a three-hundred-pound Samoan lawyer with a drug appetite to match his girth. Encouraged by Thompson, Acosta became an author himself and brought out his Autobiography in 1972. As he tells it, Acostas personal history is quite extraordinary. Raised in the racist rural community of Riverbank, California, Acosta picks peaches as a child and recalls the flour sacks his mother used to make dresses, shirts, and curtains. He begins to call himself Brown Buffalo for his complexion and obesity and because the buffalo is the animal that everyone slaughtered. After high school, Acosta launches himself into a remarkable series of careers: clarinetist in an Air Force band, Baptist missionary in Panama, copy editor for a San Francisco newspaper and, finally, poverty lawyer in Oakland. In 1110
this last occupation, Acosta is miserable, frustrated by an endless procession of poor blacks and Mexican-Americans who seek divorces, restraining orders against brutal husbands, and relief from angry creditors. His personal life is equally wretched: he is lonely, drinks heavily, and experiments with every variety of drug. At the root of his troubles is a lack of self-identity. Acosta has forgotten virtually all his Spanish and knows few MexicanAmericans intimately. In 1968, he begins to hear reports of Chicano activism in Los Angeles. Acostas Autobiography closes with his move to Los Angeles, the home of the biggest herd of brown buffaloes in the world. The Revolt of the Cockroach People treats Acostas involvement in various Chicano political activities from 1968 to 1971. It is an exceptional book for several reasons. In the first place, it is one of a very few works by Mexican-Americans with Los Angeles settings. Secondly, Cockroach People is rendered in Acostas version of Hunter Thompsons Gonzo journalism, a literary technique which requires the authors participation in the very events he is recording and which eschews revision in favor of retaining spontaneity and immediacy. Gonzo journalism resembles stream of consciousness fiction: rambling, highly personal and even idiosyncratic, sometimes overheated. The Revolt of the Cockroach People resembles a novel more closely than a journalistic narrative. Although Acosta focuses on actual events, his presentation is sensational, impressionistic and manipulative; he never hesitates to rearrange history for dramatic effect. His style is utterly consistent with his image of Los Angeles as chaotic, schizophrenic, and violentthe most detestable city on earth. Acostas Los Angeles is not the Hollywood, Beverly Hills, or Malibu of popular culture but the sprawling eastside barrios. Mexican-American Los Angeles is a city apart, not merely a collection of neighborhoods, but a distinctive, embattled community with its own language, culture, and longfestering resentments. Acosta chronicles this neglected community as it is pushed inexorably towards its flashpoint. As Acosta begins to comprehend the circumstances of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles, he discards his notion of them as buffaloes and comes to regard them instead as cockroaches, an image from a traditional Mexican song that captures the extent of their degradation. Cockroach people live in squalor and are reviled by those with higher economic and social status. As the lowest of life forms, they are exterminated even more casually than buffaloes. For Acosta, the most notable human cockroach is the vato loco (crazy dude), an embodiment of destructiveness and moral anarchy and the Mexican-American communitys unwilling contribution to the insanity of Los Angeles. Acostas participation in various Mexican-American civil rights activities leads only to disillusionment, for the social and political structure of Los Angeles seems contrived to hold Mexican-Americans in a perpetual state of 1111
peonage. The mayor, the police chief, the legal system, even the Catholic Church conspire to oppress Acostas people. The final scenes of Cockroach People are apocalyptic. Whittier Boulevard, the main thoroughfare of East Los Angeles, is burning. Telephone lines are cut, windows are broken, cars are overturned and smoking. Acosta thinks of Saigon and Haiphong during the worst moments of the Vietnam War. Ultimately, Acostas Los Angeles is a city cursed by its subjugation of Mexican-Americans and its willful destruction of their culture. The citys schizophrenia is rooted in its rejection of its Mexican soul. Without a real past, Los Angeles constantly reinvents itself, trying unsuccessfully to fill its historical vacuum. But not until Los Angeles accepts its Mexicanness will it be at peace with itself. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People stand as the most vehement Mexican-American literary denunciation of American culture to appear in the activist period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Acosta encounters bigotry, corruption, and decadence everywhere he turns in the United States. Having been made to feel shame about his heritage, Acosta lacks a stabilizing ethnic consciousness. In Los Angeles he tries desperately to recover his cultural identity but it is too late. Acosta drifts from one group or cause to another, but always toward a state of rootlessness. He sees himself as one of the casualties of American life, lonely, disoriented, and tormented. Acosta seems not only to have purged recent Mexican-American literature of much of its rage but, simultaneously, to have indicated a continuing trend toward introspection and autobiographical modes of expression. To the qualities of introspection and autobiographical expression, one might add a third feature to denote recent Mexican-American writing: elegy. As Juan Bruce-Novoa has argued, elegy, as applied to Mexican-American writing, provides for the consideration not only of tragedyof the death of an individual, a cultural group, or a body of traditionbut of some transcendent principle that makes life tolerable and meaningful. For Gary Soto, probably the most acclaimed of contemporary MexicanAmerican poets, the transcendent principle has been imagination. In his four volumes, Soto presents an array of characters who use their imaginations to lift themselves, however momentarily, out of squalor and oppression. In a group of poems set near the Mexican city of Taxco, Soto introduces Manuel Zaragoza, a tavern keeper all but destroyed by his wifes death during pregnancy. Grief follows him perched like a bird on his shoulder and so he passes his nights at his cantina, drinking and playing childish games. During the day, he walks the streets of his village perplexed like a priest, watching burros sniffing their own dung. Manuel finds relief by escaping into a world of marvelous fantasies, some of which he offers as real 1112
events. He dreams of owning a circus, complete with nude dancers and a talking rooster. In The Tale of Sunlight, Manuel tells of a beam of sunlight which, without any source, brightens his tavern. Eventually the beam settles on a wall and vaporizes any object that touches it. Zaragoza, by now thoroughly liberated from the banalities of conventional existence, offers a stub of a finger as evidence of the beams magical powers. In The Space, Manuel is reclining in a hammock enjoying a world he has largely made over: I say it is enough To be where the smells Of creatures Braid like rope And to know if The grasss rustle Is only a lizard passing. It is enough, brother, Listening to a bird coo A leash of parables, Keeping an eye On the moon, The space Between cork trees Where the sun first appears. Like Toms Rivera, Soto has written compassionately and without sentimentality about Mexican-American farm workers who labor far removed from public concern and who learn that vindication must come from within themselves. In the title section of The Elements of San Joaquin, Soto contrasts the beauty of the California farmlands with the misery of the farm workers. In the poem Field, a farm worker laments: Already I am becoming the valley / A soil that sprouts nothing / For any of us. The American landscape, so much revered in our national literature and particularly that of the West, is for the farm worker only the arena of his discontent. The elements of nature are either indifferent or genuinely hostile. The sun is a killer, and fog not only obscures mans activities but the very fact of his existence. And when the fog lifts, there is the dust, one of Sotos recurrent symbols. In a prosaic sense, it vivifies the dirtiness of contemporary life but it also suggests the eventual disintegration of living matter: The wind strokes / The skulls and spines of cattle / To white dust, to nothing. . . . Sotos poetry embodies many of the best qualities of contemporary Mexican-American writing. It moves easily across national boundaries to mark the lines of continuity between Mexican-Americans and Mexicans 1113
A Lirerary History of the American West
and to portray mans essential dignity. Sotos characters are brilliantly individualized yet recognize their need to participate in a cultural community. From his first volume to his latest, Sotos ethnic consciousness has deepened in wisdom and humor. Here is Black Hair, the title poem of his latest collection: At eight I was brilliant with my body. In July, that ring of heat We all jumped through, I sat in the bleachers of Romain Playground, in the lengthening Shade that rose from our dirty feet. The game before us was more than baseball. It was a figureHector Moreno Quick and hard with turned muscles, His crouch the one I assumed before an altar Of worn baseball cards, in my room. I came here because I was Mexican, a stick Of brown light in love with those Who could do itthe triple and hard slide, The gloves eating balls into double plays. What could I do with 50 pounds, my shyness, My black torch of hair about to go out? Father was dead, his face no longer Hanging over the table or our sleep, And mother was the terror of mouths Twisting hurt by butter knives. In the bleachers I was brilliant with my body, Waving players in and stomping my feet, Growing sweaty in the presence of white shirts. I chewed sunflower seeds. I drank water And bit my arm through the late innings. When Hector lined balls into deep Center, in my mind I rounded the bases With him, my face flared, my hair lifting Beautifully, because we were coming home To the arms of brown people. Apart from its moving affection for brown people, Black Hair is notable for Sotos willingness to straightforwardly address his frailty: his shyness, his meager 50 pounds, his black torch of hair, about to go out. This quality of self-examination and revelation, so prevalent in current Mexican-American poetry, manifests itself with particular force in the work 1114
of various women poets who must deal not only with the general maladies of American life but sexism within and outside their own ethnic culture. Lorna Dee Cervantes, in her excellent collection Emplumada, presents her readers with experiences of staggering oppressiveness and pain. Uncles First Rabbit recounts several experiences of wife-beating including one that results in the premature birth and death of an infant. Male violence against women is one of the sordid facts of Cervantess poetic world. In other poems, she describes an assault in a vacant lot, an actual rape, another incident of wife-beating, and what seems to be an attempted incestuous attack. In the face of such brutality, women learn to rely on themselves and other women. In Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway, Cervantes describes a woman family featuring a grandmother toughened by living twenty-five years / with a man who tried to kill her. Not just sexism but bigotry induces the poets alienation. I am marked by the color of my skin, she observes at one point; at a writers conference in Port Townsend, Washington, she is made to feel uncomfortable about her ethnicity and thus remarks simply, I dont belong this far north. In a prefatory note, Cervantes indicates the double meaning of her volumes title. Emplumada means feathered; in a plumage, as in after molting while the embedded word plumada refers to a flourish of a pen. The title is well chosen because the volume chronicles the poets molting of long-standing hatreds and fears and her rebirth into love and understanding. The instrument of this transformation is the pen that she flourishes with such gratifying results. Like many of the best current Mexican-American poets, Cervantes writes with clarity and economy, drawing her images from ordinary life. Her accomplishment is to have confronted ethnic prejudice and machismo, both Anglo- and Mexican-American varieties, directly, and to have emerged from the experience strengthened and ennobled. The most notable feature of current Mexican-American writing is its sheer diversity, a characteristic easily demonstrated in a necessarily brief discussion of four recent and important works. Richard Rodriguezs Hunger of Memory, probably the most widely discussed work by a Mexican-American, is an autobiography that chronicles an individuals experience of assimilation and inevitable estrangement from his family and traditional culture. It is also perhaps the most widely praised volume of prose by a MexicanAmerican. Arturo Islass The Rain God, on the other hand, is an autobiographical novel which suggests that love and the sharing of a common culture can hold a family together despite the convulsions of Americanization. The Rain God is a richly textured and moving work which expertly utilizes the West Texas desert borderlands as a symbolic background for action. In poetry, Luis Omar Salinass recent Darkness Under the Trees / Walking Behind the Spanish reveals not only immense talent but range. Salinas treats per1115
sonal matters, esthetic questions, and general issues of ethnic and historical consciousness. The collection is simply a brilliant performance. A most welcome recent development has been the growing influence and presence of women writers. In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros continues the estampa tradition but this time to describe the urban experiences of a Mexican-American family from a Chicana/feminist perspective. What all this diversity indicates, of course, is a maturation. Mexican-American writers no longer feel bound to particular themes, forms, or ideologies. Ultimately, the importance of Mexican-American literature derives from its evocation and preservation of a distinctive culture which has a shaping influence on the character of large regions of the United States. Generally, high school and college textbooks portray the American experience as an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, with the English colonists and their descendants pushing majestically westward from Massachusetts and Virginia to civilize a continent. This view, of course, is false and particularly so in the Southwest, where the signs of Mexican and Mexican-American culture cannot be easily ignored. Mexican-American literature is the record of that presence. Pasamos por aqu.
RAYMUND A. PAREDES , University
of California, Los Angeles
Fiction Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1972. Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1983. Hinojosa, Rolando. Estampas del valle y otras obras. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1973. . Generaciones y semblanzas. Berkeley: Editorial Justa, 1977. . The Valley. Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press, 1983. Islas, Arturo. The Rain God. Palo Alto: Alexandrian Press, 1984. Rivera, Toms. . . . y no se lo trag la tierra. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1971.
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Autobiography Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1972. . The Revolt of the Cockroach People. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973. Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory. Boston: David Godine, 1982. Poetry Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. Salinas, Luis Omar. Darkness Under the Trees / Walking Behind the Spanish. Berkeley: University of California Chicano Studies Library, 1982. Soto, Gary. The Elements of San Joaquin. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977. . The Tale of Sunlight. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978. . Where Swallows Work Hard. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. . Black Hair. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984. Drama Valdez, Luis. Actos. San Juan Bautista, Ca.: Centro Campesino Cultural, 1971. Anthologies Crdenas de Dwyer, Carlota, ed. Chicano Voices. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Kanellos, Nicolas, ed. A Decade of Hispanic Literature: An Anniversary Anthology. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1982. Romano, Octavia, ed. El Espejo/The Mirror. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1969. Romano, Octavia, and Herminio Rios, eds. El Espejo/The Mirror, revised edition. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1972. Vigil, Evangelina, ed. Woman of Her Word: Hispanic Women Write. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1983. Critical Studies and Bibliographies Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Informative and extensive interviews with leading MexicanAmerican writers, including Rivera and Hinojosa. . Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. The first book-length study of contemporary Chicano poetry with an emphasis on formal and esthetic qualities. Eger, Ernestina N. A Bibliography of Criticism of Contemporary Chicano Literature. Berkeley: University of California Chicano Studies Library, 1982. The most useful guide to critical studies on Chicano literature available. Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms. Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press, 1982. An overview of recent Chicano drama, especially useful for its history of the Teatro Campesino. Shirley, Carl. A Contemporary Fluorescence of Chicano Literature. Dictionary of
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A Literary History of the American West Literary Biography Yearbook, 1984. An excellent survey of Mexican-American writing today. Tatum, Charles M. Chicano Literature. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. An insightful one-volume study of the history of Chicano writing, from the nineteenth century to the present.
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Asian-American Literary Traditions

HROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH and twentieth centuries, successive groups of Asian immigrants have arrived in the United States Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, Vietnamesedistinguished by language, education, religion, class, and even sex. One thing all have shared is a racial-cultural stereotypethe yellow perilthat has influenced all aspects of Asian-American life. Likewise, the institutionalization of stereotypes in public law, in the popular sensibility governing all aspects of public media, and in institutions of public education may limit an appreciation of any minority culture in American society. Understanding the historical and social circumstances of Asian immigrants is a first step in penetrating stereotypes.
CHINESE-AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITIONS
While early merchants and traders from China received public attention in the newspapers of the day as early as 1850a delegation of China Boys organized to receive missionary tracts in San Francisco, a similar group marching in a parade to celebrate the admission of California to the Union, and the likesignificant numbers of Chinese immigrants did not arrive until 1852, when an estimated 20,000 Chinese laborers passed through the Port of San Francisco, destined in the main for the newly developed mining regions of northern California. In that same year, the California State Legislature enacted a Foreign Miners Tax which was aimed directly at the Chinese; and in 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled that an 1850 statute prohibiting Indians and Negroes from testifying for or against white people also applied to Chinese, stripping these newly arrived immigrants of access to judicial remedies. There was established from the onset of Chinese immigration a pattern of statutory and social exclusion that paralleled the development of Chinese settlement in the West, determining where and at what Chinese might be employed, where they might live, and how they might be schooled. Eventually, in 1924, laws were passed to halt all Asian immigration by excluding from entry any alien ineligible for citizenship. Such widespread discrimination shaped the response of Chinese immigrants, some of whom maintained their language and cultural ethos as a protective barrier. Another response was to adopt whatever terms of acceptance society might offer, and thereby find opportunities for succeeding gen1119
erations to establish themselves, as waves of European immigrants on the East Coast would in this same period. Chinese-American literature thus reflects two major influences that control the development of writings and writers. The first is an immigrant tradition, rooted in the historical experience of the first Cantonese to settle the western United States, a tradition discoverable in the popular art forms recorded mainly in Chinese but also in English in the publications of the day. The second and more pervasive influence is a Christian missionary tradition that offered the Chinese immigrant acceptance and interpretation through white stereotypes of the heathen Chinee, deniable and properly excluded, and his yellow counterpart, the convert who, characteristically, denied the forms of traditional Chinese expression, substituting a confessional attitude in order to gain an avenue of acceptance in American society. Also reflected is the fact that many Chinese came to America not as migrants, but as sojourners, intending to return home when they could. Perhaps the most representative literary material of the nineteenthcentury Chinese immigrant sensibility discovered to date is a collection of folk verse published by Pui-Chee Leung in his work, Wooden-Fish Book: Critical Essays & an Annotated Catalog Based on the Collection in the University of Hong Kong (University of Hong Kong, 1978). Muk yu (wooden-fish) as a traditional form of folk versification predates the Chinese settlement of the West Coast of America by some two thousand years. Originally derived from the formal chants of the Buddhist sutras, the muk yu takes its name from the wooden blocks that are struck together in rhythm to recitation. In the Chinese newspapers of the 1860s in San Francisco, publications of these folk lyrics indicate experiments in form to include instrumentation as popular songs as well as new content reflecting the immigrants experiences as settlers on a new frontier. As the published verses show, such folk expression provides a starting point from which consistent cultural sensibility may be traced. Another significant Chinese development from this period is the common use of Cantonese dialects in newspapers published both in Hong Kong and in the Chinese-American communities of San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910 1940, by M. H. Lai, et al. (San Francisco, 1980), provides translations of poems carved in the walls of the Chinese detention barracks on Angel Island. Modeled after New Yorks Ellis Island, Angel Island was used to examine newly arrived Chinese immigrants, and was a prison for deportees awaiting transportation to China. This remarkable work includes sixty-six poems as well as photographs of and interviews with Chinese-Americans who were detained at Angel Island, providing a valuable link with the immigrant past, including extralegal immigration and Chinatowns with 1120
ASIAN-AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITIONS
largely bachelor populations that eschewed traditional routes toward acculturation and assimilation for fear of detection and deportation by immigration authorities. From this period, there is but one sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese immigrants plight. Mrs. Spring Fragrance, written by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), is a collection of short stories that detail the settings of Chinatowns in San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles. Eaton captures in her stories much of the divided loyalties, the despair and cultural confusions, that mark the sensibilities of emerging Chinese-Americans, and she documents the barriers that served to exclude the immigrant from more than a marginal settlement in American society. Most remarkable are her stories that compare white male attitudes towards Chinese women to the attitudes of the immigrant Chinese, who come from a period in their own countrys cultural development when women were considered inferior. Eatons observations illuminate what must be viewed in retrospect as the only logical alternative open to Chinese settlers who would make their homes in America. In a period of Chinese-American development where men outnumbered women almost ten to one, women took on inordinate importance. Children had to be born to make citizenship possible. It is on this issuewomen, their status, self-possession and legitimacythat the cultural sensibilities of the Cantonese immigrant can be traced from the traditional muk yu through the publication of Louis Chus novel Eat a Bowl of Tea in 1961. It was no coincidence that the status of women became a major issue that was used to justify discrimination and eventual exclusion of Chinese immigrants and to further substantiate traditional Western attitudes towards Asian cultures as morally unenlightened. It should also be emphasized that the first wave of Chinese immigration came during a period in world history when the ancient injustices of colonial and neocolonial exploitation of Africa and Asia for slave and coolie labor would soon cease. A casual reading of newspaper editorials and legislative arguments supporting Asian exclusion shows that popular opinion considered Chinese labor on the western American border anathema to American notions of populist independence and to an emerging consciousness of the rights of working men that was expressed through the labor movement. Chinese labor, of course, built a good deal of the West. The first bilingual newspapers distributed in the Chinese communities of the 1850s were published by missionaries. Sunday schools and English classes were among the very few public institutions in which Chinese immigrants could meet with white Americans for social intercourse. While the number of Chinese converts was initially small, those converts representations of the Chinese immigrant to American society would later provide the only acceptable portrait of Chinese aspirations for themselves as Americans. 1121
Virtually all works written by Chinese-Americans in English before and during the exclusion period ape the form and sensibility of one book, My Life in China and America by Yung Wing (1909). In form, this work and the several to follow are confessional, condescending toward the customs and practices of the Chinese social system and uncompromising in their gratitude to the Christian order. The sensibility established here represents a life testifying to conversion and salvation and denies that the Chinese immigrant came to America with any initial commitment to specific moral and cultural values. For Yung Wing, the first Chinese graduate from an American university, his biography chronicles a life devoted to the modernization of China. Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) by Pardee Lowe, Jade Snow Wongs Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), and books by Lin Yutang such as On the Wisdom of America (1950) are likewise devoid of the original immigrant sensibility, and are presently out of favor. Stereotypes of the day were incorporated by Chinese-American writers of this generation and provided the reading public the comfortable illusion that the social and moral melting pot could make all manner of exotic ingredients palatable to American tastes and sensibilities. Some Chinese, these writers were saying, want to be accepted as Americans. The questions were: how many and at what cost?
JAPANESE-AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITIONS
There is a rich and complex tradition of Japanese-American writing in English. Its variety and development through the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps during World War IIthe apotheosis of American intolerancereflect common bonds of history, language, sensibility and culture. In part, the early adoption of English as an expressive medium may be attributed to an initial resolve among the Japanese to settle permanently in the territories to which they migratedHawaii, the Pacific Coast, and the largely undeveloped northwestern United States. Most came to stay and they assimilated to the degree they were tolerated. The ability to make such a resolve was abetted by the Japanese governments interest in avoiding the Chinese examples of Asians as a supply for cheap labor, or of immigration as exile for political dissidents. Too, the arrival in numbers of Japanese immigrants occurred between 1890 and 1910. While legal restrictions limiting Asian immigrants participation in American society were most intense during this period, exclusionary sentiments had at least become a matter of law; a few decades earlier, vigilante injustice and the violent frontier ethos had confronted Chinese immigrants. In the decades that followed the Meiji Restoration with its policy of encouraging greater contact with the West to increase trade and indus1122
trialization, some Japanese sought their fortunes in the West and subsequently returned to contribute to the technological and cultural revolution in Japan. There remained, however, a generation of Japanese immigrants who were committed to staying in America. By early treaties between America and Japan, and later by the establishment of a society based on families and children who were citizens, a stable and secure community life was established. By the turn of the century, an early recognition by the Japanese of Japan that the Issei (first generation) had become decidedly other than Japanese was acknowledged by Japanese travelers to the West. In a recent translation by Stephen W. Kohl of Nagai Kafus Amerika Monogatare (American Tales ), the author dramatizes the difference between himself and the immigrant Issei, who insists on sharing something common with the traveler: I am an ignorant man who left home to find work. I dont speak English. In fact, I cant even read much Japanese. All I have is the strength in these two arms. I have to make what money I can with my own strength. I have already saved a certain amount, but . . . but . . . His eyes darted around wildly and he clutched my sleeve again. Issei: A History of lssei Immigration in North America by Kazuo Ito (1973) provides the most detailed social history of Japanese-American communities, focusing on the Pacific Northwest. Ito documents the evolution of social networks, kinship ties, business, social and cultural organizations, as recorded in the oral testimonies of Issei and Nisei (second generation) he collected between 1965 and 1967. As a resource for recovering JapaneseAmerican writing of the pre-camp period, he includes the haiku, tanka and senryu verse written by these generations, and cites the membership and records the history of community literary groups established to practice these traditional verse forms. Ito also refers to Kyo Koike, founding member of a haiku society in Seattle and an early experimenter with a camera. Recognition has also been extended by an American literary establishment to a tradition of Japanese-American verse, in the work of such writers as Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann or in the more traditional haiku of Shieshi Tsuneishi, that is acknowledged to have had some influence on American writing. None of these three, however, can be termed a major figure in the Japanese literary community. They function more as examples of the Wests exotic mixture and evidence of the cultural vitality within Japanese America. The vitality of a literature, especially an ethnic literature, must come from its ability to codify and legitimize common experience in the terms of that experience and to celebrate life as it is lived, and those terms cannot be 1123
limited to assimilationism on the one hand or anti-assimilationism on the other. For the Japanese who saw the Nikkei (Japanese-Americans) possessed of some incomprehensible vision to settle in a land where they were despisedas Kafu saw themor for the American literary establishment, there was a common recognition that the Japanese immigrants had become something else, Americans of a unique sort. The founding in 1928 by James Y. Sakamoto of the first all-English Japanese-American newspaper, The Japanese American Courier, and the formation one year later of the Japanese American Citizens League by Sakamoto and a coterie of Nisei peers in Seattle, represent the emergence of a Nisei vision of Japanese America. An interpretation of Sakamotos career spanning that period of Japanese-American history before the relocation camps, portraying the vitality and diversity of Japanese-American life, may be read in Nisei: The Quiet Americans (1963) by Bill Hosokawa. With the recent publication of Toshio Moris The Chauvinist and Other Stories (1979), and his novel The Woman from Hiroshima (1980), we have available a pre-camp Niseis vision of Japanese-American life. Moris first publication, Yokohama, California (1949), has long been recognized as a pioneering effort to record the rhythms and sensibilities of the Issei and Nisei before the war. Born in Oakland, California, in 1910, Mori recalls the Japanese-American community of the San Francisco Bay area and his own aspirations to become first a baseball player, then a writer, while working in the family nursery in San Leandro, in a social fabric embroidered by the hopes and dreams of the Issei and Nisei who people his storiesAmericans by birth and experience, rejected by public opinion that identified them as soon-to-be-enemy aliens. Moris vision of Japanese-American life before the war is perhaps the only work available that has a unity of vision, that melds the variety of loyalties, experiences and sensibilities. No discussion of Japanese-American literary resources can fail to mention the devastating consequences of the 19421945 imprisonment by the War Relocation Authority of Japanese-Americans residing in the western United States. The camps destroyed the common bonds of history, language and culture by dividing the first generationwho were legally ineligible for citizenshipfrom the youngest of the second generation. The young, English-speaking Nisei found a measure of acceptance and authority in American concentration camps. Stunned by their imprisonment, at a suspicious distance from the Issei, these Americans fell victim to a racist equation that confused their cultural identity with loyalty to Japan. While older, experienced Nisei writers might assert the integrity of a Japanese-American culture and identity, and did so in camp newspaper editorials and literary magazines in defiance of camp policies, younger Nisei saw cultural differences as barriers to their own acceptance. In his 1124
Minidoka Camp Diary, a young and understandably confused Ted Matsuda records this entry: July 3. Night before the Fourthcampaigning for favorite queenOdori (Japanese Folk Dancing) at night. I wonder what goes through the minds of those who are enthusiastic about Japanese dancing? Are they by these dances, trying to express their inclinations toward everything Japanese? When we are in Rome, we do as the Romans. When we are in America, is it too much to ask to do as Americans? As long as Japanese insist on dragging out Japanese customs, Americans are going to believe that we cannot be assimilated into American ways. (Twin Falls Times News, 1975)
FILIPINO-AMERICAN LITERATURE
European influence has been present in the Philippines since Magellan landed in Cebu in the middle of the sixteenth century. Since then, the Philippines have been infused with Spanish cultural elements that have manifested themselves in everything from food to religious worship. Conversion to Catholicism was an important factor in the colonization of the Philippines under Spain, perhaps because religious dogma and the fear of hell kept the peasant people in line when the conquistadors were not on guard. Thus, religion has been used, radical historians assert, as a paramilitary force in order to achieve a more complete colonization. This was true mostly for the peasant classes. In the upper classes, Catholicism was embraced along with the acquisition of skill in the Spanish language. Many of the newly created landed gentry were mixtures of indigenous Filipino and Spanish blood. Filipino literature in English has roots in the Philippines itself, where English constitutes a cultivated second language. Since 1898, when the Philippines became a protectorate of the United States, English has been used as the medium of instruction in the public schools. Not only was English the medium of instruction, but English and American literature were taught as the primary literature of aesthetic expression. Of Filipino immigrant authors in the United Statesgenerally, postWorld War I migrantswho addressed the migratory experience, Carlos Bulosan renders the finest socio-historical account of the lives of the Filipino immigrant workers. He depicts situations of internal colonization and labor exploitation. So prevalent are these situations in his major work, America Is in the Heart (1946), that it has been praised as social history. This novel, partly autobiographical and partly a documentary of Bulosans compatriots experiences in America, is an expression of the working-class immigrant experience. 1125
As a collection of anecdotes or personal oral histories, America Is in the Heart stands out as one of few documents of Filipino immigrant experience. As a literary piece, it combines Filipino mythological themes with social criticism and human affirmation. As a cultural carrier, it is explicit about Filipino values and emotional life. Much of the work is focused on the unfortunate experiences of its characters and on the bonds of affection that are developed between these characters as a result of an oppressive environment. The mythological essence of America Is in the Heart is the search for a sense of home in the promised land. The novel begins in an impoverished barrio in a province of the northern Philippines. Here anecdotal depictions of traditional village life and regional customs establish the primary conditions of the emigrant. If the impetus for the protagonists journey needs explication, it is presented in this part of the book. The journey is then followed from its point of departure to its cyclical end in the hearts of the protagonists compatriots and friends. As the title suggests, the promised land turns out to be a place in the heart; so the protagonist finds, at the end of his journey, that even in a dead-end situation there are compatriots in the same predicament who can reestablish his almost obliterated faith in the human race. The cultural consciousness of the immigrant experience, not to mention its detail and style, render this a remarkable work. A contemporary of Bulosans, poet Jos Garca Villa, exemplifies the acceptance of English/American literary forms and taste. His work is often metaphysical, bespeaking a universality that limns the human spirit rather than ethnicity. Villas accomplishments challenge those who promote the often unstated but deeply held notion that all immigrant writing must in some way reflect proletarian or ethnic purposes. An artist may produce beauty and, in doing so, elevate humanity in general as well as his own particular culture. The final two stanzas of Be Beautiful, Noble, Like the Antique Ant, reveal the Blakean quality of Villas art: Speak with great moderation: but think With great fierceness, burning passion: Though what the ant thought No annals reveal, nor his descendants Break the seal. Trace the tracelessness of the ant, Every ant has reached this perfection. As he comes, so he goes, Flowing as water flows, Essential but secret like a rose.
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The career of Jos Garca Villa points out the folly of trying to limit ethnic writers to the expression of cultural uniqueness or outrage at racism. Other writers of the Filipino-American earlier immigrant generations, like Villa, do not originate from the working classes, but the content of some of their novels and short stories are reflective of the immigrant working-class experience. The pathos of the community and the pathetic alienation of its individuals become themes in the works of N. V. M. Gonzales and Bienvenido Santoswinner of the 1981 American Book Prize who are the two most prominent figures in current Filipino-American literature in the United States. Many of the short stories and novels of Gonzales and Santos are reflective of the alienation in the lives of immigrant workers. Santoss short story The Scent of Apples, in fact, speaks of the alienated among the alienated, of Filipino working-class immigrants sans community. His Tomato Game addresses the despicable exploitation of a migrant worker by a fellow countryman who is a usurer of emotions as well as money. Gonzales, in The Popcorn Man and A Bread of Salt, skillfully addresses the Filipinos alienation even within his own colonized geographical context. In Philippine academic circles, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in folk epic and other poetry of the oral tradition. The study of folkliterature as art demonstrates that something remains which may be recognized by Filipino-Americans as indigenously Filipino, not Spanish or American, and testifies that a thread of indigenous culture remains continuous and intact in spite of a harsh history of colonization. Furthermore, if readers are to understand the literature of the Filipinos that is now being written in English, the oral and immigrant tradition cannot be ignored. It is a vital link in Filipino-American consciousness.
POST-WAR ASIAN-AMERICAN WRITING
The final lifting of racial restrictions on immigration to the United States in October 1966 completed more than two decades of evolving legislation that may, in the future, provide a stable base upon which successive generations of Asian immigrants can construct a cultural sensibility. Indeed, today Southeast Asia constitutes a major new source of migrants. Of course, not all Asian-Americans seek to retain or build a unique cultural identity. Most simply seek to be accepted as Americans: the immigrants constant quest for assimilation wars with lingering racism and nativism. Asian-American literature published during the post-war period incorporates the time of exclusion and finds themes and issues reflective of a halfcentury of isolation. Dr. Kazuo Miyamoto, a Nisei born in Hawaii in 1899, attempted in 1964 the narrative reconstruction of Japanese-American his-
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tory. Not actually set in the classic West, Hawaii: End of the Rainbow was written and published after the camps; Miyamoto blends the social history of the pre-war Issei and Nisei into this biographic fiction to dramatize and celebrate the compact between the immigrants and their children. Hawaii, of course, served as a halfway point for Japanese who later migrated to the American mainland. Miyamoto speaks to an Issei vision of Japanese America that hopes to produce an American integrity and tradition that will survive in American history. The realization of the inevitable extinction of Japanese-Americans as a people is evidenced in this book in a major character, the grandson, who is happa, half-white. Racial blending is a major concern of AsianAmerican writers. Perhaps the finest single novel by a Japanese-American is John Okadas powerful, uncompromising No-No Boy (1957). The novel traces the experiences of a Nisei, Ichiro, who refuses to be inducted into the armed forces, choosing prison instead. His best friend is Kenji, a war hero with a medal and one missing leg. Ichiro returns to Seattle after the war, to a world in which everything he touches and loves dies, is killed, or goes mad. The internment has shattered the lives of these Americans, humiliated them in their own country. Thinks Ichiro: . . . I wish with all my heart that I were Japanese or that I were American. I am neither and . . . I blame the world which is made up of many [countries] which fight with each other and kill and hate and destroy again and again and again. As the editors of Aiiieeeee! point out, The distinction between social history and literature is a tricky one, especially when dealing with the literature of an emerging sensibility. No-No Boy is successful on both levels, for Okada avoids polemic overstatements while not avoiding the truth of racial self-doubt that was produced by Americas concentration camps. It is a devastating book. Another strong novel is Richard Kims The Martyred (1964)by far the finest literary work yet produced by a Korean-American. It is set in Korea during the war which involved both the United States and Kims native land. Like Okadas work, The Martyred is both powerful and understated. Since it is not set in the West, The Martyred must be viewed as an example of Asian Americas cultural dynamism rather than a specific example of western writing. The Immigration Acts of 1943 and 1946 allowed a quota of Chinese immigrants and resident aliens to establish themselves legally in America. With that opportunity Chinatowns began their gradual transition to familybased societies that established legal and financial security as employment 1128
and educational opportunities developed. A new cultural sensibility also emerged that sought recognition rather than the narrowly defined terms of acceptance offered by Christian conversion and commitment to American values. Some writing during this period examines Americas understanding of the Chinese, though without touching on the experience of the Chinese in America. The early works of Han Suyin, for example, carry themes of cultural conflict in the example of her Eurasian protagonists. Diana Changs Frontiers of Love (1956) also speaks to this issue. These works are set in China. The popular success of C. Y. Lees play Flower Drum Song (1957) established the idea that immigration laws created problems for ChineseAmericans. The work, however, is a musical burlesque and continues to support the stereotype of a community divided equally between those who adhere to Chinese ways and those who do not. In 1961, Eat a Bowl of Tea was published. Louis Chu captured the setting and social sensibilities of this isolated ethnic community on the verge of transition, and his novel was the first work since Edith Eatons early portrayals of the Chinatowns of the West to provide an accurate view of Chinatown, its culture and language, its bachelor institutions and prejudices. Eat a Bowl of Tea, while set in the East, extrapolates to the West because it is the only work to represent this experience from a sensibility formed in a Chinatown milieu. The rejection of popular stereotypes as models for expected and acceptable behavior, and a universally expressed desire to recover the fact and circumstances of Chinese-American history and culture, characterize ChineseAmerican writing during the two decades since the publication of Eat a Bowl of Tea. Frank Chin is representative of radicalized writers seeking to forge an ethnic identity for Chinese-Americans from the welter of popular stereotypes, personal experience, and the recoverable history and culture of the Chinese immigrants two generations past. Chin includes the following dialogue in a short story, published in Contact Magazine (1962), Food for All His Dead. Dont you know theres no such thing as a real Chinaman in all of America? That all we are are American Indians cashing in on a fad? Fad? Don call me fad. You fad youself. No, youre not Chinese, dont you understand? You see it all started when a bunch of Indians wanted to quit being Indians and fighting the cavalry and all, so they left the reservation, see? Inian? And they saw that there was this big kick about Chinamen, 1129
so they braided their hair into queues and opened up laundries and restaurants and started reading Margaret Mead and Confucius and Pearl Buck and became respectable Chinamen and gained some self-respect! Chinamong! You battah not say Chinamong. But the reservation instinct stuck, years of tradition, you see? Something about needing more than one Indian to pull off a good rain dance or something, so they made Chinatown! And here we are! With the production of Chins first play, The Chickencoop Chinaman, at the American Place Theatre in New York (19731975), the literary sensibility of the Chinatown enclaves established a place for itself in American literature. The publication of works such as Maxine Hong Kingstons widely read Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) asserts the significance of Chinese America in its third generation, attempting to define for itself terms of acculturation that allow respect for the cultural traditions brought to this country by the early immigrants. Hong Kingston, Americas first major writer of Chinese ancestry, breaks existing paradigms by the strength of her original, dynamic fiction. In China Men, which Linda Ching Sledge calls a cultural literary epic, Hong Kingston writes: You say with the few words and the silence: no stories. No past. No China (p. 9). With her own powerful prose, she has at last and eloquently broken that silence: Yes stories. Yes past. Yes China. Shawn Wong also represents Chinese America coming to terms with its already-long traditions. In his Home Base (1978), the narrator is a fifthgeneration Chinese-American with vivid legendary memories of his ancestors working railroad gangs in the Sierras. One of the books major themes is his sense of rootedness in Americas western landscape. Another important volume, Ruthanne Lum McCunns Thousand Pieces of Gold (1981), is a roughhewn but powerful novelized biography of a Chinese pioneer woman who arrived in Idaho in the 1870s. No similar movement to encourage an examination of the social and cultural sensibilities of the past is evident in writing by Japanese-Americans during the past two decades. They show a propensity to dwell on the concentration camps as a symbol of discontinuity, which is certainly understandable; but very few Japanese-American writers venture, for example, characterizations of the Issei. Where the Issei appear in contemporary writings, they border on the grotesque. The Issei become the stubborn elderly who refuse public rest homes and engender guilt, as in Lonny Konekos and Amy Tsembos play, Lady Is Dying. 1130
The sharp division between the Nisei who experienced the camps and their Sansei children, who militantly aim to recall what their parents wish to deny, is also a theme that recurs in much Sansei writing today. In an early poem, titled Japs, Lawson Inada speaks to the unresolved self-contempt engendered by the camp experience. This continues a theme left unresolved by writers like John Okada and Hisaye Yamamoto of a generation before: . . . Their tongues are yellow with rs, with ls. They hate themselves, on the sly. I used to be Japanese. Inadas Before the War (1971) represents the first volume of poetry by a Japanese-American released by a major publishing company, and shows a sensibility unlike anything conventionally expected from a JapaneseAmerican poet. (Reviewers point out Inadas early interest in jazz and rhythm and blues.) Although not altogether a representative survey of Japanese-American writing, Ayumi, an anthology published in 1981, is the best collection presently available. The anthology does include many well-known JapaneseAmerican writers: Wakano Yamauchi, Toshio Mori, Sue Kumitomi Embry, Janice Mirikitani, Garrett Hongo, Yamamoto and Inada, among others. Its most powerful selections deal with World War II relocation camp experiences. As Ed Iwata points out, the volume is deficient in dealing with rising political consciousness and with assimilation, but it does redress one wrong: It was believed by many readersincluding Japanese Americansthat literature coloring and documenting their experiences in the country was anemic. With the publication of Ayumi, Iwata points out, a book is now available for those who wish to study the psyche, the heart and soul of Japanese Americans. One writer not included in Ayumi, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, is among the most widely read contemporary Japanese-American voices. With her husband, novelist James D. Houston, she co-authored one of the finest literary products of the relocation camp experience, Farewell to Manzanar (1973). She has also contributed numerous articles to journals, including the much-reprinted Farewell to Momma: Perspectives on Asian-American 1131
Womanhood, which explores, among other things, the sometimes-tabooed topic of racial blending. Filipino-American writers, relatively quiescent after the careers of Bulosan and Villa, have only recently moved once more to the fore. Motivated by the general climate of ethnic awareness as well as by a growth of scholarly interest in things uniquely Filipinoespecially in Philippine universitiesa cultural renaissance is underway, as evidenced by the new, more ethnically accurate spelling Pilipino. Ben Santos is its acknowledged leader, and younger writers such as Sam Tagatac, Al Robles and Oscar Pearanda are emerging. Tagatacs contemporary consciousness and effective style are exemplified in his story, The New Anak: . . . On the horizon, that which he steadily plows toward, he sees the tree he planted, and still beyond it, the windmill and pale house. Una the beautiful Mexican girl has married Roman of Visaya . . . she is considered white and he has no tail. She learns to speak English and some Philipino. Ai Aanako, Roman says to his son when Nam is created for his children and they leave to seek their ancestry. In the past two decades, a small body of critical literature devoted to the recovery and analysis of Asian-American writing has developed, much of it produced in Asian-American Studies programs at West Coast universities. Its tone has tended to be proletarian, marking the newfound surge in political consciousness and aggressive ethnic pride that arose during the late 1960s and prompted the development of such programs. These scholars are interested not merely in Asian or American cultures, but in what is uniquely Asian-American. Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, edited by Chin, Inada, et al., marks the first collection of work written from this perspective. But Asian America is complex and dynamic. Perhaps predictably, the militant ethnicity and the quest for a recoverable social history as well as for unique aesthetics come at a time when assimilation, rising intermarriage with other races, the breakdown of Asian-American neighborhoods, and other social forces are chipping away steadily at the identity many scholars work to understand and honor. It also comes at a time when a new wave of Asian migrants, the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, are joining Americas cultural stew. In the dynamics of assimilation and change may exist the seeds of future Asian-American expression, for young artists are not only rooting out the remnants of negative stereotyping, they are assert-
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ing their unique vision of America, producing more, and more candid, literature than ever before.
J EFFERY P AUL C HAN and M ARILYN C. ALQUILOZA
San Francisco State University
with supplementary material provided by the editors
Critical Studies and Anthologies Adachi, Jeff. Yancha: A Collection of Short Stories and Poems from an Asian American Sansei Experience. Los Angeles: n.p., 1980. Adams, William, et al., eds. Asian American Authors. Multi-Ethnic Literature Series. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Agcaoili, T. D., ed. Philippine Writing: An Anthology. Reprint of 1953 edition. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood, 1971. Alcantara, Ruben R. Sakada: Filipino Adaptation in Hawaii. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981. Asian Students Association. Homegrown: Asian American Experience from the Pacific Northwest. Seattle: University of Washington, 1980. Casper, Leonard. New Writing from the Philippines: A Critique. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1966. Chang, C. J. Chinese and Literature. East/West, March 18, March 25, and April 1, 1970. Chin, Frank, et al., eds. Aiiieeeee! Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. . The Big Aiiieeeee. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982. Chin, Frank. Chinamen, Chinks and the CACA. East/West, Feb. 11 and Feb. 18, 1970.
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A Literary History of the American West , and Jeffery Paul Chan. Racist Love. In Seeing Through Shuck, edited by Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Chong-wha, Chung. Meetings and Farewells: Modern Korean Studies. New York: St. Martin, 1980. Choy, Bong-Yong. Koreans in America. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979. Daniels, Roger, ed. Asian Experience in North America Series. 47 volumes. Salem, New Hampshire: Arno Press, 1979. Dunn, Lynn P. Asian Americans: A Study Guide and Source Book. Palo Alto: R & E Research Associates, 1975. Ethnic Writers Conference; Seaattle, Washington. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1976. Fisher, Dexter, ed. The Third Woman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Franke, Wolfgang. China and the West. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Gee, Emma. Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center of UCLA, 1976. Givens, Helen L. The Korean Community in Los Angeles. Palo Alto: R & E Research Associates, 1974. Hanai: An Anthology of Asian American Writings. Berkeley: University of California, 1980. Hardy, Tom. Gidra: A Year Old, a Year Bold. East/West, May 13, 1970. Haslam, Gerald. The Forgotten Pages of American Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. . The Subtle Thread: Asian-American Literature. Arizona Quarterly 25 (Autumn 1969). . Three Exotic: Noguchi, Tsunieshi, and Hartmann. CLA Journal 21 (Fall 1976). Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki. Beyond Manzanar: A Personal View of AsianAmerican Womanhood, in Asian Americans, edited by Stanley Sue. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, 1980. Hundley, Norris, Jr., ed. Asian American: The Historical Experience. Santa Barbara: American Bibliographical Center-Clio Press, 1976. Ito, Kazuo. Issei: A History of Issei Immigration in North America. Seattle: Japanese Community Service, 1973. Kim, Elaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Kim, Hyung-chan, ed. The Korean Diaspora: Historical and Sociological Studies of Korean Immigration and Assimilation in North America. Santa Barbara: American Bibliographical Center-Clio Press, 1977. Knoll, Tricia. Becoming Americans: Asian Sojourners, Immigrants and Refugees in the Western United States. Portland: Coast to Coast, 1982. Lee, Peter H. Songs of Flying Dragons. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monographs Series: No. 22. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Manuel, Esperanza, and Resil Mojares, eds. Philippine Literature in English. Detroit: Cellar Bookshop, 1973.
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Melendy, H. Brett. Asians in America: Filipinos, Koreans and East Indians. Immigrant Heritage of America Series. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Mirikitani, Janice, ed. Ayumi: Japanese American Anthology. San Francisco: Japanese American Anthology Committee, 1980. . Time to Greez: Incantations from the Third World. San Francisco: Glide/Third World Communications, 1975. Ogawa, Dennis. From Japs to Japanese: The Evolution of Japanese-American Stereotypes. Berkeley: McCutchan Publishing, 1971. Okamoto, Daniel. American in Disguise. New York: John Weatherhill, 1971. Roseburg, Arturo G., ed. Pathways to Philippine Literature in English. Quezon City, Philippines: Alemar-Phoenix Publishing, 1966. San Juan, E., Jr. Introduction to Modern Pilipino Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1974. Santos, Bienvenido N. The Filipino in Exile. Greenfield Review 6 (Spring 1977). Smith, William C. Americans in Process: A Study of Our Citizens of Oriental Ancestry. American Immigration Collection, Series 2. Reprint of 1937 edition. Salem, N.H.: Arno, 1970. Sung, Betty Lee. Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese in America. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Tachiki, Amy, et al., eds. Roots: An Asian American Reader. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center of UCLA, 1971. Tong, Te-Kong, and Robert Wu. The Third Americans: A Select Bibliography on Asians in America, with Annotations. Oak Park, Ill. : CHCUS Press, 1980. Wand, David H., ed. Asian American Heritage. New York: Washington Square Press, 1974. Wong, James I. A Selected Bibliography on the Asians in America. Palo Alto: R & E Research Associates, 1981. Wu, William. The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction; 18501940. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1980. Newspaper and Journal Sources Amerasia Journal. Asian American Studies Center of UCLA. Bamboo Ridge: Hawaii Writers Quarterly. Honolulu. Bridge: Asian American Perspectives. (Also called Bridge Magazine ). The Basement Workshop, New York. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. San Francisco. Bulletin of the Chinese Historical Society of America. San Francisco. East/West: The Chinese-American Journal. San Francisco. Echoes from Gold Mountain: An Asian American Journal. Long Beach, California. Filipino American World. Washington, D.C. Filipino Forum. Seattle, Washington. Korea Week. Washington, D.C. MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Los Angeles, UCLA. Rafu Shimpo. Los Angeles.
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A Literary History of the American West Asian-American Writers: Chinese Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei. Random Possession. New York: Ishmael Reed, 1979. . The Summits Move with the Tide. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1974. Chan, Jeffery Paul. Eli, Eli. Occident (Spring 1965). . Jackrabbit. Yardbird Reader III (1974). Chang, Diana. Frontiers of Love. New York: Random House, 1956. Chin, Frank. The Chickencoop Chinaman and the Year of the Dragon. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. . The Chinatown Kid. In Cutting Edges: Young American Fiction for the 70s. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973. . Confessions of a Number One Son. Ramparts 11 (March 1973). . The Eat and Run Midnight People. Chouteau Review 1 (Fall-Winter 1976). . Food for All His Dead. Contact 3 (Aug. 1962). Anthologized in The Young American Writers: Fiction, Poetry, Drama and Criticism, edited by Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Ultramarine Publishing, 1967); also in The Urban Reader, edited by Susan Cahill and Michele Cooper (New York: PrenticeHall, 1971). . From A Chinese Lady Dies, a novel excerpt. Carolina Quarterly 24 (Winter 1972). . Yes, Young Daddy. Panache (1971). Anthologized in In Youth, edited by Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Ballantine, 1972). . Various essays, 19681978, published in both The Seattle Times and The Weekly newspapers of Seattle. Chu, Louis. Eat a Bowl of Tea. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961. Republished, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980. Eaton, Edith Maud. Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1912. Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. . Woman Warrior. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Republished as Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, New York: Random House, 1977. Kuo, Alexander. New Letters from Hiroshima. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1976. Lau, Alan Chong. Songs for Jadina. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1980. Lee, C. Y. Flower Drum Song. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957. . Land of the Golden Mountain. New York: Meredith, 1967. Lee, Virginia. The House That Tai Ming Built. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Leong, George. A Lone Bamboo Doesnt Come from Jackson St. San Francisco: Isthmus Press, 1977. Leong, Monfoon. Number One Son. San Francisco: East/West Press, 1975. Lin, Yutang. Chinatown Family, a Novel. New York: John Day, 1948. Rpt. Beaverton, Ore.: International Scholarly Book Services, 1980. Lord, Bette Bao. Spring Moon: A Novel of China. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Lowe, Pardee. Father and Glorious Descendant. Boston: Little, Brown, 1943.
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McCunn, Ruthanne Lum. Thousand Pieces of Gold. San Francisco: Design Enterprises, 1981. Telemaque, Eleanor Wong. Its Crazy to Stay Chinese in Minnesota. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1978. Tsung, L. C. The Marginal Man. New York: Pageant Press, 1963. Wong, Jade Snow. Fifth Chinese Daughter. New York: Harper & Row, 1950. . No Chinese Stranger. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Wong, Nellie. Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1977. Wong, Shawn Hsu. Homebase. Berkeley: Ishmael Reed Books, 1979. Yep, Laurence. Child of the Owl. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. . Dragonwings. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Yung, Judy, et al., eds. Island: Poetry & History of Chinese Immigrants of Angel Island, 19101940. San Francisco: Hoc Doi Project of the San Francisco Study Center, 1980. Yung, Wing. My Life in China and America. New York: H. Holt, 1909. Asian-American Writers: Japanese Aoqawa, Joy, Aubasan, a Novel. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1981. Hosokawa, Bill. Nisei: The Quiet Americans. New York: Morrow, 1969. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Farewell to Manzanar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Inada, Lawson. Before the War. New York: William Morrow, 1971. Kafu, Nagai. An Early Account of Japanese Life in the Pacific Northwest: Writings of Nagai Kafu. Edited and translated by Stephen W. Kohl. Pacific Northwest Quarterly 70 (April 1979). Kawakami, Iwao. The Parents and Other Poems. San Francisco: Nichi Bei Times, 1947. Kikuchi, Charles. Kikuchi Diary. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Kikumura, Akemi. Through Harsh Winters. Navato, Ca.: Chandler & Sharpe, 1982. Kitagawa, Daisuki. lssei and Nisei: The Internment Years. New York: The Seabury Press, 1967. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1982. Kudaka, Geraldine. Numerous Avalanches at the Point of Intersection. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1979. Matsuoka, Jack. Camp II, Block 211: Daily Life in an Internment Camp. San Francisco: Japan Publications, 1974. Mirikitani, Janice. Awake in the River. San Francisco: Isthmus Press, 1978. Miyakawa, Edward. Tule Lake. Waldport, Ore.: House by the Sea Publishing, 1979. Miyamoto, Kazuo. Hawaii: End of the Rainbow. Rutland, Vt.: Charles Tuttle, 1964. Mori, Toshio. The Chauvinist. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center of UCLA, 1979. . Woman from Hiroshima. San Francisco: Isthmus Press, 1980. . Yokohama, California. Caldwell, Id. : Caxton Press, 1949. Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body. San Francisco: Supa Press, 1975. Okada, John. No-No Boy. Rutland, Vt.: Charles Tuttle, 1957. Republished, Seattle: University Of Washington Press, 1979.
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A Literary History of the American West Okubo, Mine. Citizen 13660. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946. Shirota, Jon. Lucky Come Hawaii. New York: Bantam Press, 1965. . Pineapple White. Burbank: Ohara Publications, 1972. Sone, Monica. Nisei Daughter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953. Republished, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980. Tanaka, Ronald. The Shino Suite. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1981. Uchida, Yoshiko. Desert Exile. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. . Journey Home. New York: Atheneum, 1978. . Journey to Topaz. Rutland, Vt. : Charles Tuttle, 1971. Yamada, Mitsuye. Camp Notes and Other Poems. Berkeley: Shameless Hussy Press, 1976. Yamamoto, Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables. Ethnic American Short Stories. New York: Washington Square Press, 1975. Yamauchi, Wakako. The Sensei. Yardbird Reader III (1974). Asian-American Writers: Filipino Bernard, Miguel A. The Lights of Broadway and Other Essays: Reflections of a Filipino Traveler. Detroit: Cellar Bookshop, 1981. Buaken, Manuel. I Have Lived with the American People. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press, 1948. Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1946. Republished, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973. . Letter from America. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942. . Sound of Falling Light. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960. Lava, Juan Cabreros. His Native Soil. Manila: University Publishing, 1941. Santos, Bienvenido N. The Day the Dancers Came. Manila: Bookmark, 1967. . The Praying Man: A Novel. Quezon City, Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1982. . Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967. . Solomon King, excerpts from The Man Who ( Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor. Manila Review 1 (April 1975). . You Lovely People. Detroit: Cellar Bookshop, 1978. Villa, Jos Garca. Appassionata: Poems in Praise of Love. New York: King & Cohen, 1979. . Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others. New York: Scribners, 1933. . Poems 55. Manila: A. S. Florentino, 1962. Asian-American Writers: Korean Kim, Richard. The Martyred. New York: George Braziller, 1964. Pahk, Induk. September Monkey. New York: Harper, 1954.
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Afro-American Writers in the West

of New Mexico was celebrated in 1940 the first non-Indian to explore the region, an African named Esteban de Dorantes, was ignored. In 1779, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a man of mixed ancestry, established a trading post that is considered the founding of Chicago; although he was traditionally portrayed as European, local Indians later told visitors that the first white man to come to the area was black. Those two Afro-American pioneers by no means stand alone: Lewis and Clark were accompanied by a Negro slave, York, a major figure in the journey. Mountain man Jim Beckwourth was adopted by the Crows. One of the most dramatic events in frontier history was the Exodus of 1879, which brought over twenty thousand blacks in search of opportunity to Kansas from the south. The fabled Bill Pickett is credited with perfecting bulldogging, and some rodeo aficionados consider Jesse Stahl the greatest of all bronc riders; neither is surprising when one considers that approximately five thousand black cowboys rode the cattle trails. At about the same time, the Negro troopers of the Ninth and Tenth Regimentscalled buffalo soldiers because of their haircomprised twenty percent of the U.S. Cavalry in the West. Blacks were continually and intimately involved in the opening of the West. In large measure, they had even more reason to migrate to the great American desert than did their white counterparts who, though frequently poor, did not suffer the scourge of discrimination. As diplomat and author James Weldon Johnson summed it up in 1925, Your west is giving the Negro a better deal than any other section of the country . . . there is more opportunity for my race, and less prejudice against it in this section of the country than anywhere else in the United States (Denver Post, June 24, 1925). There is no reason to suppose that the Wests tolerance was based upon moral insightThe black migrant to the frontier soon found he had no hiding place from traditional American attitudes, writes William Loren Katzyet the lack of institutionalized racism, the vast tracts of open land that kept blacks from concentrating in threatening numbers, and the pragmatic willingness to accept persons for what they could do rather than where their ancestors were born all contributed to a relatively liberal atmosphere. As a result, it is no surprise to learn that on April 22, 1889, when
HEN THE QUATTRO-CENTENNIAL
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the vast region now called Oklahoma was officially opened to settlers, not only were buffalo soldiers on duty to prevent sooners from jumping the gun, but an estimated ten thousand blacks raced to stake their claims. Those are, of course, only high points of Negro involvement in the American frontier, but when Ray Allen Billingtons otherwise excellent Westward Expansion was published in 1967, none of its nearly one thousand pages contained references to black westerners. They were invisible frontiersmen. Black pioneers have had plenty to write about but, like westerners in general, they did not have the leisure or the training to do so during the early years of settlement. Thanks to historians such as Katz ( The Black West, 1971), Sherman Savage (Blacks in the West, 1976), William H. Leckie (The Buffalo Soldiers, 1967), Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones (The Negro Cowboys, 1965), and Kenneth Wiggins Porter (The Negro on the American Frontier, 1970), their experiences have not been forgotten. As early as the end of the last century a significant black novelist emerged from the West. He was Sutton E. Griggs, a Texan who was very much a product of his time. Katz sums up the final decade of the nineteenth century this way: The 1890swhich saw the close of the frontierwas an era of immense change for black and white America. During the next twenty years in each southern state, including Texas and Oklahoma, segregation was codified. The populist movement, uniting black and white farmers against eastern exploiters, ended in bitter and bloody defeat for black hopes. The 1890s, which opened with the closing of the frontier, closed with the beginning of American imperialist expansion. . . . To justify the control of darker people abroad, white supremacy arguments again flooded the land. (pp. 299300) From that turbulent and tense period for non-whites emerged Griggs, who was destined to become the most widely read Negro novelist of the time in black communities. His novels have about them, despite their Victorian tone, their melodrama, and their repetition, a curiously contemporary sense. For example, black is beautiful; the hero of Unfettered (1902) is described this way: As to color he was black, but even those prejudiced to color forgot that prejudice when they gazed upon this ebony-like Apollo. The same books Negro heroine has eyes so full of soul. More startling, however, is the authors militancy. He was a loyal Texan who, in Imperium in Imperio (1899), demanded that the state be ceded to blacks. The novel begins when a Negro organization gathers in Waco to urge that blacks revolt openly to achieve 1140
AFRO-AMERICAN WRITERS IN THE WEST
the states surrender so it can be used as a refuge for blacks. It sounds like the 1960s. Born in the Lone Star State and educated at Bishop College there, Griggs wrote the first political novels by an Afro-American. While revealing miscegenation, oppression, and Jim-Crowism, the novels point out the need for an agency to protect the interests of Negroes. Because they promote the philosophy that produced the NAACP and certain government agencies of today, and because of their artistic deficiencies, the following volumes are of more interest to sociologists than to literary critics: Overshadowed (1901), The Hindered Hand (1905), Pointing the Way (1906), and the aforementioned Unfettered. Griggs is rightly considered the most neglected Negro writer of the period between the Spanish-American War and World War I. Second place goes to Oscar Micheaux of South Dakota. The novelist of the Midwest ranks no higher than his contemporary in the Southwest in establishment literary histories; he was also handicapped by not being in the South (where the black population was) or the East (where the publishers were). The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), Micheauxs first autobiographical novel, reveals the experiences of a Negro hero in the white world of the South Dakota frontier. His second novel, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races (1915), continues a trail blazing, autobiographical account of the Negro pioneer who leaves his farmlands to sell his novel in the South. The Homesteader (1917) is the last work of this period. After an absence during which he produced black movies, Micheaux reentered the writing and publishing field in 1941. After seven novels and thirty-four films, Micheaux died in 1951 in New York; unlike the heroes of his early novels, he neglected to go back to South Dakota to find happiness. Finally, one western black man born in the nineteenth century lived long enough to see his work recognized nationally. In 1933 J. Mason Brewer (18961975) began publishing poetry (Negrito ) and folklore (in the annual volumes of the Texas Folklore Society). He told editor J. Frank Dobie how unrepresentative the loudly-heralded Negro literature out of Harlem was, how fake both in psychology and language. He meant it was false to the southwestern black, but black writers in the West did not have the publishing opportunities of the Harlem Renaissance group. Brewers black folklore collection of the period did not reach a national audience until reprinted in The Book of Negro Folklore (1958), edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, both of whom had moved from the West to Harlem. By the 1950s, Brewers best work was being published by the University of Texas Press: The Word on the Brazos (1953) and Dog Ghosts and Other Texas Negro Folktales (1958). Several other volumes followed. When Quadrangle Books published his anthology American Negro Folklore (1968), 1141
Brewer gained a national reputation. The San Francisco Chronicle said: J. Mason Brewer can rank with any folklorist, regardless of skin pigmentation. Two Texas histories call him the states one Negro writer of importance, but he never gained the recognition of those who, like Hughes, left the West to reside in the East. Langston Hughes (19021967), the dean of black American letters, was born in Joplin, Missouri, and reared in Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas. From his extraordinary bibliography of multiple pages and multiple genres, a westerner would feel most at home with his first novel and many of the poems he eventually selected as his favorites. Not Without Laughter (1930) is a semi-autobiographical novel about a young mans early years in a small Kansas town. Called Poet Laureate of the Negro people in the fifties, Hughes chose his favorite poems from seven previous volumes in Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1959). Although he was a world traveler and peripatetic poet, a surprising number of poems refer to the American West or contain vivid images of it. A few poems show the black migration to the West from the Deep South. In West Texas the speaker says, But West Texas where the sun / Shines like the evil one / Aint no place / For a colored / Man to stay. In Sharecroppers you see why: Just a herd of Negroes / Driven to the field / Plowing, planting, hoeing, / To make the cotton yield. They are like a mule broke to a halter. This leads to OneWay Ticket: I pick up my life And take it on the train To Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake, Any place that is North and West . . . Hughes published so much that he asked Arna Bontemps to be coeditor of The Book of Negro Folklore and The Poetry of the Negro, 17461970, but Bontemps attained other fame alone. Not until he published Black Thunder (1936) and Drums at Dusk (1939) was there a first rate historical novel by and about Afro-Americans. The first is a fictionalized account of the abortive slave insurrection under Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, the latter about the successful insurrection under Toussaint LOuverture in Haiti. As a child Bontemps moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles and grew up on the outskirts of Watts, a move reflected in his latest work, The Old South (1973). Of the nine stories in this book, three excellent autobiographical ones (Why I Returned, The Cure, and 3 Pennies for Luck) are set in California; they are concerned with the authors family, especially an uncle who was the embodiment of Afro-American folk cul1142
ture. Bontempss early interest was poetry, some of which he published, but he never attained the status of his friend Hughes and the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks was taken to Chicago one month later; she is now one of the major poets of the United States. For Annie Allen (1949), a book of poetry, she won the Pulitzer Prize (an extraordinary event in black literature). Her eighth major volume of poetry, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971), is the best introduction to a poet whose range is phenomenalfrom polished sonnets to childrens verses, poems as good as any that have appeared in Afro-American literature. Following Carl Sandburg, Brooks is now Poet Laureate of Illinois, the state that played a large part in the westward movement of blacks. She has aided and inspired a whole school of young black midwestern poets, the outstanding ones being Arkansas-born Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhuti) and his colleagues in Third World Press and Broadside Press. What Gwendolyn Brooks is to black poetry, Ralph Ellison is to the black novel. He has produced the best black novel yet to appear in American literature, though it is his only one. Invisible Man (1952) won the National Book Award when published, and thirteen years later a poll of over two hundred authors, critics, and editors selected it as the most distinguished work published during the past twenty years. Today it is said that this novel has lifted black fiction to the highest level of artistic accomplishment that it has yet reached. Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914, and Oklahoma is the setting of three of his best short stories. Mister Toussan and That I Had Wings were published before Invisible Man (1952), while the more complex A Couple of Scalped Indians was published afterwards, but they, like a dozen other uncollected magazine stories, were written during his apprenticeship days as a writer. They have in common the same protagonists, Riley and Buster, two pre-teen boys whose intellectual and physical adventures in an Oklahoma black community are described with the developing style, symbolism, and satire that characterize Ellisons classic novel. Before Ellison, several black writers left the West to gain fame in the East. The major satirist of the Harlem Renaissance, Wallace Thurman was born in Salt Lake City. The Blacker the Berry (1929), a study of intraracial prejudice, has a blue-black heroine who grew up in Boise, Idaho. Like the author she soon heads for Harlem. New York is a favorite setting for black novels, but a few use the West. One set mainly in the state of Washington is well known for being a rare thing, a novel by a Negro about whites. William Attaways Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), a compelling novel in the tradition of John Steinbeck, tells the experiences of two white vagabonds who encounter a little Chicano boy in their wanderings around New 1143
Mexico, and he becomes the moving force of the story. As in Steinbecks Of Mice and Men (1937), a disastrous encounter with a woman sends the protagonists running. The trip from Yakima in a freezing boxcar over the Montana Rockies causes an infection in the boys hand to grow worse and he dies. The saddened vagrants head for Kansas, leaving his body in a boxcar. Steinbecks excellent portrayal of a black character, Crooks, is equalled by Attaways white men on the road. A comic western novel by a Negro about whites, A. Clayton Powell, Sr.s Picketing Hell (1942) is a fictitious narrative of white Tom Tern, who becomes a powerful preacher. Born in La Junta, Colorado, Tom has many unscrupulous adventures with a friend in his youth: The two sublimated their sex desires to stealing, fighting, gambling, and drinking. As a preacher he no longer sublimates; he has difficulty controlling the five or six women of the church . . . making frequent visits to the parsonage. When another preacher sweeps into tears his audience of western women, one observer states a theme of the novel: Religious and sex emotions are so closely related that they cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. All characters are white, but there is a curious racelessness of character, as was the case in Attaways novel. California alone could produce a volume on black contemporary writers, mostly those who chose to live there, such as Ernest J. Gaines and Ishmael Reed. Gaines, born on a Louisiana plantation in 1933, has spent his adult years in California, where he gained wide attention with superb short stories, collected in Bloodline (1968), and three novels, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). The television version of the latter sent readers to his earlier novels Catherine Carmier (1964) and Of Love and Dust (1967), which some critics found the best black novel of the decade. The most sensational of the contemporary California writers is Ishmael Reed. His reputation is based on two novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), and a book of poetry, Catechism of D Neo-American Hoodoo Church (1970). In the much-anthologized poem I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra, and in his second novel, Reed satirizes the Old Wests mans man heroism. The novel is set in the western town of Yellow Back Radio and features a black cowboy hero, the Loup Garow Kid, in a fantastic satire of the frontier myth. Reeds absurd humor is directed at blacks and whites; to him, there are no heroes in the Old West or the Ghetto. Several of Reeds contemporaries in California are promising writers, but the West is seldom their chosen locale. A peculiar avoidance of localization is a characteristic of all black literature, according to a black critic in Texas in 1980. Al Youngs novels certainly fit this pattern, as does 1144
the writing of Lorenzo Thomas. Thomas gives this reason: The oppressed condition of the black community has remained virtually the same in all localities. One clear exception to the rule, however, is the powerful California poet Sherley Anne Williams. While she can get down with the best black poets . . . us togetha in our own selves house in our own selves bed in the dark. The dark and ahhhhh. It be so good. Good to be beautiful to be real be for him to be more than one. Its enough. I know my man lovin the way I struts my stuff. she has also retained a strong sense of place, her place, the rural San Joaquin Valley that has produced so many memorable poets: Gary Soto, William Everson, Larry Levis, Frank Bidart, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, among others. Her plaint in North Country: A Dream Realized limns the cry of other western writers: I wish I had known this land before houses infected the hills and trail bikes slashed paths across their sides; before heat shimmered on miles of concrete roads (which lead to more roads that stop just short of somewhere) . . . Says Williams, Wherever I go, I always seem to find my way back to the Valley, a reality amply demonstrated by her poetry. Williamss ethnic verse, however, does demonstrate the continuity of black communities in the Old West with those in the rest of the country. There exists no western slavery or antislavery literary tradition, since those were not slave states, but in the early writings, and some of those today, the authors are consistently aware of where black settlers came from, besides Africa. It is not unusual, then, that the black literature of the West fits Thomass two categories: one represents the black mans sense of loss, with some pessimism; the other represents his yearning for assimilation into the American mainstream, with some optimism. One is exemplified by the poetic allusion of Maya Angelous title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) and the other by Langston Hughess title I, Too, Sing America (1927). 1145
This essay has emphasized the past, with little room for such present-day authors as playwright Ed Bullins and poet Wanda Coleman, but black writers in the West must recall the motto of J. Mason Brewer: If we do not respect the past, the future will not respect us. The we refers to the young black writers of today who will realize that a new and longer essay is needed to include all of those who now contribute to the rich cultural heritage of blacks in the West.
JAMES W. BYRD,
East Texas State University
Primary Sources Attaway, William. Let Me Breathe Thunder. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939. Brewer, J. Mason. Dog Ghosts and The Word on the Brazos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. Brooks, Gwendolyn. The World of Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Gaines, Ernest J. Bloodline. New York: Dial, 1968. Griggs, Sutton E. Imperium in Imperio. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1965. Micheaux, Oscar. The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. Lincoln, Nebraska: Western Book Supply Company, 1913. Reed, lshmael. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. Garden City: Doubleday, 1969. Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry. New York: Macaulay, 1929. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Secondary Sources Gloster, Hugh M. Negro Voices in American Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948. This volume of early, mature scholarship is a first choice for a reader unfamiliar with black literature.
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Katz, William Loren. The Black West. Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. This documentary and pictorial history uses unpublished and rare manuscripts which provide background for the casual reader or literary scholar. Savage, W. Sherman. Blacks in the West. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976. While not dealing with literature primarily, Savage gives an excellent background for understanding the black writers who stayed in the West or who left for greener pastures. Turner, Darwin T. Afro-American Writers. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970. In Iowa, Turner has become an outstanding black critic of black literature. This bibliography, though brief, is a reliable and useful introduction to the field. Whitlow, Roger. Black American Literature. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1973. This is a useful, easy-to-read critical history with a 1500-title bibliography of works written by and about black Americans.
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Scandinavian Immigrant Literature

which have given expression to life and work in the prairies and plains states in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scandinavian immigrant writers have left a rich literary record of western farm life. Although immigrant writers did not focus exclusively on farm lifenovels, poems, and plays dealt with workers struggles in Minneapolis and Bohemian life in Chicago, for examplethe most significant literary contribution of the Scandinavian-Americans takes expression in novels and short stories, and traces the immigrants experience on the land. Over eighty novels and short story collections record the Scandinavians farmsteading the area of the country today known as the Midwest. The years 1850 to 1925from the early pioneer period to the groups twilight years as a thriving subcultureform the historical period the Scandinavian immigrant fiction describes. The fiction was written by those intimate with the harvest yields and hazards of the environment they describe; consequently, factual details and historical documentation dominate the early writing and lead to a particularly realistic fiction. If we analyze the immigrant fiction as a whole, a plot emerges which tells: 1) why the immigrants left Scandinavia; 2) the journey to the Scandinavian seaports, the voyage across the Atlantic, and the problems encountered in America before reaching their destination; 3) the hardships of breaking prairie sod and establishing a productive farm; 4) the emotional and psychological traumas caused by the immigrants loneliness and fear of life in the West; 5) the gradual development of family farms and of religious, political, and social institutions in infant communities; 6) the rising conflicts between Scandinavian and American values, usually portrayed as a clash between the nurturing spiritual heritage of the old world and the corruption of new world materialism; 7) the difficulties of making value choices as expressed through the experiences of immigrant children in the American common schools; and 8) the second generations alienation from the first, and third from the second, as young people search for meaningful values. While most immigrant writers document this set of experiences, individual artistic abilities vary. Only a few writers possessed the literary talent to evoke the emotional and psychological complexity of the immigrants life in the West, although many writers create interesting and dramatic scenes in their fiction. However, all immigrant writers, whether of major or minor stature, helped produce a collective, imaginative world which exMONG THE VOICES
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SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANT LITERATURE
presses the sacrifices and aspirations of the immigrant group. Thus all contributed to establishing a literary tradition, refined and vitalized by the best immigrant writers. As the above themes suggest, Scandinavian immigrant fiction has a dual-world orientation. The immigrants interpretation of the American experience was influenced by their European background. Contrary to the Adamic myth of Americans at the dawn of a new history, cut off from old world corruption and the heavy yoke of tradition, the immigrants who settled the West treasured, and transplanted in new soil, the European institutions they had to leave. The fiction describes the immigrants attempts to incorporate and adapt old world institutions to new world conditions. The immigrants embraced the concepts of democracy, equality, and independence associated with the life of frontier farmers; but the geographical fact of vast open spaceswhich gives rise to the political and social concept of freedom embodied by the American Westalso threatened a people with a culture and tradition to maintain. Therefore, the fiction shows the immigrant response to the western experience as ambivalent: the opportunity to work for material progress is applauded, but the lack of established social, religious, political, and cultural institutions is shown as having limiting, destructive, and tragic consequences. Immigrants first described their lives in the American West in guide books, travel accounts, journals, diaries, and American letters, literary forms which served as prototypes for an emerging fiction. In fact, the themes, settings, and characters which predominate in the fiction parallel the events, places, and types of people described in the letters. In the fiction, of course, events are narrated for their dramatic effect and time is telescoped to provide an overview of the immigrant experience. But even so, authors of early fiction insisted on the authenticity of their stories, often intruding on the narrative to tell the reader that they are recording actual observations or events. If the letters served as a source material for immigrant literature, the flourishing immigrant press was the medium which brought the literature into being. Besides helping to make the immigrants a more literate people, and therefore a more sophisticated reading audience, the newspapers helped the immigrants develop certain tastes and expectations about the function and merit of literature. By the 1860s, immigrant newspapers were serializing the fiction of such Scandinavian writers as Bjrnsjerne Bjrnson and H. C. Andersen, and, in translation, authors like James Fenimore Cooper and Charles Dickens. These serials proved popular with readers and stimulated immigrant writers in their own literary efforts. The newspapers also provided a market for fiction written by the immigrants themselves: thus the first Norwegian immigrant novel, Alf Brage eller skolelaereren i Minnesota: En 1149
original norsk-amerkansk fortelling (Alf Brage, or the Schoolteacher in Minnesota: An Original Norwegian-American Story) by Nicolai Severin Hassel, was published in the periodical For hjemmet (For the Home) in 1874, and was successful enough to warrant a sequel. Three years later, Tellef Grundysen published a novel entitled Fra begge sider av havet (From Both Sides of the Ocean), which exhibits a romantic strain in the section of the book using an old world setting and simple realism in its description of the immigrants daily activities in Minnesota. Following these pioneering works, an essay was published by Bernt Askevold in the periodical Budstikken (Nov. 14, 21, 1876), which outlined steps for a sound literature and recommended that a good literary periodical be established. As early as 1876, then, creating an immigrant literature was a public issue among the Norwegian-Americans. By 1884, H. A. Foss enjoyed great success when Husmundsgutten (The Cotters Son) was serialized in Decorah-posten the papers circulation increased by six thousand copies when the story was published, and editors took note of the economic clout 1 of a big seller. Soon several newspapers began to carry literary supplements. Literary magazines such as Husbibliothek (Home Library), Ved Arnen (By the Fireside), and later Prarieblomman kalender (The Prairie Flower Calendar) published essays, biographies, short stories, travel sketches, serials, and poems, as well as the work of Scandinavian writers and translations of American poets. Several of the early immigrant novels make use of a formula developed in the widely popular En glad gut (A Happy Boy, 1859) by Norwegian au2 thor Bjrnsjerne Bjrnson. The themes of class mobility and individual worth in this novel expressed the dreams of the farm labor classes who emigrated to America, and immigrant writers such as Ole Buslett in Fram (Forward, 1880) and H. A. Foss in Husmandsgutten adopt the characterization of the farm laborer as hero, and show him making his fortune in America, returning to Scandinavia to buy the farm where he once labored, andin true fairy tale fashionmarrying the aristocratic landowners daughter. These novels served as wish-fulfillment for the immigrants, and the convention remained popular for as long as the immigrants were writing fiction. But these wish-fulfillment romances do not typify the essential nature of immigrant fiction. The focus of the major writers is on immigrants working the land and trying to survive in this country. In the 1880s and 90s, several writers emergedKristofer Janson, Peer Strmme, Adam Dan, Kristian stergaard, and Carl Hansenwho critically examine immigrant life on the prairies. Kristofer Janson originally came to the immigrant communities as a guest lecturer from Norway, but he was not just a Scandinavian visitor ob1150
serving the colonieshe emigrated in 1880 and spent thirteen of his 3 most productive years working among the immigrants. He served as a role model and inspired potential immigrant writers with his lectures. He also organized reading clubs and lectured on contemporary Scandinavian literature. As a creative writer, he dramatized the relationship between settlers and Synod ministers, exposing the intolerance of orthodoxy and the dehumanizing sides of immigrant farm life. This last contribution is especially important, for the major immigrant fiction stresses at what cost the prairies were settled and farmers made prosperous. Thus Janson is a precursor for later writers. One of his short story collections, Praeriens saga (Saga of the Prairies, 1885), attacks the intolerance and self-righteousness of the Norwegian Lutheran Synod by exposing how peoples lives are made miserable by rigid orthodoxy. In one story, Wives Submit Yourselves unto Your Husbands, Janson dramatizes the toll of homesteading life on marriage, especially on the wifes emotional and physical strength. The husbands obsession with material prosperity makes him greedy, narrow-minded, and mean; finally, the wife is valued only as a draft animal. While trying to flee her husbands brutality, the wife is forced to return to her spouse and children by her local minister, who quotes her Scripture about her duties. Unable to carry on her bleak life, the woman drowns herself and her infant child. Often using his fiction as a pulpit, Janson effectively dramatizes his moral criticisms. He blames Synod ministers for failing to provide the intellectual nourishment sensitive immigrants needed to survive the drudgery and loneliness of homesteading. Jansons stories illustrate how Synod ministers condemned and quashed liberating views aired in newspapers and common schools. His stories portray the Synod maintaining its authority by keeping the immigrants ignorant and fearful. From Jansons perspective, religious authoritarianism prevents immigrants from pursuing a life of the mind, and thereby keeps them all-absorbed in their push for material wealth. Jansons characters are trapped by the land, which drains them and makes them brute beasts of burden, and by rigid Synod doctrine, according to which their corrupt human nature locks them into sin. Another author who often feels impelled to sermonize in his fiction is Danish-American writer Adam Dan. In Praerierosen (The Prairie Rose, 1892), Dan illustrates the twisted, guilt-wracked lives led by those who worship a hard Old Testament God. The stern discipline of the Old Testament leads to monotonous, idea-forsaken lives; women especially have a bleak mission, to work faithfully, endure painful childbirth, then work hard 4 again until [they are] worn out. Although a good storyteller, Dans narrative voice is uneven; the reader moves in and out of a fictional world, from the thoughts of characters to the direct expression of the author. This 1151
confusion is a result of his didactic approach to fiction, a problem Dan shares with many early authors. They cannot keep their own voice out of the fiction: frequently they intrude on the narrative to make sure we have not missed the point; or to enlarge the argument; or to provide the scene with a theoretical background; or to place a specific incident in the fiction in its larger historical context. However, despite his propensity for dogmatic melodrama, Dan analyzes the effects of the old dogma and reaches conclusions similar to Jansons: orthodoxy leads to bitter, sterile lives and crushes sensitive personalities who cannot suppress their emotions. Perhaps the pioneer generation needed a stern God whose judgments reflected the hardships of their own lives. But Dan and Janson are convinced that the immigrant group needs a more compassionate religion. They are ultimately pessimistic about the farm experience, for they show that only by escaping the confining settlement can characters lead fulfilled lives. Those who conform are crushed by dogma and convention. Thus the piety of the immigrant farmer is exposed as a kind of tragic flaw, for it embodies an arrogance and self-righteousness which victimizes those who try to break free of conservative influence. Most important, it victimizes the farmers themselves, for their intellectual and emotional lives are stunted. Norwegian-American writer Peer Strmme consciously determined to avoid both the polemics of Janson and Dan and the romanticizing of the wish-fulfillment genre. His book, Hvorledes Halvor blev prest (How Halvor Became a Minister, 1893), explores major themes in immigrant fiction: voyage to America; lure of the garden; settling and assimilating into a new culture; hardship and tragedy of farm life; development of community institutions; and the education issue. Strmme successfully describes external events; his settings are detailed, informative, and true to life. But he seldom explores the environments effect on the mental states of his characters. He is so concerned with presenting the whole picture of the immigrant experience that he describes transitions in settlement life without dramatizing the impact of these changes on his characters. Strmmes work illustrates one shortcoming of the documentary voice narrating immigrant fiction: it summarizes events and generalizes about changes when it gives fictional form to an experience occurring over generations. The narrators perspective is that of a photographer who tries to include everything by using a wide-angle lens, but discovers that this lens does not capture immediate excitement and detail; therefore, the photographer switches periodically to the zoom or telephoto lenses to focus on individual subjects. This method can be successful if the different lens-perspectives serve to illuminate each other and the total unity of the work. Unfortunately, the minor immigrant fiction is a pastiche of various perspectives with no controlling theme providing 1152
unity and form other than the all-encompassing one of the immigrant experience itself. Two other immigrant authors writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Kristian stergaard and Carl Hansen, explore with greater subtlety the issues crucial to shaping the lives of immigrants in the American West. The central debates over religion, language, and education are treated in a more sophisticated manner, reflecting the attempt to move away from polemics and documentary toward art. The documentary strain in immigrant fiction evolves in Hansens stories into a statement about the tragic costs of settling the West. stergaard goes beyond mere polemics in the assimilationist/ preservationist issue to provide insight into the underlying fears, hopes, and resentments which fueled the debate. Their fiction illustrates the transition in immigrant fiction from the experimental forms of documentaries and polemics to the realism and psychological studies of the major twentiethcentury writers. In an early work, Nybyggere (The Settlers, 1891), stergaard dramatizes how new world values and business ethics fragment the immigrant community. He debates the preservation/assimilation argument and illustrates the divisive role the issue played in the immigrant community. The preservationists in the novel argue that if the immigrants deny their children the Danish language, they also deny them the Danish spiritual tradition and the identity, stable moral values, and security it provides. stergaard shows that such an existence is incomplete and suicidal. The preservationists assume a militant tone: We shall not allow ourselvesas if we were a dead mass of peopleto be poured into the Great Melting Pot, where all differences are wiped out in order to recast us into something other than what we really are . . . we shall not allow ourselves to be blotted out, made indistinct, or remolded. Indeed, we can only become good Ameri5 can citizens by being ourselves. The preservationists make a case for ethnic plurality to vitalize a mass culture whose drive for materialism leads to empty, uniform lives. Carl Hansen records the physical hardships suffered by immigrants, not their debates about which heritage will make life on the prairies more bearable. For Hansen, farm life in the West was disconnected and aimless, nervous, and overwhelming. Even though farmers succeeded in settling the West, Hansen viewed most farmers as defeated in essential ways: weary, 6 worn out, and old before their time. In Praeriens brn (Children of the Prairie, 1895), Hansen uses precise descriptions to demythify romantic expectations about the good life in the West. Characters with Bunyanesque dreams about themselves in shirtsleeves with an axe in hand forcing their way through the dense forest are rudely awakened by the severity of prairie life where settlers unheroically lie in bed half-frozen at night or sit sleepily 1153
twisting hay [for fuel] during the day. Even characters who reach prosperity have no energy left to participate in community life: toil on the prairie sucked the marrow out of their spiritual life. The materialistic obsessions of Hansens characters give their lives focus, but their singularity of purpose saps their intellectual curiosity and leaves then unfulfilled. Nineteenth-century writers like stergaard and Hansen were laying the groundwork for a tenuous, but nevertheless existing, ScandinavianAmerican literary tradition. After the turn of the century, authors were not writing in a vacuum. Major literary magazines established between 1900 and 1905 offered both a market for publication and a forum for public discussion of literature. Besides the early literature, other valuable resources for twentieth-century authors, such as local histories and American letters with their rich descriptions of the pioneer erawere collected and stored. The stage was set for immigrant literature to flourish. Many twentieth-century writers continue earlier attacks on the immigrants chase of material prosperity, and illustrate the sterility of an obsessive work ethic. For example, in his trilogy about Jonas Olsen, Johannes Wist satirizes the business is business morality, and exposes the gossip and petty jealousies of the small town mentality. Wist is disillusioned about how the settlements evolve after reaching prosperity. Other writers do not use humor to deflect their criticism. Their fiction shows that farms and settlements prospered, but people suffered. The fiction asks, finally, whether prosperity was worth the price. Twentieth-century authors probe this question by exploring family dynamics, and placing characters in crises where they must choose between new and old world values. The younger generation sees that the relentless pursuit for land and wealth has made some farmers greedy, others dull and exhausted. This is enough to drive them off the farm to find a less compulsive occupation. Others continue the pursuit, usually on their own homestead somewhere farther west. In either case, a break-up of the family occursno attachment to a homeplace is revealed. Thus the dream of the pioneer generation to provide such a home is shown as failed. From the turn of the century to the early teens was a fertile time for immigrant culture, but this creative period was jolted by the outbreak of World War I. Rampant nativism forced the immigrants to reject their 8 foreignness, and thus the ethnic movements lost their momentum. Even after the war, anti-foreign sentiment continued into the twenties and helped shape the Immigration Bills of 1921 and 1924, whose quotas were to end immigrant cultural movements since they cut the supply line which kept the languages alive. But during this crisis, when immigrants were abandoning their native languages and traditions, the most significant immigrant fiction was written. The writers who published in the late teens, the twenties, and 1154
the thirties, had the advantages of detachment and perspective that came with time, and they recognized that a culture was vanishing and had to be preserved, at least artistically. Major novelists, such as Simon Johnson, Ole Rlvaag, and Sophus Winther, wrote as the Scandinavian group as a generative subculture was disintegrating: perhaps this cultural crisis explains the special intensity underlying their fiction. The sweeping scope of their novels stands as a testament of the immigrants contributions and sacrifices for 9 America. Simon Johnsons three major works on the farm experience, I et nyt rige (In a New Empire, 1914, translated as From Fjord to Prairie, 1916), Falliten paa Braastad (The Bankruptcy at Braastad, 1922), and Frihetens hjem (Freedoms Home, 1925), span from the first arrival of prairie settlers through World War I and the passing of the first generation of immigrants. Convinced the melting pot threatened to wipe out all traces of our footsteps, Johnson scolded the immigrants for abandoning their own traditions. His fiction focuses on the immigrants loss of inner direction, recording the confusion of second-generation immigrants as they drift from old world traditions. Deploring the rapid assimilation of his contemporaries, Johnson argues the importance of cultural roots and the power of language to preserve and convey values. Johnson suggests that the transition between centuries of poverty and the rich crop harvests in the West was too short. The immigrants did not have enough time to establish the cultural and spiritual roots necessary to keep their material riches in perspective. Johnsons characterizations show the settlers drunk with activity, so busy producing they take no time to think: consequently, progress and change are not linked to any moral purpose or social goals, but become ends in themselves. In his novels, Johnson emphasizes the loss of a moral base by showing the family structure disintegrate. Johnsons protagonists try to heal this fragmentation in the immigrant community by advocating a return to the Norwegian heritage for values and rituals which can be passed from one generation to the next. In Falliten, Johnson suggests that literature, in an almost religious way, can restore spiritual meaning to daily life. But Johnsons settlers are indifferent: the protagonist fails to interest the immigrants in their heritage. The novel ends, therefore, with the hero going to Norway, presumably to better prepare himself to awaken the immigrant farmers to an intellectual life. The most Johnson seems to be able to promise is that the new generationsafter proper educationwill revitalize settlement culture. In Johnsons final novel, the philosophy of cultural preservation triumphs. But in spite of the apparent optimism of the ending, Frihetens is really a study of alienation. The communitys eventual acceptance of the 1155
A Literary History of the American West protagonists message about the importance for America of a pluralistic cultural background strikes false: the plot does not warrant such a conclusion, and the heros triumph seems contrived. But Johnsons characterization of Braastad, the old farmer, is more credible and provides insight into that indomitable will which characterized the mind-set of the pioneers. Energetic, restless, and driven, Braastad expends his energy developing a farm, but his pioneer spiritalong with determination, vitality, and an enormous capacity for workis informed by violent confrontation and ruthlessness. Braastad fights the environment, his family and his neighbors; his son fights his father and the Central Powers. Through his characterizations, Johnson criticizes the pioneer spirit as responsible for the disintegration of family relationships, and for the larger social trend of a fragmented community. In his final novel, Johnson shows the demise of a single-minded determination and overbearing physical energy: after his sons death, Braastad is used-up and no one inherits his vitality. Johnson would like to heal the loss of drive and direction in the immigrant settlements with his preservationist philosophy; but his fiction shows, pessimistically, that this is unrealistic. Sophus Winthers trilogyTake All to Nebraska (1936), Mortgage Your Heart (1937), and This Passion Never Dies (1938)concerns Danish settlers in Nebraska over the first quarter of the twentieth century, approximately the same period covered by Simon Johnsons last two novels about the Braastads. But the perspectives of the two writers vastly differ. Johnsons settlers own their land, are well established and prosperous. Their problems stem from an erosion of values which Johnson suggests could be healed by maintaining the old world heritage. Winthers farmers, on the other hand, are late-comers in the American land-grab, and are exploited as renters. Winther makes no mention of a return to the old world cultural treasures his farmers are more concerned with making payments on time. Winthers fiction signals the end of an era: with the important exception of his trilogy about Danish immigrants, Winthers orientation in terms of community, career, scholarship, and even creative writing, is American. His trilogy deals with an experience Americans, not just immigrants, were havingthe exodus from the landand thus marks the merging of immigrant and American perspectives. In the Grimsen trilogy, the immigrants optimistic expectations of the Promised Land evolve into pessimism about the life and prospects of farming the West. The younger generation in Winthers fiction flees the farm and family traditions, and although these younger immigrants are also disillusioned by the major alternative to farmingcity lifethe trilogys focus is the relentless dissolution of a rural way of life. Winthers tone is established on the first page of the trilogy. The Grimsen family is on its way west, but not jostling along in a prairie schooner, and not traversing virgin land. Peter Grimsen does not see a landscape 1156
which inspires a sense of awe or terror, nor does he encounter open spaces which instill a sense of isolation. Instead, huddled in a railroad car, Peter faces the blank walls of the coach, the distorted faces of the passengers, and the dust and dirt that eddied about the floor. In this fiction, the way to the Land of Canaan is dirty, dusty, and grimy. At the age of sixteen, the oldest Grimsen boy runs away from home and begins the revolt against Peter and his way of life: this rebellion continues so that at the conclusion of the trilogy, all of Peters sons abandon the farm. Winther suggests that a rejection of farm life also results in a rejection of ethnic attitudes and customs. When one of the younger sons leaves the farm for California, Peter and his wife are left alone to speak their Danish, and eat their brown bread and buttermilk soupno one is left to carry on their tradition. The Grimsen sons must try to cope in a world whose social and economic structure they do not understand. Their traditional values and agrarian way of life seem irrelevant to the demands of life around them; they fit neither into modern urban society nor agrarian life. They are rootless and fragmentedmetaphors of the alienated modern man and woman. Peters death and the foreclosure of his farm signifies the passing of an agricultural society dominated by small family farms. In Winthers fiction there is no frontier; the immigrants drive to acquire land has ended. In evaluating the circumstances of the immigrants in the twentieth century, later writers conclude that the pioneer ethic had been too overbearing in the formation of the immigrant psychology. The emphasis on progress included a rapid assimilation into American society, which particularly alarmed immigrant authors since rejection of old world ties was a dismissal of the emotional validity of old world attachments on which an immigrant literature heavily depended. From the 1880s until the 1930s the goal of immigrant authorsparticularly first-generation writerswas, therefore, to preserve the Scandinavian languages, which would keep their own voice alive, and also counterbalance the rational materialism of the immigrant community, which, in spite of its prosperity, had led to a spiritual emptiness. Immigrant writers in general condemned the rampant materialism in the West, claiming it withered the emotional and intellectual instincts of the immigrants, and left them unfulfilled and alienated. The bleak tone of the later fiction particularly reflects this disappointment, even though the authors are motivated by an idealistic optimism and seek to become cultural spokesmen, outlining the spiritual direction for the immigrant group. The major writers of the 20s and 30s view the efforts of the early pioneers as heroic and even epic, but ultimately they reject the limited scope of the pioneers aspirations and accomplishments. Farming is described as a hardening experience, disconnected from its traditional nurturing values. 1157
The major immigrant writers of the twentieth century tried to fill the spiritual void suffered by the immigrants: becoming self-appointed cultural prophets, they brought the word to their people. The immigrant fiction both expresses the nourishing role of the old heritage, and becomes a means in itself of preserving this heritage through the Scandinavian languages, attitudes, and identity. By advocating a return to traditional values, immigrant authors envision an alternative to the alienated, fragmented lives they observe around them. But such a program was doomed to failure, for the old world the writers looked to was an idealized Scandinaviaif it ever existed, it was in another time. Immigrants who returned to their native countries for visits or with plans for re-migration soon discovered that life in Scandinavia was changing too under the impact of industrialism: there were rootless, lonely, cut-off people in Scandinavia as well as in America. What the immigrant writers were defining, then, in their portraits of bewildered second-generation immigrants, was really the plight of the modern age. In the hands of the most gifted authors, the immigrant experience becomes a metaphor expressing more universal problems facing modern society: disorientation, displacement, lack of meaning and values, individuals overwhelmed and confused by pressures and choices they can neither cope with nor control. As cultural prophets the immigrant writers, like their fictional heroes, failed. Rapid assimilation and a decline in new emigration quashed any notion of a continuing productive and creative ethnic culture based on Scandinavian languages and traditions. Since most writers labored with the knowledge that their efforts would inevitably fail, one would expect a pessimistic strain in their literature. Yet the fiction celebrates, and to a degree ennobles, the efforts of the immigrants in settling the West. But that celebration is always tied to a tragic awareness of loss. The immigrant fiction as a whole can be viewed as an effort to replace, substitute, or fill some essential aspect of immigrant life that was ruptured or badly bruised in the adaptation of Scandinavian life to the American West. The intellectual, cultured side of immigrant life threatened to die in an alien environment, and simple farmers were inspired to write. Thus the very harshness of immigration promoted a body of fiction which records the experiences of settling this continent in a way which challenges and enriches descriptions found in mainstream American fiction.
C HRISTER L ENNART M OSSBERG ,
University of Oregon
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Notes
This essay is a condensed excerpt from Scandinavian Immigrant Literature, Western Writers Series (Boise: Boise State University Press, 1981). I wish to thank the editors for giving me permission to use material from the monograph. 1. Theodore Blegen, Norwegian Migration to America: The American Transition (Northfield, Minn. : Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1940), p. 590, and Gerald Thorson, America Is Not Norway (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1958), pp. 16670, discuss the publishing history of Fosss novel. 2. Norwegian-American historian Lawrence Larson points out Bjrnsons influence in The Changing West (Northfield, Minn.: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1937), pp. 5859. 3. The most comprehensive study of Jansons years in America is Nina Draxtens Kristofer Janson in America (Boston: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1976). 4. Praerierosen (Chicago and Minneapolis: C. Rasmussen, 1892), p. 37. 5. Nybyggere (Copenhagen: Andr. Schous, 1891), pp. 9495. 6. Livsvilkaarene paa landet, in Max Hennis, ed., Den Danskfdte Amerikaner (Chicago: n. p., 1912), p. 163, 165. 7. Praeriens brn (Minneapolis: O. W. Lund, 1895), p. 21. 8. See John Highams study, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 18601925 (N.Y.: Atheneum, 1965. 9. Rlvaags novels are the culmination of Scandinavian immigrant literature, but I do not discuss his fiction here since his works are reviewed in a separate section.
Primary Sources Ager, Waldemar. Gamlelandets Snner (Sons of the Old Country). Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1926. . I Sit Alone. Trans. by Charles Wharton Stork. New York: Harper & Bras., 1931. Published in Norwegian as Hundeine, Oslo, 1929. Dahl, K. G. William. Hedens barn (Children of the Prairie). Rock Island, Illinois: Augustana Book Concern, 1912. Dan, Adam. Praerierosen (The Prairie Rose). Chicago and Minneapolis: C. Rasmussen, 1892. Foss, Hans A. Husmandsgutten (The Cotters Son). Decorah, Iowa: Decorahpostens boktrykkeri, 1885. Hansen, Carl. Praeriens brn (Children of the Prairie). Minneapolis: O. W. Lund, 1895.
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A Literary History of the American West . Praerifolk (Prairie People). Copenhagen: Hagerups forlag, 1907. Janson, Kristofer. Praeriens saga (Saga of the Prairie). Chicago: C. Rasmussen, 1885. Johnson, Simon. From Fjord to Prairie. Trans. by C. O. Soberg. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1916. Published in Norwegian as I et nyt rige, Minneapolis, 1914. . Falliten paa Braastad (The Bankruptcy at Braastad). Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1922. . Frihetens hjem (Freedoms Home). Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1925. Linder, Oliver. I vsterland (In the Western Land). Rock Island, Illinois: Augustana Book Concern, 1914. Malm, Gustav. Charli Johnson, svensk-amerikan (Charli Johnson, SwedishAmerican). Chicago: Swedish Publishing Co., 1909. stergaard, Kristian. Danby folk (People of Danby). Cedar Falls, Iowa: Dansk boghandel, n. d. . Nybyggere (Pioneers). Copenhagen: Anr. Schous, 1891. Rlvaag, Ole E. Giants in the Earth. New York: Harper & Row, 1927. Published in Norwegian as I de dage (In Those Days), Oslo, 1924, and Riket grundlaegges (The Founding of the Kingdom), Oslo, 1925. . Peder Victorious. New York: Harper & Row, 1929. Published in Norwegian as Peder Seier, Oslo, 1928. . Their Fathers God. New York: Harper & Row, 1931. Published in Norwegian as Den signede dag (The Blessed Day), Oslo, 1931. Strmme, Peer. Hvorledes Halvor blev prest (How Halvor Became a Minister). Detorah, Iowa: Anundsen Publishing Co., 1893. Published in English as Halvor: A Story of Pioneer Youth. Trans. by Inga Norstog and David Nelson. Decorah, Iowa: Luther College Press, 1960. Winther, Sophus. Take All to Nebraska. New York: Macmillan, 1936; reprinted, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976. . Mortgage Your Heart. New York: Macmillan, 1937. . This Passion Never Dies. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Wist, Johannes B. Nykommerbilleder (Newcomer Scenes). Decorah, Iowa: Anundsen Publishing Co., 1920. . Hjemmet paa praeren (The Home on the Prairie). Decorah, Iowa: Anundsen Publishing Co., 1921. . Jonasville. Decorah, Iowa: Anundsen Publishing Co., 1922. Secondary Sources Hasselmo, Nils. Language and the Swedish Immigrant Writer: From a Case Study of G. N. Malm. Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 25 (1974): 24153. (A study of Swedish-American writer Gustav Malms use of Swinglish to achieve realistic dialogue and humorous effects.) Mossberg, Christer L. Notes Toward an Introduction to Scandinavian Immigrant Literature on the Pioneer Experience. Proceedings: Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages 28 (April 1977): 11217. (A short introduction to Scandinavian-American literature, summarizing major themes of immigrant fiction about the American West.)
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. Shucking the Pastoral Ideal: Sources and Meaning of Realism in Scandinavian Immigrant Fiction About the Pioneer Farm Experience. In Where the West Begins, edited by Arthur Huseboe and William Geyer. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978. (An analysis of why immigrant writers wrote realistic novels.) . The Immigrant Voice as American Literature: Scandinavian Immigrant Fiction of the American West. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1979. (A literary history and analysis of Scandinavian-American literature, discussed in the context of the history of immigration and life in the American West. ) Skrdal, Dorothy Burton. The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Through Literary Sources. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. (A history of the immigrants experiences in America, as gleaned from the literature they wrote; the book has an excellent bibliography, and Skrdals study is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the field.) . The Scandinavian Immigrant Writer in America. Norwegian-American Studies 21 (1962): 1453. (A discussion of literary journals, Christmas annuals, literary supplements of newspapers, immigrant publishing houses and other avenues open to immigrant writers to get their works printed.) . Scandinavian-American Literature. In Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature: Selected Essays on the European Contribution, edited by Robert Di Pietro and Edward Ifkovic. New York: MLA, 1983. (An overview of Scandinavian-American literature, emphasizing the major writers, with a special focus on authors who wrote in English.) . Scandinavian-American Literature: A Frontier for Research. Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 28 (October 1977): 23751. (A discussion of the importance of imaginative literature as valuable documents for the social scientist; Skrdal argues that immigrant literature provides a psycho-history of the immigrant group. She also makes valuable suggestions for the direction of future studies.) Swan, Gustav. An Introduction to Swedish-American Literature. Augustana Historical Society Publication 6 (1936): 1132. (An overview of SwedishAmerican literature, providing brief biographical sketches of individual authors and a short history of literary journals.) Thorson, Gerald. America Is Not Norway: The Story of the Norwegian-American Novel. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1958. (A study of Norwegian-American fiction, with valuable biographical sketches of individual authors and helpful analyses of major works.) . First Sagas in a New World: A Study of the Beginnings of NorwegianAmerican Literature. Studies and Records 17 (1952): 10829. (A study of the first works written in America by Norwegian immigrants). . Pressed Flowers and Still-Running Brooks: Norwegian-American Literature. In Ethnic Literature Since 1776: The Many Voices of America, edited by N. Zyla and W. Aycock. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1978. (A survey of Norwegian-American literature, focusing on the major writers.)
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SECTION II
Present Trends
Introduction
HE VIETNAM WAR changed everything. Bracketed by a painful civil rights movement and an enlightened ecological crusadevital developments boththe national agony over Americas Asian conflict was central to re-visioning our national experience. The war, and the domestic upheaval that attended it, symbolizes well the two decades of dizzying change that have led to hard-edged maturity in western American letters. Westerners, like Americans generally, have been unable to see themselves or their nation in quite the same nave way they had prior to the 1960s, and contemporary western writing reflects an unwillingness to respect old boundaries, coupled with an enriched view of literary possibilities. If present trends are counter-cultural, they are counter-cultural in a generative sense, expanding limits, testing values, seeking the universal in the particular. Mark Busby sums it up: The postSputnik, Vietnam, Watts, Wounded Knee, Watergate, Iran, Moral Majority years have been both a garden and a wasteland . . . , providing a wealth of subject matter but requiring a struggle for synthesis. Western writers have been equal to the challenge. Whether it be established pros such as Wallace Stegner, William Stafford, and William Eastlake, or any of the cadre of authors who emerged during the recent past Sherley Anne Williams, Leslie Silko, Luis Valdez, et al.western writing has increasingly defined American life. Protests to the contrary notwithstanding, American culture is moving west. At the very time western writing burgeons, the traditional American book industry is sick. As James Sloan Allen points out, commerce is consuming culture in the world of publishing to a degree never before possible or imagined, with the results that quality is being leveled, variety diminished, and tastes homogenized. Publishing has always danced between commerce and culture, of course, but what Allen and others, such as Thomas Whitesides, Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell, decry is the degree to which contemporary art has become subservient to mercantile considerations: mass market sales, movie and television rights, T-shirt logos, and talk show prattle.
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The dramatic and unarguable decrease in the artistic quality of books produced by the East Coast publishing bastion might seem an unlikely source of inspiration, yet regional publishing has taken up the slack and is thriving. Not only is more literature being printed as a result of alternative publishing, but much greater diversity of subject and form are to be found. William Abrahams, senior editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, acknowledges, in a candid assessment of contemporary publishing, One bright sign is the existence of small, essentially non-commercial publishers who arent struggling with a large overhead. Perhaps they can afford to take over publishing the small, serious books. They can and have, fortunately, as the chapter in this section on Small Presses and Little Magazines makes clear. Moreover, western regional presses have proven to be both more responsive to local subjects and less frightened by experimental styles than have most eastern commercial houses, many of which still seem to consider Louis LAmour synonymous with western. Another obvious factor in the upsurge of western literary activity, increased regional sensibility, is itself a paradoxical product of Americas inexorable homogenization. In perhaps belated recognition of what is lost when people move to cities like Los Angeles or Dallas that more closely resemble Tokyo or New York than Santa Fe or Sonoma, local writers, local editors, and local readers have reintrenched and reexamined regional roots. It is in small presses and little magazines that homogenization has been least evidenced, since they recognize that the universal is most clearly recognizable through the particular. A particularly fecund development has been the literary output generated by the womens movement, for it has not only encouraged contemporary writers but has led to belated publication of earlier work. Moreover, as Lou Rodenberger points out in her chapter, it has led to a rigorous reevaluation of earlier writing, as it has offered new critical perspectives. From such early artists as Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Hallock Foote, Gertrude Atherton, and Mary Hunter Austin, through the accomplishments of Dorothy Scarborough, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Erna Fergusson, Katherine Anne Porter, Karle Wilson Baker, and Grace Noll Crowell, to contemporary authors such as Ann Stanford, Alice Walker, Tillie Olsen, Dorothy Johnson, Lois Phillips Hudson, Joan Didion, and Josephine Miles, women writers have been vital contributors to our regions writing; but that has not always been recognized and only the most nave scholar would deny that contemporary feminism has forced a more candid, more honest appreciation of women writers. That a book such as Footes A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West was not published until 1972, for example, speaks to the necessary revision of perspective recent years have brought. 1163
One important element of the contemporary small press movement has been the emergence of feminist publishing in the west. Celeste West aptly points out that ever since the printing press evolved from the wine press, it has been linked with renaissance and revolution. Audre Lord explains this impulse when she states, One chooses the conscious route not only because it is more interesting but because it is the only way to be in control of events. Publishers such as Moon Books, Kelsey St. Press, and Diana Press offer outlets to writers whose work, while not commercially viable (at least not to publishing giants), is important, and the books they produce offer often-ignored visions of life in the West. As Linda Palumbo sums it up: Willingness to struggle, need for survival, exhaustion relieved by a sense of purposethese characterize the writers and the feminist publishers who give them voice. Art is work; its working papers are literature. Tired, sometimes depressed, often horrified, yet capable of feeling thrilled, amused, and awed nevertheless, women writers in the small western presses embrace the ambiguity and paradox in their lives in the hope that it is through cultivating these qualities that we can hope to change the world. So publishing, feminist or otherwise, is moving west, with co-ops of writers, some self-publishing, grants from various agencies, and adventuresome investors all involved in the upsurge of locally produced books. The existence of such outlets has itself led to new heights of autochthonous expression. The chapters in this section by Mark Siegel, William Lockwood, and Busby, demonstrate that contemporary writing is so rich that it is difficult to summarize simply. Observes James D. Houston, Literature is moving in all directions at once. Drama in the West, once solely the domain of melodramaa form now adopted by television, frequently daytime televisionrepresents one new direction. Innovative, exciting and unpredictable, drama parallels published forms in a number of ways. Writes Busby, the real battle for western American dramatists since 1960 has been against the Broadway clawhold on American theater. He also cites the growth of powerful regional theaters and the emergence of Off and Off-Off Broadway playhouses as major developments during the past twenty years. In any case, playwrights such as Preston Jones, Sam Shepard, Ed Bullins, and Luis Valdez have created a dramatic tradition where once only class B movies roamed. Fictionalists have moved away from the urban eastern paradigm that has dominated both postWorld War II American expression and critical tastes, creating such diverse images as freeways to nowhere, kaleidoscopic
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hotdogs, and talking trout streams, as well as characters who genuinely care about life. All these things have emerged within an enriched regional context, one that expands toward the universal. As Delbert Wylder summarizes western fiction has come of age. Most startling of all, poetry seems to be exploding on all sides, with literally hundreds of journals devoted to verse now published in the western states. The growth of small presses and little magazines has been a major force in the publishing of verse, but a more compelling impulse may be responsible for the tremendous production of poetry: in a world increasingly aware of nuclear danger, ecological disaster, and the instability of world politics, art may represent one of the few consistently humane domains left; as Texan poet R. G. Vliet has written, without artand the practice of poetry is the most demanding of the artsthere would be nothing left, when all of us are gone, of our inner lives. Or perhaps Ed Hogan is correct when he suggests that the groundswell of poetry may represent less a literary movement than one toward self-help or self-growth. Certainly the quality of published verse is uneven, and westerners are in no way immune to trendy trends. In any case, another index of the will to survive, in the face of massive technology that threatens not only the environment but existence itself, has been a steady growth in concern for natures fragility. The ecology movement of the late sixties and early seventies has given way to more systematic, less sloganistic commitment that is nowhere better reflected than in the abundance of high-quality nature writing now being produced in the West. If John Muir, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Austin were avatars of the environmental awakening, they have worthy successors in Barry Holstun Lopez, Hope Ryden, and Edward Abbey, among others. Thomas J. Lyon points out in his chapter that when disintegration seems to loom, the call for accommodation [with nature] may become a voice of sanity and healing to the general public. One distinctive western genre has gone into decline in recent years. A sense of loss underlies Don Grahams chapter on the last twenty-five years of the Western movie, as he recounts first the flowering of the Western in several versions under a series of great directors in the sixties and early seventies, and then the exhaustion of the genres popularity over the last ten years. Michael Marsden and Jack Nachbar, in their chapter on the modern popular Western, trace the Western formula through several media (radio, television, film and literature) and through a wealth of sub-genres that vary the classic formula. Though they too observe the atrophy of the Western in recent years, they point out the extensive and persistent power of the genre to engage the popular mind: Over the last seven decades the American
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Western story has fulfilled more social and cultural functions for its audience than has any other American story form. Indeed, the Western can be seen as a record of Americas national self-awareness. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of growing maturity in western lettersalong with formal experimentationhas been an expansion of literary subjects that has followed a rejection of the West-that-neverwas, so-called code Westerns. For years, serious western writers had to struggle with the power of the fantasy West that so pervadedand still pervades in some circles, as Marsden and Nachbar showpopular culture. Many contemporary writers poke fun at the old formula; few take it seriously. The fantasy West had, as one of its principal characteristics, a lilywhite, nearly all-male cast. That was, of course, no more accurate than other elements of the code, and an important, exciting present trend is the growth of ethnic expression, as well as the aforementioned increase in work by women. Writers from all backgroundsLawson Inada, Rudolfo Anaya, Simon Ortiz, Annie Dillard, Scott Momaday, Diana Chang, et al.are offering views of western life with an expanded cast leading to enlarged perspectives. No longer much concerned with distortions of history, no longer limited in terms of subjects or forms, no longer dependent upon eastern publishing, western writers have matured. They have, as Lawrence Clark Powell has urged, tapped their roots, the deep unconscious sources on which literature feeds. They reach down to the sub-soil of feeling that lies far beneath the top-soil of thinking, and have achieved new levels of regional verisimilitude and universality as a result. They have entered the post-Vietnam cultural mainstream by shaping it to suit their own unique visions. Increasingly, searchers for the direction of American life and letters look west.
State University
1166
Unknown Diversity Small Presses and Little Magazines in the West, 19601980
It concerned me that one reason why it is easier to sum up a literature fifty years after its own time is that most of it gets lost and does not have to be dealt with. . . . Len Fulton, Small Press Record of Books, Second Edition, 196972, 1972. . . . remind the archivists of the eighties where to look to explain the seventieseverything is spelled out in the little mags of the sixties. Marvin Malone, Vagabond 19, 1974. are writing and being published than ever before, Unquestionably, work that not only would never have seen print in the past, but probably should not have, now filters onto pages as a result of the proliferation of literary little magazines and small regional presses. It is also true that important, innovative writers who might otherwise have languished unpublished have enriched western letters as a result of that same proliferation. As Michael Anania has suggested, small presses and little magazines are the fecund churning ground of our literary culture. In fact, James Sallis may have been even closer to contemporary realities when he observed that, with current monolithic publishing trends, the little magazinewhat it represents in our literature (and terrifyingly, it may be our literature, what is left of it)becomes ever more essential to us. The large number of regional publishing outlets that have materialized in the West during the past twenty years constitute the regions most important contemporary literary development. This rush of creative activity may be traced in part at least to the great upsurge of concern and commitment that was born in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, then continued through that decades anti-war crusade and ecological awakening, this last being linked closely a growth in literary regionalism and sense of place, while the former two were avatars of both collectivism and antiestablishment impulses that coalesced into independent publishing ventures. Because they buck big business publishing just as they test literary paraODAY MORE WESTERNERS
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digms, lit mags and small presses are counter-cultural in a generative sense, testing what a culture can and should be. As Anania observes, Throughout the century, American literature has taken its vitality from its own extreme edges, since its center is too often lifeless and boring. Alternative publishing has consistently provided those extreme edges. It is also true that western American writing has itself been considered a kind of edge, not bound by the trends or conventions of either commercial publishing or eastern reviewing. Such major regional voices as Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Frederick Manfred, Jack Schaefer, Charles Bukowski, Ed Dorn, Gary Snyder, Thomas McGrath, Frank Waters and William Stafford, among others, have relied upon small presses to publish various of their works, especially those considered unconventional. There is nothing new in the fact of small regional presses and magazinesAlan Swallow and Lawrence Ferlinghettis efforts are legendary but there is something quite new in their numbers. The initial edition of the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, published in 1965, totalled 40 pages and 250 listings; editor Len Fultons 1982 number runs more than 750 pages with over 4,000 listings such as the one below: Art Cuelho, Box 249, Big Timber, Montana 59011. 1973. Poetry, fiction, art, photos, interviews, reviews, parts-of-novels, long-poems, collages, Black Jack: rural poems and stories from anywhere in America, especially the West. Work that tells a story, a craft that shows experience, not only of the head, but of the heart too. Im more than prejudiced against poems that are made up or forced, even when they are concocted out of the supposed wisdom of some established school. Art is for individuals with strong images and characterizations. Valley Grapevine is taking material native to Central California . . . the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys. Especially want work from small town farming communities, anything to do with Okies, hoboes, ranch life, migrant labor, and writers and poets who write predominately of the valley of their birth. Contributors: William Rintoul, Wilma McDaniel, Richard Dokey, Gerald Haslam, Dorothy Rose, Don Thompson, DeWayne Rail, etc. circ. 300500. 1/yr. pubs 1 issue 1980; expects 1 issue 1981, 1 issue 1982. price per copy: $2.50$3.50. Discounts: 15, 10%; 610, 15%, 1115, 20%; 1620, 25%; over 20 copies, 30%. 80pp; 51/2X81/2; offset. Reporting time: within a week, often a day or two. Payment: copies. Copyrighted, reverts to author. Pubs reviews: 10 in 1980. Western and rural, Native American, hobo, the road, prisons. No ads. 1168
BLACK JACK & VALLEY GRAPEVINE, Seven Buffaloes Press,
SMALL PRESSES AND LITTLE MAGAZINES
CCLM. (International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, 17th Edition 198182, p. 46) That directory, as well as a Directory of Small/Press Editors and Publishers, a Small Press Record of Books in Print, plus Small Press Review, a monthly, and a Small Press Book Club, are the products of Dustbooks, a Paradise, California publisher. It is run by Len Fulton, himself a novelist, and Ellen Ferber, both of whom became involved in alternative publishing during the 1960s. The current wave of independent publishing, Ferber has explained, rose out of the social and political quakes of the sixties. . . . It is some fifteen years later now, and the politics are old, but the wave of independent publishing has not yet crested. It is alternative periodicals rather than presses that tend to offer the sharpest literary cutting edge, since most writers whose books are published by small regional presses first find print in little magazines. Observed William Carlos Williams, The little magazine is something I have always fostered; for without it, I myself would have been early silenced. To me it is one magazine, not several. It is a continuous magazine, the only one I know with an absolute freedom. . . . Lit mags have always existed primarily for writers. Paradoxically, that is what makes them so valuable for readers. It is their openness to new ideas, new subjects, new forms and new writers that sets littles apart. One general division within the ranks of alternative periodicals must be made: university-affiliated journals differ somewhat from their independent counterparts. How and how much they differ is at issue. Journals such as Prairie Schooner, Arizona Quarterly, Southwest Review, Sonoma Mandala, Northwest Review, and South Dakota Review are, of course, more financially secure than unaffiliated magazines. Charles Robinson points out that there are other differences: The independents feel that not only have the popular magazines sold out, but that the university magazines have followed suit that . . . the latter . . . have adopted a peculiar academicism as sterile as the policy of popular magazines turning out formula pieces. The university magazines, of course, deny the charge. A. D. Winans, who publishes Second Coming, claims that the fiction in academic journals is usually worked over formulas from the past. Ironically, many of the most promising writers now appearing in independent magazines support their writing habits by teaching in colleges. The accusation that university-affiliated periodicals represent estab1169
lishment versions of lit mags is at least partly true. They do tend to avoid radically experimental material of the sort that not only breaks but also challenges existing literary paradigms, possibly offending literary sensibilities. Karl Shapiro, who was dismissed from Prairie Schooner over an issue of censorship, and who has also edited both Poetry and California Quarterly, claims: In every campus literary venture there is a chain of command that runs from the magazine itself, through the English and other Humanities Departments, through the university press, the administration, and on to public opinion. In extreme cases . . . the controls can go as high as the governors of states and involve the expression of historical fact itself. Occasionally, as when Coyotes Journal split from Northwest Review, censorship has led staff members of a university journal to venture into independent publishing. On the other hand, it has been argued that university journals maintain higher if less innovative standards than their independent counterparts, which tend to reflect the tastes of individual editors rather than college administrations. If the lows of journals such as John Bennetts Vagabond or Leo Mailmans Maelstrom Review or Leonard Birds Rocky Mountain Review tend to be lower than Prairie Schooner s or Arizona Quarterly 's or Southwest Reviews, from an experimental point of view at least their highs also tend to be higher. Most writers recognize that university magazines seem to be published for coteries and limit their experimental submissions accordingly. The same chargethat they tend to be published for small coteries may as justifiably be leveled at independent journals. A glance at the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses will give a sense of how many of todays most distinct literary voices may be traced to both kinds of littles. A certain reverse snobbery invades independent journals. In one case, they may fall into the trap of publishing experimental work strictly for the sake of being different or to shock readers. Often a militant mediocrity emerges, as pieces which are no more than word games played by fellow contributors are published; it has been suggested that only the published writers read many of the most experimental magazines. Tom Montag of Margins pinpoints another negative aspect of lit mag publishing; since it is easy to be published, it is also easy to develop the pretensionthe smug assumption that innovative writing is a more distinguished and honorable profession than farming or selling lumber. Traditionally alternative magazines, as well as their less numerous brethren, small presses, have been elitist in that they were not produced for 1170
general consumption. Margaret Andersons motto on the masthead of the Little Review was, Making no compromise with public taste. As George Hitchcock so eloquently summed matters up in the credo of his muchpraised poetry journal, Kayak: A kayak is not a galleon, ark, coracle, or speedboat. It is a small, watertight vessel operated by a single oarsman. It is submersible, has sharply pointed ends, and is constructed from light poles and the skins of furry animals. It has never yet been employed as a means of mass transport. This literary elitism has warred constantly with political populism, the impulse toward mass movements that has attracted liberal-to-left followings. Many a journal founded for the people has intended to direct their behavior, not reflect it. Literary elitism is, of course, nothing new. One thing that is new is that all but the most occasional or unique little magazines are not truly independent, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. A great many have relied upon grants, principally from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM), and various states art councils to fund their publications. The late Carey McWilliams commented that the greatest change in American publishing he had seen during his long career was the move from financing to funding. While he agreed that this development was allowing considerable non-traditional, sometimes remarkably good material to see print, he pointed out that it did so amidst a proliferation of sub-par writing. As Felix Stefanile, who edits Sparrow, has observed, it seems impossible this side of idiocy not to get published these days. Stefanile is, however, more troubled by another aspect of available money: The literary tie-in of an alternative publisher with government funding is, if not complete, at the very least tragically strategic . . . the most important thing to happen to the little magazines since the early days of City Lights and The Fifties is not the introduction of cheap offset technology . . . but government intrusion into the arts. The paradox of ostensibly anti-establishment journals publishing on government grants has not passed unnoticed. One of the major granting agencies, the CCLM, also reflects the collectivist impulses that peaked in the early 1970s. A non-profit organization that distributes state, federal and private funds to magazines nationwide, it requires that a periodical have published at least three issues and have existed for at least one year before applying for membership or support, requirements that have rankled many small press editors who view such strictures as sell-outs to status-quo values. 1171
The other major national collective of editors and publishers, the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP), imposes no such membership restrictions and boasts a much larger membership. It remains true to its populist roots. Len Fulton recalls how he and Jerry Burns convened in 1967 on the U. C. Berkeley campus the original group that would become COSMEP: We held the meeting, titled Conference of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers, and attracted eighty editors like ourselves from everywhere in the country. I chaired a panel on distribution . . . It was out of that panel, the first of thousands like it, in an effort to get funds for a catalog of small press publications, that the Committee of Small Magazine/Press Editors and Publishers was born. By November 1968 it had 110 paying members and a self-appointed board of directors. Today COSMEP remains the largest organization of alternative publishers in the world, and it retains its strongly West Coast flavor. It is dedicated to helping its members obtain less expensive services, better distribution and more political clout. Generalizations about little magazines apply equally to small presses, since not only are journals and presses often linked, they are frequently products of the same impulse. In fact, more than a few of the finest small press books in recent years began as special numbers of magazines such as South Dakota Reviews Native American issue (1972), and TriQuarterly s number on the little magazine in America (1978), both of which were reissued as books, achieving both critical and commercial success. At a time when the drift toward national homogeneity seems nearly irresistible, western small presses and lit mags resist, insisting on regional realities. To Robert Boyerss admonitionThe function of the little magazine is, must be, to serve to erect and stand by principles of intelligent and imaginative discoursemust be added the responsibility of recognizing and encouraging regional perceptions as viable vehicles for artistic expressions. Observes Paul Foreman, whose Thorp Springs Press is now the largest publisher of fiction in Texas, I know far better than a New York editor whether or not a writer really captures whats vital and true in Texas. Our writers shouldnt have to reconstruct reality to meet the expectations of outsiders. Such an attitude is itself both counter-cultural and long overdue. Tension between university and independent presses is less significant than that between periodicals. In general, university presses print little fiction or poetry, and those formsespecially poetryare the lifeblood of independents. There are exceptions, of courseAhsahta Press at Boise State University specializes in poetry, while the University of Illinois Press has 1172
developed a highly regarded fiction seriesbut for every university press publishing fiction or poetry, there are several independentsDuck Down Press, Seven Buffaloes Press, Red Earth Press, San Marcos Press, etc. doing the same thing, and doing so with fewer artistic restrictions. The aforementioned Thorp Springs Press, for example, was founded by Foreman in Berkeley. He also edited and published an award-winning poetry journal, Hyperion, and one of the most unusual lit mags, TAWT (Texas Artists, Writers and Thinkers in Exile.) Foreman has since relocated his press in Austin, and has kept over fifty titles in print, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, including such successful books as Travois: An Anthology of Texas Poetry (1976) which he edited with Joanie Whitebird, Boomers Gold (1978) by Jack Walk er, Trotter Ross (1981) by James Hoggard, Playland (1982) by Thomas Zigal, the much-heralded The Stories of Amado Muro (1979) by Chester Seltzer, and Foremans own Sugarland (1978). It is not unusual for small presses to publish work by their founders, since many begin as self-publishing ventures. Ernest Callenbachs commercially successful and critically acclaimed fantasy Ecotopia (1976), for instance, was published with his own imprint, Banyan Tree Books. While no concrete figure is available concerning how many small presses remain, let alone began, as self-publishing operations, an educated guess suggests that no less than a quarter of the total at any given time fall into that category. Most self-publishers have been poets, and it is in the publication of poetry that small presses have long since outstripped their commercial rivals. They have done so for one obvious reason: poetry rarely sells well. Lately, however, small presses have been expanding their collective range. William Abrahams, senior editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, hardly a small enterprise, acknowledges that the gulf is widening . . . between the good and serious book aimed at the serious reader and the commercial, mass market book. Hope for the future, he continues, lies with small, essentially noncommercial publishers. Fiction, especially innovative fiction, has increasingly become the domain of small presses. One explanation of how alternative publishers, despite their meagre resources, have managed not only to survive but also to expand their range of activities is that technological advances have actually cut printing costs since the 1960s. Moreover, most small publishers dont expect to make a profit; grants, fund raising, and cash out of their own pockets make them independent, so they are little influenced by trends felt in the Boston/New York/Washington corridor. Theirs is a plowing of literary acreage, a churning that offers hope to writers in all forms and of all styles. Because of such expanded activity, Robert Fox predicts a continuing growth and acceptance of the small press during the 80s, with many more readers coming to the small press for fiction as well as poetry. Fiction seems 1173
so ascendant that more than a few well-established small press poets are experimenting with it. Reports Carol Berge: I am more than ever absorbed with the possibilities in fiction though I continue to work in poetry, I find the challenge lies in fiction, majorly innovative forms such as the one-page novel, the collaged prose-poem, the new short fictions and in general the area between poetry and prose. For me, the act of creating a successful (i.e., interesting and satisfying) piece of short fiction is more challenging and more demanding by far. So far, the efforts of Berge and her fellow poets to move into fiction have garnered decidedly mixed reviews, but it is the existence of the opportunity that is most significant. Reviewing, in fact, represents one obvious weak link in the chain from author to reader via alternative press or journalrivalled only by poor distribution among writers peevesbecause most small press publications, no matter how good, tend to be ignored by major review outlets; such outlets are, after all, dependent on advertising revenues provided by commercial publishers. Unfortunately, the alternative press review scene has itself been rendered untrustworthy by the reluctance of small press people to speak ill of one anothers work; negative reviews are frequently greeted with charges of betrayal. As a result, cronyismyou review my book and Ill review yourshas grown, and reliable sources of critical commentary are difficult to find, although American Book Review and regional publications such as Texas Books in Review offer hope. D. S. Phantom of S and S Press suggests that the cronyism extends beyond reviewing: Many if not most small press publishers, under the pretext of being literary and independent, contribute to this wastepile [of useless material] by continuing their incestuous publishing game: friend publishes friend, and often neither friend has much taste or talent. Phantoms point, while exaggerated, nonetheless does reveal another notable small press problem. David Ray, editor of New Letters, articulates well a growing sentiment among writers, one that promises to create a new split among the already quarrelsome small press and lit mag folks. He asserts that writers are being exploited by sloppy or downright dishonest editorial practices among alternative publishers, and that writers themselvesbecause they are desperate to see printare allowing themselves to be misused.
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The old myth that artistic integrity will suffer from too much financial reward has been used as an excuse to treat writers like beggars; and writers, in small presses at least, rarely claim the basic integrity of professionals, which the very act of writing assumes. Ray goes on to assert that authors must familiarize themselves with copyrights, contract law, and other peripheral yet vital aspects of publishing. Small presses and little magazines remain contentious, flawed, and absolutely necessary to the western American literary scene, for they constantly test limits, suggest new expressions, and introduce new writers, a few of whom develop and enrich our literary heritage. Finally, it is the finished products of alternative publishers that must validate their existence. If at their worst such products are incomprehensible or downright offensive, at their best they represent a fecund realm of possibility that commercial publishers have neither the courage nor the imagination to nurture. Perhaps, as Sallis suggests, For many years the little magazines were our literary underground; now they are close to becoming our only ground. Speaking for many of her fellow writers, novelist Paula Christian exults, Lets hear it for the small presses! Theyre giving writers a chance no longer available to them in todays conglomerate-ridden world of commercial publishing ! In the West, a region of the mind and of the nation long misunderstood by commercial publishers, alternative publishing has been and remains especially important.
State University
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Benes, Steven. Roses are Red, Poets are Blue. . . . Los Angeles, April 1983, pp. 26469. Examines contemporary southern Californian poets, revealing the importance of small presses and little magazines to the continuing output of verse. Clifton, Merritt. Early Midwestern Litmags. The Pub 6 (Spring 1981): 2531. One of several important articles on small press and lit mags history by Clifton, who has provided consistently interesting material on the subject. . The Watch. Small Press Review 28 (May 1975) to date. This continuing series was a running chronology of small-pressmanship beginning with the year 704 A.D. (the approximate date of the first known printed work, a Korean religious scroll done on wooden blocks). Invaluable. Friedman, Mickey. On Publishing Your Own. California Living Magazine/San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle, October 31, 1976, pp. 48, 50. An interesting examination of self-publishing and its role as genesis of many small presses. Gloor, Don, and Brock Yancey. Ode to Long Beach Writers Present. University Magazine 5 (Spring 1983): 69, 34. A close look at writers from one fecund literary region that reveals the vitality of the small press scene, as well as its indispensability to artists. Henderson, Bill, ed. The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition & How-To. Yonkers: Pushcart Press, 1973. A collection of how-to and how-we-did articles that further examine the importance of self-publishing in American letters. Hoffman, Frederick J., et al. The Little Magazine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946. The classic in this field and a starting point for all further research. Hume, Martha. In Memoriam: Alan Swallow 19151966. Small Press Review 1 (Spring 1967): 12. This biographical article by Hume, an editor at Swallows Sage Books, is a succinct, moving history of the Wests most important small press editor to date. No other piece better summarizes Swallows accomplishments. Kleyman, Paul. Small Press Survival. Western Publisher 1 (October 1980): 1, 8. Examines business aspects of small-pressmanship, pointing out that a solid understanding of both law and merchandising is as necessary for small publishers as for large. Discusses the impact of such matters as interest rates, discounting, distribution, etc. Pollack, Felix. Elitism and the Littleness of Little Magazines. Southwest Review 61 (Summer 1976): 297303. The title tells it all, except that Pollack documents his assertion that elitist spirit has characterized the little magazine movement from its inception. This offers perspective on a movement that often tries to pass itself as proletarian. Small Press Review. Since Spring 1967, the most consistently reliable source of material from and about alternative publishing. Special issues, such as Literature
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in the Eighties (12 : 10/October 1980) or its annual library number, are invaluable. Highly recommended. Speer, Laurel. Of What Use Are Reviews in Small Presses? The Pub 6 (Spring 1981): 4556. A fascinating survey of small press writers and editors who reveal their own opinions of the relationship of reviews to publishing. There are differing opinions included: some decry cronyism, others laud it; some attack established reviewers, others praise them. A valuable study. TriQuarterly. Special number: The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History. 43 (Fall 1978). Perhaps the most important single volume presently available on lit mags. Its list of contributors reads like a Whos Who, and a wide range of opinions is included. A must. Has been reissued by Pushcart Press as The Little Magazine in America, edited by Elliot Anderson and Mary Kinzie.
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Trends in Western Womens Writing

to the anthology The Women Who Made the West (1980), Nellie Snyder Yost extols the uniqueness of some nineteenthcentury lives, pointing out that those women were determined to be themselves and to practice their vocations with style on the frontier; moreover, they led the way for the liberation of all women and made possible the freedom women enjoy today. They were individuals who insisted on living their lives as they wished or had to, without censure or condemnation. Today, in remarkably altered circumstances, the drama of those lives, as well as their unspoken sisterhood, continues to inform writing by women. Not only the emergence of more, often better women writers, but the acknowledgement of more and better women writers, with the unique perspectives they offer, is a major present trend in western American letters. Among the unique and valuable contributions of the many womens studies programs that have been developed at western universities and colleges is an expansion of the definition of literature to include nontraditional writing, such as letters, journals, diariesmaterial previously treated as literary ephemera. As more books featuring what has come to be called private writing are published, it becomes increasingly clear that womens writing is not necessarily the same as mens in form or content, and that its formal elements may lead to a redefinition of traditional genres. While some critics complain that private writing is no more than protoliterature boosted because not enough distinguished work in traditional forms has been produced by women, a reading of books such as Elizabeth Hampstens Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 18801910 confirms that at least some gifted writers did choose to confine their work, and that intimate glimpses indeed may be gained by reading them. In any case, such writingwhether it develops into a significant genre or notdoes reveal the lives of sensitive individuals previously ignored. While the literary establishment may not yet appreciate private writings, the publication in recent years of numerous letters, diaries, journals, and oral histories has offered insights into the lives of westering women and reflected the need to set history straight on their roles and contributions. A cadre of feminist historians and philosophers have examined literary stereotypes and social roles in penetrating, sometimes conflicting studies; scholN HER INTRODUCTION
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ars such as Sandra Myres, Sue Armitage, Joan Jensen, Christiane Fischer, and Hampsten are suggesting perspectives and providing material for creative writers striving to capture the reality of womens experiences in the West. Two interesting examples of books which offer candid views of earlier western experiences are Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (1981) edited by Joanna L. Stratton, and Cowgirls: Women of the American West (1982) edited by Teresa Jordan. Both volumes are based on oral history and both destroy stereotypes in their recountings of life on the frontier, as do Pat Ellis Taylors Border Healing Woman (1981), which records the life of folk healer Jewel Babb, and Ruthe Winegartens I Am Annie Mae: An Extraordinary Woman by Her Own Words (1983), which recounts conversations with Annie Mae Hunt, the granddaughter of a slave. The list of such books could be very long indeed, but the central point is that womens lives have been diverse and so are their stories. But private writing is by no means the only significant trend in womens writing. In fact, the womens movement has been unique in another way: it has not only opened doors for contemporary authors, but has also stimulated the publication or republication of work by writers from earlier generations and has, in fact, revived the reputations of many older authors. Much of the credit for this reevaluation goes to Tillie Olsen, who in Silences (1974) showed how unfairly women authors had been treated by male publishers and critics. Her compelling argument has been a major stimulus to the republication of forgotten books by women. University presses have been leaders in reissuing out-of-print books. A number of female writers have, of course, traditionally been acknowledged to be major figures in western letters: Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, Mary Austin, Katherine Anne Porter. Others have occupied less secure niches: Dorothy Johnson, Gertrude Atherton, Josephine Miles, Helen Hunt Jackson, Dorothy Scarborough, Mary Hallock Foote, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ina Coolbrith, Jean Stafford. Still othersthe case of Meridel LeSueur is classicseem to have been forgotten entirely. In effect, such previously established writers become contemporary no matter what their dates when their work is reissued, for they are read in a new way by a new generation. Of course, publishing opportunities are greater now than ever before for women. Not only do major houses produce the work of renowned westernersJoan Didion, Tillie Olsen, Leslie Silko, Ursula LeGuin, et al. but small presses and journals increasingly publish books by female authors; in fact, more and more specialize in womens writing. The editors of Womanspirit, a magazine published in Oregon, explain, Our audience is women. Only women contribute. We use she and her as generic terms. 1179
Unpublished women are encouraged to submit personal experiences . . . . Merritt Clifton has suggested that current small press activity emerges from class struggle, representing a proletarian bid to control its own mental destiny; never has a larger group sought voice, and never have so many outlets evolved so quickly. The 19th Edition of The lnternational Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses (198384) lists nearly three hundred presses and magazines specializing in womens perspectives. The common link connecting female adventurers of the past century with women writers of today is what Jacques Barzun has called the release into space experienced by most easterners and Europeans who come to the West. It is doubtful that many of the writers themselves would consider exhilarating the most apt modifier to describe the spaces around them. Most will admit, however, that their environment offersthrough the isolation fostered by long distances between urban areasthe positive value of artistic freedom not easily found in older, more tightly knit literary establishments. Poetry by women continues to be rich and stimulating. Long a province of alternative publishers and literary magazines, more poetry is being published today than ever before. Free Rein Press, for example, in 1984 released All My Grandmothers Could Sing: Poems by Nebraska Women, edited by Judith Scornberger. Women-in-Literature, Inc., a press in Reno, has issued a series of four regional collections of poetry by female authors The West (1980), The East (1982), The Midwest (1983), and The South (1984), as well as a highly-regarded journal, Woman Poet. Ahsahta Press in Boise published Women Poets of the West (1978) edited by Thomas Trusky. Again, the list could be long indeed, but the point is that more women are writing, more women are being published, more women are being read. Until recently, women writers in the West have gone without much notice from each other, cut off as they are by the regions vast spaces, although what they have written has nearly always stressed universal implications of human experience over the perpetuation of regional eccentricities. The womens movement has produced few prominent feminist authors in the West, but its impact has certainly been felt, stimulating an awareness among female writers that their labors, if good, are now more apt to receive serious attention from publishers and critics. In turn, most think of themselves not as regional writers, but as writers who choose to live in the West. Few seem to relate as strongly to their environment as Willa Cather or Mary Austin did, but that may be because their new milieu tends to be urban. Whether it is the small-town poetry of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel or the big-city fiction of Joan Didion, women writers have established themselves as a major and unique force in western American writing. Finally, the most striking feature of womens writing in the West is the
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individuality of expression. There are really no schools, no styles, to which allegiance is automatically owed. Marilyn Yaloms Women Writers of the West Coast (1984), an anthology of interviews with such writers as Kay Boyle, Diane Johnson, Judy Grahn, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jessamyn West, demonstrates an extraordinary variety of both philosophy and style. In the end it is the dedication of individual women to their craft that will determine the power of their work. As Grahn says in her interview, Writing takes so much determination you would do it in the middle of the ocean if you had to.
L OU R ODENBERGER , McMurry
College
Hampsten, Elizabeth. Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 18801910. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. An excellent collection of private writing showing its importance to womens literature. Lee, L. L., and Merrill Lewis, editors. Women, Women Writers, and the West. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1979. A selection of essays on female authors assembled under the aegis of the Western Literature Association. A solid, preliminary investigation. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. . The Land Before Her. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. This student of Henry Nash Smith examines women on the frontier from various perspectives. Two valuable studies. Stauffer, Helen, and Susan J. Rosowski, editors. Women and Western American Literature. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1982. A collection of articles on various women writers of the West. A valuable survey.
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Contemporary Trends in Western American Fiction

much western literature has become increasingly self-conscious and self-reflective. While popular and historical western fiction, for example, have always evinced a gradual development of thematic and plot interests, what John R. Milton has called the regional and colloquial Westerns as well as the historical Western have begun to examine their own values and, sometimes, to parody their own concerns and techniques. Not only have writers like Edward Abbey (The Monkey Wrench Gang, 1975), Charles Portis (True Grit, 1968), Max Evans (The Rounders, 1960), Richard Bradford ( Red Sky at Morning, 1968), and Robert Flynn (North to Yesterday, 1967) produced western fiction centered around anti-heroes, but Thomas Berger (Little Big Man, 1964) and E. L. Doctorow (Welcome to Hard Times, 1975) have written novels that might be called anti-Westerns, since they willfully turn the previously accepted standards of the genreor at least of the popular Westernupside down. There is also a sense in which some of the above-listed writers seem to be catering to the tastes of non-western audiences. The appearance in western literature of the anti-heroor of what Anthony Hopkins has called the annihilated hero in whom people see embodied their tensions, anxieties, and frustrations about contemporary lifeis not simply a reflection of current trends in the mainstream of American literature. The material excesses of America have recently come to plague the West in a literal sense, especially in the past thirty years. Booms in the development of petroleum, uranium, natural gas, oil shale, and coal, intensified by the recent energy shortages, have already had a devastating impact on the ecology and social organization of much of the western United States. Although a sense of losing the vast, open, unspoiled environment has been a characteristic of serious western writing almost since its inception, and even Natty Bumppo was eventually outcast from the society that he helped to gain a foothold in the new Eden, in recent years the conflict of machine and garden has intensified. William Eastlake, Vardis Fisher, Edward Abbey, and Jack Schaefer have all treated the spiritually devastating advance of civilizations urbanization and industrialization over the past thirty years. Moreover, the work of such writers as Shawn Wong, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ben Santos, Toms Rivera, Hisaye Yamamoto, Rudolfo Anaya, John Okada, Richard Vasquez, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Silko, and J. L. Navarro shows how western American literaINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR,
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CONTEMPORARY WESTERN AMERICAN FICTION
ture can deal with the problems of minority cultures in America across a far broader spectrum than can any other regional literature. Western writing has focused sharply on the confrontation of eastern and western cultures, on industrial and natural Americas, in both material and spiritual terms, but it has generally been a bastion of the opposition to changes that meant exploitation. Easternization in this literature has generally meant a loss of individuality, at least in the sense of the individuals one-to-one relationship with the land, a loss of freedom, self-reliance, and the more fulfilling lifestyles of the past. Social order, once seen as the contribution of the East, is now either taken for granted or despised as corrupt, vitiating, or emotionally castrating. The more recent serious traditional western novels of A. B. Guthrie, Wallace Stegner, Frank Waters, and Paul Horgan, as well as those of younger writers such as Bill Hotchkiss, David Galloway, and Thomas Sanchez, have examined ways in which the past and the present might be bridged and western myths retained or evaluated in more sophisticated ways. The fiction of James D. Houston illustrates this movement, examining important western themes in contemporary settings. A Native Son of the Golden West (1971) is set largely in Hawaii, but involves a symbolic migration of the protagonists forebears from the South to California to the last geographical fringe of America, where we observe the confrontation of the American dream and the American reality that is so much a part of serious western fiction. Most of Houstons fiction is set in California, where surfers and solid citizens in mid-life crisis, draft-dodgers and veterans confront their universal concerns. Continental Drift (1978) effectively employs the San Andreas Fault as a metaphor for the protagonists certainty of death finely balanced by the miracle of continuing life, and for the shifting, delicate balance that exists in his family relationships. The exemplary paradox of the American West, the coexistence of lush beauty and the promise of life with violence, hardship, and the threat of death, also underlies the basic structure of the novel and is one of its basic thematic concerns. Another West Coast writer, Joan Didion, has offered intense, sensitive portraits of usually neurotic western women in novels such as Run River (1963) and Play It as It Lays (1970). Didions great strength as a writer lies in her ability to evoke the harried and askew sensibilities of her heroines, the harried and askew sense of life in an increasingly urban and socially complex place. The neurosis of her characters is, by extension, the regions, the product of rapid growth unattended by rapid maturation. Didion touches a special pulse and shares its beat with her readers. Because these themes and issues of western fiction are also the concerns of much contemporary mainstream literature, it has become increasingly difficult to define what a work of western fiction is, and what it isnt. 1183
Pieces by Raymond Chandler, Tillie Olsen, and Ishmael Reed were all included in a recent volume called West Coast Fiction (1980). Despite editor Houstons claim that these works all have emerged from the experience of the west coast, from the terrain, from the legends, from the dreams dreamed and the lives lived, some critics are likely to argue that these authors have little in common except a geographic coincidence. Still, Houstons point cannot be dismissed; these writers have shared a common influence of coastal living and therefore perhaps ought to be considered together as westerners. Serious western literature in its traditional forms will continue to show its distinctive qualities, largely because western fiction reflects its environment more than any other regional literature in the United States. The vastness, aridity, and sublime magnificence of the West that force man to reexamine his relationship to nature will continue to be the hallmark of traditional western writing, and that tradition will necessarily evolve as the face of the West itself changes. Evolution is noticeable in the short story in particular, where there is a good deal of innovation and experimentation with narrative perspective and time frame. Two interesting anthologies of short fiction have updated the direction of the contemporary western tale. The Far Side of the Storm: New Ranges of Western Fiction, edited by Gary Elder, appeared in 1975 and stressed experimental perspectives and forms, while also emphasizing strong regional flavor. Reviews ranged from outright panning (usually from traditionalists) to raves (often from younger critics). The book balanced the work of acknowledged mastersWilliam Eastlake, Frederick Manfred, Don Walker, Max Evanswith stories by promising younger writersLen Fulton, Robert Roripaugh, Ramona Weeks, and Gerald Haslam, among others. Six years later, Karl and Jane Kopps Southwest: Toward the Twenty-First Century offered an even more contemporary, equally experimental view of the western short story. Featuring a wildly varied collection of tales, the book displayed such emerged or emerging talents as David Kranes, Linda Hogan, Gerald Locklin, Ronald Koertge, Leonard Bird, David Remley, and Haslam. All the stories were informed by a distinct sense of place, but their techniques and perspectives were unpredictable. Wrote the editors: . . . This extraordinary, almost hallucinatory intersection of many realities is reflected in the stories in this collection. To be forced to shift from viewpoint to viewpoint in reading a book can be disconcerting: to be forced to do so in real life, even more so. Yet each of these stories arises out of the real stuff of everyday life in the Southwest. 1184
Roripaughs short story The Legend of Billy Jenks, which appeared in the Elder anthology, proceeds from the historical realism associated with Vardis Fisher, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and Jack Schaefer. It is, however, uncomfortably reflective about the consequences of living in a changing West where a sense of history, and the perhaps unavoidably idealized sense of ones place in that history, can be disorienting or even destructive. Roripaughs narrator reflects about the fate of his modern-day Billy the Kid: To the tourists, Billy was a modern fragment of frontier legenda young out-law born in the wrong century . . . To those of us who knew Billy Jenks, though, he was mostly something else. He was clumsy and not very bright. He was the hand-to-mouth past that most of us knew too well and wanted to forget. He was our Western innocence . . . . The range of contemporary storieseven by any individual author is vast. While personal taste and stylistic preference may influence favorites, it is the range itself that most confounds. The western short story tradition, which extends from Bret Harte through Jack London and William Saroyan to the present, is rich indeed and growing richer. A number of innovative contemporary writers continue to concentrate on this intense form despite the considerably greater commercial viability of the novel. William Kittredge (The Van Gogh Fields, 1978), Laurel Speer ( The Hundred Percent Black Steinway Grand, 1979), William Rintoul (Roustabouts, 1980), Richard Dokey (Birthright, 1980), Chester Seltzer ( The Stories of Amado Muro, 1978), David Kranes (Hunters in the Snow, 1980), Raymond Carver (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, 1976, and Furious Seasons, 1980), and Gerald Haslam (The Wages of Sin, 1980, and Hawk Flights, 1983), these among others have made noteworthy contributions to the continued development of the western story. The careers of Carver and Haslam, which have run roughly parallel courses, exemplify the versatility and quality of the contemporary western short story. Both first attracted public attention when they were cited in the 1971 Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Carver, also a gifted poet, is noted for tight, tough yet sensitive stories dealing with lifes small struggles, triumphs and tragedies. His subjects have tended to traceoften with exquisite languagea more critically-valued range of subjects than have Haslams: principally the interior journeys that so intrigue contemporary American writers, and that so illuminate the secret lives of everyone. For example, in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?one of the best recent stories from the Westa husband suspects, discovers, then agonizes over his wifes sexual dalliance, reconciling himself to reality in an act of abject and painfully believable impotence, . . . He held himself, he later considered, as long as he could. 1185
And then he turned to her. He turned and turned in what might have been a stupendous sleep, and he was still turning, marveling at the impossible changes he felt moving over him. Leonard Michaels, himself a short story writer of acknowledged skill, considers Carvers stories extraordinary in their language, their music, and their huge terrifying vision of ordinary human life in this country. Following the publication of Cathedral (1983), critics in both America and Britain acknowledged that Carver had become a major writer. As for Haslam, Max Westbrook observes that his writing demonstrates a vision that is sympathetic and affirmative, realistic and unafraid. Few subjects intimidate himspontaneous human combustion (Heat), vitalism (Earthquake Summer), abortion (A Prison of Words)and he has probably employed the most rigorously multi-ethnic cast in western writing. Moreover, like many of his contemporaries, he often handles such diverse subjects by devising technically original presentations, such as the use of a chorus (Sojourner) or merged levels of reality (Smile). Haslams stories feature what Bill Baines has characterized as his broad sense of the rhythm of dialect as well as his uncanny gift of showing minds working through the spoken word. Both Carver and Haslam have supported their writing by teaching in universities. Carvers work has tended to be published by more established presses, eastern publishers in particular, while Haslam has been principally published by regional houses in the West. Both have also been widely printed in literary magazines and both are appearing with increasing frequency in anthologies. The growth of regional presses and magazines since 1965 has provided much greater exposure for autochthonous literary material. Contemporary western writers need not alter their own sense of the real in order to be published by presses in another part of the country, and, in both journals and books, views from within are being increasingly printed. Magazines such as Scree, Black Jack, Maelstrom Review, New Mexico Humanities Review, Quarry West, Vagabond, South Dakota Review, Blue Cloud Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Rocky Mountain Review, Arizona Quarterly, and Southwest Review, among others, have published and are publishing innovative writers. Of more importance, perhaps, since literary magazines have ebbed and flowed regionally for a long time, has been the emergence of regional publishers, often dedicated to printing the finest material being written in their area, material that not infrequently is of little interest to eastern publishers. For example, Len Fultons The Grassman (1974), Jack Walkers Boomers Gold (1978), Paul Foremans Sugarland (1978), and James Hoggards Trotter Ross (1981), as well as the aforementioned stories by Chester Seltzer, are 1186
among books issued by Thorp Springs Press of Austin, Texas. All are set in a known, concrete West, usually Texas, and all have been well and widely reviewed. Some other regional presses that have contributed to the growth of quality fiction are Seven Buffaloes Press in Big Timber, Montana, Red Earth Press in Corrales, New Mexico, Dustbooks in Paradise, California, Peregrine Smith in Layton, Utah, Capra Press in Santa Barbara, California, and Duck Down Press in Fallon, Nevada. All of these publishers acknowledge the importance of grants, especially from the National Endowment for the Arts, to their enterprise, as well as the growth of western American literature classes at colleges which have created a steady market for solid western titles. Another, often ignored but quite important factor in the continued growth of fiction in the Westindeed, in the growth of all western literaturehas been the establishment of highly regarded creative writing programs at colleges and universities. Stanford, San Francisco State and Iowa are acknowledged leaders, but programs large and small are developing almost everywhere, with creative writing now considered among the most popular humanities options in higher education. Before programs became so widespread, Stanford University (which boasted Yvor Winters and Wallace Stegner), San Francisco State University (with Mark Harris, Ray B. West, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark) and the University of Iowa (which awards the Ph.D. in creative writing, and attracts a distinguished faculty) were pioneers, and their alumni constitute an impressive list of contemporary writers. While there is no question that the growth of creative writing programs has been a major contemporary influence, there remains controversy over whether they constitute a good training ground for future authors. Observes Allan Temko: Thus far they have produced competence rather than brilliance . . . . Countering arguments simply point to lists of accomplished graduates. Other critics claim that such programs lead to a homogenization of regional writing, a loss of the sense of place as future writers are more influenced by books and classes than by people and land. These may be moot points, for Louis LAmours novels demonstrate the continued power of the fantasy West that has for so long attracted a popular audience, and high-quality traditional western fiction continues to be written, while at the same timeas the short story collections cited above illustrateother western works seem to be changing in more radical ways, expanding the limits of both subjects and techniques. The westernization of American literature in general, in its quest for the spiritual, intellectual, and cultural encounters that have long been characteristic of western literature, must be examined at least briefly in any examination of contemporary trends in western literature. When Richard Etulain, in The New Western Novel, and Leslie Fiedler, in The Return 1187
of the Vanishing American, talk about the New Western, they are talking about different things. Etulain lists Ken Kesey, William Humphrey, Richard Bradford, N. Scott Momaday, and Benjamin Capps as contemporary western writers. However, he primarily discusses the development of A. B. Guthrie, Paul Horgan, and Wallace Stegner, all writing in the 1970s in a tradition well established by the late 1940s. Also in this latter group, perhaps, should be Capps, whose attentions have shifted from cowboys to Indians, paralleling contemporary sympathies, but whose style remains simple and straightforward and whose themes are less than alarmingly original. While Guthrie, in Arfive, for instance, is concerned with the environment, and Horgan and Stegner reflect, at least peripherally, recent changes in American society, none of these writers makes a radical break with the traditional perceptions of these issues. Fiedler, on the other hand, defines western literature by the presence of a symbolic Indian in a mythological West. To Fiedler, the beatnik and the hippie are the heirs of the frontiersman and the cowboy, and the frontier is not merely spiritual, but particularly psychological. Madness, he says, is the last frontier. As soon as one starts to consider as western any literature dealing with a spiritual, psychological, or material frontier, the expansion of western literature into the domain of American mainstream literature and into such genres as science fiction is an eminently predictable phenomenon. There are many precedents for this consideration. More traditional works, such as Edwin Fussells Frontier: American Literature and the American West (1965), which conceive of the frontier metaphorically, are really not so far from it. Lucy Hazard, who wrote The Frontier in American Literature in 1927, saw our literatures concern with the frontier as having evolved through two stages thus far, and she predicted a third stage. Frontier literature in Cooper and Bret Harte had begun by dealing with physical pioneering for the control of nature, then later became concerned with industrial pioneering for control of the labor of other men in Norris, Sinclair Lewis, and Edgar Lee Masters. Finally, she predicted, American literature would come to deal with a spiritual pioneering for the control of mans self. Perhaps one finds the beginnings of this movement in the years immediately following Hazards statement, though it is not in the writing of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Fitzgerald so much as in the work of Henry Miller. Nathanael Wests fiction belongs in this tradition as well, but his characters make up the Donner party of the spiritual Western, lost, snowbound, and ultimately self-destructive. The movement has taken another forty years to gain force. Its newest proponents are Thomas Pynchon, who sees the quest as apparently in chaos and its chances for success minimal, and Tom Robbins, who is more optimistic. Between the two extremes range such geographic westerners as Richard Brautigan and Ken 1188
Kesey, as well as figures who can be said to have written Westerns at least some of the time such as Bernard Malamud ( A New Life, 1961) and James Dickey (Deliverance, 1970). For Pynchon, the thematic myths of western literature are one of several sets of archetypal patterns that the writer can use to describe and investigate the mass of events and impulses that compose American history and culture; Freudian psychology and molecular chemistry are two of many others. Gravitys Rainbow (1973), in which Pynchon makes his most extensive use of western elements, is set mostly in Europe during World War II, but it is an attempt to understand the forces that have shaped our contemporary world and that are likely to pattern our future. Although his appropriation of western literature has an historical foundation, Pynchon is largely interested in repeating and adapting patterns that recur in history; he plays these patterns over and against each other in a kind of fictional fugue. One such passage begins in the mens room of the Roseland Ballroom with a confrontation between Malcolm X and Slothrop, the preppyish New England protagonist of Gravitys Rainbow. The famous black nightclub is clearly Indian territory to Slothrop. Slothrop fantasizes escape down the toilet, only to find himself, Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, in a metaphysical Great Plains. In his assessment of this mythic situation, Pynchon is not far from Leslie Fiedler, who maintains that the final outcome of each confrontation between WASP and Indian is the annihilation of one or the other. Pynchon finds American behavior, especially as it is ritualized in western literature, to be in large part futile and self-destructive. On the other hand, some western critics and scholars find Pynchons writing to be in large part futile and self-destructive. While Pynchons attraction to western literature is primarily analytical, Tom Robbins has lived in Washington for over twenty years and writes about the West with a natural enthusiasm. Works of literature are always affected by the time and place in which they are written, and Robbinss are no exception. Western American literature has often chronicled conflict that occurred on the frontier between the free-spirited, natureoriented individual and restrictive civilization, and Robbins is one of the new writers able and inclined to employ traditional western patterns in an original fashion so that the individual remains unvanquished by society. In Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), and Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), set mostly in Washington state, the Dakotas, and Hawaii, Robbins has reworked in an unusual style many of the conflicts familiar to the pop-western genre. Robbins has apparently given rise to a number of other hippie-cowboy western writers, most notably Gino Sky (Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha, 1980) and Ron Swigart 1189
A Literary History of the American West (Little America, 1978). However, it is Richard Brautigan who bridges the gap between Pynchons pessimistic interpretation of western archetypes and Robbinss optimistic assertion of the western spirit. At least geographically a western writer of fiction and poetry, Brautigan has written a variety of novels that take place in the West and at least two that deal with themes that are typically western. Both A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) and Trout Fishing in America (1967) deal with the attempts of characters to rediscover the lost promises, either ideal or historical, of pastoral America. The title character of A Confederate General from Big Sur is Lee Mellon, an expatriate Southern explorer seeking new freedom in the California wilderness. Brautigan describes the American Dream as a nightmare, and implies that the reason for this turn of events is that the American people, like Mellon, are greedy, cruel, con artists who plunder and pollute nature. Trout Fishing in America is a metaphorical excursion into the myth of American pastoralism. The trout streams that might promise the literal fisherman his reward are now plundered, polluted, or closed off, but, Brautigan suggests, America is often only a place in the mind, and its imaginative reality is still potent and promising. Brautigan does not explore compromises that must be made between spiritual needs and material reality, as so many traditional Westerns do. Rather he presents the material impossibility of literally reliving the dream of pastoral America, the frustration and corruption that result from trying to, and the possibilityor even, perhaps, the necessity of creating imaginative alternatives that will satisfy our spiritual needs. Like Robbins, Brautigan in his later works seems to have fallen into somewhat formulaic expression of what were once original ideas. Ken Keseys Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) and One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest (1962) are frequently seen as contingent to the contemporary development of western American literature. Writing about his native Northwest, Kesey fulfills almost anyones definition of a western writer, on both historical and mythic levels, and it is not surprising that his is virtually the only name mentioned by both Fiedler and Etulain. Sometimes a Great Notion examines the fierce independence and individualism of the members of a family of non-union loggers during a strike. Kesey employs an alienated part-member of the family as protagonist in order to universalize this theme, while at the same time he provides strong regional qualities in description and other characterizations. One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest is narrated by Fiedlers returning Native American, who has lived for years on Fiedlers last frontier. The schizophrenic Indians tale of R. P. McMurphy, in many ways a classic western hero, and his conflict with the grotesque and gargantuan schoolmarm of civilization, Nurse Ratched, is essentially a battle between the natural man, innocent, rebellious, free, and vital, and the castrating, suffocating minions of a repressive society. Keseys 1190
assessment of Americas potential for redemption through the western myth is rather oblique; while critics of both novels tend to interpret their endings as pessimistic, presenting hope for the future merely as a necessary illusion, Keseys western heroes are powerful figures of defiance who imply that the qualities of the westerner will always live on in the hearts of Americans. While writers such as Robbins and Brautigan are certainly the bestknown younger novelists, they are not necessarily the best, for the novel remains a kind of ultimate genre among westerners, with more and more published each year and sales consistently high. Two predictable categories dominate recent fiction: novels reexamining the historic West and novels surveying aspects of the region today. Within those two categories, however, predictability falters, for contemporary authors respect far fewer restrictions on form and content than did their predecessors. If their work falls into patterns, they are new patterns, for example the satiric hero quest, the psychopathological frontier, and the hippie road novel. In the midst of excesses, compelling, more human and often humane presentations of the past and present have emerged. Ron Hansens Desperadoes (1979), a dramatic retelling of the Dalton gangs story, is a rousing adventure yarn that shows gang members as people and as criminals; they are not heroic. Bill Hotchkiss has explored the mountain man years in Jim Beckwourths life, creating a hint of previously unrecognized complexity, in The Medicine Calf (1981), while Speer Morgans Belle Starr (1979), an effective internal drama, portrays a menopausal woman uncertain of her life. Custer in Douglas Joness The Court Martial of George Armstrong Custer (1976) is a flawed and damaged man hanging on desperately to what remains of his values. Of the four novels, Hansens is clearly the most successful work of art. It opens with portraits of the dead Daltons, so it moves with a tragic inexorability toward the Coffeyville raid of 1892, limning life on the frontier and not hiding the considerable faults (tragic or otherwise) of the Daltons. Clearing of the Mist (1979) by Richard Fleck exemplifies the continued expansion of subjects, even historical subjects, for it is the story of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth-century West. While Fleck has not fully pulled off what he has attempted in this novel, he has nonetheless offered an interesting insight into an overlooked frontier experience. In Creek Marys Blood (1980) Dee Brown traces the movement of a Creek family from Georgia through the Indian Territory to the Northern Plains. Again, the novel is not as fully realized as might be wished, but the story is strong. DArcy McNickles final novel (he died shortly after completing this book), Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978), explores the destruction of Indian values on western Agency land. It is set in the first half of the twentieth century and, as was often true of McNickles work, has about it the texture of tragedy. 1191
Another unique novel is Paula Gunn Allens The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), which is structurally cyclical, seeking to reveal layers of culture and consciousness as the author, a mixed-blood (Laguna Pueblo, Sioux, and Lebanese-American) who was raised in New Mexico, feels and understands them. Linda Hogan points out that The writing is mythical in its telling of our origins, mystical in its relation to the world layers and human consciousness that derives from those layers. For those reasons, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows is an unusual and interesting first novel. A list of historical western novels could be vast, of course, because the historic West remains rich literary territory, in no small measure because so many of the books purporting to treat it deal instead with the Westthat-never-was. Contemporary portraits from the West also range widely. Carolyn Doty, for example, has produced a satiric road novel, A Day Late (1980), that humorously and not so humorously probes American mobility; Terry Daviss Vision Quest (1979), with its exuberant, upbeat style, uses wrestling as a vehicle to explore maturation and masculinity. Modern homesteaders in Californias Big Sur areasome of whom unfortunately fall into stereotypesillustrate contemporary problems facing individualists in Jack Curtiss Eagles over Big Sur (1981). Peter Gent, in North Dallas Forty (1973), has built a revealing story of a pro football players decline, and has revealed something of the social dynamics of fat-cat Texas. Douglas Terry has produced an impressive first novel dealing with a young mans loss of innocence in a college football program, The Last Texas Hero (1982), that complements Gents account of the pro grid scene. The range of subjects and styles seems endless and varied: Wayne Udes imaginative exploration of contemporary Indian magic and mendacity in Becoming Coyote (1981) projects an almost supernatural tone, while Gerald Haslams one novel to date, Masks (1976), explores an Okie familys disintegration in California with the inexorability of neo-naturalism. Ron McClures Rawlins (1972) proceeds from historical realism toward an acknowledgement of change. The poetic language of James Welchs Winter in the Blood (1974) renders it memorable. In nearly all these examples, the writers seem to be asking where we are heading, what we are gaining, and at what price. Not only are emerging writers contributing to recent developments in the western novel, many well-established novelists continue to produce outstanding work. John Nichols, for example, burst on the scene in 1974 with The Milagro Beanfield War, a comic and highly original tale set in New Mexico. His subsequent New Mexico novel, The Magic Journey (1978), is less successful but in no way lessens the triumph of his first effort. Both William Eastlake and Edward Abbey have recently produced fantasies dealing with eco-raiders. Eastlakes Dancers in the Scalp House (1975) is less 1192
compelling, although he remains apossibly the major influence in the introduction of modern, perhaps post-impressionistic or absurdist literary forms to the West. Abbeys aforementioned The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) is more effective, largely because it does not seem to caricature any of the authors earlier work. And Wallace Stegners often-ignored All the Little Live Things (1967) is a high-quality precursor of the by-now-tiresome hippie vs. straight confrontation stories; Stegners version is in no way tiresome. Frederick Manfred produced one of his finest novels in 1975 with the publication of The Manly-Hearted Woman, a novel that explored a Sioux warrior through the vehicle of a womanly-hearted young man and a manly-hearted young woman whose paths cross in battle. Manfred plays with male and female roles and moves his readers toward a mythic apprehension. Delbert Wylder, in an important study, Recent Western Fiction in Journal of the West (January 1980), summed up matters well when he observed: . . . the variety is amazing . . . Western fiction demonstrates a surprising amount of both versatility and vitality. A genre which was once almost totally thought of as the realm of the horse opera now examines both past and contemporary America from different perspectives. It retains its distrust of progress, but more frequently with wisdom rather than mere reaction. Western fiction seems to be growing beyond some of its earlier limitations. It has come of age. (p. 70) One especially interesting example of the maturation Wylder proclaims is the work of Tony Hillerman. The University of New Mexico professor has written three novels detailing the exploits of Joe Leaphorn, a Navajo tribal policemanThe Blessing Way (1970), Dance Hall of the Dead (1973), and Listening Woman (1978). Hillerman has successfully integrated various techniques of the detective/mystery novel into a sensitive and wide knowledge of Navajo culture, producing books that are entertaining and enlightening. Leaphorn is descended from a line of Singers, and a large part of his success as a lawman is due directly to his spiritual wholeness. As Ellen Strenski and Robley Evans sum him up, more than a successful detective, Leaphorn is a cultural hero whose concern for pattern as defined typologically by The People gives him a spiritual strength and insight not available to the alienated criminals and misfits who die without finding the appropriate kachinas. Hillermans is perhaps the most successful conversion of traditional material to a non-traditional format. Whether intentionally or not, Hillermans books reflect the growing influence of magical realism, a movement first powerfully developed in Latin American writing. George McMurray defines magical realism as a 1193
recent movement whose purpose is to penetrate objective reality and reveal the mysterious and poetic qualities underlying the daily lives of a community of people. In an article, Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction (Colorado State Review, Spring-Summer 1981), McMurray points to the work of Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier and Argentinian short story writer Jorge Luis Borges as possible instigators of this movement. Carpentier has described two basic traits of such writing: its treatment of the living myths and legends that defy logic, and the magical realists belief in the validity of the reality he is projecting. Such realism rejects chronological time and the conventionally understood psychological unity of the human personality. Carpentier has suggested that magical-realist fiction seems to find expression primarily in countries with large Indian or black populations. One such country is the United States. In another essay published in the aforementioned issue of Colorado State Review, North American Magical Realism, novelist Wayne Ude further refined the definition of magical realists, asserting that their work includes the following elements: they reject the narrow confines of traditional realism for a multi-dimensional, metaphysical reality; they distort time, space, and identity as those elements are conventionally understood, seeking new understanding; their psychology tends to be Jungian; and finally, they believe in the realities they present. Ude describes the work of William Faulkner, Go Down Moses in particular, as magical realism. He further lists such titles as The Man Who Killed the Deer by Frank Waters, One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey, Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, Ceremony by Leslie Silko, Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, and the novels of Toni Morrison. In another sort of extension, Why Are We in Vietnam? by Norman Mailer, Texas has been corrupted, but Alaska is still the New Frontier. One step further joins western literature with Americas other frontier literature, science fiction. (Mailer himself employs western imagery to ponder outer space as a new frontier in Fire on the Moon, 1971.) In New Worlds for Old (1974), David Ketterer links science fiction with American literature and experience in general. More precisely, as David Mogen has noted in Wilderness Visions: Science Fiction Westerns (1981), though science fiction frontiers have often been regarded as artificial transplants of the past on the future, they are more accurately understood as products of a cultural mythology which, like a genetic code implanted in the American imagination, structures visions of the future. For example, James Blishs Okie Cities series of novels, collected under a single cover as Cities in Flight (1970), take westering into the cosmos. So-called space Westerns are often to science fiction what the popu-
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lar Western is to western literature in general, and are in fact derivative of popular Westerns. However, there are enormous numbers of serious works of science fiction that employ parallels to nearly all of the concerns of serious western writing. The frontier in serious science fiction still serves as a testing ground for human nature, values, and abilities, provides a field for the adventurer and the individualist, and generates encounters between our technologically oriented culture and The Alien Other. In The American Western Novel (1966), J ames Folsom mentions Ray Bradburys The Martian Chronicles as dealing with the theme of the last frontier; Bradbury consciously evokes the small towns of the American Midwest and West in his description of the colonization of Mars, and the issues he explores are primarily human nature and American ideals, particularly the ethnocentrism of our dominant culture with its questionably blind faith in technological progress. Huxleys Brave New World, with its savage confronting the monotonous society of ultra-industrial America, provides another well-known example of the affinity between the two genres. Science fiction actually contains two different thematic types of western literature, one literally concerned with the values and conditions inherent in exploration and colonization, the other employing planetary myths to investigate many of the same themes as serious western literature. A striking example of the former is Destinies, a paperback periodical whose editor, James Baen, believes that it is mankinds duty and destiny to colonize space. The Hainish works of Ursula LeGuin (The Lathe of Heaven, 1970, et al.) explore mans struggle to adapt to the universal forces of nature and chronicle again the confrontation with the alien other. These stories of loss, adaptation, and change are fascinating examples of contemporary western themes in science fiction. The appearance of the frontier, both literally and metaphorically, in so much contemporary American literature testifies to the centrality of the concerns of western literature to our national consciousness. Whether one sees the contemporary trends in western American literature as western literature dealing with contemporary issues or as contemporary literature dealing with western themes, continued evolution in western literature seems fairly probable. One general prediction is that in the future, western fiction is likely to merge to a greater degree with mainstream American literature while retaining many of its traditional and regional characteristics. Western fiction will employ more stylistic experimentation and deal with a broader range of issues, while mainstream fiction will continue to explore the thematic concerns traditionally associated with western literature. However, if only because of the symbolic power of their region, westerners are apt to continue setting their fiction in distinct places and
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times even as their concerns and techniques become increasingly nontraditional. Western fiction, by whatever name we choose to call it, is more than ever before an emergent force on the national literary scene.
M ARK S IEGEL , University
of Wyoming
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Dokey, Richard. August Heat. Chicago: Story Press, 1982. Doty, Carolyn. A Day Late. New York: Viking, 1980. Elder, Gary. The Far Side of the Storm: New Ranges of Western Fiction. Los Cerrillos, New Mexico: San Marcos Press, 1975. Evans, Max. The Rounders. New York: Macmillan, 1960. Fleck, Richard. Clearing of the Mist. Paradise, California: Dustbooks, 1979. Flynn, Robert. North to Yesterday. New York: Knopf, 1967. Guthrie, A. B. Arfive. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Hansen, Ron. Desperadoes. New York: Knopf, 1979. Haslam, Gerald. Hawk Flights: Visions of the West. Big Timber, Montana: Seven Buffaloes Press, 1983. . Okies: Selected Stories. Third Edition. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1975. . Masks: A Novel. Penngrove, California: Old Adobe Press, 1976. . Snapshots: Glimpses of the Other California. Walnut Creek, California: Devil Mountain Books, 1985. . The Wages of Sin. Fallon, Nevada: Duck Down Press, 1980. Hillerman, Tony. Dance Hall of the Dead. New York: Avon, 1973. . Listening Woman. New York: Avon, 1978. . The Blessing Way. New York: Avon, 1970. Houston, James D. Continental Drift. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1978. . Gasoline: The Automotive Adventures of Charlie Bates. Santa Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1980. . A Native Son of the Golden West. New York: Dial Press, 1971. (ed). West Coast Fiction. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. Huth, Tom. Unnatural Axe: A Novel of Colorado. New York: Dell, 1979. Jones, Preston. A Texas Trilogy. New York: Hill &Wang, 1976. Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest. New York: New American Library, Inc., 1962. . Sometimes a Great Notion. New York: Bantam Books, 1966. Kopit, Arthur. Indians. New York: Hill & Wang, 1969. Kopp, Karl and Jane (eds). Southwest: Toward the Twenty-First Century. Corrales, New Mexico: Red Earth Press, 1981. Mailer, Norman. Why Are We in Vietnam? New York: Berkeley Publishing, 1977. . Of a Fire on the Moon. New York: New American Library, 1971. McClure, Ron. Rawlins. New York: Dial Press, 1972. McNickle, DArcy. Wind from an Enemy Sky. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Milton, John R. Three West. Vermillion, South Dakota: Dakota Press, 1970. . ed. The Western NovelA Symposium. South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964). Morgan, Speer. Belle Starr. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. Peterson, Levi. The Canyons of Grace. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Portis, Charles. True Grit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravitys Rainbow. New York: Viking Press, 1973.
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A Literary History of the American West Robbins, Tom. Another Roadside Attraction. New York: Bantam Books, 1971. . Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. New York: Bantam Books, 1976. . Still Life with Woodpecker. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. Schaefer, Jack. The Mavericks. New York: Dell, 1974. Seltzer, Chester. The Stories of Amado Muro. Austin: Thorp Springs Press, 1978. Sky, Gino. Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose. New York: Doubleday, 1971. . All the Little Live Things. New York: Viking Books, 1967. . Recapitulation. New York: Doubleday, 1979. . Wolf Willow. Rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Swigart, Ron. Little America. New York: Pocket Books, 1978. Ude, Wayne. Becoming Coyote. Amherst, Massachusetts: Lynx House Press, 1981. Secondary Sources Barsness, John. Ken Kesey: The Hero in Modern Dress. In One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest: Text and Criticism, edited by John Kesey Pratt. New York: Viking Press, 1973. Suggests that Kesey has nor broken the traditional heroic mold but has, in response to harsh, modern realities, given it a harsh, modern and somewhat zany face. Busby, Mark. Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Ken Kesey Passed by Here. Western American Literature 15 (Summer 1980): 8392. Points out intriguing similarities between Ross McEwen in Pas por Aqu and Randle McMurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest, concluding that when you read both stories, it is clear that you are in the presence of an authentic American hero. Cawelti, John. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1971. Argues that an understanding of the Western is necessary if the American popular mind is to be understood. Urges an interdisciplinary approach be employed in future studies. Offers stimulating generalizations about the nature of western writing, stressing the triumph of imagination over stereotypes. Etulain, Richard. A Bibliographic Guide to the Study of Western American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. The most extensive available checklist of interpretive books and articles on western writing. Includes sections on bibliographies, anthologies, and general works, as well as listings for individual authors. Indispensable. Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day, 1968. A simplistic, hyperbolic, and interesting argument that such modern writers as James Leo Herlihy, John Barth, and Kesey are leading us away from stereotypes toward genuine American literature. Unfortunately, Fiedler himself seems to know little about the vanishing American he lauds, and less about western letters. Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel. New Haven: College and University Press, 1966. Another stimulating book in which Folsom discusses the major themes, forms, and ideas employed by western novelists. Particularly effective when exploring mythic dimensions.
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Gurian, Jay. Western American Letters. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1975. Uneven, yet nonetheless valuable. Contains a plea for more realistic literature delineating actual regional realities while rejecting romantic and stereotypical approaches. The Possibility of a Westem Poetics is an especially stimulating chapter. Haslam, Gerald. The Southwestern Novels of William Eastlake. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 2026. Asserts that Eastlake broke the paradigm of Southwestern letters. Says further that he merges a post-modern, absurdist view with a shamans vision. . ed. Western American Writers. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1974. A definitive series of taped lectures on varied subjects (The Roots of Western Literature by Hector Lee, Women in Western Literature by Barbara Meldrum, The Cowboy in Literature by W. H. Hutchinson, etc.) as well as individual authors (Wallace Stegner by Merrill Lewis, Frederick Manfred by Joseph Flora, Thomas Hornsby Ferril by John Scherting). . ed. Western Writing. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974. A diverse crew of writersStegner, Westbrook, Stewart, Guthrie, DeVoto, Fisher, Dobie, et al.contribute essays on their craft and its relationship to their region. Lee, Robert Edson. From West to East: Studies in the Literature of the American West. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. In this provocative study, Lee argues that the East has vitiated the freshness of western life and letters. Too prowestern, this book nonetheless contains valuable insights. Lewis, Merrill, and L. L. Lee, editors. The Westering Experience in American Literature. Bellingham: Bureau for Faculty Research, Western Washington State University, 1977. A collection of papers presented at the 1976 Western Literature Association meeting, it contains such important essays as Jamie Robertsons Henry Adams, Wallace Stegner, and the Search for a Sense of Self in the American West, and Westbrooks Mountain Home: The Hero in the American West. Marsden, Michael T. The Modern Western. Journal of the West 3 (Fall 1968): 5461. Examines the continuing impact of popular Westerns on American consciousness, saying that they aim to provoke human imagination by chronicling what could be credible strife. He concludes that Westerns remain in favor because they motivate the human spirit to win the west again, but this time to win it as it should have been won, with respect for human dignity and human rights. A strong article. McMurray, George R. Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction. Colorado State Review 8 (Spring-Summer 1981) : 720. The best brief study of this LatinAmerican literary development which has so influenced American writers. McMurray defines magical realism this way: a recent literary movement whose purpose is to penetrate objective reality and reveal the mysterious and poetic qualities underlying the daily lives of a community of people. Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. A pioneering western scholar and editor presents his sensitive
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A Literary History of the American West views on major novels and novelists. Especially good treatments of Frederick Manfred and Frank Waters. An examination of the base upon which contemporary novelists build. . The Western NovelA Symposium. South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964). This special number of South Dakota Review includes the responses of Manfred, Waters, and Fisher, among others, to questions about their craft. . The Writers Sense of Place. South Dakota Review 13 (Autumn 1975). Another special number of SDR, this one including a symposium (with such writers as Snyder, Manfred, Evans and Paley), plus commentaries and essays by a large group including Ross Macdonald, Rudolfo Anaya, William Stafford, Eastlake, and Stegner, all dealing with the relationship of locale to writing. Mogen, David. Wilderness Visions: Science Fiction Westerns. San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1981. Extends the conceptual range of western themes and subjects to outer space and the ranges of the future. A fascinating extrapolation. Nesbitt, John. Change of Purpose in the Novels of Louis LAmour. Western American Literature 13 (Spring 1978): 6581. Argues that LAmours novels are not just the same old story with the hero of each volume given a different name and a different colored horse, but show growth in moral and historical purpose. An admiring, yet not uncritical view. Rendezvous 7, no. 2 (Winter 1972). This Special issue on Western American Literature contains major essays by Westbrook, Wylder, Milton, and Walker, plus a selected, annotated bibliography by Richard Etulain. Small Press Review 12, no. 10 (Oct. 1980). This number of SPR explores Literature in the Eighties. It features not only the work of Ellen Ferber and Len Fulton, but also many guest articles from small press luminaries. A valuable inside view of alternative publishing. Small Press Review, Annual Library Issue (JuneJuly each year). Ferber and Fulton again, along with a Whos Who of guest contributors, updating the state of alternative publishing. As close to current as anything one is apt to find. Siegel, Mark. Tom Robbins. Western Writers Series, Number 42. Boise: Boise State University, 1980. Asserts that Robbins explores the clash between society and free individuals. An admiring view. Final section, Tom Robbins as a Western Writer, not entirely convincing. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950. The most influential and important book yet written about the West. It remains a starting point for all studies. Stegner, Wallace. The Sound of Mountain Water. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1969. This collection of sixteen essays contains two of particular importance in the study of contemporary fiction: Born a Square and History, Myth and the Western Writer. Strenski, Ellen, and Robley Evans. Ritual and Murder in Tony Hillermans Indian Detective Novels. Western American Literature 16 (Fall 1981): 20516. Shows Hillermans detective, Joe Leaphorn, blending modern police techniques and his Navajo belief in the metaphysical nature of the universe in which what is
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evil is unharmonious. This combination of the practical and the spiritual represents a new direction for both detective novels and western writing. Ude, Wayne. North American Magical Realism. Colorado State Review 8 (Spring Summer 1981): 2130. Points out the generative influence of Latin American writers on their northern counterparts, suggesting there is, indeed, more reality than either realism or post-modernism is able to encompass. Suggests, further, a link between contemporary magical realism and the earlier romance-novel. Walker, Don D. The Rise and Fall of Barney Tullus. Western American Literature 3 (Summer 1968): 93102. Classic and classy debunking of single-perspective criticism, this remains a valuable starting point for contemporary scholars. Also the most entertaining item on this list. Westbrook, Max. Conservative, Liberal, and Western: Three Modes of Realism. South Dakota Review 4 (Summer 1966): 319. Perhaps the single most influential essay on criticism in recent western literature. This controversial thesis posits three modes of literary apprehension: conservative, which suggests that truth is accessible only through institutions; liberal, a belief that truth is attainable only when individuals escape institutions; western, which is sacred while the others are profane, Jungian while they are Freudian, which claims that truth is found through the unconscious, and that many western writers Clark, Waters, Manfred, among othershave sensed this and produced work reflecting this deeper reality. . The Practical Spirit: Sacrality and the American West. Western American Literature 3 (Fall 1968): 193205. Further exploration of Westbrooks sacred/profane dichotomy applied to western letters. Cites such apparently diverse writers as Steinbeck, Fisher, Ferlinghetti, and Manfred. See also The Ontological Critic in Rendezvous (Winter 1972) and Mountain Home: The Hero in the American West in The Westering Experience in American Literature (edited by Lewis and Lee). Wylder, Delbert. Recent Western Fiction. Journal of the West 19 (Jan. 1980): 6270. Beginning with 1975, this major critic examines fiction in the West and finds it is thriving. He discusses a heterogeneous group that includes Abbey, Eastlake, Haslam, Dillard, Nichols, Manfred, and Roripaugh. Wylder concludes that contemporary variety is amazing, and he praises both versatility and vitality. The best recent survey.
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Present Trends in Western Poetry
HE SAVOR OF LIFE is always particular, Brewster Ghiselin has pointed out, determined for every individual by the quality of his being and by the nature of the interplay between what he is and whatever world he moves in. Western poets move in the West and are moved by it, no matter what their place of origin. Clinton Larson and William Stafford add that the analogical truth which finds its source in the western landscape . . . offers perspective through beauty and primitivistic insight, along with the ability to create in our lives a greater order than we might otherwise perceive as possible. In the Pacific Northwest, the last clause of that promise stands as a particular challenge to the best poets now writing. If creating a greater order does concern poets like Richard Hugo, Vern Rutsala and John Haines, and it does, that order must come as the consequence of a process that involves a sometimes painful reexamination of what is authentic and what is not, of what may be retrieved in spite of the human costs incurred in the Northwests history of migration and settlement. We find these northwestern poets turning to images drawn from memory in order to clarify what they find in their immediate cultural landscapes; we find those landscapes in turn being used to map our interior landscapes. When they talk, they tend to talk to us not as a fictive audience constituting an isolated literary culture, but as present listeners engaged in disentangling ourselves from similar predicaments, in fronting similar failures, in fashioning similar dreams in whatever place we have been given to live on the continent. Many Northwest poets are migrants from the Midwest. Theodore Roethke, whose work set a standard for a younger generation of northwestern writers, grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. His long career as teacher at the University of Washington, together with his volumes of poems set in the Seattle area, enabled his student Richard Hugo, for one, to shape his verse through a mastery of his craft. Hugo grew up in White Center, a small town outside Seattle surrounded with woods and hills; yet, like his mentor, he also had family roots in Michigan. He was actually brought up by his maternal grandparents who migrated to Washington in 1920. He grew up, then, somewhat dislocated, hearing stories of Midwest things like those later used in his A Good Day for Seeing Your Limitations and Iowa, Deja Vu. Something more than craft thus may be seen to underlie Hugos attachment to a poet whose work differs strongly in some respects from his
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PRESENT TRENDS IN WESTERN POETRY
own: the rumor or memory of the Midwest, which, as Ed Dorn (himself southern-Illinois-born) characterizes it, may be, by contrast to the Far West, home by virtue of six feet of loam and of the slow, rooted culture that it has nourished. The tendency of Hugos later work, shifting between Port Townsend, Washington, and Missoula, Montana, suggests a persisting loyalty to his homely, if economically depressed, inland origins. Vern Rutsala, the son of working-class Finnish immigrants, grew up in the northern prairies of South Dakota. His impulse to retrace his own migration route back to South Dakota in his distinctively hard-bitten and homely poems speaks again to that peculiar comprehensiveness of cultural consciousness that has recently emerged in the Northwest. Similarly, John Haines, first a homesteader in Alaska and more recently a migrant back into the old Pacific Northwest region, grew up in South Dakota. Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, as well as South Dakota, have come to constitute the whole field of his work and, as with Rutsala, the function of memory and the image of homesteads are central elements of it. Such is the new generation of Midwest/Northwest/Rocky Mountain poetry: it firmly retains a traceable, inland rootedness. In his first two volumes of poems, A Run of Jacks (1961) and Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (1965), Hugo gave the world poems of original genius. Their language was unique, their point of view derived from a kind of strange ordinarinessboth intensely colored by dreams and drably colored by the burden of surviving from day to day. A tough-minded, unsentimental sense of camaraderie emerges from these poems set in the Seattle area, in local places viewed as scenes of human drama. I came here to be cold . . . gray cold like the river, the speaker half-confesses, half-declares in Duwamish, from A Run of Jacks. The Duwamish River flows into Eliot Bay through a once-swampy area of the southern section of Seattle, crisscrossed by incoming railroad lines. Its mills and mill-crud waste, moulded kegs of nails, and disused brick yards at that point where salt and river-water mix project a memorable feeling of abandonment and dereliction. Midwestern in the heat this rivers / curves are slow and sick, the poem begins, and the oddness of that reference forewarns the reader that the poem concerns not the place so much as the speakers affinity for its cold and grayness, its hanging on against the odds. Somewhat similar in tone and setting is the title poem of Death of the Kapowsin Tavern. The taverns charred boards and shattered, smoke-blackened glass reflect the local history of the place: school up for sale, abandoned homes, blown-out neon lights. And yet the inside history of the place lies in the memory of the men who fish its nearby lake, who know its mysterious unseen life, possessing visions of cranes gliding from dead pines. Remembering the dots of light signalling the tavern, they miss the cheap wine they used to find at the close of a late, cold night on 1203
the lake, and so does the speaker: Nothing dies as slowly as a scene. Still, the poem closes by expressing a need to be free of the past and to start anew, closing with an image of black wind blowing that dark debris away: I know in time the lake will send wind black enough to blow it away. In three of the later volumes of poetry, chiefly set in Montana, namely The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973), What Thou Lovest Well Remains American (1975), and 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (1977), an increased objectivity and a tendency toward irony frame Hugos dramatization of such scenes. But here in Kapowsin it is the intensity of the dreams and the sharpness of the passion that underlies violence and romance that he is after. The men who fish the Skagit River are depicted as heroic in their obsession for steelhead. Plunking the Skagit is set in December in the heart of the chilly rainy season. But despite the rawness of the weather the men become feverish, like the fish when big rains bring him / roaring from the sea with fins on fire. They love their obsession and Hugo loves them for it. Indeed, the tenderness that underlies Hugos exploration of the authentic local life of men and places recalls the work of William Carlos Williams on the other coast. He has opened up the Pacific Northwest again, given it a voice, and durably framed it. His borrowing from Pounds What thou lovest well remains . . . what thou lovest well cannot be reft from thee for the title of his fifth book of poems is aptas is the title of the Greywolf Press chapbook of nine Pacific Northwest poems he published in 1975, Rain Five Days and I Love It. Hugos best-known volume of poems, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973), clarifies the characteristically New World history of men whose forebears migrated to an inland place and whose fellows have tended to move on, leaving them to examine the costs and to try to recover a sense of purpose in their lives (see A Map of Montana in Italy). As for freedom, it largely lies in a capacity for daydreamingas while taking pleasure in the sense of release and familiarity of being on the road: your radio comes in strong . . . Never has your Buick / found this forward gear. Even / the tuna salad in Reedpoint is good (Driving Montana). Where you are is what youve got to redeem. The new comprehensiveness of his poems landscapes incorporates the capacity of the man who speaks in these poems to rejoice in girls/gulls, five-day-rains, and open, windswept waters. Im o.k. now, Hugo writes in his Letter to Kizer from Seattle, Im back at the primal source of poems: wind, sea / and rain, the market and the salmon ( 3 1 Letters and 13 Dreams). If a Victorian provincialism compounded by the myth of the American Dream (Go West, young man) does still cling to the literary imagination 1204
of the Northwest, Vern Rutsala seems determined to expose it, to approach and clarify necessary recognitions of what remains in the cultural detritus overlying the lovely, far-flung landscape he presently inhabits. His poems insistently retrace, through actual journeys or through journeys in memory, the history of his forefathers migration, and his own, through the northern and western regions of the continent. His tracing of such routes (and trace is a frequent word in Rutsalas poems) intends a metaphor of the American experience, one which, in his family history, started as an emigration from Finland, involved settlement in South Dakota, and a moving on to Oregon. I invent my own way back (to the town of his birth), he states in The World: I trace it like a route on a map. (From The New Life, 1978) But when he finds his way back he characteristically finds the passion behind the impulse checked by the poverty of imagination and the provincial sadness that remain in evidence. They, meaning Finnish relatives in The Shack Outside Boise, have brought you here / where a fine brown silt / covers everything. You see the sadness they call possessions the helpless objects they have brought here with great effort old generators, bald tires, a trunk full of mildew, slaughtered mountains of the broken and useless. Then slowly in the exhausted light they divide it up making sure you get your fair share. Such images of the Northwest stick in the mind as authentic; if radically brown-colored and sometimes claustrophobic, they are fragments of fully researched and relived human stories. One of the most memorable of these stories is On a Binge with Dakota Slim. Like many of Rutsalas poems, it is set in the interior of a house, with two men at a kitchen table sharpening knives and drinking coffee, and it is set in an earlier time, here 1932, early in the Depression. The place is South Dakota. The hard work on the farm, the dreariness of drinking too much coffee at the kitchen table, and the static sounds of a radio are too much to take. After a first drink has slid down slow and easy they decide: 1205
Let the goddamn radio dim those blades dull again we dont care. Were here and by god well stay until we drink our paycheck dry. The vigor and tough clarity of such poems derive from the radical outlook of this working-class son of Finnish immigrants whose lives had been nourished by poverty, hard work, and stoicism. For Rutsala, as for Hugo, facing up constitutes a means of moving on without guilt, with hard-earned wisdom but without the draining illusions. If all maps and histories of the Northwest were to vanish, the essential outlines of that vast geographical region and the gentled presence of men in those places could best be pieced together from the poems of John Haines, whose vision is clear and broad. Like Roethke, he learned in his move from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest to enliven and deepen that steadiness of vision that some associate with the Midwest. He returns in Arlington to the small, southeastern South Dakota town in which he grew up in order to set down, in a clear sequence of images, the passionately measured thoughts triggered by the presence of his fathers grave. It begins with an evocative image: The pallor of so many small white stones, the metal in their names, somber and strange the calm of my country. Hainess speaker too, as he observes, might have come here in his time, and yet, he notes there is no peace / in this ground for me. These fields tell of a city pulled into rubble; its soil should be thick with splinters of bone; and this grave should have for a shrine, a lamp fueled with blood, if blood would burn. (From Cicada, 1977) In another poem of return, titled To My Father, one finds an even more striking resemblance to Roethke. To My Father begins with an uncanny evocation of the presence of the place (a river in Idaho) particularized in time, in the penultimate days of fall, at dusk: Last evening I entered a pool on the Blackfoot River 1206
and cast to a late rise, maybe the last of a perishing fall. Then rises the memory of a like scene, of fishing with his father, someplace in Maryland, coaxed softly to try one more cast. And the gentleness and mystery of that moment before the bright fish rose / from under its rock, and struck is retrieved, shared and celebrated. The magic of Hainess craft lies in its unobtrusive intermingling of elements into a completed large image of being: the ocean-salt permeates the salt white roots of the tree and the physical/spiritual being of the two figures who have found a satisfactory sense of being home in this place. Haines thus manages to push beyond the usual limits of a poetics of presence by considerably circumventing the inevitable split between the poems speaker and the place he stands in. For it is the effect of the presence of a given place, perceived as an indwelling interrelationship of phenomena (including mans consciousness), that Haines quietly, deftly unfolds for us. The extent to which Hainess several years of homesteading in Alaska provided the attentiveness and discipline for such art may be gathered from his poem focussed on the cross at the grave of a vanished homestead (At White River). The adaptability of that craftto the subject of the fate of men who must now live between the insistent claims of a monoculturized urban America and their memory of a simpler and richer mode of dwellingis artfully demonstrated in Missoula in a Dusty Light. Hainess two finest poems, Driving Through Oregon and Circles and Squares, which address that fate, define a trend that is new to the poetry of the Northwest with its roots in inland regions of the continent, and new to the national imagination. It is new by comparison with West Coast poetry, as well, by virtue of the fact that whereas radical West Coast poetry generally proceeds along anarchistic-philosophical lines of thought, this derives from a version of Jeffersonian, agrarian idealism. In Hainess work in general, and in these two poems in particular, we witness an act of reclaiming the continent, of reasserting values that once stressed a gentle and skillful adaptation of man to land. As darkness falls upon an Oregon landscape on New Years Eve, the visible effects of monocultural engulfment in the West diminish: The long land darkens, houselights wink green and gold, more distant than the planets in fields bound with invisible wire. Concurrently, thoughts of a drive far north to the shore of the Great Bear, 1207
where the car is imagined stalling in a snow drift near the last sputtering oil well, trigger a vision of ancient beauty: The driver sleeps, the passenger listens: tick, tick of a starlit engine, snow beginning again deep in a continent vacant and dark. In Circles and Squares, finally, we find yet another instance of Hainess vision powerfully rooted in an inland outlook. The poem is a meditation upon two ways of life: that of the migrants to the West with their square houses and straight-line mental habits; and that of the American natives with their round houses, their sense of space curving, and their sense of their lives curving into and with that space. Hainess poetics thus involves fundamental questions of address: whose benefit is to be considered? who are the legitimate inheritors of this place? The Far West coast, especially around the Bay Area of northern California, probably has more poets per acre than any other place in America. It presents a highly pluralistic literary culture within an increasingly monocultural society, and that fact makes any attempted identification of trends difficult. This is especially so inasmuch as the anarchistic impulse that informs much of the poetry from the late forties through the present has itself produced a diversity of talents and fractious literary sub-groups. Relatedly, such a cultural pluralismconsiderably nourished by the relative wealth the area enjoysapproaches the limits of self-indulgence, especially in much of the poetry spawned by those cultural pockets identified with the University of California. If we look for a rooted tradition of poetry on the West Coast we find that, as in the Northwest, most poets of an earlier generationlike most citizens of that timemigrated to this area from some place else in the continent, then fully embraced it. William Everson (Brother Antoninus) draws an interesting contrast between eastern and western American poetry when he distinguishes the impulse toward participation in the West from the habit of discrimination in the East. In any case, the presence of the Pacific and of the North-South mountain ranges that run parallel to it seems to have elicited a special sense of removal from the cultural landscape of the rest of the continent and hence a vision of new, even Edenic beginnings. Robinson Jeffers, who migrated from Pennsylvania, created early in the century a kind of inverse Eden out of his beloved Big Sur area. Kenneth Rexroth, next, arriving from Illinois by way of Ohio and Indiana, immediately and deliberately conducted explorations of the region lying between the Sierra and the Pacific, especially in the San Francisco area, in order to establish a measuring framework for his poems of urgent 1208
political and moral idealism. Next he set out to create a literary scene in San Francisco, envisioning it as a counterforce to the negative tendencies he found pervading post-World War II America. Then Lawrence Ferlinghetti, crossing the country from New York (via Paris), arrived in that city, and both through his work as poet (Coney Island of the Mind, et al.) and his skill as an entrepreneur and publisher (City Lights Bookstore) built a literary scene that, in tandem with that already established by Rexroth, opened up a nourishing field for poets like Allen Ginsberg (from Brooklyn) and Gary Snyder (from Oregon). If Jefferss poetry stands apart from the San Francisco-centered scene that thus developed, so later did that of Yvor Winters and Everson. The only native Californians in this group, they differ considerably as poets. Winters adopted in his work and articulated in his teaching at Stanford a poetics more closely identified with the tough-minded and plain moral discriminations of English Renaissance lyric poets like Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne than with a poetics of participation. Exhibiting an eastern tendency of mind, Winterss chief influence, along with that of Rexroth, appears in the more recent classicist trend in West Coast poetry. Eros, as Herbert Marcuse defined itthe integrative and healing tendency in human consciousness that opposes itself to Thanatos, the disintegrative and death-oriented tendencyappears central to the recent work of Rexroth and Ferlinghetti. Donald Halls decision to quote Rexroths entire The Signature of All Things at the close of a recent review of Rexroths career as poet reminds us that Rexrothperhaps the least-read major poet of our timewas always a poet of Eros. Eros, not in the familiar Beat sense, but as an integrative force binding man to the indwelling life of his native or adopted place: When I dragged the rotten log From the bottom of the pool, It seemed heavy as stone. I let it lie in the sun For a month; and then chopped it Into sections, and split them For kindling, and spread them out To dry some more. Late that night, After reading for hours, While moths rattled at the lamp The saints and the philosophers On the destiny of man I went out on my cabin porch, And looked up through the black forest 1209
At the swaying island of stars. Suddenly I saw at my feet, Spread on the floor of night, ingots Of quivering phosphorescence, And all about were scattered chips Of pale cold light that was alive. (From Collected Shorter Poems, pp. 17879) Ferlinghettis presence on the northern California coast is distinctive and continuing. His bright and resilient genius found in San Francisco an ideal, catalytic environment. That city is, as Rexroth noted, one of the few places in America not settled overland by the fake Cavalier culture of the South or the Puritan culture of the North. Its Mediterranean ease, derived from the migrations of Spaniards and Italians as well as from its temperate climate and geographical remoteness, enabled Ferlinghetti to become the most popular mid-century poet in America. Inland regions of the West seem not to have attracted his attentionexcept at a certain distance and at a rapid speed, as in the wonderful poem of a coast-to-coast meditative train journey titled Starting from San Francisco (1961). He has been a city poet articulating a populist national outlook, but increasingly over recent years he has turned to poems of celebration grounded in his other home in Big Sur. Open Eye, Open Heart (1972) and Who Are We Now? (1977) deserve far more attention than they have received. But the newest element in his work, itself a sign of a new trend in western poetry, appears in his return to the form of the long poem in his two populist manifestos: First Manifesto: For Poets, with Love and Adieu Charlot: Second Populist Manifesto. The first is an invocation to American poets in whatever places they have been hiding out, appealing to them to come out of the closet or out of the woods or out of their academic offices and to reassert their vision of a vital community. The thrust of the poem is satiric but it is underlain by a cry for the return of Eros. The second manifesto picks up the latter cry, invoking especially the name of Walt Whitman: Sons of Whitman sons of Poe sons of Lorca & Rimbaud or their dark daughters poets of another breath poets of another vision who among you still speaks of revolution who among you still unscrews the locks from the doors in this revisionist decade?
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Hugos letters to fellow poets, first published in the American Poetry Review and later in 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, taken together with these long epistolary, chanting poems of Ferlinghetti, seem to embody a new West Coast assertion of the need to resurrect Eros as the poets Muse in a gray, revisionist decade. Trends have been much felt and followed in northern California, and poetry from the region reflects this. Recently, movements have forced critical awareness of women writers, of disabled writers, of non-white writers, and so on. Always the spectre of overcompensatory acceptance and undeserved praise taints work published in the heat of widened perspectives, and a good many mediocre (or worse) poets have seen print of late because they happen to be women, or disabled, or non-white, or gay, or any combination of those categories. Finally, only the poetry itself matters. If it is of high quality, it merits praise; if not, well . . . There have, for example, been women poets of great merit writing in the West throughout this century, especially since World War II, and there is no doubt that while the Womens Movement has given undeserved attention to many poor poets, it has also brought belated attention to deserving writers, while at the same time opening the door of possibility to an entire generation of younger versifiers. Anthologies, such as Woman Poet (1980) edited by Carolyn Kizer and Women Poets of the West (1977) edited by Thomas Trusky, have revealed, or in some cases confirmed, the quality of such writers as Ann Stanford, Hildegarde Flanner, Hazel Hall, Joanne Kyger, Madeline De Frees, Rosalie Morris, Kizer, and the redoubtable Josephine Miles, a Berkeleyite long conceded to be an accomplished artist, yet often ignored by anthologizers. Miless talent is such that she has never had to rely on whatever novelty accrues from being a woman writer or a disabled writer, although she is a distinguished example of both. Neither does she hide those aspects of her humanity; she simply does not depend on them for recognition because she is an artist whose work stands without explanation or convenient categories. Her ability to convert what appears to be a limited range of subjects into poetic richness is phenomenal. For example, she writes of a chum given to causes: When I telephoned a friend, her husband told me Shes not here tonight, shes out saving the Bay . . . Saving the bay, Saving the shoals of day, Saving the tides of shallows deep begun Between the moon and sun . . .
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Boundary and margin, meeting and met, So that the pure sea will not forget, Voracious as it is, its foreign kind, And so the land . . . (I Telephoned a Friend . . .) Her concern with margins and boundaries informs the poem, and not merely the margins and boundaries of tidal zones. Rather she symbolically explores the limits we place upon ourselves. In the work of Miles an urban West acknowledging social complexity emerges, yet it is not a West without traditional love of land or values of the spirit. In a special sense, she celebrates an emerging region without romanticism but also without cynicism, producing a uniquely modern sensitivity for younger writers to share and grow from. Two other major literary regions within Californias complexity are producing distinct poetry. Southern Californiathe Southland, to nativescontinues to attract vast numbers of migrants and, predictably, boasts a large, innovative selection of poets. A contemporary of the Beat generation poets, Charles Bukowski is in many ways an embodiment of verse in the Southland, for his work is unconventional, unpredictable, occasionally unreadable, but always innovative. In Visit to Venice, for example, he produces this picture: We took a walk along the shore at Venice the hippies sitting waiting on Nirvana some of them flogging bongoes, the last of the old Jewish ladies waiting to die waiting to follow their husbands so long gone, the sea rolled in and out . . . Whether merely responding to the same forces, or actually influenced by Bukowski, an entire generation of Southland poets seems most concerned with innovation. Artists as diverse as Charles Stetler, Gerald Locklin, Ron Koertge, Alurista, Kate Braverman, Sherley Anne Williams, David Barker and Wanda Coleman, among many others, produce verse that follows no single form, respects no single mode. Instead, it at times seems to pursue innovation for its own sake, bumbling often into easy excesses that are locally celebrated because they are different or outrageous. Some of the most talented writers in the area refuse to limit themselves to one form, producing instead a melange of prose and poetry, seldom reflecting a sense of place, other than the place from which they migrated. Writes Barker:
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found deep woods and deeper dreams lived for a year with a mad red dog pretended we were normal with our big house my good job went quietly insane in salem, Oregon. (We Must Be Fools to Live Like This) Nonetheless, poems of arresting quality are written and, while the scattergun technique seems to dominatea few remarkable works amidst a clutter of word gamesat its best verse in the Southland is very good indeed. Locklin, for example, presents this musing: is this what we came to California for? chromatics of a Catalina sunburst? bomb-burst? eye-burst? oil-lights upon the bruised waters? a sound that laves? this, and the midriffs of young girls, and to be where it was happening. it happened tonight it is too old for mermaids and matrons. the sea is post-coital, blue . . . (low tide floodtime: winter 1969) A more powerful sense of place emerges in the writing of poets from Californias great Central Valley. Long considered a mute area populated by clodhoppers and rednecks, it has emerged as a rich, unique literary region, so rich in fact that it has exported award-winning poets to other parts of the nation: Frank Bidart to the Northeast, Larry Leavis to the Midwest, Lawson Inada to the Northwest. The valley, Californias breadbasket, emerged first as a literary region in the 1930s with the stories of William Saroyan and the poetry of William Everson. The latter, a farmboy, initiated a poetic tradition that ignored trends. San Joaquin (1939) revealed beauty where outsiders saw none, and drew strength from the lands primal energy. This valley after the storms can be beautiful beyond the telling, Though our cityfolk scorn it, cursing heat in the summer and drabness in winter, And flee it: Yosemite and the sea. They seek splendor; who would touch them must stun them; The nerve that is dying needs thunder to rouse it. I in the vineyard, in green-time and dead-time, come to it dearly, And take nature neither freaked nor amazing,
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But the secret shining, the soft indeterminate wonder. I watch it morning and noon, the unutterable sundowns, And love as the leaf does the bough. (San Joaquin) His work signalled that valley writers need not look to San Francisco or Los Angeles for literary material. What has grown since is a literature of the land equal to any in America. Such diverse writers as DeWayne Rail, Don Thompson, Robert Spear, Luis Omar Salinas, Khatchik Minasian, Art Cuelho, Gary Soto, and Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel have written memorable work. Soto, the product of a valley Mexican-American family, has won both the Discovery/Nation Award and the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum. His verse is characterized by tightly controlled images and crisp language, all of it informed by the authors intimate familiarity with field work. Writing of rain, and of how it halted field labor, Soto observes The skin of my belly will tighten like a belt And there will be no reason for pockets. But it is sun, not rain, that best characterizes work in the valleys scorching, yet verdant fields, and Soto is precise in his characterization of it. When the sun was on my left And against my face Sweat the sea That is still within me Rose and fell from my chin Touching land. For the first time. Less widely recognized than Soto, yet a major voice of the region, is Oklahoma-born Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, whose family was among the Okie migrants John Steinbeck celebrated in The Grapes of Wrath. In contrast to Steinbecks work, there is little romanticizing of characters in McDaniels poetic sketches. She knows the valley and its people from within and is not easily deceived. She is especially adept at capturing the sense of spoken language in her poems; a mourner observes at a funeral: I knowed her in them days model Ts model As
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And right on down the list, I hope shes satisfied riding in a Cadillac today . . . (Transportation) Called the Biscuit and Gravy Poet by critic Eddie Lopez, McDaniel, who is without a specific mentor, creates ingenious, accurate pictures of her region that bring with them a profound sense of the universal, writing often of people or subjects formally trained poets ignore. Gravy says a lot about us people who invoke the southern fried . . . . . . the way it stretches out the dreams from payday till tomorrow smooth on the tongue of toddling babies thick on shoulders lumping at the waist of mothers slipping exquisitely down the throats of toothless visionaries eating with a spoon. (Gravy Says a Lot) McDaniel is a singular poet who captures a time and place as well as anyone now writing. One other singular development in western poetry is largely identified with California: the astounding growth and variety of Chicano verse. Able to draw upon Native American oral forms, both Mexican and South American written traditions, and uniquely Chicano expressions along with general North American poetic trends, and capable of reflecting such influences in English, Spanish, or a mixture of the two, Mexican-American writers are producing some of the most original verse now being written in the West. While most critics agree that a great age of Mexican-American literature hovers in the future, they also agree that a substantial foundation has already been established by poets such as Alurista
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The scars of history on my face and veins of my body that aches vomito sangre y lloro libertad I do not ask for freedom I am freedom. (Mis ojos hinchados) or Jos Montoya Reluctant awakenings a la media Noche y la luz prendida. PRRRRRRINNNNNGGGGGG! A noisy chorro missing the basin Que horas son, ama? Es tarde me hijito. Cover up Your little brothers. Y yo conpena but too sleepy, Go to bed little mother! . . . (La Jefita) Such poetry, while difficult even to assess at this point, certainly represents a new and promising direction in western letters. Among well-established California poets, Yvor Winters, Thom Gunn, and Robert Duncan have been important. Winters has always drawn a precise and clear distinction between what the mind imagines and the limitations that impinge upon the mind and imagination. In The Slow Pacific Swell, a poem built out of a familiar West Coast dramatic situation, he measures himself in relation to the sea through a characteristically lucid, tough-minded poetics: A landsman, I, the sea is but a sound. I would be near it on a sandy mound, And hear the steady rushing of the deep While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep. I have lived inland long. The land is numb. It stands beneath the feet, and one may come Walking securely, till the sea extends Its limber margin, and precision ends. (From Collected Poems, 1960)
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The stoic survivor in a disordered worldthis posture is not unique to Winters. In the work of Thom Gunn, one of the most capable of Winterss former students, this classicist outlook has recently borne new fruit. A migrant to California from his native England, Thom Gunn has, except for a year spent in Texas, lived in the San Francisco area since 1955. An admirer of Winters and Gary Snyder alike, he shares with Snyder and Rexroth a deep attachment to the natural landforms of the Far West. Like most migrants to the Bay Area, he has embraced the place and the sense of ideal possibilities it seems to open up. Thus in the fourth section of a long, five-section poem titled The Geysersfrom To the Air (1974), one of his most promising recent books of poemshe begins by describing a group of men lolling naked in the sun outside an abandoned bath house. He notes that their lucky situation is fragile and vulnerable, and thinks darkly of predators and punks stomping or leeching them. Yet, given his earlier celebration (in section 2, The Cool Stream) of the special unconsidered grace that arises out of a gradual submission of human consciousness to the natural silence and ease of this place in the hills of Sonoma County, he reflects that Nothing (even predators and punks) would modify the discipline learned: To recognize, to accept, to understand. To recognize I hold all of this land Latent inside myself, including punks. Id better accept themvicious, fools, or drunks Being carrier to their violence everywhere, But hold it better from knowing it is there. Such ambiguous knowledge, he asserts, would pervade the understanding and deepen the possibilities of an inclusive community. Then he continues, with a mildly humorous and measuring introspection, toward a new (spaceage) vision of a refound, pastoral ideal: Are these mere country follies, or could we not Find other luck-inducers like this spot? So many that they could at last be joined And cancel the self-destructiveness of the land, Until the America as seen down here Would be the same as the land you see appear As the globe turns, from high in outer space, One great brave luminous green-gold meeting place. The shift from Gunns early poems in celebration of action, with their privileging of existential solitude over human contact, is remarkable. Poems like
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his well-known praise of California motorcycle riders, On the Move, assured him a place in western poetry, but he has himself since moved, within the lines of his disciplined and meditative craft, toward poems more deeply rooted in place, more fully comprehensive of the complex cultural conditions attached to places, more open to the possibilities of human community. Robert Duncan, finally, a native Californian born in Oakland in 1919, drank from the cup of the Muse at an early age and has found little reason since to move outside the vocation of Poet as defined by the romanticvisionary tradition. His poetry can be simply focussed and rich in its capacity for transforming the outer world in accordance with the inner radiance he discovers in his own soul. The title poem of Roots and Branches (1964) is an exquisite example of such a successful poem: Sail, Monarchs, rising and falling orange merchants in springs flowery markets! messengers of March in warm currents of new floating, flitting into areas of aroma, tracing out of air unseen roots and branches of sense I share in thought, filaments woven and broken where the world might light casual certainties of me. There are echoes of what I am in what you perform this morning. How you perfect my spirit! almost restore an imaginary tree of the living in all its doctrines by fluttering about, intent and easy as you are, the profusion of you! awakening transports of an inner view of things. Duncans insistent idea of the pure maker of poems is difficult to understand: the language he works with is, for better and worse, highly contaminated; and the cultural history from which he derives his native language has been burdened with the need to survive in the first place and to build a qualitative mode of living upon it in the second. Hence Rexroths fundamental questions about poemsWho speaks? Who listens?are questions one hopes Duncan will begin to ask himself. His Muse needs to familiarize herself with the place and its internal resistances, to pick up the local language through conversation with people like Hugo and Rexroth, and to address an audience ordinarily listed in the phone book. The discipline required in the long poem may be mentioned in this connection. Perhaps the most remarkable long poem by a western poet to appear in recent years is Ed Dorns Slinger, although Kirk Robertsons West 1218
Nevada Waltz (1982) has gathered a considerable following. In 1968 Dorns Gunslinger Book I came out; Book II followed in 1969. Then came The Cycle, in 1971, Book III in 1972, and the complete poem (including Book IV), abbreviated to Slinger, in 1975. As with Dorns earlier work, only small presses were involved: Black Sparrow (Los Angeles), Frontier (West Newbury, Massachusetts) and Wingbow (Berkeley). In Slinger Dorn brings to his rendering of the western hero a new kind of substance, and a new kind of relevance to the question of how one may dwell vitally in the North American continent in its recent cultural stage. It is a journey poem, a leisurely excursion by horse and carriage proceeding north from Mesilla, New Mexico, undertaken by the Gunslinger and an assortment of local, congenial characters. Dorn attributes to his hero a vitalistic philosophical outlook that constitutes a positive energy field in motion. He locates that field on a collision course with a negative energy field (proceeding by train from Boston) at the center of which appears an equally mysterious figure, the capitalistic entrepreneur Howard Hughes in the company of his cronies. The collision, first plotted to occur at Las Vegas, later shifted to a point near the Four Corners (the common boundary of New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Arizona), and even then obscured by Hughess characteristically mysterious dropping out of the picture, loosely defines the plot of this rockingly comedic, dead-seriously satiric, and stylishly metaphysical epic. The vision of a solitary figure against an open plain seems to have triggered the poems abstract conception, but the presence of Eros-as-Muse appears to enrich and sustain the poems unfolding toward a form of heroic song indigenous to the continent. Lil, the Mesilla saloon-owner and old friend of the Slinger, adds a rare vitality to the otherwise male, on-the-road camaraderie through the first three books. But in Book IV her elusive ancestry gets traced, in the persona of Cocaine Lil, back to her roots in South America, and specifically to her identity as Bright Erythra, from Cuzco, the capital of the ancient Inca Empire. Miss Americaine . . . a mountain thang/ dressed in bright red calico is also the spirit of cocaine, a drug indigenous to the original, northward-shifting morada vital of the Americas; and as such, she is the embodied opposite of the static inwardness of citizens, like the hostile folks encountered en route in Truth or Consequences or the deadly technological negativity of Hughess associates. (It is significant that Ferlinghettis voice in his Second Populist Manifesto was mediated, as from another country, through Kush, a young blood wildhaired angel poet living in Tepotzlan, Mexico, and that Dorns Muse in Slinger is derived from South America. If the West is to be reclaimed from the alien and alienating monoculture that is presently engulfing it, it needs to look, they implicitly argue, to its authentic cultural origins in the South.) 1219
Dorns fine sense of western places and his capacity for projecting the intensity of such placesboth as geography and as cultural loci along migration routesmay be traced backward from Slinger to Idaho Out, another long poem recording a meditative journey from Pocatello, Idaho, to Missoula, Montana. It maps out the psyche of that northern region as no earlier poem had done. It begins with a brief quotation from that great cultural geographer of the continent, especially of the Southwest and Mexico, Carl Sauer. And it is accompanied by exquisite lyrics conceived of as subjective resistances against the bleakness of the Idaho landscape in which Dorn then resided. These should be read along with West of Moab, perhaps Dorns finest single poem, the story of his earlier move with his family from Santa Fe to Pocatello. It should be noted that Dorn, the son of a relatively poor farm family, originally migrated west from southern Illinois, and that out of that childhood he wrote the early On the Debt My Mother Owed Sears Roebuck, a definitive rural Midwest poem. He has recently adopted San Francisco as his home base. But West of Moab, to end with that essentially Southwest poem, closes with these memorable lines: Now it is October and winter has not yet sent her punitive expedition. Warm days. It is afternoon. The leaves come and go in the Alberta wind sliding down across our country and they sit still facing the north slopes of the mountains, the remnant of a Southern Idea in their minds. In The Land Below (from Hands Up!, 1964), the earliest instance of Dorns adopting the form of the long poem, he declared (following a somewhat arcane reference to Thoreau): In America every art has to reach toward some/ clarity. That is our hope from the start. Then, ten years later, in the terse preface to his Collected Poems: 19561974, he observed: From the beginning I have known my work to be theoretical in nature and poetic by virtue of its inherent tone. Such clarity, understood as a tendency toward pure ideas and enabled by a fitting tonality, expresses what seems to constitute the classicist tendency recently emerging in the Far West. The work of Rexroth and Yvor Winters, Dorn, Tom Clark and Thom Gunn (and perhaps Gary Snyder as well) appears to stand in antithesis to the excesses of Ginsberg and the poetics of the Beat generation he has come to typify. Ferlinghettis recent homage to the Eliot of the Four Quartets, Rexroths early-sixties denunciation of the nihilism of the Beats, and Tom Clarks expos (aided by Ed Dorn) of Trungpa and the School of Disembodied Poetics Ginsberg directs for him at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, 1220
Colorado, are the visible outward signs of an evident need to move beyond poetic frenzytoward greater exactitude and toward wider frames of reference, more authentically grounded in the cultural life of the United States. This involves no denial of the earlier search for Edennor does it preclude the use of hallucinogenic drugsbut it marks a determination to reify its imaginative forms. If we take as the Southwest a concavely triangular area defined by Houston, San Diego, and Salt Lake City, we find no nationally recognized poetic voice resident in Texas, the virtual capital of the region. There are, however, distinctive voices capable of continuing development, as well as an increasingly active small press sceneThorp Springs Press, Prickly Pear Press, Texas Center for Writers Pressthat offers outlets for artists. Moreover, during the 1970s two first-rate anthologies of poetry from the Lone Star State, Dave Oliphants The New Breed (1975), and Travois (1976) edited by Joanie Whitebird and Paul Foreman, appeared. Although not widely known outside the region, a strong case can be made for Vassar Miller as a major poet. Larry McMurtry, in an otherwise scathing survey of Texas writers, acknowledged Millers gifts, calling her the one Texas writer for whose work I have an unequivocal admiration. He goes on to explain his position: That she is to this day little-known, read, or praised in Texas is the most damning comment possible on our literary culture. She works in the hardest formthe lyric poem, the form where the percentage of failure is inevitably highest. Many of hers do fail, of course, but the ones which succeed come as close to achieving what can fairly be called excellence: the product of a high gift wedded to long-sustained and exceedingly rigorous application. (Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature, The Texas Observer, Oct. 23, 1981, pp. 1819) Millers legacy to younger southwestern poets is her exquisite molding of words, the sense that each poem is the product of careful working and reworking. For example: Tired If I could sleep deeply enough, I might touch the eye of dark, life. Yet the way I sleep, men drink salt. 1221
Always wearier upon waking I have written these lines without book, thumbing the thesaurus of my bones. (From If I Could Sleep Deeply Enough, p. 6) Not prolific, Miller has nonetheless exerted a considerable influence, for she is a writers writer, known to those who care enough about literature to study it. Although the diversity of young Texas poets is most remarkable, and no one influence can be singled out, William Barney, a resident of Fort Worth for over fifty years, deserves at least some credit as a modern poetic voice singing in what was once wilderness. And Barneys has been a distinctly Texan voice: his subjects, his language, the very rhythm of his verse are indigenous to the region, remaining both complex and direct. In Canticle for a Cutting Horse, one of his finest poems, Barneys propensity for formal expression skillfully blended into local subjects is illustrated. The poem opens with a paradoxical description, a blend of desire and dissent, and of power and delicate motion, and that paradox informs the entire work, especially when the poet tentatively moves the mare onto another level: Make her a symbol for mind, a talisman in her tawniness for any who praise pursuit of the quick metaphor, the well-cinched word, the honest, honorable tone, the summer within the seed. Make her a ballad seeking right speech, a strophe kindling to song. Yet none of these you make her. She in herself is sufficient, the palomino, the perfect, the slim-legged mare; leave her to the high mesas, to the rust rimmed llano, her proper stage; let her dance her tango of intricate measures; nothing shall match her image, nothing shall rightly encompass her competence, her brute beauty. Paul Foreman has written some of the most memorable poetry of place yet produced in the Southwest, as his two collections, Redwing Blackbird (1972) and Texas Liveoak (1977), amply demonstrate. His combination of 1222
precise language and open, but not uncritical love of the Brazos River country that gave him life contributes to a steadily growing critical reputation. In Impressionist he writes: Paint outdoors? In the summer . . . ? In Texas! ? No, I would rather sit in the shade of this chinaberry tree, smell the smell of milkweed, let my tongue fall asleep on leaves of prickly ash, and watch the sun, a welt of bright Reason, burn each thing to its core. Another voice gaining increasing critical recognition is that of Max Westbrook, who had established himself as a scholar and critic long before his first volume of verse, Country Boy, appeared in 1979. Some of Westbrooks poetry is epigrammatic, some epic, but it is all characterized by a world view just enough askew to reveal old realities in new ways, and to give new meaning to old realities. This poet seems uncompelled to celebrate his region, though he uses it powerfully in many poems. Instead, he tends toward intensely personal statements, sometimes clear in their setting, sometimes unconcerned with it, for he is convinced that the region has molded him and is implicitly present in all he writes. Among the finest of contemporary Texas poets is R. G. Vliet, whose Clem Maverick, sequence ranks with the finest long poems produced in the West. He has developed a considerable following in his native state and his reputation continues growing; George Hendrick asserts, Vliet is a poet with an excellent ear for language. He uses precise details, and he has a distinctive voice . . . an important poet who has completely mastered his art. The range of Texas poetry is increasing and its execution is everimproving. The writers cited above, plus Gene Fowler, Dave Oliphant, Betsy Colquitt, Everett A. Gillis, Stan Rice, Karl Kopp, Simon Ortiz in nearby New Mexico, and expatriate Bobbie Louise Hawkins in California are all giving greater focus and power to southwestern verse. Although the fact is not commonly acknowledged today, the Southwest has traditionally extended to Spanish California. The city in that re1223
gion most clearly retaining its Latin roots is San Diego, attached thanks to mass transit to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Francisco in the north, that glamorous coastal connection. Carolyn Forchs residence in San Diego, following upon her previous stay in Washington and southern British Columbia, has been relatively brief. New Mexico is also part of Forchs background (antedating her travels to the Northwest and southern California), as the entire second section of her Gathering the Tribes (1976) reveals. In any case, the peculiar romance or the sleepy luxury of inhabiting a coastal place bordering Mexico and the great Sonora desert of the Southwest apparently helped to focus, enrich and widen Forchs natural gift for poetry. The breadth of her meditative journeying through the western half of the continent is combined with a seemingly artless, earthy feeling for local places and lives. She writes, often, with the simplicity and power of a granddaughter of D. H. Lawrence, not in her erotic poems only but in poems about her farm-based childhood and about her Slovak ancestry in southern Michigan as well. The tracing through memory of her childhood and of her parents and grandparents lives in Burning the Tomato Worms and Barley Fields securely grounds her later excursions into wider, western landscapes. Her New Mexico poems, mostly set among the Sangre de Cristo mountain range towns on the Pecos River, like Mora and Las Truchas (northeast of Santa Fe), transcend the self-consciousness and affectation that often inhabit poems written by Anglos in this Spanish and Pueblo Indian culture. Forchs healthily nourished and earthy Russian-Czech heritage seems to have enabled her to quite literally embody the deep, elusive sense of place and of indigenous cultural life that has managed to survive in this area. Song Coming Toward Us and Goodmorning and the White Girl supply ample evidence of this capacity of Forchs to make herself fully at home in such places. Out of the Staked Plains of northeastern New Mexico, born and raised in Fort Sumner (where Billy the Kid died), comes Keith Wilson. Unlike Forch, Wilson has, except for his stint at Annapolis and service in the Korean and Vietnam wars, stuck close to home, migrating southwestward only as far as Las Cruces where he has made his home. The landscape of the eastern and southern areas of his state is starkly beautiful, its mesas and protuberant volcanic hills creating a surreal, magically elusive environment. But the surreal aspect of the landforms does not define the outlook of this region; water, or the scarcity of it, does. This world of arid, small New Mexico towns has an unforgiving atmosphere about it, for only through water sufficient to drink and to irrigate crops or sustain cattle can life itself be sustained. Access to places possessing rivers, occasional flood watersheds, and underground water is basic to the cultural history of the Southwest, and 1224
this fact perhaps accounts for the conservatism and the strong sense of power relationship that underlie the deceptively placid surface of this sunbleached, windswept land and that arise from beneath the surfaces of Wilsons poems themselves. Strict codes govern the life of the land this ranchers son grew up in, and they crop up in his hard, generally humorless poems whichhowever much they pursue transcendental lines of thoughtgenerally underline the necessity of moral absolutes. Wilson seeks to adopt from the attractive indigenous Indian culture of the land a balance between masculine and feminine psychic principles; but the masculine principle, itself derived from the white Europeans recent conquest and will to hold the best land, dominates in his work. It gives it its taut, explosive quality, and, at its best, its unmistakable honesty. Wilsons gentlest poems are the early ones published in Sketches for a New Mexico Hill Town (1966). His finest single poem, perhaps, titled The Lake Above Santos, is set at the Conchas Reservoir where the south branch of the dammed Canadian River inundated the entire town of Santos (about seventy-five miles north of Fort Sumner). The sense of place here and the presence of the people who inhabited it are beautifully projected in this fine lyrical narrative. Wilsons imaginative sympathy freely unfolds: And there it was, on the banks of the slow Canadian. A small town with people, charged with the event of their days. Now the boat passes over, walls of stone houses clear beneath the water, windows doors, fish swimming thru. There is a marvellous leisure in this poem: the sinker pulls my line down, hook bouncing on a fireplace the water so translucent one can see a red coffee pot, homely things. Still, the placid scene recorded here itself overlies the story of the conquest of the white Europeans in a land of sudden, often violent contrasts. Wilsons story of a flash flood in Orogrande, New Mexico, 1937 is exemplary. The poem begins in the present tense with a description of the water breaking around a bend, crumbling the arroyos banks and tumbling the mesquite trees along the stream bed. The accompanying phrase, dangerous as hell, building toward our safe rise, introduces the dramatic situation, 1225
involving a man and his son watching from their truck, and tells us that the event is not wholly unexpected, that it is part of the life here. An allusion to the Biblical flood and a momentary vision of the dry silences of the desert from which this rushing water comes, next, precede the poems close involving the boys ambiguous identification of the event with his fathers calmly smoking a cigarette all the while: the father seen as an enigmatic, calm facing-up to the forces of nature, on the one hand, and as, himself, a source of potential destructive power on the other. Such an ambiguity of feeling on the part of the child for his father reappears in Growing Up and Twin Aces, similar dramas, evidently drawn from personal memory. In Growing Up the child misses a jack-rabbit and later in life recalls his father: a man who counted misses as weaknesses, he whipped up his own rifle, stopped the Jack folding him in midair, glanced at me, stood silent. The explosive honesty of these early poems, straightforwardly dramatic in structure but strangely ambiguous in tone, is unique and remarkable. Richard Sheltons embrace of the living, magical presence of the Southwest desert appears to have all but displaced memories of his childhood in Boise, Idaho. (I hope my work reflects something of the Sonora Desert, he tersely commented in 1973.) Educated in Arkansas, Texas, and Arizona, he lived in Bisbee on the Arizona-Mexico border before moving back, in 1960, to Tucson where he has stayed. His early poems reflect outer and inner landscapes with remarkable skill. A fundamental moral consciousness underlies what might otherwise have seemed a self-indulgently strange, introspective imagination: and to remain in the desert caught in the ropes of myself like rosaries staying here with penitent stars whose confessions frighten me there is no explanation for lights which move about inside mountains and coyotes are all that is left of a race we once conquered. (He Who Remains, from The Tattooed Desert, 1971) His vocation, he says, is to make use of his pain: to cherish transparent light, nurse broken stones, mother the cold. For such lines Shelton is fre1226
quently called a surrealist. His poems, however much they in fact draw upon the surreal quality of the southwestern landscape itself, have likely seemed at odds with the fundamentally conservative character of the culture he writes out of. Certainly his images can be surprising: I touch you as a blind man touches the dice and finds he has won. (My Love, from Of All the Dirty Words, 1972) But Sheltons Requiem for Sonora from the latter volume and the poems from his recent The Bus to Veracruz (1978) express a remarkable sense of the intensity of place, a moral commitment to act in defense of the region he loves, and an exceptionally fine intelligence. His poetry, as in Requiem, can be simple and declarative: men are coming inland to you soon they will make you the last resort for tourists who have nowhere else to go . . . . what will become of those who cannot learn the terrible knowledge of cities. . . [?] And it can be deeply moving: years ago I came to you as a stranger . . . . I am older and uglier . . . . I have learned to accept whatever men choose to withhold but oh my desert yours is the only death I cannot bear. Yet as the poems in The Bus to Veracruz demonstrate, Sheltons ability is not limited to poems of introspection and celebration. His capacity for deep attachments to people and places has nurtured that genius into a fine, comprehensive vision of us who inhabit this continent and of the authentic roots of our cultural life here. His sense of the local and how it impinges upon personal human relationships in Landscape with a Woman recalls the complexity and idiomatic naturalness of Robert Creeley (another Southwest poet during part of his career.) In Mexico he recreates the pull of 1227
that land which, after a warm April day, lies so beckoningly under the constellation Scorpio. At the same time, a self-measuring honesty tempers such authentic longings for rootedness, for release from an increasingly distracting monoculture. Reaching for a Gun, in defense of a city child being beaten next door by his drunken parents, is a forthright expression of a mans incapacity to act any longer with that only goodness which lasts . . . the ability to forgive/ and I dont have it/ I dont believe in murder I say/ reaching for the gun and wondering if Hell is where we wake up dead and realize how much life we had left that we didnt use. Sheltons title poem, finally, a prose poem called The Bus to Veracruz, needs to be read everywhere: it is a brilliant, imparaphrasable narrative set in a remote village in Mexico. The hidden beauty, the hidden love, the hidden longings to be moving freely, congenially through this loveliest of continents are exquisitely projected in this poem. It reminds us that life struggles toward blossom, as it does elsewhere, in strange and otherwise invisible inland desert places; that art in America may, indeed, survive static mystifications and rise toward clarity. For many years, critics and scholars thought of fictionespecially the novelas the natural literary form in the West. Present trends, however, reveal a dynamic, sensitive poetic tradition growing, and an increasing number of gifted artists turning to poetry to better express their sense of the West then and now.
W ILLIAM LOCKWOOD , University
of Michigan, Flint
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Individual Poets Barker, David. Scenes from a Marriage. Stockton, Cal.: Wormwood Review, 1979. Barney, William. The Killdeer Crying: Selected Poems. Fort Worth: Prickly Pear, 1977. Braverman, Kate. Lullaby for Sinners. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Bukowski, Charles. Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1982. . Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1982. Dorn, Edward. Hands Up! New York: Totem, 1963. . Geography. London: Fulcrum Press, 1966. . Slinger. Berkeley: Wingbow Press, 1975. . Collected Poems: 19561974. Bolinas, Cal.: Four Seasons, 1975. Duncan, Robert. The Opening of the Field. New York: Grove Press, 1960. . Roots and Branches. New York: Scribners, 1964. . Bending the Bow. New York: New Directions, 1968. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. A Coney Island of the Mind. New York: New Directions, 1958. . Starting from San Francisco. New York: New Directions, 1961. . Who Are We Now? New York: New Directions, 1977. . Landscapes of Living & Dying. New York: New Directions, 1979. Foreman, Paul. Redwing Blackbird. San Francisco: Headstone Press, 1973. Texas Liveoak. Austin: Thorp Springs, 1977. Forch, Carolyn. Gathering the Tribes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. . The Country Between Us. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1981. Gunn, Thom. My Sad Captains and Other Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. . Poems, 19501966: A Selection. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. . To the Air. Boston: David Godine, 1974. Haines, John. Winter News. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966. . Leaves and Ashes. Santa Cruz, Cal.: Kayak Books, 1974. . Cicada. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. . Other Days. Port Townsend, Wash.: Graywolf Press, 1982. Hugo, Richard. Death of the Kapowsin Tavern. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965. . The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir. New York: Norton, 1973. . What Thou Lovest Well Remains American. New York: Norton, 1975. . 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. New York: Norton, 1977. . Selected Poems. New York: Norton, 1979. Locklin, Gerald. Two for the Seesaw, One for the Road. Stafford, Va.: Northwoods Press, 1980. McDaniel, Wilma Elizabeth. Sister Vaydas Song. Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 1982.
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A Literary History of the American West Miles, Josephine. To All Appearances: Poems New & Selected. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Miller, Vassar. My Bones Being Wiser. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1960. . Wage War on Silence. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963. . If I Could Sleep Deeply Enough. New York: Norton, 1974. Rexroth, Kenneth. The Signature of All Things. New York: New Directions, 1949. . Complete Collected Shorter Poems. New York: New Directions, 1966. Robertson, Kirk. West Nevada Waltz. Isla Vista, Cal.: Turkey Press, 1982. Rutsala, Vern. The Window. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1964. . The Journey Begins. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976. . The New Life. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. . Selected Poems, 19691982. Pittsburgh, Penn. : University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. Shelton, Richard. The Tattooed Desert. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971. . Of All the Dirty Words. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. . The Bus to Veracruz. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978. . Selected Poems, 19691981. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. Soto, Gary. Where Sparrows Work Hard. Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. Vliet, R. G. Water and Stone: Poems. New York: Random House, 1980. Westbrook, Max. Country Boy. Austin, Texas: Thorp Springs, 1979. Wilson, Keith. Sketches for a New Mexico Hill Town. Portland: Wine Press, 1966. . Graves Registry and Other Poems. New York: Grove Press, 1969. . Midwatch. Fremont, Mich.: Sumac Press, 1972. . Homestead. San Francisco: Kayak, 1970. Winters, Yvor. Collected Poems. Denver: Swallow, 1952. Anthologies Kizer, Carolyn, ed. Woman Poet. Reno, Nev.: Regional Editions, 1980. Larson, Clinton, and William Stafford, eds. Modern Poetry of Western America. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975. Oliphant, Dave, ed. The New Breed: An Anthology of Texas Poets. Dallas: Prickly Pear Press, 1973. Poulin, A., ed. Contemporary American Poetry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Trusky, Thomas, ed. Woman Poets of the West. Boise, Id.: Ahsahta Press, 1977. Whitebird, Joanie, and Paul Foreman, eds. Travois: An Anthology of Texas Poetry. Houston: Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, 1976.
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Secondary Sources Eberhart, Richard. West Coast Rhythms. In his Of Poetry and Poets. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Fraser, Kathleen. On Being a West Coast Woman Poet. Womens Studies 5 (1977): 153160. Larson, Clinton F., and William Stafford. Modern Poetry of Western America. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1975. Lewis, Merrill, ed. But Why Be Concerned with Western Poets and Poetry. Special issue of Concerning Poetry, vol. 13. Lyon, Thomas J. Western Poetry. Journal of the West 19 (Jan. 1980): 4553. Niatum, Duane. Carriers of the Dream Wheel. New York: Harper, 1975. Parman, Frank, and Arn Henderson. The Point Riders Great Plains Poetry Anthology. Norman, Okla.: Point Riders Press, 1983. Saucerman, James R. A Critical Approach to Plains Poetry. Western American Literature 15 (Summer 1980): 93102. Somoza, Oscar U., ed. Denver Quarterly 16 (Fall 1981). Special issue on Chicano literature. Wild, Peter, and Frank Fraziano. New Poetry of the American West. Colorado: Logbridge-Rhodes, 1982.
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Contemporary Western Drama

since 1960 reflects the chaos of accelerating existence. The post-Sputnik, Vietnam, Watts, Wounded Knee, Watergate, Iran, Moral Majority years have been both a garden and a wasteland for American dramatists, providing a wealth of subject matter but requiring a struggle for synthesis. However, the real battle for western American dramatists since 1960 has been against the Broadway clawhold on American theater. Two developmentsthe growth of powerful regional theaters and the emergence of Off and Off-Off-Broadway playhouseshave allowed several western dramatists to gain national prominence. Preston Jones, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and Mark Medoff have established themselves as significant American playwrights since 1960. Such minority and women western writers as Luis Valdez, Hanay Geiogamah, Frank Chin, Ed Bullins, and Megan Terry have also influenced the look of contemporary western drama. Preston Jones and Sam Shepard represent the extremes of western drama since 1960. Joness plays are generally comic examinations of smalltown southwestern life presented realistically with stock characters speaking recognizable dialect; Shepards magical realism is peopled with mythic figures that often float off into incantatory monologues. Jones got his start with Paul Baker at the Dallas Theater Center; Shepard began Off-OffBroadway. Despite these differences, both Jones and Shepard have written plays that concentrate on themes central to much western American literature. Both, for example, demonstrate a deep ambivalence toward the impermanence of the values of the mythic West and the heroic images it spawned. When Preston Jones burst upon the national scene, it was like an unknown hayseed stepping forth to deck the heavyweight champion. Suddenly, Jones was famous. His picture appeared on the covers of Smithsonian and Suturday Review. He was the subject of a PBS television special. He was compared with Tennessee Williams and Eugene ONeill. (Saturday Reviews cover asked: Has Texas Spawned a New ONeill?) The three plays comprising A Texas TrilogyThe Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, The Oldest Living Graduate, and Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander had begun at the Dallas Theater Center in 197374, where Jones had been an actor since 1960. After their successful Texas performances, the three
MERICAN CULTURE
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CONTEMPORARY WESTERN DRAMA
plays were presented at the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in Spring, 1976, to receptive audiences. Finally, the trilogy opened on three consecutive September nights on Broadway in the fall of 1976. Clive Barnes of the New York Times pronounced that each play is oddly inconclusive . . . there seems to be no statement, no purpose. Thus, labeled regional plays with lines that sound like an expanded version of those unmemorably unforgettable quotes from The Readers Digest, the plays ignobly closed the Broadway run after five weeks. It was perhaps too much to expect a New York critic who grew up in England to appreciate plays that breathe southwestern life as much as Joness plays do. The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia examines one continuing southwestern concern: racism. Set in 1962, the play takes place when America was on the verge of a racial revolution. John Kennedys New Frontier administration proposed progressive civil rights legislation that Lyndon Johnson pushed through Congress after Kennedys assassination in 1963. The racist face of the old frontier was about to change. The play chronicles the end by focusing on a racist group, the Knights of the White Magnolia, in the fictional city of the trilogy, Bradleyville, Texas, based roughly on Colorado City, Texas, where Jones once worked for the highway department. The Knights stand to the right of the Klan (anybody thats got to put on a white bedsheet to kick a coons ass has got to be a damn fool, charges one member). But time has passed; their meetings in the Cattlemans Hotel have turned into Forty-Two games instead of planning sessions. By the end of the play, filled with Joness satiric wit directed against the bumbledick Knights, it is clear that they are finished. While Jones wishes them a happy good riddance, he is ambivalent about the change. The world that will replace them, represented by Colonel Kincaids son, Floyd, does not offer much better. Jones makes this point clear in The Oldest Living Graduate, the bestknown of the trilogy because of the live NBC television production starring Henry Fonda and Cloris Leachman. Colonel Kincaid, who is one of the Knights, is the oldest living graduate of the Mirabeau B. Lamar Military Academy. To boost sales for his lakefront development, Floyd tries to get his father honored by his old school. The Colonel, however, refuses to go along with Floyds plans for either the celebration or the development. The land Floyd wants is too important to the Colonel: Ah like to keep it for remember-in. Thats important to an old feller like me, havin places that stay the same for rememberin on. Finally, though, realizing that time is quickly closing in on him, Colonel Kincaid gives Floyd the land and laments impermanence. 1233
Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander builds times passage into the plays three acts. Act I takes place in 1953 when the title character is a Bradleyville cheerleader planning a glorious future. Act II is set ten years later in 1963. Lu Ann has married Dale Laverty, and they live miserably in a trailer park until Dale runs off and leaves her. In Act III another ten years have passed during which time Lu Ann has met, married, and been widowed by Corky Oberlander. Now she is in charge of the Howdy Wagon in a dying town. She has endured only to see her dreams die, her life turned into one of boredom. After the trilogy closed, Jones returned to the Dallas Theater Center where he presented three more plays. A Place on the Magdalena Flats (1976), Santa Fe Sunshine (1977), and Remember (1979) are set in New Mexico rather than Texas. Jones was born, reared, and educated in New Mexico. His father, J. B. Jawbone Jones, was once lieutenant governor of that state. Magdalena Flats concerns the relationship between an artistic boy and his older brother, a rancher trying to survive the drought of 1956. Santa Fe Sunshine, the lightest of Joness full-length plays, deals with an artist colony in Santa Fe in 1957. Remember is about a second-rate actor who finds himself in his hometown, Albuquerque, with a touring dinner theater company on his fortieth birthday. In a reunion with an old schoolmate, a former teacher, and an old girlfriend, he reinforces his awareness that time has ravaged all their dreams. This last play suggested that Jones was moving into a new realm. Unfortunately, within six months of its opening, Jones died unexpectedly from complications due to bleeding ulcers. He was only fortythree. When he died, Preston Jones was a national figure in American drama despite his lack of Broadway success. His plays continue to be performed around the country. They have even been translated into several languages, making him an international figure. Sam Shepard has likewise developed an international reputation, partially by living and working for three years in England. His national stature has risen so much that Richard Gilman wrote in 1981, Not many critics would dispute the proposition that Sam Shepard is our most interesting and exciting American playwright. Shepard was born in Ft. Sheridan, Illinois, in 1943, but he grew up in South Pasadena, California, where he was influenced by life close to the earth. He once had the Grand Champion yearling ram at the Los Angeles County Fair and planned to be a veterinarian. Instead, though, Shepard headed east in 1963. First he became a waiter at the Village Gate, a popular jazz club, where he met Ralph Cook, the founder of Off-Off-Broadways Theater Genesis. Cook encouraged Shepard to write, and Shepards two one-act plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, were presented by Theater Genesis in 1964. Since that time Shepard has written over forty plays and won ten Obie awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child (1978). 1234
Where Joness strength was the realistic southwestern comic language of his characters, Shepards vitality stems from his mythic imagination. Both writers, though, have been concerned with the loss of heroic ideals and coherent values the American West formerly represented. In Joness plays the contemporary Southwest is often effete, enervated, or materialistic. Old patterns embracing racism, sexism, and corrupted individualism hang on in unsympathetic ways. Shepard, often in dazzling, absurdist fashion, presents a similar world that has fallen or is falling away from something valuable. While Joness plays concentrate on the ennui of small-town southwestern life, Shepards emphasize the fragmentation of a world searching for characters who can continue to embody positive mythic values in new ways. Legendary western figures such as Pecos Bill, Mickey Free, Paul Bunyan, and Jesse James appear in Shepards plays; other characters are recognizable western types: the title characters in his first play Cowboys (1964) and its revision Cowboys #2 (1967), the Morphan brothers in The Unseen Hand (1969), the old prospector in Operation Sidewinder (1970), Slim in Cowboy Mouth (1971), Hoss in The Tooth of Crime (1972), Cody in Geography of a Horse Dreamer (1972), the cowboy side of Niles in Suicide in B(flat) (1976), and Lee in True West (1980). When he was asked by a Theatre Quarterly interview why he used cowboys, Shepard replied: Cowboys are really interesting to methese guys, most of them really young, about sixteen or seventeen, who decided they didnt want to have anything to do with the East Coast, with that way of life, and took on this immense country, and didnt have any real rules. In fact, throughout Shepards work the mythic West of cowboysthe wideopen landscape offering unlimited freedom and potential for individual selffulfillmententers and provides the conflict. Many of Shepards characters wish to reembody the cowboy figure, but the fragmented world in which they live offers little possibility of satisfaction. The cowboy is out of place in this world; those who wish to adhere to his mythic image are limited by their attempts. A changed world requires new images, but the chaos of contemporary life provides no coherent ones to supersede the cowboy. In Cowboys #2, for example, Stu and Chet, reminiscent of Samuel Becketts Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, act out a stereotyped Indian fight. As the play ends, with horse sounds clashing against car horns in the background, two suited men begin to read the plays script over again in monotone. Here, Shepard emphasizes the way that old images become crutches to support the contemporary world. In each reembodiment, however, the gap between the original and the copy grows wider. The old images need to be transformed rather than imitated. In Cowboy Mouth, Cavale has kidnapped Slim, planning to make him a rock-androll star. What the world needs, she exclaims, is a saint . . . a rock-and1235
roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth. Slim provides no redemption, but Mickey Free in Operation Sidewinder is able to transmute the Air Force computer made in the form of a gigantic sidewinder rattlesnake, representing the industrial, violent world, into an Indian god that provides the way to an apocalyptic redemption. Even if the old images have to be changed, their positive value needs to be recognized and retained. Niles, the musician who is to kill various aspects of his former self to begin anew, praises the cowboy in Suicide in B(flat): He discovered a whole way of life. He ate rattlesnakes for breakfast. Chicago wouldnt even exist if it wasnt for him. He drove cattle right to Chicagos front door. Towns sprang up whereever he stopped to wet his whistle. Crime flourished all around him. The law was a joke to him. In his confusion, though, Niles cannot distinguish between freedom and anarchy. In Shepards plays, something of the old should be retained; the exact characteristics of this, though, are murky. Niless emphasis on taking new forms may have presaged Shepards own changes. Toward the end of the 1970s Shepard pursued acting, appearing in the films Days of Heaven, Resurrection, and Raggedy Man. His plays written during that time, Curse of the Starring Class (1978), Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980), are much more realistic than his earlier work. More accessible and less irreverent, they nonetheless confront similar themes. What is the effect of the past, these plays seem to ask, especially ties to the family? The mythic West calls for independent isolation, but the family, often in strangling, debilitating ways, remains connected to the present, as Austin in True West discovers. How does one establish his own identity with past images looming so large in the minds eye? The old West, the looks within place, is dead, Lee says in True West: Theres no such thing as the West anymore. Its a dead issue! What will replace it is ambiguous, but as the fertile field behind the house in Buried Child suggests, possibility and opportunity still exist: they simply must be perceived through the fog of the present. Of all Shepards plays, the most representative and the most imaginative is The Tooth of Crime, set in a mythic space where rock-and-roll stars control territory like old gunfighters. The reigning hero, Hoss, is being challenged by a Gypsy Killer, Crow. It goes against the code, but Hoss knows that the big ones have gone against it in the past: Go against the code. Thats what they used to do. The big ones. Dylan, Jagger, Townsend. All them cats broke codes. Time cant change that. He has been successful following the code; thus he is perplexed by the changes that have produced Crow. When Becky tries to explain, he asks: What about the country? 1236
Aint there any farmers left, ranchers, cowboys, open space? Nobody just livin their life. When Crow arrives, the duel takes on the flavor of an old-fashioned walkdown between the established gunfighter and the young challenger. The fight, though, involves verbal performance. When the referee calls Crow a winner by T.K.O., Hoss responds with a true gesture that wont never cheat on itself cause its the last of its kindsuicide. The old world represented by Hoss is a kaleidoscope of past pop culture images: cowboy, outlaw, rock star, gangster, sci-fi hero. His replacement is an imitation of an imitation. Hoss is more sympathetic than Crow, suggesting that as this violent cycle continues, each change is weaker than the original. Neither Jones nor Shepard began in a vacuum, of course. Joness work was greatly influenced by his work with Paul Baker at the Dallas Theater Center and by the significant roles he had played as an actor. He identified Thornton Wilders Our Town and Arthur Millers The Price as plays that had affected his work. He also pointed to various Texas writersRobert Flynn, Eugene McKinney, Larry McMurtry, and othersas influences. Shepards work is closely aligned to the extrarealistic drama of other California writers like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure. Ferlinghetti, best known as a poet of the Beat Generation, wrote several verse plays in the early 60s. In some of them Ferlinghetti borrows images from western figures who confront significant existential questions. In Motherlode (1963), for example, Ferlinghettis main character is a miner who is confronted by the commercial Schmucks. McClure, who continues to write plays, had early success with The Beard (1965), in which Billy the Kid entices Jean Harlow to give in to her natural impulses. Shepards lament for a lost past is often submerged beneath the frenetic energy provided by images of the present, but Lanford Wilson, another writer who first toiled in Off-Off-Broadway obscurity, often makes the disappearing past a central issue in his plays. Unlike Shepard, however, who has never made it on Broadway, Lanford Wilson has finally received Broadways blessings. Wilson is a midwesterner, born in Lebanon, Missouri, in 1937. After a brief education at Southwest Missouri State and San Diego State, Wilson headed east, first to Chicago, then to New York where he worked odd jobs. After a chance meeting with Joe Cino, who encouraged young artists by producing plays at his Cafe Cino, Wilsons Off-OffBroadway career was underway. While the real or mythic West is always important to Jones or Shepard, Wilson varies his subject matter and setting. He has written more plays with eastern, urban settings than with midwestern ones. The Hot L Baltimore (1973), for example, an urban play, was his first popular success. But several 1237
of his plays move west, such as the early plays This Is the Rill Speaking (1965), The Rimers of Eldritch (1966), and the autobiographical Lemon Sky (1968). Recently Wilson has achieved his greatest acclaim with three plays of a planned five-play cycle concerning a Missouri family, the Talleys. Fifth of July (1978) takes place on July 4th and 5th, 1977, in the Talleys sprawling house near Lebanon, Missouri. Ken Talley, Jr., who lost his legs in Vietnam, has returned to the family home with his homosexual lover, Jed. During the play, past betrayals are exposed, and eventually the Talleys are reconciled to their past. Talleys Folly (1980), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle Award, continues the family cycle. Set thirty-three years before Fifth of July, Talleys Folly takes place in a boathouse where Matt Friedman courts Sally Talley by revealing his past and forcing her to understand hers. A Tale Told (1981) focuses on the events in the Talley house while Matt and Sally are in the boathouse. Angels Fall (1982) is not about the Talleys but is reminiscent of The Petrified Forest and When You Comin Back, Red Ryder? because it concerns a group of people in New Mexico who are forced to stay together and examine some of their essential motivations. Wilsons concern for the need to unearth, confront, and communicate the past connects him with other contemporary western dramatists. Communication, often forced or labored, is important to Mark Medoff, who has successfully taken both the regional theater and the Off-OffBroadway routes. Born in Mount Carmel, Illinois, in 1940 and educated at the University of Miami, Medoff became associated with the West in 1964 when he started working on a masters degree at Stanford. Since 1966 Medoff has been a faculty member at New Mexico State University at Las Cruces. The Southwest provides the setting for several of his plays, such as his first one, Doing a Good One for the Red Man: A Red Farce (1969), which was first produced in San Antonio, Texas, by the Dallas Theater Center. His first popular success, When You Comin Back, Red Ryder? (1973), took the Off-Off-Broadway route, initially produced by the Circle Repertory Theater Company. Like Shepard, Medoff dramatizes a contemporary West where traditional heroes have vanished. In a quiet New Mexico diner, a freaky doper smuggling marijuana to California menaces the patrons and the night attendant, Stephen Ryder. Stephen cannot transform himself into the cowboy hero, Red Ryder, nor can he summon Reds faithful Indian companion, Little Beaver. To confirm his point about lost heroes, Medoff uses a Paul Simon line as an epigraph: Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio/ A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. . . . With Firekeeper (1978), Medoff resumed his relationship with the Dallas Theater Center. The play revolves around the activities of a priest, a
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mentally disturbed Hispanic girl, a local sheriff (played by Preston Jones at the DTC), and an old Indian. The Indian at one point recalls the legend of the firekeeper, the shaman who could determine the right path for men to follow. Neither law nor religion seems to be able to provide this information in Medoffs contemporary Southwest. Medoffs most successful play, Children of a Lesser God (1979), does not have a southwestern setting, but it did have a western beginning. It opened in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum, whose artistic director Gordon Davidson has influenced western theater significantly. Like Medoffs other plays, Children of a Lesser God examines the difficulty of human communication; the plays subject is the love affair between a deaf woman and her hearing husband. A success on Broadway for the 198081 season, Children of a Lesser God has firmly established Medoffs name among contemporary American dramatists. Other western and southwestern playwrights began to find greater acceptance for their work in the seventies. Although Preston Jones was not well received by New York critics, his plays seemed to inspire other Texas writers. Jack Heifner in Vanities (1977) follows Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlanders lead in focusing on three Texas girls at various times of their lives. His two one-acts about Texas womensisters in Patio and motherdaughter in Porch achieved moderate success. James McLure, trained at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, received acclaim for Laundry and Bourbon, Pvt. Wars, and Lone Star (1979). Lone Star, first presented by the Actors Theater of Louisville, combines light, folksy humor with a weightier analysis of the effects of the war on a Vietnam veteran. D. L. Coburn, a Dallas friend whom Preston Jones encouraged to write, won a Pulitzer Prize for The Gin Game, an unsentimental play about old people in a nursing home that could be anywhere. Texas chic also aided Larry Kings and Peter Mastersons The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978). Whorehouse grew out of a Playboy article that Texas journalist King had done about the closing of the legendary Chicken Ranch, a brothel outside LaGrange, Texas. Using the traditional western theme of individual freedom versus the constraints demanded by civilization (represented by a meddling television journalist), this musical (songs by Carol Hall) has enjoyed an extended Broadway run and a less successful film version with Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds. At the Dallas Theater Center, Paul Baker, until his retirement in 1982, continued to encourage his company members to write plays with regional settings. John Logans Jack Ruby, All-American Boy played along with Joness plays in 1973. More recently, Mary Rhodes Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home (1977) uses a clash between a small-town Texas beauty parlor
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operator and some urban women as its conflict. Baker also received acclaim for his presentation of Texas writer Robert Flynns adaptation of William Faulkners As I Lay Dying, called Journey to Jefferson. Another regional theater that has become significant to western drama is Luis Valdezs El Teatro Campesino, originally a traveling company that played to California farm workers. In 1981 Valdez moved into a permanent structure in San Juan Bautista, California, and opened with David Belascos Rose of the Rancho. As a traveling company, El Teatro Campesinos most significant work was Valdezs Zoot Suit, originally commissioned by Gordon Davidson, director of the Mark Taper Forum. After its success at the Mark Taper, Zoot Suit moved to New York in 1979 and was filmed in 1981. The play is based on the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of 1942 when seventeen Mexican-Americans were tried for the murder of another MexicanAmerican in Los Angeles. The trial and its aftermath, riots by American servicemen who began beating and stripping zoot-suited Hispanics, allow Valdez to dramatize the treatment of Mexican-Americans in the West and to examine the difference between a mythic western heroin this case, the pachuco and his modern follower, Hank, the leader of the gang. Valdez is committed to exploring the Hispanic background of the West in his plays. He states: I have concentrated on theater images rooted in the realities of the Southwest. Ethnic and regional as those images might be, I feel we have nevertheless penetrated through the superficial differences that separate us all into a level of universal significance. Our study of Chicano culture has led us into investigations of the entire history of America. . . . We feel we are inexorably a part of the evolution of America and assume the right to participate as artists in the creation of its future. Valdez furthers his search into the Chicano past in Bandito! (1981), a play about Tiburcio Vasquez, a Mexican-American Robin Hood hanged in 1875. Native American culture has been the subject of Hanay Geiogamahs plays. Geiogamah, a Kiowa-Delaware, established the American Indian Theater Ensemble in the 1970s with Ellen Stewarts help. Later called the Native American Theater Ensemble, the company has toured America and in Europe presenting Geiogamahs plays, among others. Although oral performance is central to Indian tradition, drama is a European literary form. Geiogamah combines the two and explores Indian culture and history. Most of his plays focus on contemporary Indian life with glimpses into the past. Body Indian (1972) examines the way the Indian body politic undermines itself. Bobby Lee is an alcoholic who has lost his legs to the archetypal American machine in the gardenthe train. When he gets drunk in some friends apartment, they steal his lease money. Foghorn (1973) takes its title from the foghorns used to harass the Indians who occupied Alcatraz in 1969. It presents a variety of Indian stereotypes from Pocahontas to activists 1240
at Wounded Knee in an effort to exorcise them. In 49 (1975) the subject is an Indian celebration broken up by police. The Chinese-American experience in the West has been explored by Frank Chin in The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and The Year of the Dragon (1974). David Henry Hwang uses an encounter between a recent Chinese immigrant to Los Angeles and two Chinese-Americans in FOB (1980). (The title means first off the boat.) In The Dance and the Railroad (1981), familiar to cable television viewers, Hwangs subject is Chinese railroad workers in 1867 who dream of striking it rich in the California gold fields and then returning to China, where one of the characters, Lone, was a dedicated artist in Chinese opera before he was kidnapped and forced to come to America. In Family Devotions (1981) Hwang has an elderly citizen of present-day China visit his two sisters in Bel Air, an exclusive section of Los Angeles. Black dramatists have found western motifs less compatible than southern or eastern-urban ones, but Ed Bullins, who was educated in California, uses Californian settings in The Electronic Nigger (1968), Goin a Buffalo (1968), and The Pig Pen (1970). Although Goin a Buffalos title may sound as though it will investigate a western theme, it does so only ironically. The main characters are not searching for the wide-open spaces where the buffalo roam; rather the only frontier available to them is Buffalo, New York, where the drug pushers, prostitutes, and thieves who are Bullinss subject hope they can thrive. In his more recent plays Bullins, like Geiogamah, examines how an American minority often betrays its own interests by failing to look carefully at the pasts lessons on the need for group cooperation. One black playwright who has used a southwestern setting is Ted Shine, playwright-in-residence at Prairie View A&M west of Houston. Shoes (1970) takes place at a fashionable Dallas country club. In the play the group identification is broken down by materialistic self-interest: one characters desire to spend the money he has made working at the country club for $85 alligator shoes. Shines other plays, originally presented by Douglas Turner Ward and the Negro Ensemble Company, use Shines Louisiana background. Another play with a southwestern setting presented by Ward and the Negro Ensemble Company was Charles Fullers The Brownsville Raid (1978), based on a 1906 incident. When the town of Brownsville, Texas, was shot up, white townspeople charged that members of a black regiment were responsible. Eventually the entire regiment was dishonorably discharged. Fuller, who grew up in Philadelphia, won the Pulitzer Prize for A Soldiers Play. Just as Hispanics, Indians, Chinese-Americans, and blacks have found 1241
playwrights to dramatize their concerns, so have women playwrights had great success since 1960. One woman playwright with a western background is Megan Terry, who was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1932. Educated at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and the University of Seattle, Terry worked at the Seattle Repertory Playhouse before traveling east. She was a founding member of the New York Open Theater, where her most important play was Viet Rock (1966). After serving as writer-inresidence at Yale University Drama School, Terry returned to the West, where she became the writer-in-residence at the Omaha Magic Theater in Omaha, Nebraska. Terrys plays are often meant more to be seen and heard than read, and several of her plays that began at the Open Theater in New York grew out of an acting technique called transformation in which an actor transforms from one character into another in one scene. Likewise in her plays, the characters often undergo transformation. Terry, like Shepard, often draws from recognizable western figures, such as Ranchman in The People Vs. Ranchman. Ranchman is tried for rape and electrocuted. Later he reappears and his victims reenact his crime. Finally, in eternity his accusers ask his forgiveness. Hothouse (1974) is set in Washington, near Seattle. Its main characters are a grandmother, mother, and daughters who contrast with the enervated men worn out by the wars in which they have fought. Like other western writers who search for heroic figures to replace the ones that have been lost, Terry offers these strong women. All this activity demonstrates that western drama since 1960 is thriving. Just as Mark Twains and Bret Hartes local color helped postCivil War Americans regain a sense of identity, so contemporary Americans have turned to regional artists to help make sense of the whirl modern life presents. The theater, as an experience that combines the vitality of a live physical event, language, and spectacle, helps us take stock of ourselves. Regional theater directors, recognizing the contributions already made, will no doubt continue to encourage western playwrights. The Off-Off-Broadway movement, unless it is seduced by financial demands to become another Broadway, will persist in providing a testing ground for young writers work. Live theater will not take televisions place as the major entertainment in America, but neither will television cause the sun to set on drama. The show will go on, and often when it does it will be written by a western writer.
M ARK BUSBY , Texas
A&M University
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Primary Sources Bullins, Ed. Five Plays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Includes Goin a Buffalo; In the Wine Time; A Son, Come Home; The Electronic Nigger; and Claras Ole Man. . Four Dynamite Plays. New York: William Morrow, gyp. Includes It Bees Dat Way, Death List, The Pig Pen, and Night of the Beast. Chin, Frank. The Chickencoop Chinaman, The Year of the Dragon: Two Plays. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. Also contains a fine introduction by Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald. Coburn, D. L. The Gin Game. New York: Samuel French, 1978. Geiogamah, Hanay. New Native American Drama. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. Contains Body Indian, Foghorn, and 49 as well as an excellent introduction by Jeffrey Huntsman. Heifner, Jack. Patio/Porch. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1978. . Vanities. New York: Samuel French, 1977. Hwang, David Henry. Broken Promises: Four Plays. New York: Avon Books, 1983. Contains Family Devotions, The Dance and the Railroad, FOB, The House of Sleeping Beauties, and a foreword by Maxine Hong Kingston. Jones, Preston. Santa Fe Sunshine. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1977. . A Texas Trilogy. New York: Hill & Wang, 1976. Contains The Oldest Living Graduate, Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, and The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia as well as a brief introduction by Paul Baker. King, Larry L., and Peter Masterson. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. New York: Samuel French, 1981. McClure, Michael. Gorf New York: New Directions, 1974, 1976. McLure, James. Lone Star. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1980. . Pvt. Wars. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1980. Medoff, Mark. Children of a Lesser God. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1981. . The Wager & Two Short Plays. Clifton, N.J.: James T. White, 1976. Contains The Wager, Doing a Good One for the Red Man, and The War on Tatem, and a revealingly personal introduction by Medoff recounting the trials of a young playwright. . When You Comin Back, Red Ryder! Clifton, N.J.: James T. White, 1974. Also contains Home Movie, another autobiographical introduction by Medoff. Shepard, Sam. Buried Child. New York: Urizen Books, 1979. Also contains Seduced, and Suicide in B(flat). . Five Plays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967. Contains Icaruss Mother, Chicago, Melodrama Play, Red Cross, and Fourteen Hundred Thousand. . Four Two-Act Plays. New York: Urizen Books, 1980. Contains La Turista, The Tooth of Crime, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, and Operation Sidewinder. . Seven Plays. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Contains True West, Buried
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A Literary History of the American West Child, Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, La Turista, Tongues, and Savage Love as well as an introduction by Richard Gilman. Shine, Ted. Contributions. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1970. Contains Plantation, Shoes, and Contribution. Terry, Megan. Hothouse. New York: Samuel French, 1974. . Viet Rock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Also includes Comings and Goings; Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place; and The Gloaming, Oh My Darling. Wilson, Lanford. Fifth of July. New York: Hill & Wang, 1978. . The Hot L Baltimore. New York: Hill & Wang, 1973 . Lemon Sky. New York: Hill & Wang, 1970. . The Mound Builders. New York: Hill & Wang, 1976. . The Rimers of Eldrich and Other Plays. New York: Hill &. Wang, 1967. Also includes The Madness of Lady Bright, This Is the Rill Speaking, Days Ahead, and Wandering. . Talleys Folly. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981 Secondary Sources Aaron, Jules. The Mark Taper Forum: Gordon Davidsons Balancing Act. Theater 10 (1979): 5563. Entire issue concerns regional theaters. Brustein, Robert. Critical Moments. New York: Random House, 1979. Contains the essay Theater in the Age of Einstein: The Crack in the Chimney, which discusses theater of causation (David Rabe) versus absurdist, anti-causal theater (Durang, Shepard). . The Culture Watch. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Includes a discussion of Shepards The Unseen Hand. Busby, Mark. Preston Jones. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1983. Cizmar, Paula L. The Rise of the Regionals. Books & Arts 1 (26 October 1979): 2022. Copelin, David. Chicano Theater. The Drama Review 17 (1973): 7389. Haller, Scot. The Dramatic Rise of Lanford Wilson. Saturday Review 8 (Aug. 1981): 2629. Hill, Errol, ed. The Theater of Black Americans. 2 vols. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Maguire, James H. A Bibliography of Western American Drama. Western American Literature 13 (1979): 14963. Marranca, Bonnie, ed. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981. Contains an imaginative introduction by Marranca and collects various essays on most of Shepards plays through True West; sections on directing and acting Shepard, and Shepard on Shepard. Marranca, Bonnie, and Gautam Dasgupta. American Playwrights: A Ctitical Survey. Vol. I. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1981. Sommers, Joseph, and Toms Ybarra-Frausto. Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1979.
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Vinson, James, ed. Contemporary Dramatists. London: St. James Press, 1977. Weales, Gerald. American Theater Watch, 19771978. Georgia Review 32 (1978): 51527. Asserts that New York has become a receiving station for pre-tested goods. . Drama. In The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Literature. Edited by Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. . The Jumping-Off Place: American Drama in the 1960s. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Wong, Yen Lu. Ch inese-American Theatre. The Drama Review 20 (1976): 1318.
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The Western Nature Essay Since 1970

the year of the first Earth Day and of several important pieces of environmental legislation, makes a logical starting date for a summary of recent trends in the western nature essay. In truth, though, the Environmental Decade saw no startlingly new developments in western nature writing; what happened was that the theme and concerns of the genre, as they had evolved for almost a century, now became public themes and national concerns. Indeed, as Paul Brooks has argued in Speaking for Nature (1980), the work of such writers as John Muir, Mary Austin, Enos Mills, and Joseph Wood Krutch may have been a major impetus to the environmental awakening. In a sense, then, there is nothing new in the contemporary western nature essay. Writers are still describing the solitary immersion in wilderness that has for millennia given rise to insight, and they are still portraying fellow animals with the feeling of shared life. The basic matter of the nature essay remains, as it must, the same. And western writers continue, as they have since the time of Muir, to criticize the simultaneous triviality and power-forill of our brand of civilization. If there is distinctiveness to the contemporary nature essay, it is perhaps only its aura of increased seriousness and urgency as the human population and the technosphere relentlessly expand, wilderness dwindles, and species diversity declines. 1 Edward Abbey, who grouses at the label nature writer, remains, perhaps, the Wests most important writer-about-nature. More than others, he explores the psychological, social, and even political meanings in the encounter with wild nature. His most recent collections, Abbeys Road (1979) and Down the River (1982), do not have the sustained unity or philosophical intensity of the classic Desert Solitaire (1968), perhaps because these later books are made up of essays written for periodicals; however, their wide range and surprising, shock-of-recognition insights (often delivered humorously) reveal a writer with truly various powers. For Abbey, wilderness experience is a standard by which the aberrations of technological, money-distracted society may be measured incisively. In the canyons of the Southwest (Abbey Country, as the author once termed it), there is yet a remnant of peace, quiet, and time in which one might make a start toward an examined life. Abbey portrays this wild opportunity cherishingly, in the image-detail that respect for its importance inspires. The distance between the authenticity of wilderness life on the
970,
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THE WESTERN NATURE ESSAY SINCE 1970
one hand and the abstracted desperation of the mass of men on the other then leads him (as one familiar with the modern nature essay might expect) to a Jeremiah-like vision. This is common enough, perhaps; Abbey, though, surpasses other nature writers by expressing his dismay in sardonic, self- and species-reducing humor, the like of which has not been seen in the West since Mark Twain. The effect of the humor is to democratize and personalize the complaint; Abbeys rapport with the reader is unequalled in the genre. He is probably the only western nature writer to make good literary use of the automobile, that universal phenomenon; his use of it is to destroy it, slowly and with unmistakable relish. His narratives describing trips in new, unfit vehicles over rocky desert tracks develop a giddy, accumulating humor as the cars are piecemeal destroyed. Through it all, Abbey remains blithe, perfectly regardless, cooking dinner at evening by the disabled vehicle, listening to the sounds of the desert, preparing to hike onward the next day. The enemy, for once, has been vanquished. There are western nature writers with more documentary knowledge of flora and fauna than Abbey, perhapshis approach to natural history is almost always narrative and experientialbut his mingling of prophetic depth with outrageous exaggeration and satire gives him a unique literary voice, a standing in a wholly separate category from other nature essayists. He may be enlarging the field significantly. John Gravess Goodbye to a River (1960) shares with Abbeys Desert Solitaire the status of a modern classic. Both books work the theme of the lone individual in nature, reflecting slowly and deeply on self and man and the scheme of thingsThoreaus territory. Graves went on, in Hard Scrabble (1974) to ruminate on Texas country life; by nature, perhaps, his subjects were not so vividly individual as the story of his earlier, solitary trip on the Brazos River. His latest collection of essays, From a Limestone Ledge (1980), moves even further from Goodbye to a River to cover a wide variety of subjects (fences; meat; trash, and so forth), each one de novo in a separate chapter. The book is held together by Gravess tentative, unrighteous voice (Notes of an Uncertain Bluecollar Man, the title of the first chapter, sets the tone), but there is simply not the opportunity for extended or especially searching reflection. From a Limestone Ledge consists of essays gathered from Texas Monthly; with their good sense, modesty, and savor for the practical, they are likely the state of the art in the country column. Ann H. Zwinger of Colorado, whose most important western works are Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra (co-authored with Beatrice E. Willard, 1972), Run, River, Run (1975), and Wind in the Rock (1978), writes with considerably more passion and involvement. She is centered in the wild, and unafraid to declare it as her world of source. She describes a night spent camping alongside the upper Green River in Wyoming, in Run, River, Run: 1247
I lie awake most of the night, sensitized to the river, Peace, contentment: these are programmed cultural words; what I feel is the infinity outside of culture, and although I sleep little, I awake 2 rested. Her method, in general, is to present factual natural historyboth by straight exposition of scientific data and by her own rather technical drawings, which profusely illustrate her booksand to vivify the detail with relevant personal response. The quality of open space and light in the high country, to take one instance, is a result of very specific environmental factors that Zwinger details in documentary fashion: thin air, thin soil, and relentless weather have shaped this world. Above timberline, life is exposed. She describes the multitude of adaptations that plant and animal life must make to survive the hard conditions. Then she rounds and enlivens the scene with human consciousness: And psychologically, the great wash of light illuminating the alpine tundra gives one a sense of encompassing 3 comprehension, verging on euphoria. Later she writes, lt is the land4 scape of ultimate freedom. The sense is of a whole world, seen and known in its particulars and also as a totalityessentially the world of poetry, one might say, and of the best nature essayists. The alpine tundra, the wild river, the remote canyons of southwestern Utah with their Anasazi ruins, all these subjects of Ann Zwingers books are threatened. Each, as her treatment shows, is a stunningly intricate realm whose natural state is one of patterned, structural health; but each can easily be injured by careless humans. They are fragile worldsbalance is by nature a fragile thing. Man and the Tundra, the concluding section of Land Above the Trees, is short and understated, centering on the snowballing tendency of a disturbance as it reverberates through the myriad mutualisms in a natural community. Zwinger does not belabor the point, because the book as a whole has already made it. The harsh, hard world of the high country is, ironically, extremely vulnerable. Fifty to one hundred years of 5 plant growth can be snuffed out by a beer can. The Green River, too, the length of which she walked or floated for Run, River, Run, Zwinger shows to be threatened. It is a living thread of wildness, but it can easily be dammed. The engineering problems are not insuperable. In the canyon country of Wind in the Rock, the quality of life preserved for seven hundred years of quiet, unknown repose can be lost in a casual afternoon of vandalism, as pothunters work over an Anasazi ruin. In Wind in the Rock, Zwinger portrays her personal commitment and her reward, giving a fine explanation of the lure of backpacking. She walks out from under the temperature-controlled dome, as it were. Outside, one can be hurt, thirsty, too hot or too cold; but there are other possibilities, also: 1248
In spite of this, after walking there for days, coming home bug-bitten, shins bruised, nose peeling, feet and hands swollen, I feel ablaze with life. I suspect that the canyons give me an intensified sense of living partly because I not only face the basics of living and survival, but carry them on my back. And in my head. And this intense personal responsibility gives me an overwhelm6 ing sense of freedom I know nowhere else. With wilderness diminished to something less than five percent of the area of the United States, the frontier-adventure style of nature writing has had to undergo certain modifications. It is not possible, any longer, to see country that no white man has seen, or to give names to mountainsas was possible so late as the 1930s for Robert Marshall in Alaska. Under the circumstances, frontiersmanship has gone in two main directions: high onto enormous cliffs deemed unclimbable just a few decades ago, and (crucially, for literature) inside, to moral and psychological frontiers. When these two trends converge, as they do in some of the best climbing literature, the possibilities are rich indeed. When the climber, or in a few cases the wilderness trekker, deliberately chooses less equipment and thus a more direct (and dangerous) contact with the environment, the modern or post-frontier era of self-consciousness appears. The literary potential of this territory is just beginning to be explored. For the literature of climbing, Galen Rowell of California is perhaps the best guide among western American writers. His subtle, post-frontier focus is well illustrated in the fine climbing-essay collection he edited in 1973, The Vertical World of Yosemite. Then in High and Wild: A Mountaineers World (1979), Rowell developed further, richer ironies and complexities by relating that contemporary, lower-technology climbing methods are, surprisingly, often faster and less strenuous than the 7 old-fashioned methods. Thus frontier becomes an almost infinitely progressive term. The degree of ones exposure to the unknown is to some extent, and ironically, a matter of choice and planning. Nevertheless, the quest for self-knowledge and more powerful levels of experience is not taking place in a purely mental vacuum. The contemporary nature essay continues to hold that the wild world is the purest, most potent scene for the quest. One of the most stimulating recent explorations into the possible meanings in wilderness trekking is David J. Coopers Brooks Range Passage (1982). In 1976, Cooper made a long, solitary journey in the Brooks Range in Alaska, finishing with a descent of the Alatna River on a raft he made from spruce logs. For shelter he chose to carry only a poncho, and much of his food was found on the journey itselfEskimo potatoes, for example, and blueberries. The terrain was difficult, and the weather hardly ever agreeable. As the weeks passed, Cooper made adjustments, found some strengths and weaknesses, enjoyed luck and developed pa1249
tience; he reports his gradual assimilation to the requirements of the wild in a fittingly unpretentious, unwriterly style. He claims no great breakthrough, but simply in his learning to live with the rain there is a passage indeed. Very frequently in the land he crossed, clouds lowered and another storm hit; the willows dripped with water; the streams rose and rushed and were hard to ford; at night the rain slammed in waves on the poncho, pitched a few inches overhead on a tripod of willow sticks. Finally, on the Alatna, Cooper learned how to guide his heavy, half-awash raft of spruce logs in the safest of the channels, where the flow was fullest. He had never floated a river before, anywhere, but now, rather quickly, and as if regaining an ancient and normal human capacity, he learned a great deal. The intimacy with nature portrayed in this book, symbolized by the water that is everywhere in one form or another, is remarkable. Another well-established tradition in the nature essay is the journal written from the cabin in the woods. This, too, like the adventure narrative, is somewhat constrained by modern conditions, but its essence of quiet reflection based on a simplified existence remains intact. It is still possible to lead, at least for a time, a Walden-like life. Theodore J. Walkers Red Salmon, Brown Bear (1971) and Dwight Smiths Above Timberline (1981) are of interest, because both books resulted from a venture called the New Explorers, in which the American Museum of Natural History and other sources funded a kind of cabin-sabbatical for professional biologists, and because the journals themselves often reveal quite profound changes and developments in outlook, sometimes coming as a surprise even to the writers. Walkers stay in Alaska, for example, led him to personal and philosophical insightshe rethought his relationship with his draft-avoiding son, saw how important (and rare in normal life) delight is, and learned that his earlier intuition in favor of direct field study had been absolutely correct. He expresses his thoughts in a conversational style (both his and Smiths books are transcriptions of daily taping sessions) that occasionally rings with something like poetic force: We add and we subtract and chance plays its ugly games. We come, we go. We all move, we all cry. We all are lonely. Ive come further than most. I look ahead, I look back, I look out the window. (There are the trees, swaying in the wind. 8 Beautiful, beautiful trees.) John Haines, better-known for his poetry, also has published a prose account of his life as a back-country Alaska trapper. Of Traps and Snares (1981) has the virtues of direct-contact existence, a simple and strenuous life. There is a strong sense that Haines felt intimate with the wilderness, at 1250
least after he had served his apprenticeship. But the account also has a cer9 tain odd ambiguity. He is living a dream, he says, apparently meaning the old frontier dream of self-sufficiency in the wilderness, and implying that it is indeed a dream and not in this modern time an ecologically responsible course. He makes his living partly by trapping, and admits the end in view: selling the fur so that others may be rich and clothed beyond their natural 10 right. However, rather surprisingly, the insight does not translate into restraint; as far as this book shows, he goes on trapping. Perhaps Of Traps and Snares may be most valuable for its honest record. One Mans Wilderness (1973), drawn by Sam Keith from the Alaska Journals of Richard L. Proenneke, is extraordinarily clear and unified. Proenneke built a cabin by himself, with a few hand tools only, and has lived in it for many years while photographing wildlife. His attitude is rockbottom practicalreaders may wonder if there has ever been a more ingenious or self-reliant cabin manand this practicality is also (and logically, as Proenneke tells it) the surest guide to ecological rightness. He takes no more than he needs, and examines his needs rigorously. There are several passages in his journal that are almost perfect paraphrases of Thoreau; but their originality is never in question, for Proennekes thoughts are seen to come straight from his experience. If he is similar to Thoreau it is probably because both men touched the same source. I learned something from the big game animals. Their food is pretty much the same from day to day. I dont vary my fare too much either, and Ive never felt better in my life. I dont confuse 11 my digestive system, I just season simple food with hunger. Proennekes existence is only superficially like that of the nineteenthcentury western frontiersman; his writing reveals an earned sophistication about the interweavings of natural patterns and the right fit of man into those patterns. It is calm and grounded, with the simplicity of a naturalized, moral decisiveness. Studies of wildlife afford perhaps the most direct, obvious and logical opportunity for cultural criticism in the modern nature essay, because so many wild animals are under attack or are unconsciously endangered by the burgeoning of a powerful, technology-aided human species that for the most part has not outgrown earlier attitudes. Among the most important western studies are those of Hope Ryden and Barry Lopez, who have done scientifically respectable and spirited works on often-anathematized species. Rydens books on mustangs, Americas Last Wild Horses (1970), and Mustangs: A Return to the Wild (1978), her study of coyotes, Gods Dog: A Celebration of the North American Coyote (1979), and Bobcat Year (1981) are fac1251
tual, sensitive and compassionate, and unsentimental. She has done her field work; her study of coyote dens in Wyoming, for example, approaches Adolph Muries of Alaskan wolves in its patience. She has small use for telemetry, preferring to see the animals in person and follow them in person, and this Murie-like approach tends to substantiate her conclusions on the social and historical dimensions of her subjects. There is strong fellowfeeling in Rydens books, and a clear sense of moment. This emotional depth, not present in so many of the myriad, purely technical studies con12 ducted nowadays on animal behavior, gives resonance to her work. With one outstanding book, Of Wolves and Men (1978), and several essays in national magazines, Barry Holstun Lopez has taken a place as an important western writer. In Of Wolves and Men, he has constructed a significant synthesis, combining science reporting, lore collection, and an unsettling, unsparing historical critique. As with Rydens coyote and bobcat, and to an even greater extent, the wolf as men know him is largely a creature of projection and legend. Astonishingly, and regretfully now as the species range shrinks and subspecies are extirpated, we know little about the wolf that is field-verifiably true. Adolph Muries The Wolves of Mount McKinley and David Mechs The Wolves of Isle Royale (1966) and The Wolf (1970) are important breakthroughs. But Lopez has attempted something more comprehensive. What emerges from his book is not only a plausible behavioral description, but an insight into what is being lost as the wolf declineswhat kind of different, lesser world is evolving, and what qualities of heart and mind are helping to propel that world. In common with most modern nature essayists, Lopez does not shy away from the dark side of the human performance. After describing the almost paroxysmic savagery with which the wolf population of the United States was decimated in the decades after the Civil War, he concludes, It seems to me that somewhere in our history we should have attempted to answer to ourselves for all this. . . . I think it is simply that we do not understand our place in the universe and have not 13 the courage to admit it. Of Wolves and Men is far from a work of wolf-hagiography; Lopez lays to rest the notion that wolves kill only the sickly or old in prey species, and also the idea that wolves, except for rabid ones, have never attacked humans in North America. He also shows that wolves have often been known to kill more than they need. What is needful on our part, and this is a major theme in the book, is to know the wolf as it actually is, with no neurotic hatred, sentimentalism, or anthropomorphic projection. In that knowing, Lopez implies, we may start to know ourselves in a different way, and perhaps begin to make an accommodation.In the end, I think we are going to 1252
have to go back and look at the stories we made up when we had no reason 1 4 to kill, and find some way to look the animal in the face again. What this sort of clear seeing might be like is modeled in the remarkable essay that serves as an extended epigraph to Of Wolves and Men. It is a brief description of a wolf moving through a forest in western Canada, written with such apparent knowledge of both wolf and woods as to seem to transcend the conventional limitations of human view and become expressive of the scene itself. In his essays for magazines, Lopez writes of places and wildlife from a standpoint of respectful stillness. He avoids projecting much of a literary persona, apparently preferring simply to record. But the stillness itself is a reverence and a clarification, and the record written from this position appears singularly trustworthy and lifelike. The animals seem to be leading absolutely their own lives; their very being is sufficient. There is, perhaps, a profound quieting in this kind of writing. When Lopez observes a homed lark on its nest on the Alaskan tundra, for example, noting its perfected behavior through all the varying conditions of an Arctic summer, the still earnestness of the bird becomes shared. More than some sort of objective correlative, what is implied here is nothing less than the overall rightness of the biospherea forthrightness man can participate in. If, as some students of intellectual history have argued, the dominant thought in Western civilization is aggressively dualistic, and thus is naturehating or simply nature-indifferent, the ecological theme so prominent in the western nature essay from Muir to the present may be described as subversive. But it can be so defined only so long as alienation from nature, and the social structures built upon alienation, are in the ascendant. When contradiction becomes obvious, and disintegration seems to loom, the call for accommodation may become a voice of sanity and, possibly, healing.
T HOMAS J. LYON , Utah
State University
1253
Notes
1. Edward Abbey, Abbeys Road (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), p. xviii. 2. Ann H. Zwinger, Run, River, Run (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 29. 3. Ann H. Zwinger, Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 4. 4. Zwinger, Land Above the Trees, p. 56. 5. Zwinger, Land Above the Trees, p. 381. 6. Ann H. Zwinger, Wind in the Rock (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 5. 7. Galen Rowell, High and Wild: A Mountaineers World (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979), p. 58. 8. Theodore J. Walker, Red Salmon, Brown Bear: The Story of an Alaskan Lake (New York: World Publishing, 1971), p. 221. 9. John Haines, Of Traps and Snares (Delta Junction, Alaska: Dragon Press, 1981), p. 42. 10. Haines, p. 4. 11. Sam Keith, ed., One Mans Wilderness (Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1973), p. 71. 12. It is probably safe to say, for example, that nothing of literary quality will come out of the study, recently reported, in which redwing blackbirds were operated upon so that they could not give their territorial call. Such an investigation would appear to lack the ethical and aesthetic consciousness that makes literature possibleto say nothing of its casual cruelty. 13. Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1978), p. 196. 14. Lopez, p. 199.
Abbey, Edward. Abbeys Road. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979. . Down the River. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982. Bakker, Elna S. An Island Called California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Brooks, Paul. Speaking for Nature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Cooper, David J. Brooks Range Passage. Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1982. Cowles, Raymond B. Desert Journal: A Naturalist Reflects on Arid California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Craighead, Frank. Track of the Grizzly. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979. Geist, Valerius. Mountain Sheep and Man in the Northern Wilds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Graves, John. From a Limestone Ledge. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1980.
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Haines, John. Of Traps and Snares. Delta Junction, Alaska: Dragon Press, 1981. Keith, Sam, ed. One Mans Wilderness. Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1973. Lanner, Ronald. The Pion Pine: A Natural and Cultural History. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1981. . Trees of the Great Basin. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1984. Lopez, Barry Holstun. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1978. Rowell, Galen. High and Wild: A Mountaineers World. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1979. . ed. The Vertical World of Yosemite. Berkeley: Wilderness Press, 1973. Ryden, Hope. Americas Last Wild Horses. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970. . Bobcat Year. New York: Viking Press, 1981. . Gods Dog: A Celebration of the North American Coyote. New York: Viking Press, 1979. . Mustangs: A Return to the Wild. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. Smith, Dwight. Above Timberline: A Wildlife Biologists Rocky Mountain Journal. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1981. Walker, Theodore J. Red Salmon, Brown Bear: The Story of an Alaskan Lake. New York: World Publishing Company, 1971. Zwinger, Ann H. Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. . Run, River, Run. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. . Wind in the Rock. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.
1255
Western Movies Since 1960

NOT-SO-ACCURATE prophet once wrote, As recently as 1972, there were a tremendous number of quality Westerns being made . . . and since there seems to be a ten-year cycle in Western movie 1 making, Id say well see more in about 1982. In 1982 only two Westerns were released, and neither was exactly a major success. Barbarosa, starring Willie Nelson, drew some respectable reviewsand some very damaging onesbut nobody went to see the film. The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez appeared first on PBS television, then later went into general release. Today the Western seems to be deader than the California Med-fly. Critics and aficionados of the form can only hear, as with Arnolds sea of faith, its long receding roar. Everything except fluoride in the water has been blamed for the death of the Western. Even critics themselves have come under attack of late. Stephen Tatum, writing in 1983, called critics such as Brian Garfield and Don Graham shootists, indicting them for a variety of sins. They are said to hold a fundamentalist, transcendent conception of the Western. They are redeemer critics who wish to stop the clock, deny history, and halt the inevitable evolution of genres. Not only that, Garfield and Graham are moreover accused of being authoritarian and suspiciously close to the moral majority position. It seems quite possible, however, that the roots of the Westerns decline lie deeper than in the likes and animadversions of benighted critics. The Western has lost its audience. An entire generation of moviegoers has seen one big-screen Western in their lives, and that, sadly, is Blazing Saddles (1974). For this generation, who as children were glutted with television Westerns, such a legacy makes the Western an impossible form. Blazing Saddles is the final debunking of a long tradition and exposes the Westerns moral preachiness, its presumed insensitivity to blacks, reds, women, and other minorities, its good-guy-bad-guy schematic oppositions. Blazing Saddles took the Western into the terrain of the scatological, and from that defamation, nothing could be regained for an entire generation. By the early 1980s, the Western seemed hopelessly irrelevant to the largest share of the moviegoing audiencethe teen market. How could it ever compete with the simpleminded eighth-grade prurient voyeurism of Porkys, the futuristic and infantile fantasies of Star Wars, the primal fears of Jaws I, II, III, etc. ? Obviously it couldnt. For all subsequent generations, then, the West-
1256
WESTERN MOVIES SINCE 1960
ern has to be rediscovered, like some store of ancient literature one studies in school. Reviewing the last twenty-five years of the Western, 19601985, is salutary for both aficionados and novices. The sixties began with a great film done in the sparest, most austere classical manner, Budd Boettichers Comanche Station (1960). The last of the Renown cycle of seven films that Boetticher made with Randolph Scott, Comanche Station reduces the elements of the journey Western to create one of its purest expressions ever. Scott is an aging knight, a man always alone in Comanche country, who, reminiscent of John Waynes searcher, hunts endlessly for his wife, taken ten years previously by the Comanches. He buys a woman out of captivitynot his wife, of course, whom he will never findand escorts her back to her husband. The journey pits him against a charming, evil adversary (Claude Akins), and the trip becomes the occasion for a moral dialectic of the kind for which the Western seems the perfect vehicle. In the end the villain adopts Scotts code, dying honorably, and Scott delivers the wife to her husband. He turns out to be a blind man, a fact that surprises and pleases because all through the film we have worried, along with Scott, about what kind of man would leave such a woman to anothers care. It is a great film, and anybody wanting to know what the old-time Western was about would do well to review all of the Boetticher-Scott Westerns. Boettichers films froze the genre in a timeless frontier world, but the seminal films of the decade did something quite different; they announced the end of the West. That became the great theme all through the 1960s. Five films from the 196163 period are of particular note. The first was a highly literary Western, The Misfits (1961), written for the screen by Arthur Miller from a short story by the same title. Typical of things to come, The Misfits played off the integrity of the old-time cowboy against the confusion, hysteria, and corruption of the industrial age. The wild mustang ponies, now greatly reduced in number and used for the manufacture of dog food, poignantly symbolized the despoliation of the natural wilderness and anticipated the ecological Westerns of the future, including The Electric Horseman (1978), a film deeply indebted to another early sixties Western as well, Lonely Are the Brave (1962). Like The Misfits, Lonely Are the Brave was based upon a literary source, Edward Abbeys novel The Brave Cowboy. Kirk Douglass rendition of Abbeys hero, a modern, ironic version of the lone cowboy Shane, contained some bleak poetry and much nostalgic counterpointing of one era with another. Thus, early in the film Douglas sits astride his cow pony, and in the background, framing and bulking the composition, is a high mound of compressed automobile chassis. This film, like the novel, wears its western sympathies on its sleeve, and there is nothing subtle about the opposition symbolized by the difference between the brave 1257
cowboy, emblem of an older, saner time, and the pathetic figure of modern man, expressed unforgettably in Carroll OConnors harried truckdriver whose cargo is a load of toilet bowls. Nineteen sixty-two also saw John Fords next-to-last Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, drawn from Dorothy Johnsons fine short story of the same title. A highly self-conscious film, full of self-reference to the Fordian canon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance addresses openly such themes as the transformation of the wilderness into a garden. The effect is sometimes as though the script had been co-written by Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx. The greatest Western of this period was Ride the High Country (1962), Sam Peckinpahs second essay in features and a crowning achievement for its stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. Another journey Western, seemingly much indebted to the structure of Boettichers journey films, Ride the High Country celebrated all the old-time Western values, in the person of McCrea, yet revealed a depth of understanding of the degree to which rigid idealism needs the tempering of pragmatism, represented by Scotts character. The last of this group of end-of-the-West films was Hud (1963), but Hud was different from all the others; here ones sympathies lay with the antipathetic character instead of with the virtuous old order. Director Martin Ritt certainly never intended for that to happen; all his sympathies were with the grandfather, Homer Bannon, and his sensitive grandson Lonnie, not with Hud the unprincipled and rapacious son. Ritt was surprised at the degree of favor Hud found among audiences. Paul Newmans raw, edgy portrayal of Hud was one reason for the positive reaction; another was that the old mans moral certainty grated upon an American audience growing suspicious of received pieties. If the other films pointed backwards to the assured truths of the past, Hud looked forward to ironic and morally unstable fissures within the genre. In the middle of the decade, a new force was loosed upon the genre, the spaghetti Western. In a densely textured, learned, and absorbing study of the European Western, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, Christopher Frayling does a splendid job of tracing the influence of certain American WesternsHigh Noon, Vera Cruz upon the European imagination, but no one has yet written anything of consequence about the influence of the spaghettis upon the American Western. Such a study would doubtless focus on the role of Clint Eastwood in such films as Hung Em High ( 1967) and High Plains Drifter (1972). The spaghetti Western may have liberated the American Western in the closing years of the decade and into the seventies, for a burst of creativity equal to the greatest cycles of the genre in the past took place. Sam Peckinpah delivered on the promise of his early work and created in The 1258
Wild Bunch (1969) a great tragic work built around a decision that, in the words of actor Robert Culp, was neither Good nor Bad . . . simply a Right 3 decision, balanced on a hair. The Wild Bunch gave the ancient concept of honor a new validity and presented an ultraviolent West in unforgettable, stylized images. Beside it, runaway hits such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) were attractive cream-puffs. But all bore the sign of the Italian: violence, irony, and self-reflexive commentary on the genre. In the next decade, 1972 was another of those bench mark years in the history of the Western. Radically revisionist films like The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid vied with traditional works such as The Cowboys, one of John Waynes better films of this period. Each showed a keen awareness of the fundamental strengths of the genre. The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, directed by Philip Kaufman, reinterpreted the Jesse James legend, depicting James as a rabid anti-yankee paranoid crazily self-absorbed in the creation of his own legend, while turning Cole Younger into a visionary hero who understands the new world of machines, baseball, and finance capitalism. Mark Rydells The Cowboys exploited John Waynes persona of an aging westerner who has many truths to impart to those of the younger generation who are willing to listen. In this cattle-drive story of an old rancher taking his herd to market with the help of children cowpunchers, many of the glories of the early trail-drive films were evoked, from North of 36 (1924) to Red River ( 1948). Probably the greatest of the 1972 Westerns was a cavalry film, Robert Aldrichs Ulzanas Raid. In the previous decades several cavalry films were attempted, but neither Fords Cheyenne Autumn (1964), the masters last Western, nor Peckinpahs Major Dundee (1965), nor Ralph Nelsons Soldier Blue (1970), an example of wretched excess, could match the splendor of the cavalry films of the past, such as Fort Apache (1948) or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). Ulzanas Raid, however, does; it belongs with the best of the genre. It was also one of the few films of the era to translate the horrors of the Vietnam War into oblique but convincing western allegory. Soldier Blue, and to a lesser degree the overrated Little Big Man (1970), used the Vietnam analogue sentimentally, resulting in cardboard cut-out good-guy Indians and monstrous Anglo cavalry. In Ulzana's Raid, though, the Apaches are simply one alien culture at war with another. This is a film that takes sentimentality, especially its Christian liberal version, and impales it upon the cactus thorns of the realities of desert guerilla warfare. After the prolific outpouring of innovative Westerns of the early 1970s, something happened to the genre that is very difficult to pin down. Some fine Westerns were made during the middle years of the decade, including the best of them, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and the quirky, highly original The Missouri Breaks (1976), but none created the kind of box office 1259
that Hollywood genres require if they are to flourish. Then, in 1980, came Heavens Gate, Michael Ciminos ballyhooed follow-up to The Deer Hunter, which itself owed much to the Western, especially to John Ford and The Searchers. As everybody knows, Heavens Gate was a $40 million flop. Since that failure, the tendency has been to blame the Westerns demise on the fate of this one film, but to do so seems a vast oversimplification. Other reasons must be brought to bear to explain the Westerns decline, which may in the long run prove to be only temporary. Some suggestions, highly speculative and subjective, include the following: (1) The narrative pace of the Western cannot hope to appeal to children whose narrative expectations have been influenced by the intergalactic space races of Star Wars, the quick cross-cutting and dime-store surrealism of MTV, the electronic pulses of self-directed narratives in video games. A man on a horse, moving across a wilderness wasteland, must seem unbelievably pokey to such a sensibility. (2) The moral dichotomy and some of the special features of the Western have been easily absorbed by other genres such as science fiction. Star Wars, for example, played cutely upon specific Western motifs, as in the saloon scene; the serials adventure Raiders of the Lost Ark redid the old Stagecoach feat of the hero performing dangerous deeds on a speeding vehicle; Outland, or High Noon on 10 as it was known in the trade, translated High Noon to outer space; and, in a different genre, Jaws was itself a kind of Western with the shark as the gunfighter come to terrorize a peaceful community. (3) The loss of a sense of landscape is another possibility. Westerns have always been praised for their cultural insight in reflecting images of American space, though admittedly such insights invariably come from intellectuals and Europeans. It may be that the hunger to see wilderness landscapes has been diminished by modern travel, suburban deracination, and the multiplicity of landscapes in the profane world of television advertising. Monument Valley, for example, is shrunken, despoiled, and trivialized in ads for dog food, insurance, and automobiles. Some of the magic of American wilderness space may be lost by such profanations. (4) Finally, there is that problem of the R rating. The Western used to be a family film; fathers (and mothers) took their sons (and daughters) to see Westerns; in some families it was a weekly ritual. But this was long ago, in a time when families attended movies together. That quaint practice is no more, and now a vast gulf separates the attendance habits of youths and their parents. The best Westerns of the recent past have been made outside the United States. In Australias great explosion of film masterpieces in the mid- to late 1970s, the Western was a strongly felt influence underlying such works as Breaker Morant (Fords cavalry films), The Road Warrior (a great futuristic riff on Stagecoach ), and the charmingly old-fashionedly ro1260
mantic The Man from Snowy River (in which landscape and horses again came to the fore). Canada contributed The Grey Fox, one of the best of the end-of-the-West films, and the U.S. chipped in with a kind of third-world Western, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, which critiqued the Texas Ranger legend and created the possibility of a new hero for the genre, the Texas Mexican. But for fans and novices alike, such moments were rare. In 1984 not a single Western was released, and in December of that year Sam Peckinpah died. Gone, probably forever, were the days of twenty Westerns being released per year. It remains to be seen whether Stephen Spielberg or Clint Eastwood or anybody else can revive the Western for a new generation of filmgoers.
D ON G RAHAM , University
of Texas
Notes
Don Graham, A Medley of Fearless Forecasts, Next (JulyAugust 1980): 34. The Western Film Critic as Shootist, Journal of Popular Film & Television 11 (Fall 1983): 115, 118120. 3. Sam Peckinpah, the Storyteller and The Wild Bunch, Entertainment World 2 (January 1970): 11. 1. 2.
Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Rigorous intellectual examination of the meaning of the American Western in the European imagination. Indispensable for understanding the spaghettis. French, Philip. Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre. Revised Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Last chapter is one of the most enthusiastic appraisals of post-sixties Westerns to be found anywhere. Garfield, Brian. Western Films: A Complete Guide. New York: Rawson Associates,
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A Literary History of the American West 1982. Highly opinionated and vigorously written. Especially valuable for its insistence upon the importance of the writer in the creation of good Westerns. Graham, Don. Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas. Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1983. Focuses on changes in the Western as reflected in its preoccupation with Texas and its various myths. Hardy, Phil. The Western. New York: William Morrow, 1983. A large, handsome book containing lively annotations of Westerns through 1983. Invaluable for anybody wanting either quick reference or the big picture. Hyams, Jay. The Life and Times of the Western Movie. New York: Gallery Books, 1983. Useful if unexciting survey of the Western from its beginnings to 1983. Lenihan, John H. Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Definitive study of how the postWorld War II Western reflects such contemporary issues as civil rights, the Cold War, and Viet Nam. Pilkington, William T., and Don Graham, eds. Western Movies. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979. Contains explications of several major films released during the 1960s and 70s.
1262
The Modern Popular Western Radio, Television, Film and Print

have gone through as many transformations as the Western story, from its origins in the nineteenth century to contemporary variations on classic themes. Over the last seven decades the American Western story has fulfilled more social and cultural functions for its audience than has any other American story form. Indeed, the Western 1 can be seen as a record of Americas national self-awareness. By the mid-1970s, the popular Western in its several forms of print, radio, television and film had just begun to receive the intensity and depth of critical analysis it deserves. There is little doubt that popular Westerns up to that point had not dealt with the historical West as it was, but with the West as we wish it had been. Thus, the evolution of the idealistic Western to the more realistic contemporary one reveals much about the state of American society along the way. The persistence of the Western format, even in its evolved state, indicates American preoccupation with a time of optimism about the American Dream, thus placing the popular Western of both yesterday and today in the American romantic tradition. Critics are quick to point out a basic flaw in the popular Western that the authors have used the same basic plots and character types since the beginning days of the genre. What the critics fail to acknowledge is that it is this very repetition of the formula that is aesthetically satisfying to audiences. A Western fan, upon hearing or seeing a Western, is like a person meeting an old friend. He simply expects to share old news. John Cawelti has illustrated the viability of this formulaic approach to the study 2 of popular story forms in The Six-Gun Mystique and Adventure, Mystery, 3 and Romance: Formula Stories us Art and Popular Culture. Both books should be required reading for anyone who attempts critical analysis of the popular arts.
EW STORY FORMS
THE RADIO WESTERN
The transformations the Western formula experienced in its transition from radio to television led to the current nature of modern popular Westerns. As J. Fred MacDonald so aptly points out in Dont Touch That Dial! 4 Radio Programming in American Life from 1920 to 1960, Western programming on radio up until Gunsmoke in 1952 was primarily aimed at children.
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Televisions ultimate threat in the 1950s served to impel the Western genre on radio to innovate and attempt to recapture the adults. In the childrens Westerns, as MacDonald writes, the most common types of moral messages were those that implored listeners to work hard, to 5 respect the ways of elders, and to be honest in all dealings. What a number of the programs shared was an American ideology best characterized by two of the most popular shows of the 1930s, Tom Mix and The Lone Ranger. With the cry, The Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters are on the air! And here comes Tom Mix, Americas favorite cowboy!, American youth were drawn into the romantic world of Tom Mix, which was at the same time realistic because it was placed in a twentieth-century milieu of trouble and 6 technology. The show was so popular it continued for a decade. Premiering in 1933, The Lone Ranger, on the other hand, although set in real time, derived its plot and action from the timeless American West of the nineteenth-century frontier. The much-discussed relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto in the series was certainly a distinguishing feature, giving it a deeper cultural and social significance than that enjoyed by a number of the competing Western series, since it attempted a resolution of the western conflict between races. Although the Lone Ranger and Tonto never broke into song on Americas airwaves during the 1930s and 1940s, many other weekly Western heroes did. The most famous were Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Despite their tendency to warble about the sagebrush, the cattle and the sky, these cowboys, like their non-singing counterparts, were inhabitants of a male world where women were tolerated because they were necessary for civilization. (They were rarely featured and, with the exception of Dale Evans on the Roy Rogers Show, never starred.) The Western heroes were also patriotic, helping to serve the war cause as well as any other citizen. The fictional Tom Mix delivered the following message to the American public on May 8, 1945: Weve shown Hitler and his gang that we know how to lick bullies and racketeers, but weve still got a big job to do for our brothers, and our cousins, and our uncles, and our dads who are still fight7 ing the Japs. Buck Jones of Hoofbeats opened membership to his Buck Jones Club to any boy or girl whos interested in clean living, outdoor exercise, and 8 seeing that the underdog gets a chance. Radio Westerns, like much of programming in popular media, upheld traditional American values of friendship, honesty, justice, perseverance, and concern for others. The rise of the adult Western in radio in the decade after World War II was an attempt to tell the Western story more realistically. Radio, reacting 1264
THE MODERN POPULAR WESTERN
to competition from television, attempted to create its niche in the marketplace. Gunsmoke is, of course, the best remembered of these hard-hitting, realistic Westerns which presented tough plots and very human characters. Matt Dillon worried about killing, about whether the fragile civilization represented by Dodge City would hold up against all the attacks, and about whether he could continue to serve as the man who stood between civilization and the savage wilderness day after lonesome day. William Conrad as Matt Dillon opened the program with this description of his job as U.S. Marshal around Dodge City and in the territory on West: First man they look for, and the last they want to meet. Its a chancy job. But it makes a man watchfuland a little lonely. On Gunsmoke Marshal Dillon got shot, farmers did not survive on their land, and criminals were not always easily or finally dealt with. Other adult Western series of the period included The Six Shooter, Dr. Six-Gun, Fort Laramie, Luke Slaughter of Tombstone, and Have Gun Will 9 Travel, all appearing and disappearing between 1953 and 1960. According to J. Fred MacDonald, violence and even sexuality were dealt with in franker ways than had been the case when the juvenile Western dominated 10 11 the airwaves. Even the American Indian was handled more fairly. Still, the radio Western never really achieved maturity; radio remained a proving ground for variations in the Western formula which were to be more completely developed on television and film.
THE TELEVISION WESTERN
Television in the early 1950s, as a new popular medium in need of programming, found itself going back to older, familiar entertainment forms in order to provide an easy transition for its audience. In the case of the popular Western, this meant adapting formats and series already established on the radio and in B Western movies. The first significant Western TV series in prime time was Hopalong Cassidy, which premiered on NBC in June 1949. Series star William Boyd had been playing Hoppy in B Westerns since 1936. During the 1940s he had gambled his own savings to acquire the TV rights to the Cassidy pictures. His quick leap into the new medium proved to be a financial bonanza, as Hoppy became a national craze worth millions in merchandising rights alone. Noting the huge success of the Hoppy series, other B film stars quickly began working the television goldmine. The two leading singing cowboys of Saturday matinee and radio, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, began their own TV series in 1950 and 1951, respectively. Unlike the early episodes of Hopalong Cassidy, which were merely recuts of the old B features, The Lone Ranger was the first successful network Western to create original filmed episodes. The masked rider of the plains and his faithful Indian companion premiered on ABC in September 1949. 1265
The early episodes look clumsy today, with wooden acting taking place on small sound stages where a bush and a couple of trees often represent the vistas of the American Southwest. Nonetheless, the show was a big success, enjoying an eight-year run and holding down seventh place in the Nielsen ratings in 195051. Other radio shows followed the Ranger to television, notably Sky King, a modern Western where criminals were chased down by a hero in a twin engine Cessna; Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, a Mountie adventure featuring the wonder dog, Yukon King; and The Cisco Kid, which partially made up for its Latin stereotypes by making its Mexican hero genuinely charming and attractive. Other television Westerns of the early 1950s, such as Wild Bill Hickock, Range Rider, and Walt Disneys fabulously successful 195455 mini-series, Davy Crockett, were series created originally for television. However, these also adapted the formats of B films or radio childrens Westerns by featuring comic or youthful sidekicks, an emphasis on action, very clearly defined perspectives on good and evil and the heroic administering of righteous justice. Television also absorbed the adult Western formula from radio, and in doing so ushered in the modern era of the TV Western, bringing the popular Western its greatest mass popularity. In September 1955, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp premiered on ABC and Gunsmoke was introduced on CBS. Both of these new half-hour shows were dramatically different from all of the action-oriented Western series that had preceded them. On Wyatt Earp, the story was presented for the most part as historically accurate, although this was in fact rarely the case. Other changes from early TV Westerns were an increased sense of moral complexity; the presence of a larger number of regular characters, including villains; a hero who often solved problems with his head rather than with guns or fists; and secondary characters who had individualized personal qualities or problems, rather than merely broad virtues or vices. Here, in other words, was a Western with a degree of sophistication, a show that could appeal to adult sensibilities as well as to children. Gunsmoke made no claims to historical accuracy, but its sense of realism far surpassed that of Wyatt Earp. The structure and characters of Gunsmoke had already been clearly established by its three-year success on the radio at the time the show reached the TV screen, the first three years of the TV series being mainly adaptations of old radio shows. Writer John Meston and producer Norman Macdonnell brought to the television version of Gunsmoke a nineteenth-century Dodge City, Kansas, peopled by half-wild buffalo hunters, homesteaders brought to the brink of insanity by the emptiness of the prairie, and men whose only handle on survival was the butt of a six-gun. It was a neurotic, compulsive world dominated by greed and cruelty, and made livable only by the vulnerable, tiny community of friends headed 1266
by U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon, the gimpy, rather stupid deputy Chester Goode, the booze-sipping Doc Adams and the saloon ownermadam, Kitty Russell. It was the ideal show for a 1950s mass audience, brooded over in their own world by the Cold War and by trendy social science and psychology jargon about deviance and the failure to adjust. By 1957, Gunsmoke was the top-rated program on television, a position it would hold for the rest of the decade. In 1961, the show expanded to an hour, gradually softening its outlook and evolving into an anthology format. It placed amongst the top twenty shows every year until it finally left the air at the end of the 197475 season, as the longest-running and most successful dramatic show in the history of television. The success of Gunsmoke and Wyatt Earp quickly filled the TV screen with adult Westerns all hoping to capture some of the audience. Wagon Train began a successful eight-year run in 1957. Rawhide, an excellent series about a cattle drive north from Texas, premiered in 1959 and continued until 1966. Warner Brothers Television began a group of hit shows in the middle fifties about wandering heroes that included Cheyenne, Bronco, Sugarfoot and the comedy-oriented Maverick. The popularity of the television Western peaked in 195859, when twenty-four adult Westerns were on prime time television each week, including seven of the top ten shows in the Nielsen ratings. With over fifty million Americans watching Westerns every night of the week, Westerns had become the most popular mass-appeal story formula ever created. From that pinnacle, Westerns slowly lost their appeal for television audiences until 1975, the first year in the history of network television that not even one Western series was included in the prime time schedule. By the time television Westerns were at their point of unparalleled popularity in the late 1950s, they had evolved past their roots in film and radio and developed formulaic qualities of their own. Simply put, most successful television Westerns featured ensemble casts who functioned as a collective hero in a family or quasi-family structure. This was a change from the mid-fifties, when shows with loner heroes were the norm. The Restless Gun with gunslinger Vint Bonner, The Texan with the Texas gunfighter Bill Longley, and Tales of Wells Fargo with special agent Jim Hardie, along with the Warner Brothers series, all made regular appearances on Nielsens top twenty list. But the more spectacular success of ensemble shows such as Gunsmoke and Wagon Train focused series creators more and more in that direction. Most loner-hero shows came and went quickly. During the 1960s, The Loner and Branded lasted only a single season. And only two loner-hero shows, The Lone Ranger and Have Gun Will Travel, both begun in the 1950s, lasted six seasons or longer. Ensemble hit shows, following Gunsmoke s lead, created tiny commu1267
nities of love and cooperation that were able to withstand the ravages of frontier savagery. Many shows created family-like relationships. Lawman, Wagon Train and Rawhide, for example, all featured an older man guiding and teaching a younger, impulsive apprentice. Although in all three cases the two were not related, the parallels with an ideal father-son relationship were obvious. By the late 1950s, however, genuine families were beginning to take the reins of the television Western. The trend was inaugurated in 1958 when The Rifleman, featuring a widower raising his son on a western ranch, quickly became a ratings hit. The most important stimulus for Western series built around a family, however, was Bonanza, which premiered in 1959. The series was not successful until it was moved by NBC to a Sunday evening slot in 1961, where it quickly became a major hit, finishing as the top ratings winner of the entire decade. Featured on the series were Pa Cartwright, owner of the biggest ranch in Nevada, and the three sons who helped him protect and run his western domain: Little Joe, the hot-headed youngster, Hoss the slow-witted but gentle and sensitive giant, and the oldest son, Adam, loyal and reliable, but somehow enigmatic. After Bonanza came a number of imitators, all featuring a diverse family of huge landowners. The Virginian, the first ninety-minute series, debuted in 1962; The Big Valley, featuring Barbara Stanwyck as a mother ruling over her unruly sons, began in 1965; and The High Chaparral, with the usual huge ranch but more than the usual share of Freudian family tensions, went on the air in 1967. Several reasons have been posited for the television Westerns evolution from the single-hero structure to the ensemble hero formula. The most obvious reason is the simple need for variations. On a television series, single characters normally cannot initiate enough inventive interest to sustain a show that is viewed every week. In devising a format that could easily feature one of several regulars during a particular episode, the producers of TV Westerns solved the problem of overfamiliarity. 12 Horace Newcomb in his book TV: The Most Popular Art argues that the family formula was established by the success of those situation comedies in the early 1950s that centered themselves around families. All television programming, Newcomb concludes, has taken the cue from TV situation comedies and invented family-like groups not only to sustain variety and interest, but to establish a connection with a vast audience, most of whom are watching television at home as a family unit. A third theory for the evolution of the TV Western formula is offered by Ralph and Donna Brauer in the only book-length study of the television 13 Western, The Horse, the Gun and the Piece of Property. According to the Brauers, the changing formulaic pattern in the TV Western reflects a changing fable of our identity in which the national psyche moved from valuing 1268
individualism to valuing the team-play of corporate anonymity. The family on the giant ranch, the Brauers conclude, is a metaphor for corporate America in which characters become heroic by learning to control individualistic and eccentric behavior for the sake of the prosperity of the ranch. Ben Cartwrights advice to an old frontiersman on an episode of Bonanza, for example, is to join the local Cattlemans Association. Whatever the reasons for the changing pattern of the TV Western and its resulting success, sheer overexposure caused a gradual but steady decline in the popularity of the form. Since 1970, no new Western series has lasted 14 longer than two years, and only one new series has managed to attract a large audience. How the West Was Won in 197778 finished eleventh in the ratings mainly because of the nostalgic appeal of star James Arness, who earlier had played Matt Dillon for the entire twenty years of Gunsmoke. Attempts to revive television Westerns in the 1980s have been spoofs of the Western formula. However, even parodies seem unable to revive audience interest. Neither Best of the West in 1981 nor Gun Shy in 1983 was renewed for a second season. Beyond the fact of overexposure are perhaps more subtle reasons for the television audiences loss of interest in Westerns. It is no doubt coincidental that 1975, the first Westernless television season, was the first season planned by TV executives after the Watergate scandals and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. On the other hand, the relationship between these two events is at least symbolically suggestive. If Watergate and the Vietnam War that preceded it signaled, as many suggest, the end of American innocence and the beginnings of American self-doubt, it seems appropriate that at that very moment the Western story, which was traditionally a narrative confirming Americas worthiness to venture onward, would disappear from television.
MODERN WESTERN FILMS
As Westerns proliferated on television, they began to decline in the movie theatres. In 1950, at least 135 American-made Westerns were released in the United States. By 1956, the number had declined to seventyeight. And in the entire decade from 1965 to 1975, only about two hundred Westerns appeared on movie screens, an average of less than twenty per 15 year. Part of the decline in Western film production is traceable to the fact that television began presenting the type of kiddie action Westerns that ear16 lier had been produced as low budget B movies. Mainly, however, it simply reflected less audience interest. From 1965 to 1970 only two Westerns made it to the top fifty of Variety s top grossing films of the period (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969, number 7; True Grit, 1969, number 37); during 1269
the entire 1970s, no new Western made the Variety top ten list of box office champs during the specific year it was released. Despite the waning loyalty of the Western movie audience since 1950, the films themselves have been unusually rich in style and ideological diversity. The classic Western story described by Cawelti as that of the wilderness versus civilization, mediated by the Western hero, no longer serves as a constant formulaic model. Instead, the classic Western now provides a basic structure for experimentation within which the old formula is twisted, laughed at, and sometimes bitterly repudiated. Director Anthony Mann, for example, in a series of Westerns with star Jimmy Stewart, beginning with Winchester 73 in 1950 and including such fine films as The Naked Spur (1952) and The Man from Laramie (1955), presented stories of men motivated by revenge against a dppelganger figure, sometimes a member of 17 their own family. For Mann, Freudian psychology is as much a determining element in the settlement of the West as is the desire to build churches and schools. Similarly, John Ford, the best known of all Western movie directors, in his most critically praised film, The Searchers (1956), has the hero, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) driven by a pathological hatred of Indians. At the climax of the film, civilization is preserved only when whites attack a sleeping Comanche village and slaughter nearly everyone, including women and children. Fords Cheyenne Autumn (1964) actually reverses his older stories of a heroic U.S. Cavalry during the Indian wars by having the Cavalry harass a tiny band of Cheyennes whose only desire is to return from Oklahoma to their Yellowstone country homeland. Some critics link these formulaic revisions to immediate historical events. Philip French in Westerns says that modern Westerns can be directly traced to the political philosophies of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, William Buckley and Barry 18 Goldwater. John Lenihan in Showdown relates changing patterns in the Western formula to specific attitudes about public issues such as the Cold 19 War, racism and late-sixties attacks on the establishment. Considering modern Westerns from a somewhat broader perspective, however, allows them to be grouped into four major categories: traditional Westerns, anti-Westerns, elegiac Westerns and experimental Westerns. Together, these four categories reveal not only common themes but also the extent of the diversity of Western movies, especially since 1960. The traditional Westerns of the post-1960 era continued to glorify the white taking of the wilderness. A great many argued for the validity of such a vision more strongly than ever, especially the 1970s movies of John Wayne. By the time Wayne received a Best Actor Oscar for his role as the irascible lawman Rooster Cogburn in True Grit in 1969, he had been cast as a traditional Western screen hero for forty years and was the virtual mythic embodiment of the character. The box office success of True Grit may well 1270
have encouraged Wayne to continue his heroic westerner on screen. Whatever the reason, Wayne continued to glorify and defend the West until his last film, The Shootist in 1976, with but a slight revision of the traditional formula. In True Grit, the aging gunfighter Rooster teaches the adolescent Mattie Ross about a true westerners personal code of values, including loyalty, courage and the defense of the weak. Most of Waynes subsequent Westerns followed a similar pattern, eschewing standard young and vital heroes for near-old men who could teach the proven western values to the uninitiated. In Big Jake (1971) Wayne rescues his grandson from a kidnapping with the help of twenty-ish sons. In Cahill, U.S. Marshal (1973) Wayne is saddled with two delinquent sons who learn to love and respect him by the end of the movie. The Cowboys (1971) is the most obvious example of Waynes role as Western patriarch of older values. In that film Wayne is forced to hire on a gang of twelve-year-old boys to help him drive cattle to market. On the trail, Wayne forces the boys to become like himself, so that when he is murdered, the boys revenge the murder, regain the stolen herd and deliver it to market. The film closes on the boys returning with the cattle money to Waynes widow as the camera pans upward, a sign that Wayne is looking down from heaven approvingly. The only real rival to John Waynes personal popularity as a Western hero during the 1960s and 70s was Clint Eastwood, whose Westerns, like Waynes, reaffirm the ideals of the traditional Western. Eastwoods American films are known for their violence, which stems from the macho power of his tight-lipped heroes. Within such a context, however, Eastwoods Westerns develop a pattern of values that defends proper civilization as strongly as the oldest Western movies. In Hang Em High (1968) Eastwood begins with a desire to gain revenge against a gang who had nearly lynched him. At the end of the film he changes his mind and delivers the surviving culprits to the Sheriff, thus confirming the values of law and civilization. In High Plains Drifter (1973), Eastwood is an avenging ghost who sees to it that an evil town is destroyed so that the few decent citizens can rebuild it. Eastwoods last Western of the 1970s, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), once again presents a hero motivated by revenge. But Josey eventually joins a small group of settlers and finally chooses to discard his hatreds in order to preserve the fledgling society that has accepted him. The second general category of modern Westerns, the anti-Western, is nearly the opposite of the traditional Western of Wayne or Eastwood. AntiWesterns began to be seen on American screens in the mid-1960s. During this time revisionist history, critically examining the commonly accepted versions of historical events, began to be popular on college campuses. Similarly, anti-westerns consciously rejected the heroic components of western historical events or, like much activist rhetoric of the 1960s sug1271
gested that the idealist assumptions of the traditional Western formula were naive and masked the racism, violence and greed of the historical conquest of the West. The Wyatt Earp gunfight at the OK Corral, for example, had been presented in earlier movies as an heroic defense of family and community. Two anti-westerns pictured the event much differently. Hour of the Gun (1968) shows the famous gunfight as a consequence of a near-psychotic urge for revenge. Doc (1971) suggests that the killings were precipitated in part by Earps political ambition and in part by his repressed homosexual lust for the gunfighter Doc Holiday. Another famous historical figure, Billy the Kid, who had invariably been seen sympathetically on screen as a victim of society, is depicted in Dirty Little Billy (1972) as a mentally deficient punk whose murderous impulses were brought to a full flowering by a depraved environment in the West. Anti-Westerns featuring historical struggles between whites and Native Americans were especially virulent in their condemnation of whites. The Sand Creek Massacre in Soldier Blue (1970) and Custers Last Stand in Little Big Man (1971) are both presented as the result of the literally insane leadership of white troops. Often, the movies went to unfair extremes in their attempt to correct stereotypes. In Ulzanas Raid (1972), the savagery of the Indians is presented as consistent with their cultural beliefs, while equal savagery by the white cavalry results from racism and uncontrolled emotions. Many anti-Westerns, instead of taking a new look at specific characters or events, sought a rethinking of traditional attitudes about the West by reversing earlier patterns of the Western formula itself. For example, in There Was a Crooked Man (1970) Henry Fonda, who for a generation was a symbol of the integrity of the Western hero, plays a hypocritical prison warden who grabs a bagful of stolen loot and happily runs off to Mexico. One of the best made of the anti-westerns, Martin Ritts Hombre (1967), intentionally reverses the pattern of John Fords 1939 classic Stagecoach. Whereas in Stagecoach most of the passengers are flawed but essentially good people who eventually find their better selves and a new life, in Hombre all but two of the passengers are rotten to the core. Stagecoach ends with John Wayne killing the evil Plummer boys and riding off with the woman he loves. Hombre ends with Paul Newmans senseless death and the womans loneliness and grief. The most striking of the anti-Westerns were the Italian spaghetti 20 Westerns. The highly successful release in 1967 of Sergio Leones 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars, with Clint Eastwood, set off a craze for Italian-made Westerns starring American actors. Leones man with no name trilogy of films released in America the same year, Fistful, For a Few Dollars More and the three-hour The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, are both typical of and the best of the sub-genre. All three partially parody the Western formula with 1272
an overstated style featuring an almost endless number of killings, lush musical background, huge closeups of faces and the melodramatic lengthening of climactic scenes. Against this operatic background, Leone presents protagonists who are stirred into action by personal vendettas or greed for money, thus trivializing Western violence by showing the seedy intentions that lie behind majestic events. Ironically, Leone himself apparently got caught up in the epic qualities of his style. His most critically praised film, Once upon a Time in the West (1969), retains the baroque colorations of the trilogy but applies them to genuinely epic events, such as the founding of towns in the western wilderness and the building of the transcontinental railroad. The vogue for anti-westerns rose and fell with the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. None of any consequence has appeared since 1973. Because Westerns since the late 60s have presented a much less idealized picture of the frontier West, it appears that anti-Westerns were an important influence on the entire genre. A third general type of Western, the elegiac, was to some degree influenced by the negativism of anti-westerns, even though the elegiac Western has its roots in earlier themes. As far back as The Gunfighter (1950) and Shane (1953), there were suggestions that the individualistic frontier hero had outlived his time. It was in 1962, however, that this theme came to a full flowering in three memorable movies. David Millers Lonely Are the Brave is a modern-day story of the flight of a cowboy (Kirk Douglas) who breaks jail because he can no longer abide civilizaton. His escape ends when his horse is run down by a truck hauling a load of toilets. Sam Peckinpahs Ride the High Country featured fine performances by veteran Western stars Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, who played aging westerners testing the integrity of their lives one more time by taking on a job delivering gold from a mountain mine, and rescuing a young bride from a family of maniacal inlaws. John Fords The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance showed the old-time western man of action, John Wayne, eclipsed in the changing West by Jimmy Stewart, who begins as a lawyer insisting that the law must replace brute force on the frontier, and ends as a prominent U.S. Senator. All three pictures set their time frames a decade or more after the usual era of traditional Westerns, which is 18661886. All three films also featured heroes no longer at ease in a West moving past its frontier origins. And, most importantly, all three films presented their aging protagonists as majestically noble in their gritty individualism, and juxtaposed their virtue against a new West only slightly less corrupt than the decadent frontier of the antiWesterns. In these elegiac Westerns, as well as in later ones such as Death of a Gunfighter (1968), Will Penney (1968), Monte Walsh (1970) and Tom Horn (1980), we mourn the loss of the hero. The film message is all too clear 1273
there are no longer men capable of replacing him; there is no longer a West that appreciates him; there is no longer a frontier worth fighting for. The most noted director of elegiac Western movies, as well as the most 21 critically praised creator of modern Westerns, is Sam Peckinpah. Besides Ride the High Country, Peckinpah developed a vision of radically individual characters in an increasingly conformist West in The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Junior Banner (1972) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). The Wild Bunch influential and controversial mainly because of two extraordinarily bloody shootouts given a gory beauty by being filmed in slow motion, is the only elegiac Western most critics agree is a definite classic of the genre. In the film, the Bunch is a gang of outlaws led by two veteran gunmen (William Holden and Ernest Borgnine) who maintain that above all else, a man must be loyal to the men he rides with, even though it is 1912 and railroads and corporations have made frontier outlawry obsolete. This code is threatened when the youngest member of the Bunch is taken prisoner by a Mexican renegade officer who has hundreds of troops and is in total control of a weak and immoral town. At the famous climax of the film when the prisoner is murdered right in front of them, the Bunch retains its honor by suicidally shooting it out with the renegade troops. The beauty of the slow-motion carnage becomes Peckinpahs poem of praise for violent men who have the nerve to choose to die with the same bloody code of honor with which they had chosen to live. The most notable elegiac Western of the 1970s was Don Siegels The Shootist, a film which not only dramatizes the story of J. B. Books, a dying gunfighter, but also successfully sums up the career of the films star John Wayne, who, like Books, was soon to die of cancer and who was playing in his last movie. The Shootist begins with a montage of clips from Waynes old Westerns, suggesting that Books and Wayne are identical. This relationship is strengthened when Books says his code of life is, I will not be wronged. I wont be insulted. I wont be laid a hand on. I dont do these things to other people and I require the same from themthus echoing Waynes own private views. When the admirable Books dies in The Shootists final shootout it is 1901, the beginning of modern America. It is easy to see in that ending, and in the death of John Wayne which followed not long after, a symbolic death of the Western film itself and a future in which the form no longer has an important place. The essential characteristic of experimental Westerns, the fourth broad category, is not the attitude toward the traditional Manifest Destiny ideology of the Western nor the violent individualism of its heroes, but a fascination with the Western form itself. Makers of experimental Westerns take a playful attitude toward the genre and manipulate the form to achieve highly personal visions, as well as to extend some of the implications of the 1274
earlier films upon which their experiments are based. Philip Kaufmans exhilarating The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) is perhaps the most obvious example. Kaufman playfully debunks the older, formulaic movie 22 heroics of the James-Younger gang. Jesses idea for the raid, for example, is actually conceived while sitting in an outhouse where he reads notes scribbled by Cole Younger, though he claims the idea has come to him in a religious vision. At the same time, however, Kaufman affirms Western heroism by picturing Cole Younger as genuinely admirable. In yet another reversal of the Western formula, Cole becomes heroic because he foresees and embraces a mechanized twentieth century, an attitude directly opposite those of the outlaw heroes of elegiac Westerns. Kaufman films all of these goings-on in an energetic, self-conscious style suggestive of the French new wave directors. Other experimental Westerns of the 1970s, taken together, have explored broad new vistas in the popular frontier landscape. Robert Altmans lyrical McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972) equated the Western hero with the small town entrepreneur. Sidney Pollacks Jeremiah Johnson (1973), stunningly photographed amidst the Rocky Mountains in wide-screen 70mm, gave unprecedented importance to the frontier environment. The title character does not obtain his heroic credentials by conquering the wilderness. Instead his full status as a legendary mountain man is earned only after he has allowed himself to be fully absorbed into the mountains and all their wildness. John Houstons The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) comically debunks frontier heroism in the first half of the film, but in the second half demonstrates the need for western heroic individualism in the modern era. Another Robert Altman film, Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bulls History Lesson (1976), is a crazy quilt of juxtaposed attitudes toward Manifest Destiny and white-Indian conflicts. Altman seems to conclude that legend, history and fiction are all ultimately determined by the show business, and that illusion and reality are inseparable. Other experimental Westerns were less exhilarating. Arthur Penns The Missouri Breaks (1976), for example, presented a highly eccentric performance by Marlon Brando as a tricksterbounty hunter. It proved to be an expensive failure with critics and at the box office. William Frakers The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981) suffered a similar fate when a hackneyed script and wooden acting ruined an attempt to modernize the old radio and television hero. For the most part, however, experimental Westerns added a fresh vitality to the familiar, giving the story itself new life even as it seemed to be expiring at the box office. The box office popularity of Westerns was momentarily revived in late 1979 by the success of Sidney Pollacks The Electric Horseman, a modern elegiac Western contrasting the real virtues of cowboys with the phoney 1275
A Literary History of the American West glitter of Las Vegas. By 1980, newspapers all over the United States were running stories predicting the popular revival of Western movies. But the promised boom quickly became a bust when two new Westerns, Broncho Billy and The Long Riders, after receiving enthusiastic reviews, both did mediocre business. The near-permanent doom of movie Westerns occurred in 1981 when Michael Ciminos spectacular dramatization of the Johnson County War, Heavens Gate, was such a dismal flop that United Artists, the studio that produced the film, wrote it off as a forty-million-dollar loss, the largest loss on any picture in the entire history of American movies. It is not hard to relate this decline of the mass appeal of movie West23 erns to the erosion of popularity of the television Western. During the socially tumultuous 1960s and 1970s audiences of both media apparently lost a hold on the simplistically optimistic version of American history provided by the formula Western, and were no longer thrilled by Indian wars, homesteading, or the building of railroads. Although big screen Westerns hung on into the 1980s by adjusting their formulas and attracting talented young filmmakers, modern movie Westerns like TV Westerns became dramatically less popular than their pre-1960 antecedents.
POPULAR WESTERN LITERATURE
Unlike the Western radio or television series whose popularity waxed and waned according to various media-specific developments, the popular Western novel has enjoyed a consistent and notable following from the nineteenth century to the present. With its foundation firmly in the dime novels, the Wild West shows, the pulps, and the popular Western formula, Western fiction has simply been more fully developed than its counterparts in the other mass media. From its earliest manifestations through the writings of Owen Wister, Zane Grey and Max Brand, the popular Western 24 novel appealed to eastern sensibilities rather than western. Other Western writers, such as Ernest Haycox, Luke Short and Louis LAmour, weaned the form away from its eastern mindset and planted it more firmly in western soil. The Western of postWorld War II years is marked by two major tendencies. First, because novels, like radio, had to compete against the ever more popular television, like radio they fought back with realistic, toughminded content. However, despite changes in content, the tone has continued to be romantic and idealized. The contemporary Western novel thus strikes a precarious balance between the audiences need for realism and romanticism; however gritty the plot becomes, the results remain hopeful and optimistic. The second major distinguishing characteristic of the postwar Western is its emphasis on reality of setting. What Western writers and Western 1276
readers are interested in is a good story which not only entertains but also informs them about the American West. In his fine study The Dime Novel 26 Western , Daryl Jones notes that the late nineteenth-century public grew less and less tolerant of the increasing sexual and violent content of many of the dime novels, whose sales fell off notably. The Western story, in fact, seems to have gone through several cycles of birth, sordid adulthood, and rebirth during its one hundred and fifty-plus years of existence. Jones quite accurately pinpoints the popular appeal of the cleansed Western story: That we are still reluctant today to abandon our vision of an ideal world, a moments glance at a newsstand, a theater marquee, or a television program guide will instantly confirm. The medium has changed, but the popular Western lives on. To be sure, the message is neither so simple nor so reassuring as it once was. With the advance of the twentieth century have come cultural and worldwide dilemmas which have brought about significant alterations on the familiar formula. . . . Altered, inverted, even parodied, the popular Western formula nonetheless survives. And it will continue to survive as long as it extends to humanity some glim27 mer of hope that a golden age still lies ahead. The modern popular Western, like its early predecessors, views the American West as a golden age which did not allow spiritual or physical weaknesses among the survivors. The heroes of the modern Western, however, can be philosophers on the range, men used to wrestling with ideas as well as cows, like those found in the novels of Ernest Haycox. Haycox, like a number of his contemporaries in the post-1930 period, added a historical dimension to some of his Westerns which, while heightening the realism, did not diminish the idealism. The author of twenty-four novels from the late 30s to early 50s, Haycox penned several classic Westerns, including Trouble Shooter, The Border Trumpet, Alder Gulch, Bugles in the Afternoon, and The Earthbreakers. Henry Wilson Allen in his Will Henry Westerns followed in the same tradition. In his Maheos Children, the Sand Creek massacre plays a prominent role in the plot, and his From Where the Sun Now Stands depicts the annual trek of the Nez Perce Indians to follow the 30 buffalo. Luke Short also wrestled with the realities of the West in his works of romance. In Paper Sheriff, which is considered one of his best Westerns, the focus is on the importance of group needs over individualistic inter31 ests, a theme which marks a certain maturity of the Western formula. The emphasis on the historical West in each of their works allowed these writers to meet effectively the changing needs of the audience by providing them with hard information about the West, while at the same time engaging them in a romance. This compromise is not without its price, however. 1277
Paperback Westerns, which had been a staple of the publishing industry for more than three decades, have begun to decline in popularity. In 1975, for example, only sixty-five new paperback Westerns were published out of a 32 total of 177 which were distributed; the other 112 were reissues. The most dominant type of Western on the newsstands at present is the adult Western series, which does not exclude sex and violence. George G. Gilmans Edge series, Jake Logans Slocum series, and Tabor Evanss Longarm series are only three of the many adult Western series now commanding an impressive part of the popular Western marketplace, leaving the casual peruser of the paperback racks with the impression that in the Western market the only competition adult Westerns have are reissues, or Louis LAmours novels. While adult Westerns do not seem to be consistent with the mainstream popular Western tradition, at least one critic, Gary Hoppenstand, has suggested that rather than a bizarre outgrowth of the genre, adult Westerns might be an evolution of the approach of the Western romance towards sex and violence. He argues that the sex and violence of the adult Western series have been there all alongthey have simply been more fully developed in this stage of the Western romances 33 evolution. While other writers like Jack Schaefer, whose Shane helped to elevate the Western paperback to new levels of respectability, deserve serious analy sis as well, perhaps the most representative author of the mainstream popular Western tradition is the best-selling and prolific Louis LAmour, who has been ranked by Saturday Review as the third top-selling writer in the 34 world. LAmour clearly believes in a responsible and responsive West populated by the restrained and civilized. He has a considerable talent for perceiving the needs and interests of his audience and, after three decades of writing Western novels, has been able to establish his own genre against which the works of other popular Western writers are judged. LAmour has developed a strong, personal relationship with many of his readers. He writes: As for myself, whatever else I may be I am a storyteller. I see myself as carrying on the story of my people just as the shanachies in Ireland and the Druids before them, and as Homer did in 35 Greece. . . . Telling stories is my way of life. . . . My intention has always been to tell stories of the frontier, the sort of stories I heard when 36 growing up. LAmours fiction can be used as a touchstone for the modern popular literary Western because of its universal appeal and continuing success in 1278
the marketplace. In addition to providing his audience with enjoyable stories, he also provides them with a popular history of the settlement of America by focusing on family dynasties, vernacular architecture, the cultural history of the American Indian, womens roles on the American frontier, cowboy customs, and myriad other details of nineteenth-century American life. From the 1950s Hondo to his most recent Sackett novel, Louis LAmours works remain convincing examples of the viability of the mainstream popular Western story, presenting the historical West in something like an oral tradition. But the successes of the adult Western series also serve as convincing examples of what many perceive to be the evolution of the Western story form into a distinctly different type of story. Still others perceive the two forms, the mainstream popular Western story and the adult Western series, as linked in an evolutionary process where the latter is developing elements already present in the former. Whatever the specific form or forms the popular Western story takes, it seems reasonable to suggest that it will continue to remain a strong force in the popular literary marketplace. One possible explanation for the longevity of the popular Western story in its many forms is that writers like Ernest Haycox, Luke Short, and Louis LAmour are really telling versions of one, long epic tale unfolded over an extended period of time through the efforts of a number of skilled storytellers. The death of John Wayne, the movies greatest Western star, symbolically suggests a place to mark the demise of the modern popular Western. By that date, hoofbeats on the radio had been silent for a generation. Both the film and television media had become incapable of producing a Western hit. Even the long-lived Western novel showed signs of aging. However, though the popularity of the Western theme has declined, its struggle to maintain a place in American life has brought about a thematic maturity and dignity to the popular Western formula. Where early or classic Westerns had affirmed the European-American taking and taming of the West, modern Westerns often did not. Radio and television Westerns such as Gunsmoke sometimes suggested that pioneering could mean no more than a slow death on a barren prairie. Movies often explored the negative side of the settlement of the West, such as the pathology behind much outlaw violence and the racism at the heart of the Indian wars. Even Western novels, the form that most strongly retained the values of classic Westerns, moved in the direction of stronger characterization and a closer fidelity to historical accuracy. During the 1980s the formula Western refuses to pass completely from the scene. Western novels stubbornly maintain their slots in paperback book racks. Just as significant, perhaps, is the persistence of images from 1279
popular Westerns in the media. Popular music stars such as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings still sell millions of records featuring songs about cowboys. During the early 80s, Western-style bars and cowboy clothes were a billion-dollar fad. On television, ads for chewing tobacco, gum, beer, aftershave lotion and numerous other products all ride into American homes on the shoulders of popular Western heroes. The continuing presence of these images suggests the remaining, latent attraction of the popular Western. When the national mood changes and is again receptive to frontier stories, it is not unlikely that a third significant period of popular Western storytelling will engage Americas national imagination.
M ICHAEL T. MARSDEN
AND
Bowling Green State University
J ACK N ACHBAR
Notes
1. Michael T. Marsden, The Modern Western, Journal of the West 19 (January 1980): 5461. 2. (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1971). 3. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976). 4. J. Fred MacDonald, Dont Touch That Dial! (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979), pp. 195229. 5. MacDonald, p. 211. 6. Jim Harmon, The Great Radio Heroes (New York: Ace Books, 1967), p. 108. 7. MacDonald, p. 203. 8. MacDonald, pp. 209210. 9. MacDonald, p. 220. 10. MacDonald, p. 225. 11. MacDonald, p. 226. 12. (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974). 13. (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1975). 14. A possible exception to this argument is Little House on the Prairie, which premiered on NBC in 1974 and lasted until 1983. Although its locale is frontier Minnesota during the 1880s, it has not been included in this survey because its
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stories were primarily domestic-rural in emphasis. The themes of settlement, justice and violence which are normally associated with Westerns were only dealt with occasionally on episodes of Little House on the Prairie. 15. Figures were compiled from Les Adams and Buck Rainey, Shoot-Em-Ups (New York: Arlington House, 1978). 16. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between the B Western and television see George N. Fenin and William K. Everson, The Western: From Slents to the Seventies (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), pp. 301317. 17. Jim Kitses, Horizons West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp. 2987. 18. Philip French, Western, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 1247. 19. John H. Lenihan, Showdown (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980). 20. For a full-length treatment of this sub-genre, see Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 21. For a full-length analysis of Sam Peckinpahs Westerns see Paul Seydor, Peckinpah: The Western Films (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980). 22. Don Graham, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and the Cinematic Legend of Jesse James , Journal of Popularar Film 6 (1977): 7785. 23. For an analysis of film Westerns that closely parallels the description of the evolution of the television Western described by Ralph and Donna Brauer in The Horse, the Gun and the Piece of Property (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1975), see Will Wright, Sixguns and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 29185. 24. In his Exploration and Empire (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1966), William Goetzmann argues that the wilderness has traditionally been a screen upon which generations of easterners have projected images of what they thought the West ought to be. The explorers and settlers simply made the West over according to their memories of the East. And why, we might ask, should popular Westerns be any different, especially given the expectations of their largely eastern readership in the early decades of their development? 25. Marsden, p. 56. 26. (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1978). 27. Jones, pp. 1678. 28. Richard W. Etulain, The Literary Career of a Western Writer: Ernest Haycox, 18991950 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon, 1966), pp. 1956. 29. Robert L. Gale, Ernest Haycox, in Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain, eds. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 183. 30. Anne Falke, Clay Fisher or Will Henry? An Authors Choice of Pen Name, in The Popular Western: Essays Toward a Definition, Richard W. Etulain and Michael T. Marsden, eds. (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1974), p. 51. 31. Richard W. Etulain, Luke Short, in Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, p. 439.
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A Literary History of the American West 32. Clarence Petersen, How the West (North, East, South and Midwest) Was Won, Chicago Tribune Book World, July 4, 1976, Section 7, p. 3. 33. Gary Hoppenstand, Foraging in the Virgin-less Land: Development and Definition of the Weird Western (unpublished essay, 1982), p. 17. 34. Tad Bartimus, Romances Make Her Rich, Toledo Blade (August 17, 1981). 35. Letter to Michael Marsden, March 1, 1979. 36. Letter to Michael Marsden, January 3, 1979.
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EPILOGUE
The Development of Western Literary Criticism

I
ROM THE BEGINNING, the westward movement carried with it much of Americas transatlantic and colonial heritage. In 1758 almanac-maker Nathaniel Ames prophetically remarked: So Arts and Sciences will change the Face of Nature in their Tour from Hence over the Appalachian Mountains to the Western Ocean. This conviction J. Hector St. John de Crvecoeur also upheld in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Of course, most frontier folk preferred practical education, many even attributing book larnin to Old Nick. Still, from the beginning there was western literary criticismnotions, talk, jottings about western themes, western writings, western writers. Romantic literary criticism written by easterners treated such problems as the Wests critical submission to the East, the dominance of Byron and Scott as literary models, the difficulty of describing western scenery in British English, the limitations of the Indian as a fictional character, and the conflict among regional reality, national identity, and the universal ideal. Critics out west also wrote about the isolation of western writers, the scarcity of western literary markets, and about the rivalry between literary centers in the West. Early newspapers like the Pittsburgh Gazette (1781) and the Kentucke Gazette (1787) carried morsels of Addisonian criticism into the wilderness. They even empowered village Lucindas to launch into neoclassical pentameters and local wits to pen effusions signed Agricola or Sylvanus. As early as 1799 Charles Brockden Brown (17711810) precociously claimed that between the covers of his fourth novel, Edgar Huntly, were more ambitious ingredients than castles and chimerasto wit, the incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of western wilderness. Who were the literary commentators at this time when criticism as an isolated profession was only beginning? Venturing beyond the Alleghenies to bumptious Pittsburgh in 1781, Hugh Henry Brackenridge (17481816) left behind his gamecock editorship of Philadelphias patriotic United States Magazine. A classic satirist and aristocratic democrat, Brackenridge the backlander wrote social and literary criticism for the Gazette. For Tom, Dick, and Harry in the Woods, his goosequill produced over the years the first important western fictionthe popular and quixotic Modern Chivalry
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(17921815), a work which anticipates Bret Hartes picturesque local color and Mark Twains picaresque realism. The Prefaces to Modern Chivalry and the collection Gazette Publications (1806) illuminate the literary goals and achievement of this Swiftian American, a transitional figure between Federal classicism and Jacksonian romanticism. With his Scottish literary roots still intact, his Epistle to Walter Scott lumpishly pleads for an American Scott to capture the beauty and spirit of the western country: Here by Ohios stream my pen Gives image to a sort of strain Which feeling prompts but Genius none, So gifted to a native son. My gift is only to admire; In madness I attempt the lyre; At hearing this celestial sound From Scotias hills and distant bound Of this I dream and when awake I read the Lady of the Lake. During the long Paper War following the War of 1812, William Tudor (17791830) chirked up national feeling in the first number of his North American Review (1815) by announcing that Americas barely mined literary wealth was richer than Scotts. Tudor compared the braves of the American forests with the heroes of classical antiquity: the red mans habitat, superstitions, harangues, and hieroglyphics he viewed as rich veins for poetic exploitation. He made his critical stance poignant by prophesying the Noble Savages imminent demise: In the next century the Indian warriour and hunter will perhaps only be found on the shores of the Pacific . . . . Also sensing the red mans genius, starry Walter Channing (1786 1876) disclosed in his Essay on American Language and Literature (1815) that the stumbling block to American literature was the English language. How could any writer, he asked, describe the majesty of the Mississippi in language made for the Thames? He boasted that the only language suited to the task was the oral language of its aborigines. Concerned less with language than with sensations, John Knapp (17671845) exhorted poets in National Poetry (1818) to take in the stupendous frame of nature . . . feel its life-breathing motions . . . perceive its immortal complacency in the gleamings which break from out the hill-sides and the plain . . . listen to its supernal promptings. That same year the Edinburgh Review, trying to puncture the literary balloon of the Americans, myopically predicted that prairies, steamboats, gristmills, are their natural objects for centuries to come. But by defending Americas splendid barbarism, the rhetorical critic 1284
EPILOGUE: WESTERN LITERARY CRITICISM
Edward Tyrrell Channing (17901856) paved the way for Emerson and Whitman. Channing opposed neoclassical straightness, smoothness, and harmonyeffects, he declared in On Models in Literature (1816), to bring the native of the mountains and plains, of inland and coast, to a lifeless similarity of taste. He keenly felt the descriptive freshness of Charles Brockden Browns western wilderness. Similarly, James Kirke Paulding (17781860) honored Brown for breaking a new literary path. Still, critics like historian Jared Sparks (17891866), while admitting the pictorial gorgeousness of feathered tribes, viewed the Indian as barren of literary interest. To try making enduring song out of what he viewed as grim primitive uniformity was to him an act of desperation. Grenville Mellen (17991841), a North American Review critic from Maine, poked fun at the formula Indianon the one hand a taciturn savage, on the other hand a red Ossian. He admired efforts to set tales somewhere between the Rockies and the Atlantic but reminded writers in 1828 that, after all, the author is primary, not his theatre. Of course, William Cullen Bryant (17941878) urged writers to exploit regional peculiarities. He read Coopers The Pioneers as an American pastoral, a prose poem by our own Hesiod or Theocritus. Lines in Bryants well-known poem The Prairies (1832) hark back to Walter Channings complaint about the language of the Thames: These are the gardens of the Desert, these The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name. To be sure, early western journals show some noble efforts to spell the French prairie: prary, perarie, perara, preare, etc. Apparently no reviews of The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper (1789 1851) appeared in 1827, the time of its publication. The criticism of America, the testy author once declared, has never been of a very high orderhigh talents easier finding loftier employments. His suspenseful Leatherstocking Tales too often gave rise to that dreary ethnological question: Are Coopers Indians true to life? Though Cooper had gazed on Indians and white hunters, his Prefaces make clear that in much of his fiction only objects and customs are literal. Indeed, moral requirements of the novel make selection and rejection imperative. For Cooper, local realism and romantic idealism best express national and ethical values, but as a man of the world he would not simply fetter national literature to native locales. Paulding argued in his rip-roaring Lion of the West (1830) that western peculiarities exaggerated in a single character represented the species, not the individual. Critics for the anti-isolationist Southern Review especially fa1285
vored the idea of a universal and cosmopolitan literature. They regarded the heritage of English literature and criticism as an asset. To them the backcountry spirit was depressing. Furthermore, they warned that western emigration would siphon off southern literary talent. Both the antiquarian East and the primitive West pulled at Washington Irving (17831859). In fact, the boy Irving interpreted the oral literature of the West in terms of foreign letters. He referred to fur trappers and traders, for example, as Sinbads of the wilderness. To be sure, his later encounters with whites, reds, and halfbreeds were seldom perfect romance. Still, he added Irvingesque filigree to his western works, though a number of reviewers found them repetitious and wearisomenot so Edward Everett (17941865), who thanked the author for turning poor barbarous steppes into classical land. In his Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard in 1824, Everett confidently predicted: Whithersoever the sons of the thirteen states shall wander, to southern or western climes, they will send back their hearts to the rocky shores, the battlefields, and the intrepid councils of the Atlantic coast. Dieting on British books and on reviews of British books naturally turned the western mind eastward for literary inspiration and critical direction. Though Dr. Johnson disdained tales about savage felicity in backwoods America, his Lives of the English Poets was long popular in the Ohio Valley. Hinterland readers who would not support American literary journals nevertheless passed around dog-eared copies of Scott and Byronsometimes via some bookish circuit-rider with a penchant for moral rather than aesthetic judgmentor they bought or bartered for new editions and new titles carted in by Yankee peddlers. When boondock journals did rear their belletristic heads, editors could look forward to a spate of crippled rhymes about the Scottish Highlands and duncical aperus of Rob Roy. Compared to New England, of course, the West produced little important literary criticism during this period. Scrapbookish newspapers and magazines lifted most of their criticism from books, pamphlets, and other newspapers and magazines. Daniel Bradfords Lexington Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, published throughout 1803, was the pioneer magazine in the West. Ten years later Zadoc Cramer briefly edited Pittsburghs Western Gleaner, wholly literary. Lexingtons improbable Journal of Belles Lettres (181920), devoted to French and Italian literature, expired after five issues. Doubtless the journal was one of the exotic fruits of classic-minded Transylvania College, which offered instruction in some of the Fine Arts, as Oratory and Criticism. Lexingtons chief magazine, however, was William Gibbes Hunts Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine (181921). But even this periodical in the Athens of the West folded for want of contributors. 1286
In the 1820s and 1830s new western magazines grumbled about subservience to Great Britain and the American East. As publishing rivalry existed earlier among Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, so in the West competition arose between Lexington and Cincinnati. In 1824 the Cincinnati Literary Gazette (182425) declared: This is the Age of Magazines Even skeptics must confess it: Where is the town of much renown That has not one to bless it? In her classic Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), the cultured Englishwoman Frances Trollope (17801863) deplored Americas immense exhalation of periodical trash. Much western criticisma by-product of the bar and the pulpitwas vitiated by political and personal sniping. But Mrs. Trollope relished the gentlemanly satire and sarcasm of Timothy Flint (17801840). Minister, missionary, teacher, novelist, critic, and editor, Flint had established in Cincinnati in 1827 the Western Monthly Review. In some of his critical notices, wrote Mrs. Trollope, there is a strength and keenness second to nothing of the kind I have ever read. Flints polemical, moralistic, didactic criticism anticipates the literary/ moral instruction found in McGuffey Eclectic Readers, those mind-molding national monuments first published in Cincinnati in 1836 as a series of Western textbooks. In fact, Dr. Daniel Drake (17851852) pleaded for heartland geniuses, publishers, and readers in his McGuffey essays Natural Ties Among Western States and The Patriotism of Western Literature. Flints Western Monthly Review affirms the equality of East and West. He pledges not to puff, inferior western writers. He attacks Puritan New Englands witch-hunting fear of novels. He complains that the western writer is ill-paid, lacks a literary metropolis, and is viewed by England and the East with hostility. Flints criticism reveals little interest in the aesthetic and symbolic nature of art. For example, he chides Cooper for having written The Prairie without ever having seen the real prairie. After the demise of Flints magazine, the ambitious lawyer-politician James Hall (17931868) started the first literary periodical west of Ohio, The Illinois Monthly Magazine (1830), renamed The Western Monthly Magazine (1833) in Cincinnati. Like Flint, he lit into Coopers The Prairie and into other unfaithful portrayals of western scenes and manners. Probability, clarity, patriotism, religious orthodoxy, reverence for womenthese were Halls critical principles. However, sectional bias empowered him to praise such an execrable production as Angus Umphravilles Missourian Lays and Other Western Ditties and attack as a vile piece of humbug the domestic realism of Caroline Kirklands Western Clearings. 1287
Indeed, seven years with her husband and children in a remote Michigan settlement transformed Caroline Kirkland (180164) into something of a pioneer literary realist. Daughter of a New York bookseller, she blamed her girlish dream of driving a barouche-and-four through Edenic oak openings on Chateaubriand, Bryant, Cooper, Flint, and Hallon writing touched by the glowing pen of fancy. Finding Jane Austens and Mary Russell Mitfords mode of chronicling manners congenial to interior America, she punctured the romantic view of the frontier with three books. In the Preface to the personal and satiric A New HomeWholl Follow? (1839), under the pseudonym Mrs. Mary Clavers, she is tempted to announce her western sketches a veritable history . . . an unimpeachable transcript of reality, but settles for a general truth of outline. She confesses to coloring some commonplaces, but not whatever is quite unnatural or absolutely incredible. In the more regional Forest Life (1842) she warns of no wild adventures,no blood-curdling hazards,no romantic incidents. In fact, so westernized has she become that she can offer only a few vividly amusing First Impressions. In her embittered Western Clearings (1846), published under her own name after her disillusioned return east, Mrs. Kirkland speaks of life-like pictures of peculiar people in what was once an El Dorado. Seeing El Dorado as an ally in his literary wars with New England, Edgar Allan Poe (180949) favorably reviewed the western writings of Kirkland, Flint, Hall, and Ohio editor William D. Gallagher (180894). Gallagher, pleading for a relativistic criticism, prefatorily and accurately warned in Selections from the Poetical Literature of the West (1841) that the thirty-eight contributors were not literati, their poems simply momentary outgushings of irrepressible feeling. . . . One of Poes longest reviews exalts and summarizes Irvings Astoria (1836), an influence on Poes own Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838). He declared in Grahams Magazine that although Paulding, Cooper, Bryant, and Cornelius Matthews were first to exploit the fascinating wilderness theme, they were not original writers. But Poe lauded Margaret Fuller (181050) for her book of western travels, Summer on the Lakes (1844). She writes: I trust by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry, is to be evoked from this chaos. Influenced by Herder and other German romantics to discuss literature in terms of feeling, sympathy, geography, and das Volk, New England Transcendental criticism in James Freeman Clarks distinguished Western Messenger encouraged backwoods rhapsodists to ponder the ideal, to view art as symbolic of the invisible. Impressed by frontier optimism and individualism, Emerson, in his famous essay The Poet (1844), called for the national bard who will sing of the organic American scene: . . . The West1288
ern clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. In his review of Hawthornes Mosses, the young Herman Melville (181991) bragged that . . . Men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio. If so, they were still too young to appear in Poets and Poetry of the West (1860), an anthology of 152 poets compiled by Ohio journalist William T. Coggeshall (182467), author of The Protective Policy in Literature (1859). In his novel Kavanagh (1849), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 82) gently satirizes a western-minded supernationalist who desires an American literature as shaggy and unshorn as a herd of buffalo thundering over the prairies. In fact, says the supernationalist, he is himself at work on a colossal national dramaabout cockfighting in New Mexico. And his bringing into the play a stateside circus will produce [a] great scenic effect. Like Melville and unlike Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau (1817 62), of course, is on the side of the West, the future. The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild. . . . In literature it is only the wild which attracts us. He knows no poetry which adequately expresses the yearning for the wild. The West, he predicts, is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. Orestes Brownson (180376) in Brownsons Quarterly Review (1864) is less sanguine: he misinforms us that Cooper has exhausted the Indian as a literary resource. As the prairie fatigues the eye, so nature writing fatigues the mind. And he returns to the argument that the western wilderness lacks human associationseven dwarfs. Though far behind Boston, San Francisco published more books than the rest of the trans-Mississippi. Thus the gilded peninsula early developed critical savoir-faire, its chief organs The Pioneer, The Golden Era, The Hyperion, The Californian, and The Overland Monthly. Beyond question, wrote Edward Pollock (182358), popular California poet of the 1850s, this is the country. His Pioneer essay, Thoughts Toward a New Epic, continues: Where else could exist the land of liberty and of change? Where else could a poets mind rise and expand to the sublimity of such themes? The land should grow giants and will;or our history, our institutions, and our destiny are the changes of a distempered dream. Alas, before he could write his giant poem the inspired Pollock expired.
II
After the Civil War, scientific, industrial, and westward expansion strengthened the movement toward realism and naturalism. Western humorists like Mark Twain, Bill Nye, John Hay, Artemus Ward, and John Phoenix mocked the dulcet taradiddles of romance. The race-milieu-moment doctrine of the French critic Hippolyte Taine (182893) induced Harte, 1289
Eggleston, Garland, and other writers to treat the western life they knew. Inasmuch as local color stressed American democracy over European feudalism, the movement was also a form of nationalism. Of the leading writers between the Civil War and World War I, Henry James had roots in the East and in Europe, William Dean Howells in the Midwest, and Mark Twain in the Midwest and in the Far West. In the fall of 1879 the rediscovered but ailing Walt Whitman (1819 92) toured the West. The spontaneous prose of Specimen Days (1882) reveals whits of an ars hesperia. In Topeka, Whitman deftly penciled an undelivered address expressing his gladness in having no poem for the occasion, for in the freedom and vigor and sane enthusiasm of this perfect western air a poem would be almost an impertinence. This remark, coupled with his identification of poetry and geology (he wonders if inlanders know how much of first-class art they have in the prairies), clouds the basic nature-art distinction. Later, in Colorado, he cannot help but notice that feudal castles pale beside the nonutilitarian piles of the Rockies, which emanate a beauty, terror, power, more than Dante or Angelo ever knew. Beyond anything possible from European art, the mountains awaken Whitmans soulbut words like far, large, vast, etc., are insufficient. He finds in the grim yet joyous elemental abandonthis plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammeled play of primitive nature the law of his own poems. More grand to the poet than the vision of mankind filling up the land is the prospect of transforming the landscape into a perfect work of art, entirely western, fresh, and limitlessaltogether our own, without a trace or taste of Europes soil, reminiscence, technical letter, or spirit. Thus poets on the eastern seaboard need first and feeding visits here. Back home, Whitman remembers the western peaks, applauds the poet Joaquin Miller for laboring with first-class elements, and clamors for a poetry of the future a great throbbing, vital, imaginative work, or series of works, or literature, in constructing which the plains, the prairies, and the Mississippi River, with the demesnes of its varied and ample valley, should be the concrete background, and Americas humanity, passions, struggles, hopes, there and nowan claircissement as it is and is to be, on the stage of the New World, of all Times hitherto drama of war, romance, and evolutionshould furnish the lambent fire, the ideal. The dude who took up the editorial reins of the Overland Monthly in 1868, Bret Harte (18361902), found Whitman tedious. Besides editing copy and writing stories, poetry, and a column, Harte also wrote most of the 1290
reviews. Often his fiction displayed the kind of qualities his criticism scorned. He asserted in Railroad Reading (1866), for example, that he would not dine on indigestible moral pie, sensational hot coffee, sentimental tea, and emotional soda-water. He equated Americas audacious exaggeration and lawlessness with the boundless prairies, limitless rivers, and stupendous cateracts that make the West. Still, he favored the common, the local, the humorous, the representative. He liked Joaquin Millers realistic metaphors. A stern compressionist, Harte, like Poe, attended to technique and form, to the craft of unified effects. Hartes Preface to The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870) disdains caricatures of California miners. Defending his own fiction against charges of sentimentality and didacticism, Harte says that his stories illustrate an era seen through the eyes of optimismnot through those of genteel transcendentalism but through those of environmental realism. The Argonauts of 49, Hartes expanded lecture for his collected works (1891), enlarges on the material underlying his local-color art: Californias landscape, history, and people. My First Book: California Verse (1894) hyperbolizes the early hazards he faced when, as anonymous editor of the anthology Outcroppings (1865), he rejected the asininities of some Pacific Augustans. Still read is Hartes Condensed Novels (1867), thirteen Thackerayan parodies on contemporary novelists. Muck-a-Muck: A Modern Indian Novel parodies Coopers wooden dialogue, lumbering description, exaggerated civility, and social bias. Mark Twain, Frank Norris, and others later adopted Hartes parodic critical method. In American Humor (1909), a posthumously published lecture, Harte points out that western funnymen struck the note of modernity: great humor, however, goes beyond the topical and amusing to a belief in mans essential goodness. A future seriousness, he believed, would make the inimitable Mark Twain universal. Though Harte saw Artemus Ward as more platform showman than literary humorist and Josh Billingss eccentric orthography not funny, he again praised American jokes, tall tales, and slang in his last critical essay, The Rise of the Short Story ( 1899). Here he also assessed his own place in American literature as a pioneer for regional honesty. Another literary pioneer, Edward Eggleston (18371902), pointed out in the 1892 Preface to his classic The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871) that Hartes stories were forerunners rather than beginners of the dialect school. Tired of reading books about New England, Eggleston began his own novel under the spur of Taines argument in Art in the Netherlands that the original artist works courageously with local materials. Besides reporting on dingy-paged volumes in Ohio publications, antiquarian W. H. Venable (18361920) gave a lecture series in Cincinnati 1291
in 1881 on Western Poets and Poetry. His appraisals salt the desultory sketches that make up his stout ana, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (1891). Venable, who likes to correct wrong dates, sees literature as anything in print, but for old-style western criticism the student should read the chapters on periodical literature, on pioneer poets and storywriters, and on individual writers like Drake, Flint, Hall, and Gallagher. Venable throws the word genius around too freely, but soundly characterizes pioneer poetry as either painfully labored and pedantic, or ludicrously explanatory and rhapsodical. He depicts much early literature as semi-historical, semi-fictitious. Writers empowered to move the lower millions do not rank high with him, but he sympathetically quotes a letter from E. Z. C. Judson (Ned Buntline): . . . To make a living I must write trash, for the masses, for he who endeavors to write for the cultivated few . . . will go hungry. . . . Another Ohioan, frontier-reared William Dean Howells (18371920), rendered in Literary Friends and Acquaintances (1900) his early attraction to the literary holy land of New England. But he agreed with Lowell, Hawthorne, and Emerson that the promise of a true national literature lies in the West. Thus the incessant western charge that eastern jealousy conspired against the interior was to Howells feeble and foolishas was the western sentiment that acreage expanded the mind and rich soil warmed the heart. As man of letters and influential editor of the Atlantic Monthly (186681) and Harpers Magazine (188692, 19001920), Howells also championed other western writers like Mark Twain, Bret Harte, E. W. Howe, Joseph Kirkland, H. B. Fuller, Hamlin Garland, John Hay, Frank Norris, Brand Whitlock, Robert Herrick, Booth Tarkington, and Theodore Dreiser. Like their dean, these writers identified realism with democracy, probability, the average. Ren Wellek delineates Howellss main critical concerns as the objective point of view, fidelity to contemporary American life, the concrete universal, and didactic illusionism. In such works as Criticism and Fiction (1891), My Literary Passions (1895), and Literature and Life (1902), Howells recommended Russian, Spanish, Italian, and English realism over French naturalism. Over the romanticistic novels of Hugo and Dickens, he advocated the pure romances of Hawthorne or, better still, the verisimilar novels of Tolstoy. The American writer, Howells taught, must go deep like Henry James or regional like Mark Twain. Mark Twain was a great literary critic, Howells remarked in a letter to his sister in 1906, his praise . . . better worth having now than any other mans. In literary as in other criticism, Mark Twain (18351910) loved to pitch into flapdoodle. As a young Washoe scribbler, he parodied simpleminded Sunday-School tales and ridiculed the frontier stage. His well1292
known parody in Huckleberry FinnEmmeline Grangerfords warmed-over Wordsworth-Byron-Shelley (Ode to Stephen Dowling Botts, Decd) modeled on Michigans Sweet Singer Julia A. Mooremasterfully discloses the lady poetasters heavy little hand: the touch, Mark Twain elucidated in Following the Equator, that makes an intentionally humorous episode pathetic and an intentionally pathetic one funny. In The Gilded Age, Mark Twain refers to the popular American Miscellany as that fatty degeneration of the heart. Like Bret Harte, he regarded the American short story as high and delicate art. He suggested in his essay What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us (1895) that a novelist should develop his characters in association with a place he knows from long and slow unconscious observationabsorption. In a famous letter (1884) to E. W. Howe, he praised the simple and direct style, the descriptive and psychological realism, of The Story of a Country Town, but also pointed out faults of sentimentality, intention, proportion, characterization, and grammar. Mark Twains Explanatory to Huckleberry Finn (1884) takes pains to represent the vernacular precisely. As anti-feudal as most realists, he professed that false chivalric idealsthe Sir Walter diseasecorrupted the South and started the Civil War. In his hilarious critical tall tale, Fenimore Coopers Literary Offenses (1895), Mark Twain lambasts the Leatherstocking Tales for their inaccuracy and improbability, and he even browbeats Thomas Lounsbury and Brander Matthews for enshrining Cooper in the academy. Best known for his vernacular novel Zury (1887), Chicago Tribune literary editor Joseph Kirkland (183094) continued the Middle Border realism started by his mother, Caroline Kirkland. Of interest are two Dial essays. In Tolstoi and the Russian Invasion of the Realm of Realism (1886) Kirkland writes: Photographic exactitude in scene-painting phonographic literalness in dialoguetelegraphic realismthese are the new canons for the art of fiction. In Realism Versus Other Isms (1893), he issued a ten-word commandment: Let only truth be told, and nor all the truth. The writer must be selective. Morality, delicacy, and decency lie on one side of the line the artist must drawimmorality, indelicacy, and indecency on the other. Appreciating Eggleston and Howe, he also encouraged Garland. Hamlin Garland (18601940) contributed inspirationally, courageously, and repetitiously to the raging debate. In the mid-1880s Howells had persuaded young Garland, reading philosophy and literature in Boston, to return to the Middle Border and write about it. Garlands Whitmanesque collection of essays, Crumbling Idols (1894), urges democratic idealism and veritism passion for truth and individual expression. Feverishly, Garland explains how painters and writers recreate not a scene but an individual per1293
ception of a scene. Thus truth flows from a particular self as well as from a particular time and a particular place. This realism (impression corrected by fact) Garland equated with iconoclastic modernismthe present, nature, wisdom, principle, originality, men and women, sincerity, democracy, progress. Anathema to him was traditionthe past, artificiality, culture, form, imitation, heroes and saints, hypocrisy, aristocracy, stagnation. Garland defined provincialism as dependence on the Mother Country, on British critics who sneer at Whitman and Howells. Among the riches awaiting western pens (subservient to no overtopping western literary personality), Garland points to lumbering, farming, railroading; to wheat fields, dun prairies, lofty mountains; to St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco. Pacific Coast literature (distinguishing between California valleys and Oregon forests) paves the way for other regions. Like the contemporary European novel, the American novel will become colloquial, shorter, more subtle. Though more truthful, it will become more humorous, more humane, than the French novel. Rather than crime, abnormality, and death, it will treat work, comradeship, and love. Art to Garland was autonomous, with parts subordinate to wholes, but his antipathy toward romantic artificiality makes finish, smoothness, and rounding out suspect. He believed that realistic drama, developing with the novel, would displace the old melodrama. But in America the grim Ibsen would be less model than inspiration. Garland asserted that the stable elements in international literary history, even for the once-contemporary romantics, were local fiction, sincerity, and interest in real life. Western literature, he maintained, should differ from the nippy accent, nice phrases, and balanced sentences of easterners. From time to time, Garland declared, Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, Joseph Kirkland, Edward Eggleston, Opie Read, and Octave Thanet have caught western life. So, too, have western newspapersbut not, Garland notes, dime novels. Paradoxically, the very life Garland wants depicted in literature militates against the creation of that literature in life. While praising The Californian, The Midland, and The Overland Monthly, Garland laments the poverty of literary markets in the West, but he discerns in the East growing interest in the cruder settlements. Under the influence of Cooper came the stories of wild life from Texas to Ohio, and from Illinois. The wild, rough settlements could not produce smooth and cultured poems or stories; they only furnished forth rough-and-ready anecdotes, but in these stories there were hints of something fine and strong and native. Garland extols lifelike characters in such native plays as The Old Homestead, Blue Jeans, and In Missoura. Pressing his point, he even finds an old Hoosier farmers parting from his daughter more touching than 1294
Clytemnestras passion or Hamlets death. More ridiculous is his assertion that Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dante, and Milton have faded into mere names. He simply opposes any theory of literature not based on life. With Vron, he believes that art should deal with humans, not gods. Besides Taine, he approves of such forward critics as Posnett, Dowden, Freiligrath, and Bjrnson. He is gratified by Lowells faith in the present and finds strange and powerful Olive Schreiners distinction between stage and life literature. Garland maintained that by attacking feudal epics and dying romance he really was attacking contemporary fetishism and prostration. Literary aspirants should follow those who charged American literature with vitality and characterthe postwar writers of interior America. No longer acceptable, Garland announced, were the literary superficialities of tourists and outsiders. No mere sightseer, novelist Frank Norris (18701902), an early theorist of naturalism, viewed American literature from a western perspective. At the University of California he took Charles Mills Gayleys course in literary criticism and read George Henry Lewess Principles of success in Literature (1865), practical advice on such narrational matters as experience, sincerity, and climax. As Norriss early ideas in the San Francisco Wave (1896) inform McTeugue (1899), so his later notions (190102) in the Chicago American, Boston Evening Transcript, and Worlds Week animate The Octopus. While big scenic effects in McTeugue contribute to the novels grotesquerie, Norriss pictures of western grandeur in The Octopus support at least Presleys belief in the ultimate goodness of natural process. The larger view always and through all shams, all wickednesses, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things surely, inevitably, resistlessly, work together for good. Early Norris criticism not in the posthumous Doubleday collection, The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903), may be found in Donald Pizer (ed. ), The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris (1964). In Norriss view America, confusing patriotism and national spirit, could not create a Heimskringla, Nibelungen, or Song of Roland. Though never a primitive people, Americans surrendered their epic impulse and their frontier experience to traducing, falsifying, dime-novels. . . . Norris described the precursors of Deadwood Dick and Buffalo Billthe Leatherstocking Talesas the sodden lees of an ancient crushingwith Coopers Americans discoursing like characters out of Bulwer and his Indians (stalking through Byronic tableaux) declaiming like bordermen out of Scott. Lacking a national spirit, Americans, Norris declared, first must cultivate their sectional vineyards. The West is different, he writes in The Great American Novelist (1903) and the Pacific Coast is a community by itself. The new regionalism must provide more than the old local-color sur1295
face: it must depict the truth underlying a place. Only the delving writer strikes what is common to Cowboy and Hoosier and Greaser and Buckeye and Jay Hawkerbedrock for future literature. True western fiction for Norris must reflect the spirit of adventure. Whatever the westerners current garb, job, or lingo, his old conquering continues. Believing in progress through evolutionary struggle, Norris viewed the winning of the West as another stage in the doughty AngloSaxon advance. To the charge that the Wild West is dead and that the westerner is now as common as a lamppost, Norris in The Literature of the West (1902) replied that the desert, Indians, and courage still exist. He also maintained that many Iowa farmers and San Francisco businessmen might be in the West but not of the West. The true westerner in fiction must be an heroic adventurer, a dignified man of action, an indomitable pioneer. The western writer himself must be an adventurer, a hearer of natures majestic diapason which sounds in the canyons of the higher mountains, in the plunge of streams and swirling of rivers yet without namesin the wilderness, the plains, the wide-rimmed deserts. Like Whitman, Norris praised both nature and technologyprimitive nature and nonmonopolistic technology. The greatest threat to western primitivism, Norris felt, was not the machine, but eastern decadence. During the western conquest, gentlemanly New Englanders abandoned the theme to hacks by looking eastward to the Old World for inspiration. Norriss aversion to dime novelists was exceeded only by his contempt for bayside bohemians and precious Iron Madonnas. Even the messenger-boy who devoured dime novels was for Norris more honest than the circle of dilettanti who coquetted with Verlaine. Though partial to a manly writer like Kipling, Norris resented the flood of English books in San Francisco bookstores, particularly the yellow effusions of Oscar Wilde. Only literature capable of vulgarization, Norris felt, was lasting. To gain literary success, the Californian placed himself in New York, but he deemed Washington Square no better than Washington Territory. In fact, he believed that eastern preciosity vitiated western strength. Thus he advised the western writer to create his own literary centeraround a table, a sheet of paper, and a pot of ink: Poems are now indited in Dakota, novels composed in Wyoming, essays written in Utah, and criticisms flourish in Kansas. A thousand and one little centres have sprung up. The hectic superficiality of an eastern metropolis offered much less than the lofty perspective of a Rocky Mountain village: . . . Isolation, remoteness, and seclusion are pre-eminently essential to that quiet meticulous searching of the heart that goes to the making of a master work of fiction. Norris insisted that technique was as attainable as romance. He noted with approval W. C. Morrows course in California on the mechanics of 1296
novel-writing, for what the writer makes real is more important than what is real. Though Chicago lacked a romancer, Norris contended that there is as much romance on Michigan Avenue as there is realism in King Arthurs court. San Francisco was for Norris a pinpoint in a vast circle of solitude. In this city with its Nob Hill, Chinatown, Barbary Coast, the Mission, the Presidio, and Fishermans Wharf resided certain unhampered types and characters and habits unbiased by outside influences, types that are admirably adapted to fictitious treatment. The critic, Norris thought, should be no less sincere than the novelist. Perceptive critics lived in Martinez and Cheyenne, but they found it harder to pen unfavorable reviews than to let loose a cliche like a strong and vital portraying of the wild life of the trail and the frontier. Norris scoffs at inland reviewers who, instead of encouraging contemporary literature, lament the bygone age. Norris unrealistically held that in time the plain people would become more discriminating; even now the messenger-boy correctly judges Dime Novel No. 3666 better than Dime Novel No. 3667. Of western writers, Norris judges Eggleston deeper than Harte. He lauds Mark Twains humour, Londons depiction of life, and Howellss vision, if not his teacup realism. Norriss Perverse Tales (1897)A Hero of Tomato Can and Ambrosia Beerare clumsy parodies of Harte and Bierce. Though Frank Norris and Jack London (18761916), both romantic naturalists in California, never met, London extolled Norris as the novelist who had captured the spirit, luster, and wonder of the great, incoherent, amorphous West! Had criticismLondon called it a snappaid the successful proletarian storyteller as much as fiction, doubtless a recent collection of his articles, essays, prefaces, reviews, and letters on writing and writers would have been heftier. Judiciously, editor Dale Walker even admits into his little trove, No Mentor but Myself (1979), excerpts from Martin Eden (1909), Londons semiautobiographical Knstlerroman. Though London knew that passing honest literary judgment loses friends and gains enemies, he loved to teach, to offer up his ideas and impressions. His critical standardsimaginative realism, functionalism, sinceritysprang from his feverish life and his wolfish reading of Spencer (evolution), Nietzsche (elitism), and Kipling (white mans burden). His primal frontier experiences gave him perspective. In The Terrible and Tragic in Fiction (1903), he points to the emotion inseparable from great literature: Deep down in the roots of the race is fear. Charged by Theodore Roosevelt and John Burroughs with nature-faking, London in The Other Animals (1908) argues convincingly that dogs possess rudimentary reason as well as instinct. In Stranger than Fiction (1903) he sounds an Aristotelian note: one cannot do on the printed page what one does in life. He 1297
A Literary History of the American West tells of a Sierra girl, a tramp, a cliff-climbingall too improbable for fiction. London exalted books charged with experience, individuality, atmosphere. Focussing on the political-economic forces in his 1901 review of Norriss The Octopus, London admires the breadth and depth of the San Joaquin Valley and its people. Inasmuch as Norriss Titanic imagination soars above commonplace realism, London glosses over the novels copious minutiae. He discerns Norris in his poet-dreamer Presley, who resembles Edwin Markham only superficially. Londons review of Markhams Lincoln and Other Poems (1901) testifies that the poets noble discontent can sing more than The Man with the Hoe (1899). London reviews Upton Sin clairs The Jungle (1906) as the Uncle Toms Cabin of wage slavery. In short, London simply panegyrizes literary imaginations that LIVE, and spout blood and spirit and beauty and fire and glamor. Owen Wister (18601938) also believed that the wild kind is eternal. Wistfully, he explains in his preface to The Virginian (1902)the novel that fixed the Popular Westernthat Wyomings mountains and sagebrush remain, but the last romantic figure of our soil, the horseman with his pasturing thousands, has vanished, never to return. Though the cowboy rides in his historic yesterday, he is among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. Even though America had a distinctive literature, had Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, John Macy (18771932) complained in The Spirit of American Literature (1913) that it still was treated as a branch of English literature. In his Life and Letters (1910) genteel critic E. C. Stedman (1833 1908) blamed dialect writers like Harte, Hay, and Billings for the present horrible degeneracy of public taste. But in his History of American Literature Since 1870 (1915), Fred Lewis Pattee (18631950) devoted chapters to Twain, Harte, Pike Literature, and Miller. Pattee treated the National Period (Neo-Americanism) as a unity, showing the rediscovery of America in sectionalism. In Apology for Crudity (1917) Sherwood Anderson (18761941) asserted that America lacks native subtlety. In line with Whitman and Norris, he writes: For a long time I have believed that crudity is an inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present-day literature. Why, he asks, should we want to escape crudity? As in his tales, he communicates notions of the vagrant eye, the surface of things, and childlike responses.
III
After World War I the radical Young Intellectuals attacked Puritanism, provincialism, and academicism. Van Wyck Brooks (18861963) employed a heavy-handed Freudianism in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) to 1298
expose his subject as a genius thwartedby his uncouth river life, his Calvinistic inheritance, and his wifes and Howellss censorship. But for H. L. Mencken (18801956) Americas real literary center was not New York but the Midwest. The raffish Mencken abetted, among many others, Howe, Dreiser, Cather, Lewis, Suckow, and Anderson. Mencken also promoted The Midland, established in Iowa City in 1915 by John T. Frederick (1893 1975). Patient and exacting, Frederick wanted no commercial romance, Victorian gentility, or local-color stereotypes. He wanted localism, stories with rich settings out of deep experience. His publication inspired the creation of Prairie Schooner (1927) at the University of Nebraska and of Frontier (192039) at the University of Montana. In 1920 the Modern Language Association allowed the first section in American Literature. Poet John G. Neihardt (18811973) was among the New Regionalists. While waiting for the wellsprings of the final Song of his epic Cycle of the West to flow, he wrote apologia in the tradition of Sidney and Shelley. Poetic Values (1925)containing the lectures Common Sense and The Creative Dreamdefends poetry in an age of science and pragmatism. Indebted to the orphic likes of Ouspensky, Coomaraswamy, and Korzybski, Neihardt drives home the practicality of poetic experience: heightened perception, insights for decision. As literary editor of the Minneapolis Journal (191230) and of a literary page in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (192632, 193638), he played down pessimistic literature, played up works that teach people how to live together decently on this planet. Like Neihardt, the New Humanists often failed to judge the morality of a work of art as a function of its inner qualities. In his Turnerian anthology The Reintepretation of American Literature (1928), New Humanist leader Norman Foerster (18871972) noted that frontier influence now is strangely exaggerated. Between 1925 and 1928 three substantial academic books treated frontier conditions shaping life and literary expression. Least critical is Ralph Leslie Rusks mother-lode of fact, the two-volume Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (1925). With Venables and Turners blessings, Dorothy Anne Dondore (18941946) wrote the first extended study of the inspiration of the frontier on American literature, The Prairie and the Making of Middle America (1926). Her heavy labor of love aims for high generalization, but often bogs down in detail. Four centuries of description serve criticism less than ut pictura poesis. Though Turner saw the westward advance as counter to European influence, Dondore quite sensibly concludes that we remain heirs to Europes past: a clean break is not only impracticable but impossible. In her lively The Frontier in American Literature (1927) the crisply critical Lucy Lockwood Hazard (18901959) attributes regional pioneering to New England and the South, industrial pioneering to the Gilded Age, and spiritual pioneering to the closing of 1299
the frontier. She relegates the Aldriches, Stedmans, and Gilders to cheerful yesterdays. In The Rediscovery of the Frontier (1931), Percy H. Boynton (1875 1946) applies the ubiquitous Turner theory to his own jaunty mix of social history, literary criticism, social criticism, and literary history. His opinion of Rlvaags anti-mythmaking is high, of Hartes meretricious sentimentalities low. As in Dondore, Europe is antidote to western provincialism. Thus he ranks Dodsworth as Sinclair Lewiss best novel: Sam Dodsworths We want everything that Europe has means for Bcynton that our frontier spirit is alive and well. This spirit enters into the socio-literary criticism of the monumental Main Currents in American Thought (192730) by Vernon Parrington (18711929). His concerns are broadly political, economic, and social rather than imaginative, aesthetic, and moral: The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate the materials is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather than Federalistic. Davy Crocketts autobiography is the last pungent note of realism before the romantic revolution swept over American literature. Gladly, he takes up Garlands early frontier realism, but sees in Tarkingtons smooth neighborliness a twentiethcentury version of gentility. More literary background than criticism appears in the four Middle Border autobiographies and four chatty reminiscences which Garland wrote between 1917 and 1934. The same holds for Gertrude Athertons Adventures of a Novelist (1932) and Mary Austins Earth Horizon (1932). But critical positions are sharply defined by Atherton (18571948) in her antiHowellsian Wanted: Imagination (1935) and by Austin (18681934) in her pro-mystical Regionalism in American Fiction (1932) and in her earlier, controversial study of Indian poetry, The American Rhythm (1923). In Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub! (1920), Theodore Dreiser (18711945) called on the literary world to fight for social justice. In The Folk Idea in American Life (1930), Ruth Suckow ( 18921960) pointed regional artists to the open corridors of the future. And in The New Regionalism in American Literature (1930), Carey McWillams (190580) scolded regionalists for shrugging off modern problems and finding little interest in proletarian heroes. Marxist criticism prospered during the Great Depression. The revolutionary sensibilities of V. F. Calverton (190040) and Granville Hicks (190182), for example, employed literary criticism as a political weapon in the economic class war. Attuned to varieties of capitalistic exploitation, they measured a writer with a crude Marxian yardstick, gauging his utility to the proletarian. Sectional peculiarities and local mannerisms were subordinate to national issues. Calvertons oppressively reductive The Liberation of American Literature 1300
(1932), with its long chapter on The Frontier Force, makes plain his aesthetic deficiencies. In his cramped view the social significance of Clemens, Eggleston, Howe, Garland, Norris, London, Anderson, Lewis, Cather, Suckow, and Dreiser outweighs their art. Calverton sees the ultimate liberation of American literature in proletarian collectivism. More sensitive to art than Calverton, Hicks (with so many others) later became disillusioned with the Communist Party. But his early faith in the dull Marxian method gave his The Great Tradition (1933, 1935) the force and clarity that often accompany revolutionary allegiance. He gauges the socio-economic relevance of Harte, Clemens, Eggleston, Garland, Bierce, Norris, Sinclair, and Cather. Hicks approves of efforts to depict the contemporary scenein Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, and Sandburg. He disapproves of Robinson Jefferss symbols of despair. On the one hand, Hicks can complain about the impassioned quibbling of Yvor Winters; on the other, extol the working-class consciousness of B. Traven. Far less polemical are two books of discerning critical essays by T. K. Whipple (18901939). Whipple contends that regions rendered in art contribute to national health. Spokesmen (1928), a study of ten writers and their environments, challenges Van Wyck Brookss thesis about Americas cultural failure. Future students, says Whipple, will reconstruct the lowermiddle-class Midwest from Dreisers novels. But Whipple has trouble equating the fat Midwest with Sherwood Andersons penurious world, his underdeveloped settings far less visualized than Cathers, whose triumph over Nebraska implies for Whipple her victory over the Nebraska in herself. Unlike Cathers strength, Sinclair Lewiss power rests on the popularity of his inert, thickly varnished surface, on his romanticism, philistinism, and vulgarity. Sandburgs slabs of the sunburnt West are the contemplative stage on the mystic way, but not the higher degrees of union. In Study Out the Land (1943) Whipple concedes that Henry James is more interesting than Jesse James. Still, in American Sagas and The Myth of the Old West Whipple has the temerity to declare that Zane Greys crude epic stories are American equivalents of Beowulf and the Norse skalds. In due time, Brookss joyless Ordeal of Mark Twain was decimated in a critical walkdown by an enfant terrible from Ogden, Utah. Relying less on unity of projection than on unfenced fact, Bernard DeVoto (18971955) presented Mark Twains America (1932) as an essay in the correction of ideas. Unlike Brookss frustrated genius, DeVotos Mark Twain is a frontier humorist, a satiric realist working exuberantly in the native comic tradition. Two important early lecturesMark Twain: The Ink of History (1935) and Mark Twain and the Limits of Criticism (1936)appear in DeVotos critical collection Forays and Rebuttals (1936), along with How Not to Write History (1934). Following A. B. Paine as curator (193846) 1301
of the Mark Twain Papers, DeVoto carefully edited and prefaced Tom Sawyer (1939) and Huckleberry Finn (1942), cleverly assembled and introduced Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), Mark Twain at Work (1942), and The Portable Mark Twain (1946). Besides teaching English at Northwestern and writing at Harvard, conducting Harpers Easy Chair (193555), and editing Saturday Review of Literature (193638), Bernard DeVoto was a middling novelist, a PulitzerPrize historian of the West (1948), and a pugnacious critic of critics. In The Skeptical Biographer (1933), he describes literary criticism as an activity in which uncontrolled speculation is virtuous and responsibility almost impossible. To DeVoto the literary mind was unfactual, incapable of penetrating the forces surrounding a writerthus incapable of understanding a writers work. If DeVoto saw the social historian as tough and realisticas something like Mark Twainhe saw the literary critic as soft and sentimentalas something like Emmeline Grangerford. If you called DeVoto a critic, it was a good idea to smile! A lover of authenticity, he reviewed books by Bojer, Fisher, Rhodes, Steinbeck, Clark, OMeara, and by another enfant terrible: Sinclair Lewis (18851951). When DeVoto declared in The Literary Fallacy (1944) that literature cannot abide folly and lying and that these should be denounced, Lewis, defending Van Wyck Brooks, generously complied: Very well, I denounce Mr. Bernard DeVoto as a fool and a tedious and egotistical fool, as a liar and a pompous and boresome liar. Lewiss Fools, Liars and Mr. DeVoto (1944) is a celebrated piece of tomahawking. Less known are his bouquets to western writers like Cather, Fisher, Manfred, Horgan and Stegner. Readers of Lincoln, Nebraska, newspapers in the early 1890s knew Willa Cather (18731947) as a meat-ax critic. (Art is temperament and Hamlin Garland has no more temperament than a prairie dog.) By 1896, the coltish journalist had dashed off nearly a million words of criticism available in Bernice Slote (ed.), The Kingdom of Art (1967), and in William M. Curtin (ed.), The World and the Parish (1970)most on theater, only a modicum on western literature. When Mark Twain roughhoused some of Cathers favorite French littrateurs, she furiously announced that he never will be part of literature. Later she changed her mind. Ecstatically, the young Cather plot-outlined Frank Norriss McTeugue in her 1899 review, rigging it a year later to her thoughtful review of Blix: Norris, she declared, adjured the literature of nerves, possessed the strength of the soil and knowledge of the feminine element, andmost importantmade of his descriptions an active force. Of considerable worth is Willa Cather on Writing (1949), a little collection of mature essays, honest, serene, and powerful. Her aesthetic exclusivity is obliquely illuminating. With tongue in cheek, Cather warns in My 1302
First Novels (1931) that for settings Nebraska is dclass, Kansas almost as unpromising, Coloradoquite possible, but Wyoming really has some class. She informs us that My ntonia followed the suggestive method of O Pioneers! not the vulgar details of The Song of the Lark. Rejecting photographic catalogs, she explains in On the Art of Fiction (1920) that art should simplify, select the best details for the most universal idea. She despairs, however, of analyzing the individuality of a first-rate writer. In the fragment, Light on Adobe Walls, she objects to the exploitation of art by science or sociology. If a writer feels that his little story is less important to him than, say, the Preservation of the Indian, he ought to be working in a bureau. On Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) acknowledges the narratives historical sources. On The Professors House (1938) reveals that the open window in Dutch paintings of interiors inspired her to open a window from the professors stuffy house onto the Blue Mesa. How wonderful it would be, she declares in The Novel Dmeubl (1922) if we can throw all the furniture [of novels] out of the window. Finally, her Preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) affirms that the writer who gives himself totally to his material fades away into the land and people of his heart, he dies of love only to be born again. This idea informs Katherine Anne Porters ( 18901980) fine impressionistic essay, Reflections on Willa Cather (1952). The strength of several well-known early studies lies less in impressionism than in biography, history, and bibliography. In Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (1931), George R. Stewart (18951980) shows how the writers work grew out of the locale and how that work shaped the writers life. Stewart observes in The Regional Approach to Literature (1948) that all literary works have a regional flavor, but that a work is distinctly regional when its location and social modes contribute to actual substance. Stewarts argument that approaching literature regionally makes a better citizen and a happier person may be true but contributes nothing to literary criticism. Critical tidbits crop up in Southwest Heritage (1938), the pioneering pedagogical history-biography by Mabel Major, Rebecca W. Smith, and T. M. Pearce. The well-known, well-researched, well-written group biography of Harte, Twain, Bierce, Miller, Coolbrith, Stoddard, Mulford, and George San Franciscos Literary Frontier (1939)by Franklin Walker is critically deficient, as is his Literary History of Southern California (1950). What makes Walkers books, including his biographies of Norris and London, attractive, however, is his large talent for tying local cultural history to the national life. For the Marxist-minded Edmund Wilson (18951972) the only serious theme out of the West Coast (stemming from Norris, London, and Sinclair) has been class war. In The Boys in the Back Room (1941), a little 1303
book fashioned mostly out of his New Republic criticism, he treats and maltreats writers who, however Hemingwayesque, have written of California from personal experience. Hans Otto Storm, James Cain, John OHara, Saroyan, Steinbeckall suffer from theatricality, Orientalism, fakery, and nihilism. Wilsons Jaccuse (recalling the plights of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West) points to Hollywoods appalling record of talent depraved and wasted. In spite of its Dream Factory, California today remains a vital literary and critical forcethough sometimes interior westerners envision without distress the ledge falling into the Pacific. Mr. Texas, J. Frank Dobie (18881964), liked to take pot-shots at Zane Grey Factories. He expected books about cowboys to smell of cows: thus he ranked Andy Adamss The Log of a Cowboy (1903) supreme. Much of Dobies writing for the Texas Folklore Society, the Southwest Review, and Lone Star newspapers reappears in one book or another. Prefaces (1975), compiled by his widow, reprints Dobies introductions to a wide range of western books, a few of literary import. His chatty appreciations mosey along, laying out a stock of hearty challenges, historical bric-a-brac, English literary allusions, straight-arrow biography, personal reminiscences, and sunny anecdotespieces as interchangeable as the parts of a Colt .45. Dobie points out that reading only bully sectional literature subverts sound criticism. It is more important for people to read The Trial and Death of Socrates than Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony. But as he puts it in his highly influential Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (1942)revised and enlarged and packed with keen thumbnail assessmentsNothing is too trivial for art, but good art treats nothing in a trivial way. Dobies zeal for the folk imagination inspired Henry Nash Smith (1906 ) to investigate the popular imagination. As associate editor of the Southwest Review from 1927 to 1942, he was well aware of the serious western writer swimming between the Scylla of sensationalism and the Charybdis of sentimentalism. Smith scrutinized the West through poetry, letters, journals, biographies, newspapers, histories, travel books, and dime novels. He writes in his celebrated Virgin Land: The West us Myth and Symbol (1950): The Western story has reached the seemingly indestructible state of petrification which it . . . is apparently destined to maintain through successive geological epochs while subtler and more ambitious literary forms come and go. If his dime-novel distinctions remind one of Norriss messenger-boy, Smiths interdisciplinary finesse and serious purpose do not. He sees correctly that bad artthe automatic, the formulaic, the subliterarypowerfully reflects and affects the popular mind and will. Smith writes more clearly, more firmly, less personally than Dobie, more selectively, more logically, less peremptorily than DeVoto (whom he 1304
succeeded as literary editor of the Mark Twain Papers). With sustained perspicacity, Smith demonstrates in Virgin Land that down to and within the Turner hypothesis Americans identified the frontier with the myths of Empire (Passage to India), the Hero (The Sons of Leatherstocking), and the Garden (the agricultural Garden of the World). To this objectified mass dream, Smith has brought the attention of social historians, historians of ideas, students of literature, readers who set store by the West, and an alarming number of Pop Culturists. If Van Wyck Brooks projected Americas sickness in his first career, in his second he projected its health. Affirming mans freedom and essential goodness, he rejected modernism, submerging himself in his five-volume Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America 18001915. In dense associational prose he picturesquely sought Americas usable past, relishing the warmth of little details. Three volumes contain a dozen chapters on western writers. Sympathetic to western efforts, he can provide no ideas or techniques for analyzing or judging a text. The UCLA librarian Lawrence Clark Powell (1800 ) is a Longinian impressionist, a bibliophile apparently intimidated only by 451 degrees Fahrenheit. In 1953 A.D.After Dobiehe first reverenced the Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Since then, Powell has habitually carted books to their settings while he breathlessly awaits the adventure of evocative fusion. For him a book must breathe, be chromatic . . . full of murmurous overtones . . . pulsing . . . glowing . . . echoing. . . . The critic resembles a cross between Anatole France and Fred Bason or, more simply, a connoisseur of bouillabaisse. His bookscape-landscape coign apparently offers him delight, escape, therapy. The methodobvious in such elegant collections as California Classics (1971) and Southwest Classics (1974) contributes to Powells lyrical, repetitious, gossipy essays. For Powell, classics are books Powell loves by authors beyond the pale. For an olla podrida of southwestern writersAbbey, Austin, Lummis, Lawrence, La Farge, Grey, Horgan, Cather, Comfort, Waters, Long, Fergusson, and many morehe has chanted his praises and quoted their regionary descriptions at length. For most critics, Powells public enthusiasm would be private precondition. And though his appreciations lack intellectual body, his passion for books is refreshing in an age of multimedia centers and retrieval systems. Literary criticism for important western novelistsoften mutual partisansis an aside. The gritty criticism of scholar-novelist Vardis Fisher (18951968) is autobiographic and didactic. His massive novel of ideas the Vridar Hunter tetralogy (193236)treats literary-critical problems and is itself the subject in his essay A Trivial Excursion in Modesty (1942). Fishers contempt for the New York critical establishment and censorious impressionists is clear, for example, in Critics and Reviewers, a 1305
chapter in his unorthodox textbook for beginning writers, God or Caesar? (1953). To strengthen the moral will and destroy romantic illusions, Fisher the Encyclopdiste here musters de profundis a swarm of quotations from those whose credentials none can question and a multitude of harrowing personal experiences. For his work to survive, the artist needs a good deal of mind. In The Novelist and his Background (1953), Fisher finds definitions of myth no more satisfying than explorations of the subconscious. He assumes some sort of correspondence, however, between ancient mythmaking and daily legend-making. The novelists task is to perceive not simply the man in the child, but the past which produced the child. By exploring the myths and symbols of tenacious human yearning he rediscovers the ancients intuitive wisdom. Again, much of thisplus his conviction that the artists male-female components cause neurosiscrops up in Orphans in Gethsemane (1960), a redaction of his early tetralogy, now the final volume of his twelve-volume Testament of Man. In his critical odds and ends, the important Northwest poet and novelist H. L. Davis (18941960) maintained that literature was a humanistic enterprise. He thus reproves Jefferss inhumanism and approves of Ferrils humanity. The serious western writer, besides acknowledging the Wests special problem, must know both the folkways and the great tradition. With James Stevens, Davis privately printed two hundred copies of the pamphlet Status Rerum (1927), a butterfly-hammering cause clbre whose mocking subtitles run: A Manifesto, upon the Present Condition of Northwestern Literature: Containing Several Near-Libelous Utterances upon Persons in the Public Eye. Stevens and Davis in Oregon disassociated themselves from regional circles of posers, parasites, and pismires who produced ostentatious tripe. In a less perturbed spirit, Davis in The Elusive Trail to the Old West (1954) argues for historys literary importance: perspective helps shape the western novelists unwieldy present. The Civil War, Davis contends, disrupted the exciting continuity of the Wests rapidly developing history and literature. Before World War I, however, writers like Roosevelt, Reming ton, Wister, and A. L. Lewis reached back for Old West material. The western writer now must first link the Old and New Wests and then link them both to the present. Reno novelist Walter Van Tilburg Clark (190971) feltlike Robinson Jeffers (on whom he wrote a graduate thesis)that primordial vision preceded intellectual constructs. Only by experiencing primordial reality, Clark insists in The Writer and the Professor (1962), can the right language find you. To think about the language puts you out of the creative and into the critical act. Essentially, American myths are old-world myths, rationally applied. In the Signet Afterword (1962) to The Ox-Bow Incident, Clark explains that he tried to fuse the standard Western with realistic 1306
treatment and universal theme. Craft serves vision. As he told John R. Milton in 1971, landscape is character, not background. A reviewer of western titlesgood books by imaginative and entertaining writers Clark admired especially Cathers Death Comes for the Archbishop. New Mexico novelist Harvey Fergusson (18901971), however, looked upon Willa Cather as a tourist. He preferred Walden and Huckleberry Finn. Though apprised of mystical intuition, he remained essentially a rationalist. His aesthetic and critical notions appear in the philosophical Modern Man (1936) and autobiographical Home in the West (1944). A Howellsian realist of sorts, Fergusson respected technological and social progress as much as nature and the past. Seeing literature as communication, he placed a premium on clarity, logic, objectivity, and frowned on sterile erudition, as well as on experimentation, subjectivism, and eccentricity. He disdained obsession with private psychology and cosmic relationshipsfor example, D. H. Lawrences neurotic blood consciousness. Another southwestern writer, Frank Waters (1902 ), has praised not only Lawrence, but Cather, Austin, and Clark for treating aboriginal ideas as thematic substance. His reviews on inside writers like Momaday and Anaya are enthusiastic. Waters equates primitive archetypal intuition with organic wholeness and health. He equates modern materialistic rationality with fragmentation and sickness. Like Neihardt, he believes that art should reveal mans relationship to the universethe interrelatedness of all things. The mystical view in Relationships and the Novel (1943), while admirable, limits criticism by its inclusiveness. Waterss criticism relies less on analytic thought and discursive detail than on poetic feeling and striking metaphor. Waters, Fisher, and Clark are for novelist Frederick Manfred (1912 ) kindred spirits. Wallace Stegner sees Manfred the literary Siouxlander as a natural force, related to hurricanes, deluges, volcanic eruptions, and the ponderous formations of continents. In scattered articles, reviews, prefaces, and interviews, Manfred favors historical realism overlaid with mythic patterns. The genuine western writer is in touch with Old Lizard, Old Adam, Old Leviathan. He loves sacred places, responds to dreams, listens to his own tone. Passionate autobiographical fictions are not novels for Manfred, but rumes. Fellow Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis exemplifies for him the ordinary talent lifted by emotional force and mental brilliance to greatness. Montanas A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1901 ), lover of the Old West, tells in The Historical Novel (1954) of melding the facts of history and the magic of imagination. For Guthrie the historical novel must be authentic: The little anachronism will excite a howl. Thus the historical novelist first must be a reader, a researcher, wise to nineteenth-century reticences. 1307
The single event is no more important than the undigested mass: what is important is human response to event. When the imaginary figure and historical man collide, Guthrie wisely tries to make his creation true to character. Guthrie quotes approvingly Whiteheads statement, Style is the ultimate morality of mind. Whether his style be rich or spare, writes novelist-historian Paul Horgan (1903 ), the serious novelist must create harmony, a realized sense of place, a story. The criticism in Approaches to Writing (1973), Horgans spruce collectanea, is unsustained but seductive. Horgan eschews the self-consciously modern. Delicately, he needles modish permissiveness, faddish relevance, vulgar neologism. Toward raw indulgence he is as ill-disposed as toward pedantic apparatus. Anathema is the with-it crowd, inverted snobs who slum in the Pop Arts. How, he wonders, can the artist hope for discussion of his works on his termsnot in terms of Marxists, Freudians, Existentialists, Blacks, Absurdists, Sexists, or whatever? The gifted critic clarifies subliminal meanings, knows what the author is unable to write. Over the years the brilliant essays of Wallace Stegner (1909 ), novelist, story writer, educator, editor, and conservationist, have appeared in leading national publications. Three collectionsThe Writer in America (1952), The Sound of Mountain Water (1969), One Way to Spell Man (1982)and one skillfully balanced biography of DeVotoThe Uneasy Chair (1974)testify to his ability to dramatize criticism as well as history. Cum DeVoto, Stegner is historical in bias and realistic in intention. He suspects beautiful thoughts and academese. A Stegner essay is a personal, fluid, metaphorical performance. At times it might sound a bit proud or showy. In Born a Square (1964) Stegner projects doing for the West what Faulkner did for the South create a usable continuity between past and present. Crimes against the land would be the Wests shared guilt, hope its shared innocence. Models for study: Cather, Sandoz, DeVoto, Davis, Fisher, Guthrie, Horgan, Clark, Morrisand himself. Without a possessed past, the western writer, Stegner warns in History, Myth, and the Western Writer (1967), has only extremes: the no-present of constant change or the mythic petrifaction of the past. On the Writing of History (1969) details his preference for the middle ground between fiction and history over analytical exposition. Stegner has written finely on Harte, Cather, Fisher, Clark, Guthrie, and, of course, DeVoto. DeVoto touched history with a novelists imagination, he says in his introduction to The Big Sky. Guthrie imagines his novels around a historians sure knowledge. As Stegner admires the explorative and literary achievements of John Wesley Powell, so the Colorado journalist-poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril 1308
(1896 ) values the wagon-train diary and the gold-rush rag, the explorers journal and the scientists log. The hybrid vigor of cross cultures give greater vigor to the whole. A drama critic in the 1920s and a Harpers columnist in the mid-1940s) Ferril published his most important essay, Rocky Mountain Metaphysics, in B. A. Botkins Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany (1930). In 1937 Saturday Review published a companion piece, Writing in the Rockies. For Ferril scientific wonder replaces low-grade mysticism. Even in a scientific bulletin wonder can give rise to genuine poetry: Great winds blow in an atmosphere of stars. The reality of mountain erosion displaces the romance of mountain eternality. Men supplant gods. Oscar Wildes insight in Coloradothat mountains are unfavorable to art and poetryFerril finds superior to Whitmans nonsense about nature being a better artist than man. Mediating between science and poetry, between a western past and a western present, Ferril infects readers with the gusto of westering. Living most of his life in the West, the maverick Stanford University professor Yvor Winters (190068) was a force both for regionalism and the cluster of attitudes before, during, and after World War II called the New Criticism. Like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and others, he opposed impressionism and positivism. Lacking Eliots Church and Tates Old South, he erected a moral/aesthetic absolutism: a good poem is short, a good poem is in metrical or measured language, a good poem makes a rational statement about human experience. His Johnsonian contempt for obscurantism, decadence, automatism, and mindless experimentation is legion. Without a usable system of evaluation, criticism for Winters was worth little. In Forms of Discovery (1967) he acidly counters abuse: It has been a common practice for years for casual critics to ridicule my students in a parenthesis: this has been an easy way to ridicule me. He goes on: . . . Six or seven of my former students are among the best poets of this century. J. V. Cunningham, Howard Baker, Thorn Gunn, and N. Scott Momaday doubtless were among those he had in his confident mind. Winters could endorse the intelligent detail in Theodore Roethke, but not the careless feeling in Robinson Jeffers. Of translations and interpretations of Indian poetry, he remained skeptical. On Indian oral criticism, he remained silent. In 1944, Alan Swallow (191566) hailed Yvor Winters as the greatest critic of the recent critical renaissance. Influenced by the Southern Agrarians as a graduate student at Louisiana State University, Swallow was a prolific reviewer of poetry for New Mexico Quarterly during the 1940s. A courageous publisher of a small press in Denver, he reprinted Winterss Primitivism and Decadence, Maules Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense under the title In Defense of Reason (1947). Like Winters, he eschewed pro1309
lixity, loss of control, occultationall products, he believed, of nineteenthcentury European romanticism. Though prone himself to occasional hyperbole, he cherished concentration, discipline, clarity. A purple passion for landscape was no substitute for technical mastery. An Editors Essays of Two Decades (1962) displays Swallows interest in, among other things, literary methods, critical theory, and contemporary poetry. He notes in A Magazine for the West (1957) the lesson of the Agrarians, the Fugitives, Ill Take My Stand (1930), and the Southern Review. Sensing a literary flowering of the West, he suggests that the diverse western writers meet, find a common ground, move independently in one direction. In The Mavericks (1959) he envisions the dominance of the South in the 1940s50s passing to the West in the 1960s70s. Wallace Stegner, Harvey Fergusson, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Forrester Blake, Howard Baker, Donald Wetzel, Mark Harris, Katherine Anne Porter, and Caroline Gordon have, for Swallow, a speaking acquaintance with greatness. But here he touts Fisher, Clark, Waters, Manfred, Edward Loomis, and Janet Lewisall mavericks on his publishers list. In three essays he lauds Winters, for Swallowbefore his rapt life was cut short in 1966had hoped to infuse more of Winterss rationality into his program for western poetry.
IV
Like Swallow, a growing number of literary scholars in the region resented the Wests horse-opera image. As J. Golden Taylor (191282) was wont to phrase it: The damned cowboy really had no license to ride his rough-shod, gun-slinging way over the whole Western literary landscape. Led by Taylor and Delbert E. Wylder (1923 ), a small group of scholars met at Colorado State University in the fall of 1965 to establish the Western Literature Association. Among writers and critics connected with the association from the beginning were: John Q. Anderson, Forrester Blake, Mildred Bennett, Paul T. Bryant, Martin Bucco, Benjamin Capps, Walter Clark, Philip Durham, Richard W. Etulain, Jim L. Fife, Vardis Fisher, James K. Folsom, Warren French, James D. Hart, W. H. Hutchinson, Herbert Krause, L. L. Lee, Robert Edson Lee, Merrill Lewis, Wilson M. Long, Thomas J. Lyon, Frederick Manfred, Roy W. Meyer, John R. Milton, T. M. Pearce, Levi S. Peterson, William T. Pilkington, Jackson K. Putnam, Morton L. Ross, Jack Schaefer, C. L. Sonnichsen, Max Westbrook, Don D. Walker, and Frank Waters. The first number of the associations journal, Western American Literature (edited by Taylor and Wylder), appeared in the spring of 1966. In his editorial, A Critical Forum for the Western Muse, Taylor announced: When a scholarly organization appears on the scene sponsoring a quarterly devoted exclusively to the literature of the American West, a significant 1310
new phase in Western literary scholarship has begun. In the Winter 1967 issue Wylder editorially roasted some retrograde western critics who insisted that all Western literature fit the patterns of 19th century local color realism . . . a pattern as stereotyped and stifling to creative growth as the pattern of Eastern publishers.Properly, Wylder went on to ask: . . . How many courses in Western American literature have treated Western literature more as history than as literature? Indeed, the American Studies approach in such works as Roy Harvey Pearces The Savages of America (1953), Edwin Fussells Frontier (1965), Richard Slotkins Regeneration Through Violence (1973), and Louise K. Barnetts The Ignoble Savage (1975) lends itself more to cultural history than to literary criticism, though nice discriminations of an aesthetic rather than social order may be seen in Robert Edson Lees From West to East (1966) and in Jay Gurians Western American Writing (1975). Limitations of space permit comment on only a few of the betterknown contemporary western critics. Author of the Twayne Timothy Flint (1965), James K. Folsom (1933 ) in The American Western Novel (1965) sees western story as metaphoricala parable of the wilderness-civilization, youth-maturity themes. Although Folsoms criterion for judging the genre he uses Western and Western novel interchangeablyis closer to Hawthornes concept of romance than to Howellss idea of realism, he raps insensitive handling of western literary conventions. To support his notion of western myth, Folsom weaves theme-and-plot medleys out of works either esthetically significant or important in some other contextin one chapter, for example, out of works by Guthrie, Sublette, Gardiner, Ertz, Scarborough, Ferber, Crane, and Richter. Though at times Folsoms generalizations are hasty, his selections arbitrary, and his prose jittery, his insights into Coopers historical perspective, the metaphors of Garden and Desert, the relationship between the heros skills and his morality, the literary Indian as noble friend or bestial foe, and the grange? novel are compelling. Novelist Larry McMurtry (1936 ) prefers the resonance of fiction to the pseudo-fiction of essay. Still, his collection In a Narrow Grave (1968) sparkles with detail and corruscating absurdities. I can never be sure, he says, whether home is a place or a form: The novel, or Texas. Unscornful of the popular Western, he yet notes its ultimate irresponsibility. A lyricism appropriate to the Southwest, he slickly indicates, needs to be clean as a bleached bone and as well spaced as trees on the llano. In Southwestern Literature ? he pays homage but not obeisance to the three worthies: Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb. Like others, McMurtry relishes Dobies Guide, its terse, opinionated annotations. McMurtry holds that the Texans stampeding out of creative writing classes today must 1311
create dialogue adequate to emotional, sexual, and urban life. He notes that his own stories start with the heart faced suddenly with the loss of its country. . . . His bibliography recommends novels by Manfred, Algren, Berger, Humphrey, Brammer, and Eastlake. As far as erstwhile University of Montana critic Leslie Fiedler (1917 ) is concerned, Eastlake, Guthrie, and Waters are for the pubescent. A masterful stylist, Fiedler finessed a major critical reputation by ruffling straight academics with his ingenuity and chutzpah. In the wide wake of Freud and Frye, this pitchman of the archetype can dream, intuit, convert, invert, alter, distort, dissolve, disguise anything into anything else. Dedicatorily thanking the Blackfoot tribe who adopted him, showman Fiedler in The Return of the Vanishing American (1968) transforms a job lot of literary, subliterary, and unliterary characters into Indians. This critical magic he also performs on selected WASPSthat feebly derogatory acronym Fiedler prizes. Literature of the funny West is reduced to four libidinous myths: white man flees white woman, white man desires red girlor boy, red woman is Earth Goddess, West is Earthly Paradise sans white Eve and red serpent. Incompatible works simply are not western or, like so many other things, are anti-, crypto-, quasi-, hemi-, or semi-. New western fictionits genesis in Hemingways Torrents of Spring, its conclusion in the counterfantasies of Jews, hippies, acid-headstrips as easily into Fiedlers giddy pan-Myth Criticism as into his novels. In tune with all of this is Fiedlers cool invitation to psychosisthe real West via hallucinogens. The anthropological quest for documented racial tidbits makes light of rational literary criticism, an enterprise the tribe of consciousness-raisers deems too narrow. Earlier the orgiastic Beat Movementnakedly exploiting and exploited by midcentury mediarhapsodically jeered at nonexistential literature, academic writers, and the New Criticism. Self-consciously spontaneous, indecorous, and experimental, generational members swung down the beatific road to renewal via marijuana, jazz, and Zen. Not until Rexroth, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Snyderso claims William Eversondid the primary (Western) archetype reclaim its constellated voice. Cunningly concentrated, the subculture hero and California Buddhist Gary Snyder (1926 ) sought salvation in cosmic wholenessin singing an idiosyncratic syncretism out of his reading of Blake, Thoreau, Whitman, Lawrence, Muir, Pound, Jeffers, and Williams and out of his experiences with peyote, shamanism, animism, nature worship, and other Native American and Oriental wisdoms. His journal entries, book reviews, and poetic essays in Earth House Hold (1969) voice a Paleolithic poetics, a lyrical medicine of universal holiness. As poet-shaman and ecological revolutionary, the haiku-minded Snyder sees in wilderness/unconsciousness the 1312
source of unlimited spiritual energy. He espouses a visionary, organic, sensual, colloquial, elliptical poetry of liberation rising out of the mythological present. But Snyders practice of publishing poetry in book form manufactured out of unrecycled paper, though understandable, is not altogether in tune with his teaching that poetry is oral and that trees are sacred. Another evident critic, John G. Cawelti (1929 ), has inspired scrutiny of ingrained patterns of popular narrative. His Six-Gun Mystique (1971) focuses on the protean construction of the Popular Western as a cultural phenomenon. With alterations of setting, characters, and plot, any story so it seemscan become a Western. Again, literary criticism (as description, interpretation, and judgment of individual works) dissolves into history, mythology, psychology, sociology, journalism, political science, and mass communications. But Cawelti easily convinces us that the simple Western formula has complex implications. Legitimately enough, he examines the formula in terms of heroic archetypes, dramatic clarity and unity, the media, social ritual, collective dream, cultural concerns, and games (the fifty yard line is the frontier). But surely the middlebrow Pop Culturists who detect high art in low art are mistaken. As L. L. Lee puts it, Narcissus could not love himself better. Before the upsurge of interest in western literature, John R. Milton (1924 ), one of the Wests most respected critics, had published a dozen or more articles on the subject. Founder-editor of the South Dakota Review (1963), Milton has edited also The Literature of South Dakota (1976) and prominent symposia, interviews, and conversations with western writers. His long-awaited The Novel of the American West (1980) integrates much of his best criticism since 1955. Used wisely, his classifications (for example, the startling catalogue of contrasts between eastern and western fiction) are quite credible. Though sympathetic to the Popular Culture movement, he rightly distinguishes among low, middle, and high orders of western fiction. He sees the serious western novel as essentially pastoral, its highest forms representing the sacrality of the earth through myth, symbol, and archetype. Miltons chapters on the themes and techniques in Fisher, Guthrie, Manfred, Clark, Fergusson, and Waters are lucid, solid, and discerning. Finally, Milton contrasts the archetypal regionalists with widely read authors whom he views as concerned less with philosophical unity than with historical continuityCather, Steinbeck, Stegner, Horgan, and others. The theoretical criticism of Max Westbrook (1927 ) has attracted particular attention. In The Authentic Western (1978), for example, he usefully distinguishes between sterile facsimile and vital denotative authenticity. As he puts it in his highly regarded Twayne volume, Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1969), the western writer is obliged to know the color of the hawks wings, the name of the small cold lake further up the mountain, and 1313
how to catch the trout that swim there. The book is informed by Westbrooks influential earlier essays, Conservative, Liberal, and Western: Three Modes of American Realism (1966) and The Practical Spirit: Sacrality and the American West ( 1968). Coining the phrase American Sacrality, Westbrook reads Clark in terms of Mircea Eliades The Sacred and the Profane and C. G. Jungs Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Sensing myth as real, Westbrook (interested in the relationship between art and culture) notes that the sacred man must often feel absurd in a practical democracy. Still, Clark and writers like Manfred, Waters, and Fisher have struggled to evoke primordial experience in art. Westbrooks confident, tentative, leisurely disquisitions sometimes give the impression that he himself is scrutinizing literature on the verge of the universal subconsciousness, that in his ontological effort to fuse New and Myth Criticism he is playing ring-around-the-text with the shades of Kant and Jung. Honored by many younger scholars, Don D. Walker (1917 ) justly maintains that western literature is part of American literature and that American literature is part of world literature. Through the years he has written many sophisticated essays on myth, the outlaw, the explorer and mountain man as literary heroes, and on Norris, Roosevelt, Wister, Cather, and DeVoto. As editor of The Possible Sack, he is a sharp critic of western criticism, and has even written a delightful spoof, The Rise and Fall of Barney Tullus (I 968), on pedantic formalists and factualists. Walkers essays in the historiography of the cattle trade, Clios Cowboys (1981), point the logical and imaginative way to a genuine history of the cowboy. In pressing for a truce between history and fiction, Walker seeks truthful fictions. He demonstrates that Joseph G. McCoy lacks objectivity, Theodore Roosevelt glorifies the cowboy into a romantic abstract, the metaphors of western historians are more poetic than scientific, critics like Dobie and DeVoto read cowboy fiction as history rather than as literature, and that the improbable Prose and Poetry of the Cattle lndustry (1905) shows the cowboy as extremely free and extremely conditioned. To the contrary images of the cowpuncher as rugged individualist and exploited worker, Walker would apply empirical rigor. Finally, Walker calls for the depiction of the cattleman as a social creature with a sense of his own past, his own psychological reality. The sincere and supple essays of William T. Pilkington (1939 ) in My Bloods Country (1973) recommend us to selected southwestern literature. Pilkington nicely points up the physical and spiritual isolation in explorer Cabeza de Vacas Narrative. In unaffected detail, he holds up such underrated novels as Fergussons Grant of Kingdom and The Conquest of Don Pedro, Waterss Pikes Peak, and Edwin Corles Fig Tree John. Sensitive to 1314
Horgans mannerisms, Pilkington yet acknowledges vitality in the western works. Noting Abbeys punch, he regrets his extremism. Pilkington passes novelist William A. Owens on his own criterionto make us see and know and understand a way of life. The parodic western novel and the essays of Larry L. King and Larry McMurtry suggest to Pilkington that the literary southwest has come of age. Praising Jean Staffords The Mountain Lion, he advises novelists to avoid time-tainted. . . romance and simplistic realism. Author of the Twayne Harvey Fergusson (1975), Pilkington has written a number of introductions to reprints of Fergussons works and has edited Critical Essays on the Western American Novel (1980), containingbesides his perceptive introduction and important essays by Milton, Westbrook, Walker, and othersa frank statement, Western Interpreters (1924), by cowboy novelist Andy Adams and an early essay, Virgins, Villains, and Varmints (1953), by E. M. Rhodes executor W. H. Hutchinson. Essential tools for students of western literature are some articles and reference works by Richard W. Etulain (1938 ), editor of the New Mexico Historical Review. A historian, Etulain prefers to combine cultural history, biography, and criticism rather than, say, literary theory, literary history, and literary criticism. Admitting that Pop Lit is of more interest to the cultural historian than to the literary critic, he has written on a host of popular Western writers. Like other critics of cowboy novels, he relishes ranch lingoHarpers loosed its cinch, The Virginian galloped to the top of the best seller list, a region can brand its ways into native hides. Besides writing such key articles as Frontier and Region in Western Literature (1971), Origins of the Western ( 1972), Research Opportunities in Western Literary History (1973), and The American Literary West and Its Interpreters (1979), Etulain has edited (or co-edited) Interpretive Approaches to Western American Literature (1972), The Popular Western (1974), The American Literary West (1980), Fifty Western Writers (1982), and the indispensable 5030item A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature (1982). Through Etulains Guide the reader interested in western literary criticism will find Gods plenty. The work of western scholars and critics is published by both university and commercial presses. Many western critics have written books and pamphlets for Twaynes United States Authors Series, the Southwest Writers Series, and the Boise State University Western Writers Series. They also have contributed to such reference works as The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Twentieth Century Western Writers, and Fifty Western Writers and to such critical anthologies as Western Writing, The Westering Experience in American Literature, Where the West Begins, Northwest Perspectives, and Women, Women Writers, and the West. Western American 1315
Literature, ably edited since 1974 by Thomas J. Lyon, remains the primary journal in the field. Compared to the terrifying rhetoric of postmodern theory, western criticism still offers us the luxury of humane discourse. The story of this discourse has begun. And in the landscape of western letters, this ambitious Literary History of the American West is a salient feature, a landmark of monumental importance.
M ARTIN BUCCO , Colorado
State University
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MAJOR REFERENCE SOURCES
on the
WEST
1. Adams, Ramon F. Burs Under the Saddle: A Second Look at Books and Histories of the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. 2. . The Rampaging Herd: A Bibliograpy of Books and Pamphlets on Men and Events in the Cattle Industry. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. 3. . Six-Guns and Saddle Leather: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on western Out-laws and Gunmen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954, 1969. 4. Alsmeyer, Henry L., Jr. A Preliminary Southwestern Reconnaissance. Southwestern American Literature 1 (May 1971): 6771. 5. Anderson, John Q., Edwin W. Gaston, Jr., and James W. Lee, eds. Southwestern American Literature: A Bibliography. Athens: Ohio University PressThe Swallow Press, 1979. 6. Andrews, Clarence A. The Literature of the Middle West: A Beginning Bibliography. Great Lakes Review 1 (1974): 3567. 7. Andrews, Thomas F. Ho! For Oregon and California!: An Annotated Bibliography of Published Advice to the Emigrant, 18411847. Princeton University Library Chronicle 30 (1971): 4164. 8. Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature. Western American Literature. Appears annually in Winter issue. 1966. 9. Baird, Newton D., and Robert Greenwood. An Annotated Bibliography of California Fiction 16641970. Georgetown, Calif. : Talisman Literary Research, 1971. 10. Bataille, Gretchen M., and Charles L. P. Silet, eds. The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980. 11. , and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women, Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. 12. Bay, Jens C. Western Life and Western Books. Missouri Historical Review 36 (1942):40311. 13. Brumble, H. David III. An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. 14. . A Supplement to An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies. Western American Literature 17 (1982): 24360. 15. Bush, Alfred L. The Princeton Collections of Western Americana. Princeton University Library Chronicle 30 (1971): 117.
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A Literary History of the American West 16. Cole, Wendell. Early Theatre West of the Rockies: A Bibliographical Essay. Theatre Research 4 (1962): 3645. 17. Coleman, Rufus A., ed. Northwest Books: First Supplement. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1949. 18. Colonnese, Tom, and Louis Owens. American Indian Novelists: An Annotated Critical Bibliography. New York: Garland Publications, 1985. 19. Corson, W. G. B. Theatre of the American Frontier: A Bibliography. Theatre Research 1 (1958): 1423. 20. Current Reading: A Scholarly and Pedagogical Bibliography of Articles and Books, Recent and Old, on Southwestern Literature and Culture. Arizona English Bulletin 13 (April 1971): 80108. 21. Dary, David. Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. 22. Davidson, Levette J. Rocky Mountain Life in Literature: A Descriptive Bibliography. Denver: University of Denver Book Store, 1936. 23. Dobie, J. Frank. Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Rev. ed. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952. 24. Dondore, Dorothy Anne. The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description. Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1926. 25. Eger, Ernestina N. A Bibliography of Criticism of Contemporary Chicano Literature. Berkeley: Chicano Studies Library Publications, University of California, 1982. 26. Emerson, O. B., and Marion C. Michael, comps. Southern Literary Culture: A Bibliography of Masters and Doctors Theses. University: University of Alabama Press, 1955, 1979. 27. Erisman, Fred, and Richard W. Etulain, eds. Fifty Western Writers: A BioBibliographical Guide. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1982. 28. Etulain, Richard W. The American Literary West and Its Interpreters: The Rise of a New Historiography. Pacific Historical Review 45 (August 1976): 31148. 29. . Western American Literature: A Bibliography of Interpetive Books and Articles. Vermillion, S. Dak.: Dakota Press, 1972. 30. . Western American Literature: A Selective Annotated Bibliography. Rendezvous 7 (Winter 1972): 6778. 31. . Western Literary History: A Brief Bibliographical Essay. Journal of the West 19 (January 1980): 7173. 32. . A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 33. Evers, Larry, et al., eds. The South Corner of Time: Hopi, Navajo, Papago, and Yaqui Tribal Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980. 34. Fender, Stephen. Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 35. Flanagan, John T. A Bibliography of Middle Western Farm Novels. Minnesota History 23 (June 1942): 15658.
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36. Fleck, Richard F., and Robert A. Campbell. A Selective Literary Bibliography of Wyoming. Annals of Wyoming 46 (Spring 1974) : 75112. 37. . Supplement to a Selective Literary Bibliography of Wyoming. Annals of Wyoming 47 (Fall 1975): 232. 38. Garfield, Brian. Western Films: A Complete Guide. New York: Ransom Associates, 1982. 39. Gaston, Edwin W., Jr. The Early Novel of the Southwest: A Critical History of Southwestern Fiction 18191918. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1961. 40. Graham, Don, James W. Lee, and William T. Pilkington. The Texas Literary Tradition: Fiction, Folklore, History. Austin: The College of Liberal Arts of the University of Texas and the Texas State Historical Association, 1983. 41. Griffith, Doris, et al. A Regional Bibliography. Western Humanities Review 6 (1952): 20712. 42. Haslam, Gerald. Who Speaks for the Earth? English Journal 63 (January 1973): 4248. 43. Hill, Gertrude. The Southwest in Verse: A Selective Bibliography of Arizona and New Mexican Poetry. Arizona Quarterly 23 (Winter 1967): 30612. 44. Hubach, Robert R. Early Midwestern Travel Narratives: An Annotated Bibliography 16341850. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961. 45. Jacobson, Angeline, comp. Contemporary Native American Literature: A Selected and Partially Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977. 46. Kurtz, Kenneth. Literature of the American Southwest: A Selective Bibliography. Los Angeles: Occidental College, 1956. 47. Lamar, Howard R., ed. The Readers Encyclopedia of the American West. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1977. 48. Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr., and James W. Parins. Native American Bibliography Series No. 2. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1980. 49. Lomeli, Francisco A., and Donaldo W. Urioste. Chicano Perspectives in Literature: A Critical and Annotated Bibliography. Albuquerque: Pajarito Publications, 1976. 50. Maguire, James H. A Selected Bibliography of Western American Drama. Western American Literature 14 (Summer 1979): 14963. 51. Major, Mabel, and T. M. Pearce. Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with Bibliographies. 3d ed., rev. and enl. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972. 52. Marken, Jack W., and Herbert T. Hoover. Native American Bibliography Series No. 1. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1980. 53. Meyer, Roy W. The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 54. Milton, John R., ed. Selected Bibliography of Materials Relating to the Western American Novel. South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964): 1018; 4 (Summer 1966): 7980.
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A Literary History of the American West 55. Murphy, James E., and Sharon M. Murphy. Let My People Know: American Indian Journalism, 19281978. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. 56. Nemanic, Gerald C. A Bibliographical Guide to Midwestern Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1981. 57. Northwest Books. Portland, Oreg.: Binford and Mort, 1942. 58. Paluka, Frank. lowa Authors: A Bio-Bibliography of Sixty Native Writers. Iowa City: Friends of the University of Iowa Libraries, 1967. 59. Patterson-Black, Sheryll and Gene. Western Women: In History and Literature. Crawford, Nebr.: Cottonwood Press, 1978. 60. Paul, Rodman W., and Richard W. Etulain. The Frontier and American West. Goldentree Bibliographies in American History. Arlington Heights, Ill. : AHM Publishing Corporation, 1977. 61. Polk, Noel, comp. Guide to Dissertations on American Literary Figures, 18701910: Part One. American Literary Realism 18701910 8 (Summer 1975):177280. 62. Pollard, Lancaster. A Check List of Washington Authors. Pacific Northwest Quarterly 31 (1940): 396; 35 (1944): 23366. 63. Powell, Lawrence Clark. Heart of the Southwest: A Selected Bibliography of Novels, Stories, and Tales Laid in Arizona and New Mexico and Adjacent Lands. Los Angeles: Dawsons Book Shop, 1955. 64. Research in Western American Literature. Western American Literature. Appears annually in Winter issue. 1966 . 65. Robertson, Kirk. Unknown Diversity: Little Magazines and Small Presses of the West, 19601980. Western American Literature 19 (1984): 12534. 66. Rundell, Walter, Jr. Interpretations of the American West: A Descriptive Bibliography. Arizona and the West 3 (Spring 1961): 6988; (Summer 1961): 14868. 67. Rusk, Ralph Leslie. The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1925. 68. Skrdal, Dorothy Burton. The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Through Literary Sources. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. 69. Smith, Dwight L., comp. The American and Canadian West: A Bibliography. 3 vols. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio Press, 1979. 70. Sonnichsen, C. L. From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1978. 71. Streeter, Thomas W. Notes on North American Regional Bibliographies. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 36 (1942): 17186. 72. Stronks, James. Supplements to the Standard Bibliographies of Crane, Dreiser, Frederick, Fuller, Garland, London, and Norris. American Literary Realism 18701910 11 (Spring 1978): 12433. 73. Tonsfeldt, Ward, comp. The Pacific Northwest: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. In Northwest Perspectives: Essays on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest. Eds. Edwin R. Bingham and Glen A. Love. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979.
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74. Tuska, Jon, and Vicki Piekarski. Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. 75. Uzendoski, Emily Jane. A Handlist of Nebraska Authors. Lincoln: The Nebraska Department of Education, 1977. 76. Van Derhoff, Jack. A Bibliography of Novels Related to American Frontier and Colonial History. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Company, 1971. 77. Vinson, James. Twentieth-Century Western Writers. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1982. 78. Wagner, H. R., and Charles Lewis Camp. Plains and the Rockies: A Critical Bibliography of Exploration, Adventure, and Travel in the American West, 1800 1865. 4th ed., edited by Robert H. Becker. San Francisco: J. Howell Books, 1982. 79. Weber, F. J. A Bibliography of California Bibliographies. Southern California Quarterly 50 (March 1968): 532. 80. West, Ray B. Writing in the Rocky Mountains with a Bibliography by Nellie Cliff. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1947. 81. Wheeler, Eva F. A Bibliography of Wyoming Writers. University of Wyoming Publications 6 (1939): 1137. 82. Winther, Oscar Osburn. A Classified Bibliography of the Periodical Literature of the Trans-Mississippi West ( 18111957 ). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961. 83. Wright, Frances Valentine, ed. Whos Who Among Pacific Northwest Authors. 2d ed. Missoula: University of Montana Press, 1969. General Reference Sources: American Literature 84. Adelman, Irving, and Rita Divorkin. The Contemporary Novel: A Checklist of Critical Literature on the British and American Novel Since 1945. Metuchen, N. J. : Scarecrow Press, 1972. 85. American Literary Scholarship: An Annual. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963 . 86. American Quarterly. Philadelphia: American Studies Assoc., 1920 . (Bibliography published annually). 87. Blanck, Jacob. Bibliography of American Literature. 7 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 19551974. 88. Brenni, Vito Joseph. The Bibliographic Control of American Literature 1920 1975. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1975. 89. Bryer, Jackson R., ed. Sixteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974. 90. Coan, Otis W., and Richard G. Lillard. America in Fiction: An Annotated List of Novels That Interpret Aspects of Life in the U.S. 4th ed. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1956. 91. Curley, Dorothy Nyren, Maurice Kramer, and Elain Fialka Kramer, comp. and eds. A Library of Literary Criticism: Modern American Literature. 4 vols. 4th ed. New York: Frederick Ungar, 19601976.
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A Literary History of the American West 92. Dietrich, Crist. A Comprehensive Bibliography for the Study of American Minorities. New York: New York University Press, 1976. 93. Eichelberger, Clayton L., comp. A Guide to Critical Reviews of United States Fiction, 18701910. 2 vols. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1971, 1974. 94. Gerstenberger, Donna, and George Hendrick. The American Novel 1789 1959: A Checklist of Twentieth-Century Criticism. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1961. 95. . The American Novel: A Checklist of Twentieth Century Criticism on Novels Since 1789. Volume II: Criticism Written 19601968. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1970. 96. Gohdes, Clarence. Literature and Theater of the States and Regions of the U. S. A. : An Historical Bibliography. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967. 97. , and Sanford E. Marovitz. Bibliographical Guide to the Study of the Literature of the U.S.A. 5th ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984. 98. Hart, James D. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. 99. Havlice, Patricia Pate. Index to American Author Bibliographies. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1971. 100. Haywood, Charles. A Bibliography of North American Folklore and Folksong. 2 vols. Rev. ed. New York: Dover Press, 1961. 101. Herzberg, Max J., ed. The Readers Encyclopedia of American Literature. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962. 102. Howard, Patsy C. Theses in American Literature, 18961971. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pierian Press, 1973. 103. Jones, Howard Mumford, and Richard M. Ludwig. Guide to American Literature and Its Backgrounds Since 1890. 4th ed., rev. and enl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. 104. Kirby, David K. American Fiction to 1900: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1975. 105. Leary, Lewis. American Literature: A Study and Research Guide. New York: St. Martins Press, 1976. 106. . Articles on American Literature, 19001950. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954. 107. . Articles on American Literature, 19501967. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1970. 108.. Articles on American Literature, 19681975. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1979. 109. Lepper, Gary M. A Bibliographical Introduction to Seventy-five Modern American Authors. Berkeley, Calif.: Serendipity Books, 1976. 110. Literary Writings in America. 8 vols. Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1977. 111. McNamee, Lawrence F. Dissertations in English and American Literature . . . 18651964. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1968; Supplement One, 19641968, 1969. 112. MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1949 . (Published annually)
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113. Modern Humanities Research Association Annual Bibliography. London: Modern Humanities Research Assoc., 1920 . (Published annually). 114. Nilon, Charles H. Bibliography of Bibliographies in American Literature. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1970. 115. Oaks, Priscilla. Minority Studies: A Selective Annotated Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976. 116. Pownall, David. Articles on Twentieth Century Literature: An Annotated Bibliography, 1954 to 1970. 6 vols. New York: Kraus-Thomson, 197378. 117. Putney, Henry Beers. Bibliographies in American History, 19421978. 2 vols. Woodbridge, Conn.: Research Publications, 1982. 118. Robbins, J. Albert, et al., comps. American Literary Manuscripts: A Checklist of Holdings in Academic, Historical, and Public Libraries, Museums, and Authors Homes in the United States. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977. 119. Rosa, Alfred F., and Paul A. Eschholz. Contemporary Fiction in America and England, 19501970: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research, 1976. 120. Schwartz, Narda Lacey. Articles on Women Writers: A Bibliography. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1977. 121. Spiller, Robert E., et al., eds. Literary History of the United States. 4th ed., rev. New York: Macmillan, 1974. 122. White, Barbara. American Women Writers: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. New York: Garland, 1977. 123. Women and Literature: An Annotated Bibliography of Women Writers. 3d ed. Cambridge, Mass. : Women and Literature Collective, 1976. American Writers, pp. 193. 124. Woodress, James. American Fiction, 19001950: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1974. 125. . Dissertations in American Literature 18911966. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1968. 126. , ed. Eight American Authors. Rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. GEORGE F. DAY, University of Northern Iowa
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CONTRIBUTORS
Charles L. Adams (Ph.D., University of Oregon), is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Paula Gunn Allen has published five books of poetry and a novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. She teaches Native American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Marilyn C. Alquiloza teaches in the Ethnic Studies department at San Francisco State University. Henry L. Alsmeyer, Jr. (Ph.D., Texas A&M University) spent several years as a journalist, and now is Director of Libraries, Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas. Lucile F. Aly has published a biography, John G. Neihardt: A Critical Biography, and several articles on his poetry and prose. She is currently editing Neihardts letters and preparing a new edition of his short stories. Richard Astro is author or editor of books on Steinbeck, Hemingway, Malamud, and the literature of New England. Formerly Chair of English, Oregon State University, he is Dean of Arts and Sciences, Northeastern University. Louie W. Attebery has taught at the College of Idaho since 1961. He is senior editor of Idaho Folklife (1985). Robert Brophy, Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, has published two books, including Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual and Symbol in His Narrative Poems. He is Editor of the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter. Paul Bryant, a co-founder of the Journal of English Teaching Techniques, has published numerous articles on literature, composition, pedagogy, and environmentalism. He is Dean of the Graduate College at Radford University. Martin Bucco is Professor of English at Colorado State University, and Executive Secretary of the Western Literature Association. Among his works are the critical biographies Frank Waters (1969), Wilbur Daniel Steele (1972), E. W. Howe (1977), and Rene Wellek (1981). Mark Busby is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Preston Jones (1983), and articles in Western American Literature, New Mexico Humanities Review, and others. James W. Byrd is Professor of Literature at East Texas State University, where he teaches Black literature and folklore. His dissertation (Vanderbilt University) was White Character Portrayal by Negro Novelists, 19001950.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Jeffery Paul Chan is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, and serves as Chairperson of the Asian American Studies Program. Wayne Chatterton (Ph.D., University of Utah) is Professor Emeritus at Boise State University, where he founded the Western Writers Series in 1972. He has published books on Nelson Algren, Alexander Woollcott, Nathanael West, Irvin S. Cobb, and Vardis Fisher. Richard H. Cracroft, Dean of the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University, has published studies on Karl May, Washington Irving, Mark Twain, and George Frederick Ruxton, among others. He is Research Editor of Western American Literature. G. B. Crump is Professor of English at Central Missouri State University. He is author of The Novels of Wright Morris (University of Nebraska), and has published articles in Contemporary Literature, MidAmerica, and the D. H. Lawrence Review. George F. Day is on the faculty of the University of Northern Iowa, where he teaches courses in American literature. He has published a book analyzing Vardis Fishers use of history in fiction, and is engaged in research for a biography of Fisher. Fred Erisman is Professor of English at Texas Christian University. A specialist in American Studies, he is co-editor of Fifty Western Writers (1982) and has published numerous articles on popular and regional literature. Richard W. Etulain is Professor of History and Editor of the New Mexico Historical Review at the University of New Mexico. His books include Fifty Western Writers (1982, co-editor), A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature (1982), Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature (1983), and Western Films: A Brief History (1983, editor). Larry Evers teaches in the English Department and the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Arizona. Joseph M. Flora, Professor and Chairman of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is author of Vardis Fisher (1965), William Ernest Henley (1970), Frederick Manfred (1974), and Hemingways Nick Adams (1982). He co-edited Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (1979). James K. Folsom, Professor of English at the University of Colorado, has written extensively on western American literature. His work includes Timothy Flint, Harvey Fergusson, and The American Western Novel. Everett A. Gillis is Professor Emeritus at Texas Tech University, where for many years he taught courses in American and southwestern literature. He continues to pursue his interests in critical and creative writing. Robert Gish, Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, teaches Western American, Native American, and Chicano literature. He is author of Paul Horgan: Yankee Plainsman, and of other monographs and articles on western literature and history. Joan Givner (Ph.D., University of London), was born in Manchester, England. She is Professor of English at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Her biography Katherine Anne Porter: A Life was published in 1982.
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A Literary History of the American West Don Graham, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, is the author of The Fiction of Frank NorrisThe Aesthetic Context (1978), Western Movies (co-edited, 1979), Critical Essays on Frank Norris (edited, 1980), and Cowboys and Cadillacs: Cinematic Images of the Lone Star State (1983). Jacqueline Hall teaches EnglishComposition and American Studies at California State University, Chico. She also works on the family cattle ranch near Chico. With Mary Austin, she believes that to survive, man must develop a sense of the purposeful earth. Gerald Haslam, Professor of English at Sonoma State University, has published four short story collections and one novel, as well as booklets on Jack Schaefer and William Eastlake. He has edited three anthologies, Forgotten Pages of American Literature (1969), Western Writing (1974), and (with James D. Houston) California Heartland (1978). James D. Houston is the author of Continental Drift (1978), and edited the Bantam collection, West Coast Fiction (1979). His non-fiction narrative, Californians: Searching for the Golden State, appeared in 1982. He lives in Santa Cruz. Kenneth B. Hunsaker, Professor of English at Utah State University since 1974, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation (Pennsylvania State University, 1968) on the twentieth-century Mormon novel. Arthur R. Huseboe, Chairman of Humanities and Professor of English at Augustana College, has edited three books: Where the West Begins (1978), Big Sioux Pioneers (1980), and Siouxland Heritage (1982). He is completing a study of Herbert Krause. W. H. Hutchinson, Professor Emeritus at California State University, Chico, is the biographer and bibliographer of Eugene M. Rhodes and W. H. D. Koerner, and author of several other books and articles on California and the West. Michael Koury lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, and operates the Old Army Press. Earle Labor, Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana, is the editor of Great Short Works of Jack London (1965, 1970), author of Jack London (1974), and co-editor of The Letters of Jack London (forthcoming). James W. Lee served as editor of the Southwest Writers Series (196774) and editor of the quarterly Studies in the Novel (196976). He is Professor of English at North Texas State University. William J. Lockwood has published articles on Robert Bly, Richard Hugo, Ed Dorn, and Kenneth Rexroth. He is currently writing a book on the idea of place among contemporary American poets. Glen A. Love is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is author of New Americans: The Westerner and the Modern Experience in the American Novel (1982), and other studies on western American writers. Thomas J. Lyon has taught at Utah State University since 1964, and has edited Western American Literature since 1974. Dennis McNally (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts), has published a biography of Jack Kerouac, Desolate Angel (1979). He is at work on a history of the San Francisco of the 1960s and is Archivist for concert promoter Bill Graham. James H. Maguire is Associate Professor of English at Boise State University, where
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CONTRIBUTORS
he has served as co-editor of the Western Writers Series since 1972. He was President of the Western Literature Association in 1981. Michael T. Marsden, Professor of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, is Co-Editor of the Journal of Popular Film and Television and author or editor of a number of works on popular western literature and film. Roy W. Meyer (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is Professor of English at Mankato State University. He is author of The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century; History of the Santee Sioux; and The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri. Patrick D. Morrow, Professor of English and Associate Editor of Southern Humanities Review at Auburn University, is the author of Bret Harte, Literary Critic, and numerous papers and articles on western American literature. Christer Lennart Mossberg teaches at the University of Oregon. He is the author of several articles on Scandinavian-American literature, as well as a monograph on the subject for the Western Writers Series. John J. Murphy teaches at Brigham Young University and has published in American Literature, Western American Literature, Prairie Schooner, Great Plains Quarterly, and other journals. He contributes the annual essay Fiction: 1900 1930s to American Literary Scholarship. Jack Nachbar is Professor of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches American film and popular literature. He is author or editor of two books on popular Westerns and is Co-Editor of the Journal of Popular Film and Television. Jane Nelson studied the literature of the American West at the University of Wyoming (B.A., 1969) and the University of Utah (Ph.D., 1976). From 1977 to 1982 she taught at Texas A&M University, and now teaches at the University of Wyoming. Raymund A. Paredes is Associate Professor of English at UCLA. He has edited two books, Mexican American Authors and New Directions in Chicano Scholarship, and has written numerous articles on Chicano Literature and U.S. attitudes toward Mexicans. Paul N. Pavich teaches at Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado. During the past decade he has been collecting trickster stories among the Chippewa and Sioux. He is currently writing a monograph on Joseph Wood Krutch. Levi S. Peterson is Professor of English at Weber State College. His doctoral dissertation was the first submitted at the University of Utah to deal with western literature. He is author of a collection of western stories, The Canyons of Grace (1982). William T. Pilkington is Professor of English at Tarleton State University, Stephenville, Texas. His books include My Bloods Country: Studies in Southwestern Fiction and Imagining Texas: The Literature of the Lone Star State. He is coeditor of Texas Books in Review. J. Russell Roberts, Sr. (Ph.D., University of Washington), is Professor Emeritus at Pacific University. He has published widely on American and European literature. Born in Montana in 1903, the son of pioneer settlers, he taught at Pacific University from 1949 to 1974.
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A Literary History of the American West Lou Rodenberger teaches English at McMurry College. She has published several articles on southwestern literature and is editor of the collection of short fiction, Her Work: Stories by Texas Women. Ann Ronald is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of The New West of Edward Abbey and Zane Grey, and of numerous articles and reviews about women and the American West. Morton L. Ross is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. He has published widely on American literature and more narrowly on Canadian letters. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She has published critical and bibliographic articles on Indian writers, and has directed NEH summer seminars (1979, 1983) on American Indian literatures. Mark Siegel teaches contemporary literature and popular culture at the University of Wyoming. He is the author of seven books and over twenty articles on these subjects. Douglas Smith, who teaches film and literature at the University of Manitoba, is the author of four books of poetry: Thaw, Scarecrow, The Light of Our Bones, and Living in the Cave of the Mouth. Patricia Clark Smith (Ph.D., Yale) is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She has taught composition and poetry workshops on the Navaho Reservation and is a contributor to a book about southwestern women artists and landscape (in progress). Helen Winter Stauffer, Professor of English at Kearney State College, published her biography of Mari Sandoz in 1982. She is also Co-Editor, with Susan J. Rosowski, of Women in Western American Literature (1982). Kent L. Steckmesser is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles, and the author of The Western Hero in History and Legend and The Westward Movement: A Short History. Wallace Stegner has taught at Utah, Wisconsin, Harvard, and Stanford, and is the author of numerous novels as well as histories and biographies. These last include The Uneasy Chair, a biography of Bernard DeVoto. Frederick C. Stern (Ph.D., Purdue University) teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic ( 1981), and numerous articles on modern English and American literature. He lives in Gary, Indiana. J. Golden Taylor (19121982) taught at Brigham Young University, Utah State University, and Colorado State University. He edited Great Short Stories of the American West, the anthology The Literature of the American West, and was founder of the Western Literature Association and its journal, Western American Literature. He was the Editor-in-Chief and moving spirit behind the present work. Barre Toelken teaches folklore at Utah State University. Formerly editor of Journal of American Folklore, he is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Tom Trusky is Associate Professor of English at Boise State University. He is the
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CONTRIBUTORS
founder and Co-Editor of Ahsahta Press, and founder and adviser of Cold-Drill, the Boise State University literary magazine. Kermit Vanderbilt (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is the author of books on W. D. Howells and C. E. Norton. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is teacher of American literature at San Diego State University. Ben Merchant Vorpahl teaches American literature at the University of Georgia. His most recent books are My Dear Wister: The Frederic Remington-Owen Wister Letters, and Frederic Remington and the West: With the Eye of the Mind. He is completing a study of the traveler in American romantic thought. Max Westbrook, Professor of English at the University of Texas, is the author of Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1969), numerous essays on American literature, two books of poetry (Country Boy, 1979, and Confrontations, 1983) and a chap book of humorous sketches, For Whom the Bell Rings (1983). Robert C. Wright (19211980) taught at Mankato State University, where he was chairman of the English Department for many years. He wrote the Twayne United States Authors Series book, Frederick Manfred (1979). Delbert E. Deb Wylder (Ph.D., University of Iowa), taught southwestern literature at the University of New Mexico, and helped to found the Western Literature Association and Western American Literature. He has published Hemingways Heroes and Emerson Hough, and articles on Hough, Eastlake, Abbey, and Manfred. He now teaches at Murray State University.
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INDEX
Abbey, Edward, 136, 222, 255256, 377, 510, 530, 592, 604609, 1019, 1021, 1182, 1193, 1246 1247, 1257, 1305, 1315 Abernethy, Francis E., 538, 543 Abrahams, William, 1163, 1173 Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 1110 1112 Adamic, Louis, 402 Adams, Alice, 327 Adams, Andy, 307, 501, 524525, 526, 601, 835, 1304, 1315 Adams, Charles L., 949 Adams, Henry, 285, 992, 993994, 997 Adams, James Truslow, 285 Adams, Ramon F., 500 Adams, Randolph G., 5 Adams, William Lysander, 205 Adeler, Max, 850 Adkins, Nelson, 749 Afro-Americans in the West, 1026; folklore of, 1141; literature of, 11391146, 1241; in white fiction, 589 Agee, James, 436 Ager, Waldemar, 718, 723 Agrarianism, 389391, 648 649, 826 Ahsahta Press, 138 Aiiieeeee!, 1031, 1032, 1034, 1132 Aimard, Gustave, 169, 173 Alaska, 182, 211, 244246, 331, 12491251 Albee, Richard, 428, 433
Alberta, 10101011 Aldrich, Bess Streeter, 652, 674 Aldrich, Robert, 1259 Aldridge, John, 777 Alger, Horatio, 381 Algren, Nelson, 1312 Allee, W. C., 427 Allegory 439, 475, 771 Allen, Henry Wilson, 113, 128, 130, 156, 1277 Allen, James Sloan, 1162 Allen, John Houghton, 628 Allen, Paula Gunn, 1075 1076, 1192 Allen, William, 285 Alsop, Richard, 1003 Alter, J. Cecil, 85 Altman, Robert, 1275 Altrocchi, Julia Cooley, 191 Alurista, 631632, 1212, 1215 Aly, Lucile, 750 American Folklore Society, 106 American Historical Association, 273, 277, 284287 Ames, Nathaniel, 1283 Ammons, A. R., 888 Anania, Michael, 810, 1167, 1168 Anarchism, 484, 486, 489, 606, 607 Anaya, Rudolfo, 512, 632, 1030, 11091110, 1182, 1194, 1307 Andersen, Hans Christian, 1149 Anderson, G. M., 266 Anderson, Judith, 402, 403 Anderson, Margaret, 1171
Anderson, Maxwell, 213 Anderson, Nephi, 850 Anderson, Sherwood, 637, 654, 671, 866, 997, 1298, 1299, 1301 Angelou, Maya, 1145 Anthropology, 567570 Apaches, 14, 15, 106, 107, 113, 625, 626, 1054 1055 Apple, Max, 512 Applegarth, Mabel, 382 Arce, Julio, 1088 Arias, Ronald, 338 Aristotle, 419, 487, 489 Arizona, 107, 112, 253254, 291, 359, 364366; in fiction, 524, 607, 609, 625, 628; Tucson, 1093 1095 Arkansas River, 224 Armato, Philip M., 216 Armenian-American literature and culture, 332, 472 479, 1033 Armes, George A., 108 Armitage, Sue, 1179 Arness, James, 1269 Arnett, Carroll, 1067, 1068 Arnold, Ben, 109 Arthur, Anthony, 751 Ashley, William H., 8087, 92, 97, 646, 745 Ashliman, D. L., 161 Askevold, Bernt, 1150 Assiniboines, 1054 Astor, John Jacob, 80, 85, 1003 Astrov, Margot, 21 Athearn, Robert G., 89 Atherton, Gertrude, 330, 354,
1330
INDEX
1090, 1179, 1300 Atlantic Monthly, 305, 346, 348, 515 Attaway, William, 1143 Auden, W. H., 403, 873 August, John. See DeVoto, Bernard Augustana College, 720, 730 Aurora Colony (Oregon), 34, 60 Auslander, Joseph, 195 Austen, Jane, 148, 1288 Austin, Mary Hunter, 1122 23, 136, 181, 187, 188, 209, 221, 222, 237239, 251, 312, 354, 359366, 424, 502, 626, 1179, 1180, 1246, 1300, 1305, 1307 Autry, Gene, 267, 1264, 1265 Aydelotte, Dora, 674 Ayumi 1131 Babb, Jewel, 1179 Babbitt, Irving, 748 Baen, James, 1195 Bailey, Paul Dayton, 853, 854 Baines, Bill, 1186 Baja California, 251252, 253 Baker, George Pierce, 209 Baker, Howard, 1309, 1310 Baker, Karle Wilson, 1163 Baker, Paul, 1232, 1237, 1239 Balakian, Nona, 475, 476 Ballantyne, Robert M., 170 Baloian, James, 1033 Bamford, Frederick Irons, 385 Bancroft, H. H., 1089 Bandelier, Adolph, 500 Bannock War (1878), 1040 Baranov, A. A., 182 Barbeau, Marius, 1006 Barker, David, 1212 Barker, S. Omar, 187 Barlow, John, 482 Barnard, Mary, 181, 191 Barnes, Clive, 1233 Barnett, Louise K., 1311 Barney, William, 1021, 1222 Barth, John, 781 Bartlett, A. Jennie, 850 Bartlett, W. C., 350 Bartlett, W. S., 306 Barzun, Jacques, 1180 Basque-Americans, 31, 841, 1033
Bass, Milton, 531 Bass, Sam, 120, 122, 123 Baum, L. Frank, 137 Beach, Rex, 267, 516, 519 Beadle, John Hansen, 850 Beadles American Library, 170, 171, 175 Beale, Edward, 361 Bean, Amelia, 129, 856 Bean, Ellis, 624 Beard, James F., 151 Beat Movement, 138, 335 336, 354, 482493 1312 Beaubien, Carlos, 553 Beckett, Samuel, 1235 Becknell, William, 6 Beckwourth, Jim, 81, 83, 85, 89, 349, 745, 1139, 1191 Bede, the Venerable, 981982 Bedichek, Roy, 247249, 250, 504505, 543, 1311 Beers, Lorna Doone, 672673 Begg, Alexander, 1008 Belnyi, Ferenc, 167 Belasco, David, 207208, 1240 Belisle, Orvilla S., 849 Belknap, Arthur, 4849 Bell, James Madison, 344 Bell, Sidney, 853 Bellamy, Ralph, 402 Bellow, Saul, 781, 1194 Benavides, Alonso de, 5 Bent, Stephen Vincent, 448, 729 Bent, William Rose, 402, 749 Bennett, Emerson, 136 Bennett, John, 1170 Bennett, Melba, 400 Benson, Jackson, 436 Bent, Charles, 83, 8889 Bent, George, 83, 89 Bent, William, 83, 8889 Bents Fort, 8889, 94, 95 Bentley, Eric, 474 Benton, Thomas Hart (painter), 668 Benton, Thomas Hart (senator), 313 Berge, Carol, 1174 Berger, Thomas, 115, 128, 592, 1021, 1182, 1312 Berkeley, George, Bishop of Cloyne, 141, 142 Berlin, Irving, 215
Berry, Don, 336, 1003, 1005 Bessai, Diane, 1O1O Beston, Henry, 221, 222, 250 Betzinez, Jason, 1054 Bible, 407, 409410, 440, 794, 798 Bidart, Frank, 1145, 1213 Biddle, Nicholas, 74 Bierce, Ambrose, 7, 308, 330, 339, 352353, 362, 1297 Bigelow, John, Jr., 107 Bigfoot (Sasquatch), 5456 Bilingualism, 1067, 1085, 1092, 1094, 12151216 Billings, Josh, 1291, 1298 Billington, Ray Allen, 160, 167168, 303, 1140 Billy the Kid, 121, 124, 127 128, 129, 508, 1185, 1272 Binns, Archie, 332, 1006 Bird, Leonard, 1170, 1184 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 144 Birney, Earle, 1007, 1008 Birney, Hoffman, 854 Bishop, Morris, 623 Bissett, Bill, 1008 Bjrnson, Bjrnsjerne, 721, 1149, 1150, 1295 Black, W. E., 751 Black Elk (Sioux), 19, 455, 579, 646, 747, 750751, 1069 Black Mountain College, 484 Blackfeet, 18, 1049 Blacks. See Afro-Americans Blake, Eleanor, 674 Blake, Forrester, 856, 1310 Blake, William, 487, 1312 Blaser, Robin, 1007 Blaustein, John, 608 Blish, James, 1194 Blom, Frans, 567 Bloodworth, William, 136 Bloom, John Porter, 77 Blue Cloud, Peter, 1029 Bly, Robert, 659, 660, 810, 813817 Boas, Franz, 22, 1006, 1054 Boatright, Mody C., 50, 520, 597 Bode, Elroy, 153, 630631 Boetticher, Budd, 270, 1257, 1258 Bogan, Louise, 449 Bogdanovich, Peter, 615
1331

Bohemian Club (San Francisco), 353354 Boileau-Despraux, Nicolas, 428 Bojer, Johan, 723 Bolton, Herbert, 303 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 72 Bonilla, Francisco Leiva, 4 Bonner, T. D., 85, 745 Bonneville, Benjamin Louis Eulalie de, 80, 829, 908, 1004 Bonney, Orrin H. and Lorraine, 90 Bonnin, Gertrude, 1044 Bontemps, Arna, 1141, 1142 Boodin, John Elof, 748 Boone, Daniel, 313, 915, 916, 919 Borges, Jorge Luis, 1105, 1194 Boston, 665 Botkin, B. A., 9, 50, 578, 1309 Boulder Dam, 238 Bourke, John Gregory, 106 Bowen, Catherine Drinker, 906 Bower, B.M., 153, 517, 835 Bowering, George, 1007 Bowie, David, 492 Bowles, Samuel, 830 Boyd, William, 267, 1265 Boyers, Robert, 1172 Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 717 Boyle, Kay, 354, 1181 Boynton, Percy H., 1300 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 149, 12831284 Bradbury, Ray, 1195 Bradford, Daniel, 1286 Bradford, Richard, 1182, 1188 Bradford, William, 5, 68, 143, 498 Braithwaite, W. S., 181 Brammer, William, 1312 Branch, Douglas, 523, 527 Branch, Houston, 942, 943 Brand, Max, 125126, 128, 130, 156, 520, 1276 Brando, Marlon, 1275 Brandon, William, 21 Brannan, Sam, 347 Brauer, Ralph, 140, 1268 Brautigan, Richard, 69, 328, 337, 1017, 1020, 1190 Braverman, Kate, 1212 Bread Loaf Writers Conference, 729, 902, 920 Brebner, John Barlet, 1004 Brett, George, 388 Brewer, J. Mason, 1032, 1095, 1141, 1146 Brewer, William Henry, 228, 230231, 232, 234 Bridger, Jim, 56, 81, 8586, 92, 892, 908 Bridges, Harry, 484 Brininstool, E. A., 1045 British Columbia, 10051007 Brito, Aristeo, 512 Broadway, 138, 212, 213, 215, 216, 475476, 1232 1233, 1237 Brooks, Cleanth, 1309 Brooks, George R., 87 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 1143 Brooks, Juanita, 42, 838 Brooks, Noah, 350 Brooks, Paul, 1246 Brooks, Van Wyck, 402, 899, 901, 1298, 1301, 1302, 1305 Brougham, John, 1039 Brown, Charles Brockden, 144, 1283, 1285 Brown, Dee, 1191 Brown, Henry, 123 Brown, John Mason, 475, 476 Brown, Marilyn, 857 Brown, Maurice F., 209 Brown, Valentine, 197198 Browne, J. Ross, 90, 625 Browne, Lina Fergusson, 90 Browning, Robert, 347 Brownson, Orestes, 1289 Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 1112 Brunvand, Jan H., 54 Bryant, William Cullen, 642, 1285, 1288 Bryce, James, Viscount Bryce, 90 Buchanan, Robert, 196 Buckley, William, 1270 Buddhism, 482483, 486, 488493, 843 Bukowski, Charles, 1168, 1212 Bullins, Ed, 1021, 1033, 1146, 1164, 1241 Bulosan, Carlos, 1032, 1125 1126 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 849, 1295 Bunyan, Paul, 50, 448, 1235 Burbank, Luther, 389 Burke, Kenneth, 449 Burkman, John, 109 Burnett, Peter H., 1004 Burns, Jerry, 1172 Burns, Robert, 1046, 1047 Burns, Walter Noble, 120, 124 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 520 Burroughs, John, 232, 1297 Burroughs, William, 485, 489 Buslett, Ole A., 718, 1150 Byer, Douglas, 568 Bynner, Witter, 187, 190, 501, 577 Byrd, William, 276, 281, 293, 294, 329 Byrne, Donn, 426 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 344, 1038, 1051, 1283, 1286, 1295 Cabell, James Branch, 426 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nez, 4, 497, 623, 638, 1081, 1314 Cable, George Washington, 304 Cabrillo, Juan Rodriguez, 328 Cady, Edwin H., 321 Cagney, James, 402 Cain, James M., 137, 1304 Caldern de la Barca, Pedro, 1079 California, history and description, 77, 86, 230 232, 237238, 328, 359, 361362, 407409, 424425, 623, 625626, 1027, 1119; literature of, 181, 206, 311312, 330336,339355, 381392,399403, 424440, 472475, 482493, 978980, 10381039, 11011103, 1145, 1183, 12081218; Carmel, 362, 400403, 424; San Joaquin Valley, 330, 336, 374, 474475, 1101, 1145, 12131215. See also Los Angeles; San Francisco
1332
INDEX
California 341, 343, 345, 1294 Callenbach, Ernest, 487, 1173 Calverton, V. F., 13001301 Calvin, Ross, 496, 506, 548 Calvinism, 972 Cambridge University, 535, 539540 Cameahwait (Shoshoni), 78 Campbell, Bartley, 206 Campbell, Joseph, 428 Canada, history, 638; literature, 10001011 Cannon, Blanche, 855 Canton, Frank, 123 Cantwell, Robert, 330, 1006 Capilano, Chief Joseph, 1006 Capote, Truman, 601 Capps, Benjamin, 510, 527 530, 597602, 990, 1188 Cardenal, Ernesto, 354 Crdenas de Dwyer, Carlota, 1030 Carey, Alice, 664 Carlisle Indian School, 1045, 1049, 1055 Carmichael, Sarah E., 196 Carpenter, Bill, 743, 744, 745 Carpenter, Will Tom, 500 Carpentier, Alejo, 1194 Carrington, Frances C., 112 Carrington, Henry B., 112 Carrington, Margaret I., 112 Carroll, John M., 105 Carson, Kit, 83, 85, 88, 89, 313, 879, 892 Carter, Harvey Lewis, 88 Cartier, Jacques, 906 Cartwright, Gary, 511 Carver, Raymond, 153, 1020, 1023, 11851186 Cassady, Neal, 483, 485 Cassidy, Butch. See Parker, Robert Leroy Cassidy, George W., 345 Castaneda, Carlos, 492, 1030 Castaeda, Pedro de, 498, 638, 1081 Castao de Sosa, 4 Cather, Willa, 136, 137, 155, 321 322, 503, 576577, 637, 650, 655, 656, 668, 669, 686706, 773, 905, 994, 1180, 1299, 2302 1303; critical reception
of, 307, 658, 706, 772, 793, 793, 13011302 1305, 1307, 1308, 1313, 1314 Catholicism, 485, 489, 490, 701705, 10961097, 1106, 1125 Catlin, George, 291, 1004 Cawelti, John G., 766, 1000, 1263, 1270, 1313 Century, 292, 515 Cerf, Bennett, 402 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 1115 Cervantes, Miguel de, 1079 Chacn, Eusabio, 1089 Chadwick, H. M., 745 Chambers, Pat, 435 Chamuscado, Francisco Sanchez, 4 Chan, Diane, 1032 Chandler, Raymond, 137, 333334, 1184 Chang, Diana, 1129 Channing, Edward Tyrrell, 1284 Channing, Walter, 1284, 1285 Chaplin, Charlie, 402 Charbonneau, Baptiste, 78, 92 Chase, Mary, 215 Chateaubriand, FrancoisRen, Vicomte de, 160, 161, 168, 173, 1288 Chatillon, Henry, 83, 9596 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 540 Chvez, Csar, 110I Chavez, Fray Angelico, 187, 194, 501 Chekhov, Anton, 209 Cherokees, 419, 1038, 1050, 1053 Cheyennes, 89, 769 Chicago, 637, 691, 1297 Chicano as a term, 1027, 1093, 1095, 1096. See also Mexican-American culture Childhood in literature, 448 451, 453454, 560 Childrens literature, 137, 341, 928, 958, 1044 Chin, Frank, 354, 1027, 1032, 11291130, 1132, 1241 Chinese-American literature and Culture, 3234, 43, 337, 350 1027, 1031
1032, 11191122, 1128 1130, 1241 Chisholm Trail, 305 Chittenden, Hiram M., 80, 82, 744 Choate, Julian E., 523 Chona, Maria, 18, 19 Chopin, Kate, 340 Chouteau, Auguste Pierre, 92 Christian, Paula, 1175 Chu, Louis, 1031, 1121, 1129 Church, Peggy Pond, 180, 181, 187190, 192, 194, 196 Cimino, Michael, 1260, 1276 Cino, Joe, 1237 Cisneros, Sandra, 1116 City Lights Bookstore, 485, 815 Civil Rights movement, 332, 1022, 1101, 1167, 1233 Civil War, 324, 383, 419, 905, 906, 907, 943944 Clark, Barrett H., 210, 212 Clark, Ella E., 77 Clark, James Freeman, 1288 Clark, Tom, 1220 Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, 153, 156, 322, 421, 458, 839, 989998, 1019, 1187, 13061308, 1310, 1313, 1314 Clark, William, 11, 75, 77, 915. See also Lewis and Clark expedition Clarke, Charles G., 78 Cleaveland, Agnes Morley, 500 Cleland, Robert Glass, 626 Clifton, Merritt, 1180 Clough, Wilson O., 192 Coates, Grace Stone, 191, 674 Cobb, Irvin, 402 Coburn, D. L., 1239 Cochise (Apache chief), 569 Cody, William F. Buffalo Bill, 121, 167, 170, 207, 313, 769 Coggeshall, William T., 1289 Colcord, Lincoln, 721, 723, 726, 727 Cold War, 1267, 1270 Coleman, Arthur L., 1095 Coleman, Bernard, 16 Coleman, Rufus A., 839
1333

Coleman, Wanda, 1033, 1146, 1212 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 119 Colfax, Schuyler, 830 Collins, Caspar, 86, 90 Collins, Tom, 436 Colorado, 182, 824, 825, 830, 833,838 Colquitt, Betsy, 1223 Colter John, 79, 81, 83, 914, 927 Columbus, Christopher, 906, 910, 1026 Comanches, 598599 Comfort, Will Levington, 1305 Commerce, frontier, 282285, 551555, 824828 Communism, 484, 485, 657, 659, 810, 899, 902903, 973, 13001301, 1303 Confucius, 489 Conkle, E. P., 138, 211 Connelly, Marc, 211 Connor, Ralph, 1009, 1011 Conrad, Joseph, 486, 772 Conservation and environmentalism, 238, 242 245, 249250, 255256, 320, 604609, 666, 880, 904, 961962, 967969, 1165, 1182, 1192, 1246, 12511252 Conybeare, W. J., 849 Cook, James, 1002 Cook, Jim (Lane), 305306 Cook, Ralph, 1234 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 1058, 1062 Cooke, Marjorie B., 519 Coolbrith, Ina, 181, 183, 308, 330, 340, 349350, 352, 1179 Cooley, Dennis, 1010 Coolidge, Dane, 853 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 748, 1299 Cooper, David J., 12491250 Cooper, Gary, 268, 270 Cooper, James Fenimore, 136, 144151, 154155, 160161, 162, 169, 170, 274, 276, 291, 313, 515, 640641, 702704, 719, 793, 1149, 1182, 1188, 12851295, 1311 Cooperman, Stanley, 1007 Copland, Aaron, 127 Corbin, Alice, 180, 181, 187, 188, 194, 195, 501 Corey, Paul, 677679, 681 Corle, Edwin, 128, 507508, 1314 Corning, Howard McKinley, 191 Coronado, Francisco Vsquez de, 4, 498, 638, 906 Cortez, Gregorio, 631, 1084 Cortez, Hernando, 328, 1026 Cortez, Santos, 536537 Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno, 1083 Coser, Lewis A., 1162 Coues, Elliott, 74, 1001 Coulter, John, 1009 Counter-culture, 482493, 1017 Covici, Pascal, 430 Cowboys and ranching, 278 281, 499502 535538, 542, 626628, 827828, 1314; in fiction, 501 502, 515521, 523532 601602, 604605, 612613, 924925, 962963, 965966, 12351236; folklore of, 3031, 39, 4345, 504, 537538 Cowley, Malcolm, 9, 899, 903 Cox, Ross, 1003 Coyner, David H., 136 Craig, Nancy, 466 Cramer, Zadoc, 1286 Crane, Stephen, 370, 627, 837, 1311 Crashing Thunder (Winnebago), 19 Crawford, John Wallace, 207 Crawford, Lewis, 109 Crawley, Alan, 1007 Crazy Horse, 99, 455, 460, 486, 646, 647, 732, 744, 768769, 772 Creeks (tribe), 1046 Creeley, Robert, 1007, 1227 Crespi, Juan, 329 Crvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 142143, 223, 314, 1283 Crockett, David, 1300 Cronyn, George, 21 Crook, George, 106, 107, 111, 455, 768 Cross, Wilbur, 701 Crowell, Grace Nell, 1163 Cruze, James, 268 Cuelho, Art, 1214 Culp, John, 529 Culp, Robert, 1259 Cunningham, Eugene, 520 Cunningham, J. V., 1309 Curry, John Steuart, 668 Curti, Merle, 287 Curtin, Jeremiah, 22 Curtis, Jack, 1192 Curtis, Natalie, 21 Curtiz, Michael, 268 Curwood, James Oliver, 1011 Cushing, Frank, 22, 310 Custer, Elizabeth Bacon, 110, 111 Custer, George Armstrong, 92, 104, 105, 108111, 455, 732, 768, 769, 1046; in fiction, 113, 114115, 1191, 1272 Cutler, Manasseh, 639 Cutright, Paul Russell, 75 Daggett, Joe, 344 Dale, Harrison Clifford, 744 Dali, Salvador, 402 Dallas Theater Center, 1232, 1234, 1237, 12381239 Daltongang, 120, 129, 1191 Daly, Augustin, 206 Dan, Adam, 11511152 Dana, Richard Henry, 77, 90, 329 Daniells, Roy, 1008 Dante, 419, 463, 1295 Daro, Ruben, 1087 Dartmouth College, 1044 Daves, Delmer, 270 Davey, Frank, 1007 Davidson, Gordon, 1239, 1240 Davidson, Jo, 402 Davidson, Levette J., 323 Davis, Britton, 107 Davis, Elmer, 903 Davis, H. L., 181, 192, 327, 332, 416421, 887, 1005, 1306, 1308
1334
INDEX
Davis, Richard Harding, 370 Davis, Terry, 1192 Dawson, Cleo, 628 Day, A. Grove, 21, 1028 Day, James M., 114 Day, Robert, 528 De Angelo, Jaime, 485 Decker, Caroline, 435 Decker, William, 529, 531 Deep Image movement, 814 De Frees, Madeline, 1211 Delane, John T., 92 Delano, Alonzo, 206 Dell, Floyd, 873 Deloria, Ella, 1042, 1054 Deloria, Vine, 748, 1027, 1055 DeMille, Cecil B., 268 Derby, George Horatio, 344, 1289 Derleth, August, 727 Desert Land Act (1877), 826 De Smet, Pierre-Jean, 86, 93, 830, 1004 Detective fiction, 137, 333 335, 927, 1193 Deutsch, Babette, 400 DeVoto, Bernard, xvi, 6, 7374, 83, 918 95, 171, 322, 515, 837, 852, 879, 899910, 984, 1301 1302, 1304, 1308, 1314 Dialect, 206, 420, 509, 516, 561564, 781, 868, 1067 Dickens, Charles, 347, 1149, 1292 Dickey, James, 1189 Dickinson, Emily, 833, 1018 Didion, Joan, 334335, 1020, 1023, 1027, 1163, 1179, 1180, 1183 Dillard, Annie, 1166 Dimenovels, 120122, 128, 130, 136, 155, 156, 170, 207, 266, 274, 373374, 515, 523, 1038, 1276 1277, 12941297, 1304 Dimsdale, Thomas J., 70, 830831 Dinesen, Isak, 982 Dippie, Brian, 105 Disney, Walt, 1266 Doane, Gustavus Cheney, 90, 110 Dobie, J. Frank, 50, 247248,
250, 273, 310, 323, 500 502, 503506, 515, 523 524, 535543, 548, 554, 559, 564, 627, 1095, 1141, 1304, 1311, 1314 Dobie, Jim, 536537 Doctorow, E. L., 1182 Dodge, Grenville M., 86 Dokey, Richard, 1185 Dolliver, Clara, 342 Donato, Pietro di, 1052 Dondore, Dorothy Anne, 1299 Donner party, 878, 908 Donovan, Josephine, 674 Dorantes, Esteban de, 1026, 1139 Dorn, Ed, 484, 1168, 1203, 12181220 Dorson, Richard, 50 Dos Passos, John, 637, 675 Doten, Alfred, 992 Doty, Carolyn, 1192 Douglas, Kirk, 1257 Dowden, Edward, 1295 Downey, Fairfax, 105 Downey, Stephen W., 832 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 850 Drake, Daniel, 1287 Drake, Sir Francis, 5, 71 Dreiser, Theodore, 587, 637, 772, 837,871, 1292, 1299, 13001301 Dresbach, Glenn Ward, 501 Drouillard, George, 83 Drumm, Stella M., 94 Drury, Allen, 856, 857 Dubois, Arthur E., 361 Duffy, William, 813 Duncan, Isadora, 350 Duncan, Robert, 484, 1007, 1218 Dunn, J. Allan, 520 Dunn, Jacob P., 744 Dunne, John Gregory, 335 Dunne, Peter Finley, 1047 Dunraven, Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, 4th Earl of, 93 Duplessis, Paul, 168 Durgan, Milly, 598 Durham, Philip, 137, 1026, 1140 Dust Bowl, 211, 436, 437, 794 Dutton, Clarence E., 5, 228,
232234, 240, 976 Duval, John C., 306, 311, 499, 625 Dylan, Bob, 492 Eagle Elk (Sioux), 749 Earp, Wyatt, 126, 129130, 269, 937938, 1266, 1272 East and West, xvi, 141, 144, 518519, 575, 577, 582, 667, 757, 865, 877, 973, 983, 1183, 1208, 1296 Eastlake, Martha Simpson, 587588 Eastlake, William, 156, 587 593, 10171019, 1182, 1184, 1192, 1312 Eastman, Charles, 1029, 10431044 Eastwood, Clint, xvi, 1258, 1261, 1271, 1272 Eaton, Edith, 1121 Eaton, Geoffrey Dell, 670 671 Eberhart, Richard, 403, 465 Eddington, Arthur, 748 Eden, America as, 4, 142 144, 147, 160, 420, 795, 1149 Edmonds, Margot, 78 Edwards, Jonathan, 143 Egan, Feral, 77 Eggleston, Edward, 664, 1290, 1291, 1293, 1294, 1297 Eide, Ingvard Henry, 7273 Einstein, Albert, 164 Ekelf, Gunnar, 813, 817 Elder, Gary, 1022, 1184 Eliade, Mircea, 1314 Eliot, T. S., 214, 320, 325, 637,1220 Ellison, Ralph, 1032, 1143 Ellmann, Richard, 887 Embry, Sue Kumitomi, 1131 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 305, 360, 541, 904, 959961, 1285, 1288, 1292 Emmett, Chris, 500 Endrezze, Anita, 1029 Engle, Paul, 458 English, Thomas Dunn, 205 Environmentalism. See Conservation and environmentalism
1335

Epic fiction, 373377, 436, 520, 551, 1295; film 268269; poetry 455, 744747, 749 Erdman, Loula Grace, 506 Erhard, Thomas A., 212 Ertz, Susan, 853, 1311 Espejo, Antonio de, 4 Espinosa, Aurelio M., 1090 Ethnic groups in the West, xvii, 3034, 332333, 337338, 474, 496497, 10261036. See also individual groups by name Etulain, Richard W., 275, 1033, 1035, 11871188, 1190, 1315 European attitudes toward the West, 9093, 159173, 352 Evans, Dale, 1264 Evans,Max, 506, 531, 1021, 1182, 1184 Evans, Robley, 1193 Evans, Tabor, 1278 Evans, Walker, 436 Evans-Wentz, W. Y., 949 Everett, Edward, 1286 Everson, William K., 266, 327, 398, 1145, 1208, 1209, 1213, 1312 Ewert, Theodore, 109110 Exploration and settlement, Spanish, 45, 496498, 623, 639, 1079, 1081; French, 638639; 18th century, 276, 281, 1001 1002; 19th century, 5, 7199, 221230, 282, 498499, 639642, 646650, 743746, 799, 801, 849, 906910, 913916, 919924, 10031005, 10081009; surveys and mapping, 9698, 228233 Fairbairn, A. M. D., 1006 Fallersleben, August Heinrich Hoffmann von, 166 Family chronicle fiction, 676 678, 679, 868869, 939, 947, 973974, 984986, 11541157 Fante, John, 1035 Farfn, Marcos, 1079 Farina, Richard, 354 Farm life and culture, 637, 649653, 659660, 664681, 686689, 691694, 705706, 794796 866869, 1148, 11511157 Farm workers. See Labor movement Farnham, Thomas J., 93 Farrar, John, 940 Farrell, James T., 678, 1052 Fascism, 539 Fatout, Paul, 345 Faulkner, William, xvi, xvii, XVIII, 333, 425, 447, 547, 553, 592, 686, 771, 781, 793, 881, 997, 1194, 1240, 1308 Faulks, Odie B., 105 Faust, Frederick. See Brand, Max Favour, Alpheus H., 84 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 899, 904 Federal Resettlement Administration, 436 Federal Theatre projects, 211 Federal Writers Project, 838, 865, 876 Feltskog, E. N., 96 Feminism, 209, 362, 668, 1075, 1115, 1116, 1163 1164, 11781181, 1211 Fenin, George N., 266 Fenn, G. Manville, 172 Ferber, Edna, 1311 Ferber, Ellen, 1169 Fergusson, Erna, 579580, 1163 Fergusson, Harvey, 170, 310, 546556, 577, 579, 990, 1019, 1305, 1307, 1310, 1313, 1314 Fergusson, Harvey Butler, 546 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 335, 354, 485, 1168, 1209 1211, 1219, 1220, 1237, 1312 Ferne, Doris, 1008 Ferril, Thomas Hornsby, 137, 181, 186, 191, 198, 837, 887895, 1168, 1306, 1309 Ferry, Gabriel, 168, 173 Fey, Harold E., 1053 Fiedler, Leslie, 779, 842, 1022,11871190,1312 Field, Matthew C., 93 Field, Peter, 127 Fields, Jonathan, 679680 Fife, Austin, 37, 42 Filipino-American literature andculture, 1032, 1125 1127, 1132 Finch, Robert, 215 Finerty, John F., 110111 Fink, Mike, 743, 744, 745 Finlayson, Duncan, 1003 Finn, Benjamin Franklin, 48 49 Fire, John (Lame Deer), 19 Fischer, Christiane, 1179 Fischer, John, 899 Fisher, Clay. See Allen, Henry Wilson Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 729 Fisher, Vardis, 144, 167, 322, 323, 837, 838, 853854, 857, 862881, 972, 974, 975, 976, 984, 985, 990, 1003, 1182, 1185, 1305 1306, 1308, 1310, 1313, 1314 Fitzell, Lincoln, 192 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 333, 334, 372, 547, 637, 973974, 1304 Fitzgerald, John D., 856 Fitzpatrick, Thomas, 83, 85, 879, 908 Flanagan, John T., 77, 637, 750 Flanner, Hildegarde, 180, 181, 188, 190191, 192, 1211 Flaubert, Gustave, 426 Fleck, Richard, 1191 Fleming, Victor, 268 Fletcher, Alice, 22, 1042 Fletcher, Colin, 254 Fletcher, John Gould, 727 Flint, Timothy, 136, 143 145, 151, 624, 641642, 1287, 1288 Floan, Howard, 475 Flora, Joseph, 872 Florin, Lambert, 76 Flynn, Robert, 527, 1182, 1237, 1240 Foerster, Norman, 729, 730, 1299
1336
INDEX
Folklore and oral tradition (European-American), 910, 2963, 535543, 627, 867868; ethnic variations, 3034; occupational, 3132, 58, 627; regional variations, 30, 3437, 4042, 45 52, 503504; songs and ballads, 3845, 122, 124; tall tales, 4553, 154, 340341, 345, 351 Folsom, James K., 113, 155, 515, 537, 799 1195, 1311 Fonda, Henry, 269, 1272 Foote, Mary Hallock, 136, 323, 332, 353, 834, 983, 1005, 1163, 1179 Forch, Carolyn, 1224 Ford, Bob, 121, 122 Ford, James, 76 Ford, John, 268269, 270, 1258, 1259, 1260, 1270, 1272, 1273 Foreman, Paul, 1172, 1173, 1186, 1221, 12221223 Fort Bridger, 82; peace treaty at (1868), 78 Fort Laramie, 85, 88, 93, 113 Fort Sumner, 88 Foss, H. A., 717, 718, 1150 Fountain, Albert J., 507 Fowler, Gene, 1223 Fox, Robert, 1173 Fraker, William, 1275 France, in American literature, 697, 701 Franchre, Gabriel, 1003 Frank, Waldo, 654 Franklin, Benjamin, 329 Frantz, Joe B., 523 Fraser, Simon, 1002 Frayling, Christopher, 1258 Frederic, Harold, 664, 670 Frederick, John T., 668, 670 671, 1299 Freeman, Mary Ellen Wilkins, 340 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 1295 Frmont, Jessie Benton, 344 Frmont, John Charles, 5, 84, 92, 97, 228229, 234, 908 French, Philip, 1270
Frenzel, Herbert, 167 Frey, Wilhelm, 167 Friends of the Earth, 487 Frontier, 1299 Frontier, closing of, 3, 216, 236, 240, 276, 319, 373, 1273; Turner hypothesis concerning, 244, 273, 277, 282287, 303, 306, 313, 315, 381, 575, 644 645, 835, 1188, 1299 1321, 1305 Fronval, George, 159, 167, 168 Frost, O. W., 205 Frost, Robert, 535, 729, 881, 894, 903, 927, 981 Fry, Alan, 1006 Frye, Northrop, 1312 Fuller, Charles, 1241 Fuller, H. B., 1292 Fuller, Margaret, 1288 Fuller, Metta Victoria, 850 Fulton, Len, 1167, 1168 1169, 1172, 1184, 1186 Fulton, Maurice Garland, 576 Fundamentalism, 560 Fur trade, western, 6, 7989, 224, 282283, 908, 10011004. See also Mountain men Furbee, Louanna, 76 Furman, Laura, 511 Furnas, J. C., 857 Fussell, Edwin, 1188, 1311 Gabriel, Gilbert Wolf, 1003 Gaddis, Isabel, 542 Gagern, Friedrich von, 167 Gaines, Ernest J., 1033, 1144 Gale, Zona, 655656 Gallagher, William D., 1288 Galler, Cristal McLeod. See Mourning Dove Galloway, David, 1183 Gann, Walter, 527 Garcia, Andrew, 1089 Garcia, Jerry, 492 Garcia Lorca, Federico, 817 Garcia Mrquez, Gabriel, 1105 Gardiner, Dorothy, 1311 Gardner, Leonard, 336 Gardner, Richard, 527 Garfield, Brian, 1256 Garfield, James Abram, 97
Garland, Hamlin, xvii, 137, 155, 274, 314, 340, 353, 383384, 644, 645, 649, 654, 665667, 670, 836, 866, 881, 1005, 1290, 1292, 12931295, 1300, 1302 Garner, Claud, 629 Garrard, Lewis Hector, 50, 68, 89, 94, 98, 323, 499 Garrett, Pat, 124125, 127 Garza, Roberto J., 205 Gaspard, Leon, 945 Gass, William, 661 Gates, Susa Young, 851 Gayley, Charles Mills, 1295 Geddes, Gary, 1007 Geddes, Virgil, 138, 211 Geiogamah, Hanay, 1240, 1241 General Allotment Act (1887), 1041 Gent, Peter, 511, 1021, 1192 George, Henry, 308309, 350, 665, 666 German-American literature and culture, 727730, 794 Geronimo (Apache), 106, 107, 291, 1054 Gershwin, George, 402 Gerstcker, Friedrich, 162163 Gervaud, Michel, 697 Ghiselin, Brewster, 1202 Ghost Dance movement, 1044 Gibson, Hoot, 267 Gilder, Richard Watson, 1300 Giles, Janice, 1004 Gilfillan, Archer B., 323 Gillett, James B., 625 Gillis, Everett A., 1223 Gillis, Jim, 345 Gillis, Steve, 344, 345 Gilman, George G., 1278 Oilman, Richard, 1234 Gilmore, Melvin, 1045 Gilpin, William, 830 Ginsberg, Allen, 335, 354, 482, 485, 486, 1209, 1220 Ginty, Elizabeth Beall, 127 Gipson, Fred, 137, 508509 Gipson, James H., 873, 876 Gladstone, Thomas H., 92
1337

Glass, Hugh, 83, 648, 744, 745, 750, 799800 Gleason, Jackie, 53 Glidden, Frederick D., 113, 156, 520, 1276, 1277, 1279 Gloux, Oliver. See Aimard, Gustave Gluek, Alvin C., 1008 Godfrey, Edward S., 744 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 161, 164 Gold, Herbert, 474, 478, 479 Golden Era, 344 Goldstein, Malcolm, 214 Goldwater, Barry, 1270 Gngora y Argote, Luis de, 1079 Gonzales, N. V. M., 354, 1127 Gonzlez, Jos Elas, 1088 Gonzalez, Rodolfo, 1031 Goodale, Elaine, 1043 Goodnight, Charles, 500 Goodwyn, Frank, 506, 627 628 Goodwyn, Larry, 543 Gordon, Caroline, 1310 Gordon, Charles, 1005 Goyen, William, 506, 577 Graham, Don, 1256 Graham, Winifred, 851 Grahn, Judy, 1181 Grainger, Martin Allerdale, 1005 Grand Canyon, 232233, 236, 239 Grant, George, 1009 Grant, Heber, 51 Grant, Robert, 182 Graves, John, 247, 249251, 1020, 1247 Gray, John S., 105 Gray, Robert, 1002 Greasybear, Tom, 1029 Great Depression, 182, 211, 304, 473474, 486, 587, 597, 673, 1018, 1205, 1300 Great Divide (magazine), 833 Great Plains, 278280 Great Salt Lake, 85, 228, 229230 Greeley, Horace, 141, 826 Green, Thomas Jefferson, 624 Gregg, Josiah, 9394, 170, 311, 499, 576 Gregg, Kate L., 93 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 740 Gregory, Susan, 428 Grey, Zane, xvi, 123124, 126, 128, 136, 155,312, 320, 323, 518, 520, 527, 851, 1276, 1301, 1304, 1305 Griffin, John Howard, 1032 Griffis, Joseph, 1046 Griffith, D. W., 266, 268 Griggs, Sutton E., 1032, 11401141 Grove, Frederick Philip, 671 672, 1009 Grummond, William, 112 Grundysen, Tellef, 717, 1150 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of (1848), 1081, 1082 Guatemala, 568 Guie, Heister Dean, 1048 Gulick, Bill, 1004 Gunn, Thom, 354, 1216 1218, 1220, 1309 Gunnison, John Williams, 97 Gurian,Jay, 137138, 1311 Guthrie, A. B., Jr., 79, 170, 213, 323, 550, 648, 839, 912929, 990, 1005, 1183, 1185, 1188, 1307 1308, 1310, 1311, 1312, 1313 Guthrie, Carol, 928 Guthrie, Woody, 124 Gutirrez Njera, Manuel, 1087 Hafen, LeRoy, 83, 91 Haines, Aubrey L., 87 Haines, Francis, 60 Haines, John, 198, 1203, 12061208, 12501251 Hakluyt, Richard, 142 Halbing, Kjell. See Masterson, Louis Haley, J. Evetts, 500 Haliburton, Thomas, 340 Hall, Carol, 1239 Hall, Donald, 1209 Hall, Hazel, 181, 199, 1211 Hall, James, 641642, 1287, 1288 Hall, Sharlot, 180, 181, 183 187, 188, 198 Halpern, Martin, 209 Hammerstein, Oscar, 211, 215 Hammett, Dashiell, 13, 333 334, 354 Hampsten, Elizabeth, 1178 Hamsun, Knut, 867 Han Suyin, 1129 Hanna, Archibald, Jr., 77 Hannon, Jessie Gould, 76 Hansen, Carl, 11531154 Hansen, Ron, 129, 1191 Hanson, Kenneth, 1007 Hardy, Thomas, 426, 772, 871 Harjo, Joy, 1073, 1075, Harker, Herbert, 857 Harlem Renaissance, 1141, 1143 Harlow, Robert, 1007 Harmon, Daniel Williams, 1001 Harnack, Curtis, 679, 680 Harpers Monthly, 90, 121, 287288, 292, 515, 518, 899, 903, 904 Harpers Weekly, 292 Harrigan, Stephen, 511 Harrington, J. P., 568 Harris, Geroge W., 340 Harris, Joel Chandler, 304 Harris, Kenneth, 516 Harris, Mark, 857, 1187, 1310 Harris, Moses Black, 83, 85, 908 Harrison, Dick, 1010 Harrison, Jane, 745 Hart, Moss, 211 Hart, William S., 267 Harte, Bret, 7, 137, 154, 167, 182183, 206208, 214, 304, 305, 308309, 329, 331, 339355, 371, 516, 1090, 1188, 12891293, 1294, 1297, 1298, 1300, 1303 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 1031, 1123 Harvard University, 209, 211, 277, 278, 282, 288, 567, 919920 Haslam, Gerald W., 322, 336, 355, 587, 589, 1184, 11851186, 1192 Haslette, John, 516 Hassel, Nicolai Severin, 717, 1150
1338
INDEX
Haste, Gwendolen, 181, 191, 838 Havighurst, Walter, 76 Hawaii, 225, 346, 1128 Hawgood, John A., 83 Hawkes, John, 609, 778, 781 Hawkins, Bobbie Louise, 1223 Hawks, Howard, 270 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 68, 145146, 152, 153, 209, 320, 324, 602, 667, 793, 795796, 983984, 1292, 1311 Hay, John, 1289, 1292, 1298 Haycox, Ernest, 113, 125, 156, 332, 520521, 1005, 1276, 1277, 1279 Hayden, Ferdinand V., 5 Hazard, Lucy Lockwood, 750, 1188, 1299 Hearne, Samuel, 1002 Hearon, Shelby, 511, 512 Hearst, William Randolph, 1031 Hebard, Grace, 745 Heifner, Jack, 1239 Heller, Joseph, 592 Hemingway, Ernest, 592, 637, 771, 779, 781, 972, 997, 1052, 1312 Hemyng, Bracebridge, 170, 171 Henday, Anthony, 1002 Henderson, Alice Corbin. See Corbin, Alice Hendon, Telfair, 307, 578 Hendrick, George, 1223 Hendryx, James B., 155 Hennepin, Louis, 638639 Henri, Robert, 771 Henry, Alexander (the elder), 1001 Henry, Alexander (the younger), 1001 Henry, Alfred H., 851 Henry, Andrew, 7981, 83, 646, 745, 915 Henry, Ann, 1009 Henry, O. See Porter, William Sydney Henry, Will. See Allen, Henry Wilson Henty, G. A., 171 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 1288
Herrick, Robert, 1292 Herron, Ima Honaker, 204 Hertzog, Carl, 629 Hewes, Charles Edwin, 889 Hewitt, John N. B., 1042 Hickok, James Butler Wild Bill, 121122, 125, 126, 128, 769 Hicks, Granville, 13001301 Hiebert, Paul, 1010 Higginson, Ella, 183 Hildreth, William H., 95 Hill, Francis, 519 Hill, Jim, 826 Hill, Joe, 825, 856, 975976 Hill, Roberta, 1069 Hill, Ruth Beebe, 1028 Hillerman, Tony, 511, 1193 Hinckley, Helen, 855 Hinduism, 741 Hines, Donald, 1048 Hinojosa, Rolando, 512, 631 632, 1030, 11071108 Historical fiction, 550554, 597601, 668, 675, 799 801,851,853854,871, 878, 919926, 976, 989 991, 1003, 10041005, 1191 Historiography, 273275, 276294, 303315, 504, 764769, 901, 905910, 976 Hitchcock, Frank, 206 Hitchcock, George, 1171 Hitler, Adolf, 164, 304, 770 Hoback, John, 915 Hobson, Geary, 1058, 1068, 1071 Hodgins, Jack, 1007 Hofstadter, Richard, xvi Hogan, Ed, 1165 Hogan, Linda, 1058, 1071, 1184, 1192 Hoggard, James, 1173, 1186 Holbrook, Stewart H., 50, 331 Holbrook, Weare, 668 Halley, Mary Austin, 498 Hollywood, 138, 210211, 212, 266, 476, 547, 1304; in fiction, 211, 333, 334, 617, 778, 785; writers in, 942, 943 Holmes, William H., 232 Homer, 4, 740, 744, 750
Homestead Act (1862), 314, 826 Hongo, Garrett, 1131 Hood, Tom, 352 Hooper, J.J., 340 Hoover, J. Edgar, 899 Hopis, 13, 15, 18, 21, 94 946 Hopkins, Anthony, 1182 Hoppenstand, Gary, 1278 Hopwood, Victor G., 1002 Horgan, Paul, 114, 310, 574 583, 626, 628, 1026, 1183, 1188, 1302, 1305, 1308, 1313, 1315 Hosokawa, Bill, 1032, 1124 Hotchkiss, Bill, 1183, 1191 Hough, Emerson, 125, 501, 516, 519, 520, 526527, 648, 922, 1004 House, Julius T., 749 Houston, James D., 336, 1020, 1021, 1023, 1031, 1034, 1131, 1164, 1183, 1184 Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, 1031, 1034, 1131 Houston, John, 1275 Howard, Ebenezer, 755 Howard, O. O., 106 Howard, Richard, 488 Howard, Sidney, 209210, 212, 214 Howard Payne University, 559 Howay, F. W., 1002 Howe, Edgar Watson, 314, 638, 644, 653654, 664, 905, 1292, 1293, 1299 Howells, William Dean, 305, 377, 654, 664, 1290, 12921293, 1294, 1297, 1299, 1311 Hewlett, W. J., 701 Hoyt, Charles H., 207, 500 Hudson, Lois Phillips, 679, 680, 1163 Hudson, Mary W., 850 Hudsons Bay Company, 79, 87, 1001, 1003, 1008 Huffaker, Clair, 530 Hughes, Howard, 269, 1219 Hughes, Langston, 402, 1141, 1142, 1145 Hugo, Richard, 843844, 1007, 1069, 12021204,
1339

Hugo, Victor, 1292 Humaa, Juan de, 4 Humor, 172, 341, 344346, 350351, 418, 420, 516, 590591, 607, 809, 856, 1047, 10671068, 1247, 1289, 1291 1301 Humphrey, William, 506, 564, 1188, 1312 Huning, Franz, 546, 551552 Hunt, Annie Mae, 1179 Hunt, William Gibbes, 1286 Hunt, Wilson Price, 80, 915 916 Hunter, Rodello, 857 Hurd Peter, 574, 576, 578 Hutchinson, W. H., 526, 1315 Huxley, Aldous, 252, 333, 334, 402, 1195 Hwang, David Henry, 1241 Hyde, Edward, 745 Hyde, George E., 89 Hyde, Philip, 606 Hymes, Dell, 23 Ibsen, Henrik, 209, 721, 1294 Idaho, 824, 827, 838, 862 869 Illinois, 640, 641, 642 Imlay, Gilbert, 640 Immigration, 3233, 160, 162, 163, 289, 716730, 841, 1031, 11191133, 11481158; immigrants in fiction, 640, 649652, 686694, 705706, 717726 Inada, Lawson, 338, 1027, 1032, 1131, 1132, 1213 Indian cultures, in Chicano literature, 11031104; modern literature of, 19, 512, 842, 10281029, 10381055, 10581064, 10671076, 11911192, 1240; in movies, 269, 1270, 1272, 1275; oral literature of, 89, 11 24, 52, 58, 187, 204, 365, 498, 836, 1006, 1028, 1042, 1054, 1058 1064, 1067, 1069, 1070, 1075; religion, 11, 13 14, 1618, 20, 365, 570571, 746748, 799800, 939940, 942943, 944946, 948950, 10581061, 10691070; reservations and federal Indian policy, 570572, 599600, 842, 844, 10391045, 1055; study of, 89, 2123, 75, 9394, 226, 227, 237, 245, 359, 364366, 485, 486, 567568, 768, 1002, 1006, 1041, 1042; white attitudes towards, 89, 34, 55, 6061, 143144, 269, 497, 625 626, 638, 639, 666, 690, 699, 701104, 168769; in white literature, 143 145, 147, 149, 336, 408, 419, 452, 455, 460, 507 508, 551, 567572, 579 580, 589591, 593, 598 600, 645648, 701704, 743, 768769, 799800, 809, 834, 841, 878879, 921, 923, 939942, 964 965, 1006, 1028, 1039, 1190, 1191, 1193, 1239, 12831285, 1289, 1311, 1312 Indian wars, 8889, 143, 291292, 746, 834; in fiction, 112115; narratives of, 104112; captivity narratives, 143, 1003, 1083 Indian Reorganization Act (1934), 1052, 1055 Indiana, 675 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 199, 210, 486, 808, 825, 975, 1006 Industrialization, 279281, 324, 824829 Inge, William, 138, 215216 Ingles, Beth, 428 Ingraham, Prentiss, 121 Iowa, 651, 653, 669, 678 Irigaray, Louis, 1033 Irsfeld, John, 512 Irving, Washington, xvi, 80, 93, 154, 155, 224, 291, 829, 1003, 1004, 1286, 1288 Irwin, Wallace, 519 Isherwood, Christopher, 334 Islas, Arturo, 1115 Itliong, Larry, 1101 Ito, Kazuo, 1123 Ito, Momoko, 1032 Ives, Joseph C., 163 Iwata, Ed, 1131 Jackson, Andrew, 906 Jackson, David, 84, 86 Jackson, Donald, 7475 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 197, 312, 323, 330, 628, 833 834, 1019, 1028, 1090, 1179 Jacobson, Don, 354 Jacolliot, Louis, 741 James, Frank, 120121, 122 123 James, George Wharton, 240 241, 312, 387, 625 James, Henry, 781, 997, 1290, 1292, 1301 James, Jesse, 52, 120121, 122123, 127, 128, 130, 692, 1235, 1259, 1275 James, Will, 137 Janson, Kristofer, 11501151 Janvier, Thomas, 516 Japanese-American literature and Culture, 3234, 337, 10311032, 1034, 1122 1125, 11271128, 1130 1131 Jarvis, William Henry, 1005 Jay, Mae Foster, 674 Jazz, 485, 488, 492 Jeffers, Robinson, 140, 187, 190, 191, 312, 321, 322, 328, 354, 398411, 416 417, 419, 425, 428, 429, 485, 892, 895, 992, 1208, 1209, 1301, 1306, 1309, 1312 Jeffers, Una, 399402 Jefferson, Thomas, 5, 7172, 7475, 99, 313, 314, 826 Jenkins, Rev. Andrew, 124 Jenkins, Dan, 511 Jenney, Walter P., 5 Jennings, Gary, 531 Jennings, John, 1003 Jennings, Talbot, 213 Jennings, Waylon, 1280 Jensen, Joan, 1179
1340
INDEX
Jesus, 872 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 304 Jewitt, John, 1003 Jews in western literature, 555 Jimnez, Juan Ramn, 813, 817 Johannesen, Albert, 175 Johns Hopkins University, 282, 285 Johnson, Diane, 1181 Johnson, Dorothy M., 153, 156, 840, 1163, 1179, 1258 Johnson, Herbert, 519 Johnson, James Weldon, 1139 Johnson, Josephine, 674 Johnson, Lady Bird, 563 Johnson, Lyndon B., 1270 Johnson, Pauline, 1006 Johnson, Samuel, 1286 Johnson, Simon, 718, 1034, 11551156 Johnson, Willard, 187, 194, 578 Johnson County War (1892), 129, 801, 828, 831, 842 Jones, Buck, 1264 Jones, Daryl, 1277 Jones, Douglas C., 114, 115, 1191 Jones, Everett L., 137, 1026, 1140 Jones, Howard Mumford, 4 Jones, Preston, 511, 1024, 1164, 12321234, 1239 Jones, Suzi, 30 Jones, William, 1042 Joplin, Janis, 492 Jordan, Teresa, 1179 Joseph, Chief (Nez Perce), 6061, 106, 186, 1000; in literature, 193, 455, 660 Joyce, James, 1109 Judah, Charles, 89 Judson, E. Z. C., 207, 1292 Jung, Carl Gustav, 56, 428, 747, 771 815, 948, 1314 Kadushin, Charles, 1162 Kafka, Franz, 166 Kafu, Nagai, 1123 Kane, Paul, 1004 Kane, Rudolph, 14 Kansas, 41, 92, 121, 461, 1142
Kant, Immanuel, 1314 Katz, William Loren, 1139, 1140 Kaufman, Bob, 335 Kaufman, George, 211 Kaufman, Philip, 1259, 1275 Kazan, Elia, 430 Kearney, Denis, 353 Kearney, Philip, 908 Kearns, Lionel, 1007 Keil, Wilhelm, 60 Keith, Sam, 1251 Kelley, William Fitch, 111 Kelly, Grace, 270 Kelly, Luther S. Yellowstone, 108 Kelly, Robert, 814 Kelsey, Henry, 1002 Kelton, Elmer, 510, 531532, 602 Kemp, Harry, 674 Kendall, George Wilkins, 170, 499, 624 Kennedy, John F., 1086, 1270 Kennelly, Ardyth, 856 Kennon, Bob, 500 Kentucky, 915916, 918919 Kerouac, Jack, 328, 335336, 354, 482493, 1017, 1312 Kerr, Alvah Milton, 850 Kerr, Orpheus C. See Newell, Robert Henry Kesey, Ken, 323, 327, 336 337, 354, 1006 1188, 1190, 1194 Ketterer, David, 1194 Kherdian, David, 472, 1033 Kim, Richard, 1128 Kimball, J. Golden, 42, 51 52 King, Charles, 110, 112113, 834 King, Clarence, 5, 228, 230 232, 234, 235, 323, 354 King, Henry, 268, 270 King, Larry L., 501, 1239, 1315 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 327, 354, 1032, 1130, 1181, 1182 Kiowas, 601, 1062 Kipling, Rudyard, 370, 381, 1296, 1297 Kirkland, Caroline, 314, 642,
664, 12871288, 1293 Kirkland, Joseph, 664665, 670, 1292, 1293, 1294 Kitagawa, Daisuko, 1034 Kittredge, William, 336, 1185 Kizer, Carolyn, 1007, 1211 Klondike, 383384 Knapp, John, 1284 Knibbs, Henry Herbert, 155 Knox, John, 182, 191 Koerner, W. H. D., 520 Koertge, Ronald, 1184, 1212 Kohl, Stephen W., 1123 Koike, Kyo, 1123 Koneko, Lonny, 1130 Kopp, Karl and Jane, 1184, 1223 Korean-American culture, 1128 Korzybski, Alfred, 748, 1299 Kranes, David, 1184, 1185 Krause, Herbert, 651, 679, 716, 727732 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 402 Kroeber, Karl, 89 Kroeber, Theodora, 1028 Kroetsch, Robert, 1010, 1011 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 210, 222, 252254, 1251 Kuralt, Charles, 46 Kyger, Joanne, 1211 Labor movement, 825, 856, 1121; farm workers, 432 437, 11011102, 1105 1106, 1113; strikes, 435 437, 531, 825, 834, 837, 1101 La Farge, Consuelo Baca, 569 La Farge, Oliver, 567572, 574, 1028, 1053, 1305 LaFlesche, Francis, 1042 Lai, M.H., 1120 Lake, Stuart M., 129 Lamar, Howard R., 94 Lamar, Mirabeau B., 624 Lamb, W. Kaye, 1002 LAmour, Louis, xvi, 128, 156, 324, 1024, 1163, 1187, 1276, 12781279 Lamy, Jean Baptiste, 576, 701 Land of Sunshine, 183, 626 Landscape in literature, 321 322, 373, 407409, 416, 418, 420, 460, 578581,
1341

747, 813, 822824, 844, 867, 879, 889, 913914, 1260, 1296 Lane, Patrick, 1008 Lane, Red, 1008 Lane, Rose Wilder, 674 Lange, Dorothea, 436 Langer, Susanne, 213 Langford, Nathaniel Pitt, 831 Lanham, Edwin, 506 Larkin, Thomas O., 908 Larson, Clinton F., 842, 1007, 1202 La Salle, Robert, Sieur de, 168, 638639, 906 Laurence, Margaret, 1010 Lauritzen, Jonreed, 855, 857 Lavender, David, 89 Lawrence, D. H., 310, 486, 503, 1224, 1305, 1307, 1312 Laxalt, Robert, 841, 1033 Lea, Tom, 500, 506, 626, 629630 Leavis, Larry, 1145, 1213 Leckie, William H., 105, 1140 Ledyard, John, 906 Lee, C. Y., 1129 Lee, Don L., 1143 Lee, Harper, 304 Lee, Jason, 1004 Lee, John D., 831 Lee, L. L., 992, 1313 Lee, Robert Edson, 1311 Lee, Virginia, 1031 Leforge, Thomas H., 110 LeGuin, Ursula, 1179, 1195 Leiper, Maria, 729 Lemly, Henry R., 744 Lenihan, John, 1270 Leone, Sergio, 12721273 Leopold, Aldo, 222, 243244, 248 Lerner, Alan Jay, 215 LeSueur, Meridel, 661, 1179 Leung, Pui-Chee, 1120 Lewes, George Henry, 1295 Lewis, A. L., 1306 Lewis, Alfred Henry, 353, 376, 516, 524, 627 Lewis, Charles Bertrand, 850 Lewis, Janet, 192, 1310 Lewis, Meriwether, 11, 71 75, 77, 99, 221, 223. See also Lewis and Clark expedition Lewis, R. W. B., 795 Lewis, Sinclair, 211, 655, 671, 730, 754761, 793, 902, 1010, 1188, 1299, 1300, 1301, 1302, 1307 Lewis and Clark expedition, 5, 7176, 7779, 291, 313, 329, 640, 829, 878, 909 910, 914, 915, 1075, 1139 Liberty, Margot, 1041 Library of Congress, 466 Lighton, William R., 516 Lilly, Ben, 540 Lin Yutang, 1122 Lincoln, Abraham, 906, 907 Lincoln County War (1878), 127, 129 Linderman, Frank B., 836, 1006 Lindsay, John S., 205 Lindsey, David L., 511 Lisa, Manuel, 79 Literary criticism, 144147, 748, 901, 1178, 1283 1316 Little Bighorn, battle of (1876), 104, 105, 109, 114115, 834 Littlebird, Harold, 1029, 1073 Livesay, Dorothy, 1007 Local color, 135, 154, 206 208, 212, 303306, 339 355, 371, 376, 420, 664 665, 983, 1039, 1042, 1290 Locke, John, 252 Locklin, Gerald, 1019, 1184, 1213 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 285 Loewe, Frederick, 215 Loftis, Anne, 436 Logan, Chief, 149 Logan, Jake, 1278 Logan, John, 1239 Lomax, John A., 537 London, Charmian Kittredge, 385, 388390 London, Jack, 137, 155, 209, 321, 330, 331, 350, 354, 362, 381392, 424, 852, 866, 868, 1005, 1297 1298, 1303 Long, Haniel, 187, 194, 501, 506, 623, 1305 Long, James L., 1054 Long, Reub, 37, 4748, 53 Long, Stephen H., 5, 226, 243 Long, Sylvester, 1049 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 166, 305, 342, 347, 645, 1039, 1289 Longstreet, A. B., 340 Loomis, A. W., 350 Loomis, Edward, 1310 Lopez, Alonzo, 1029 Lopez, Barry Holstun, 1252 1253 Lopez, Eddie, 1215 Lopez, Frank, 14 Lord, Audre, 1164 Lorentz, Pare, 436 Loria, Achille, 296 Lorimer, George Horace, 520 Los Angeles, 337, 362, 1102; in fiction, 333335, 1094, 11111112 Lott, Milton, 841 Louisiana Purchase, 72, 281 Lounsbury, Thomas, 1293 LOuverture, Toussaint, 1142 Lovejoy, A. L., 57 Lowe, Pardee, 1031, 1122 Lowell, James Russell, 340, 347, 643, 1292 1295 Lowell, Robert, 447 Lowry, Beverly, 512 Lowry, Malcolm, 1006 Lucas, Samuel, 182 Lucretius, 891 Ludlow, Fitz Hugh, 344 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 502 Lummis, Charles Fletcher, 183, 362, 625626, 1305 Lutheranism, 724725, 727, 728, 11511152 Lyon, Thomas J., 182, 935, 944, 1316 MacArthur, Douglas, 1093 Macaulay, Thomas, xvi MacDonald, J. Fred, 1263 1264, 1265 MacDonald, Ross, 137, 324 Macdonnell, Norman, 1266 Machebeuf, Joseph, 701 Mackenzie, Alexander, 829, 1002 Mackie, J. Milton, 636
1342
INDEX
Maclean, Norman, 843 MacLeish, Archibald, 99 MacLeod, Leroy, 675676 Macleod, Norman, 180, 181, 182, 188, 192193, 195, 199 Macy, John, 1298 Madden, David, 778 Magellan, Ferdinand, 1125 Magical realism, 476, 1193 1194, 1232, 12351236 Magoffin, Samuel, 94, 499 Magoffin, Susan Shelby, 94, 624625 Magorian, James, 1033 Mailer, Norman, 778, 1194 Mailman, Leo, 1170 Major, Mabel, 69, 273274, 303, 306308, 311, 312, 505, 1303 Malamud, Bernard, 1189 Malone, Marvin, 1167 Malory, Sir Thomas, 426, 429, 440 Manby, Arthur Rochford, 947948 Mandel, Eli, 1010 Manfred, Frederick, 170, 323, 425, 550 645, 647648, 650651, 657, 661, 679, 750751, 792802, 990, 1168, 1184, 1193, 1302, 1307, 1310, 1312 1313, 1314 Manifest Destiny, doctrine of, 72, 313, 659, 900, 905 909, 1026, 1274, 1275 Manitoba, 10081010 Mann, Anthony, 270, 1270 Mann, Edward Beverly, 128 Mann, Thomas, 164 Manoogian, Katherine, 1033 Mantle, Burns, 212 Mao Tse-tung, 486 Marcos de Niza, Fray, 4 Marcus, Carol, 476, 477 Marcus Aurelius, 981 Marcuse, Herbert, 1209 Mardikian, George, 1033 Markham, Edwin, 181, 330, 1298 Marlatt, Daphne, 1007 Marler, Robert, 153 Marquette, Jacques, 638 Marquis, Thomas B., 110
Marriott, Anne, 1008 Marryat, Frederick, 170, 849 Marsden, Michael, 156, 1024 Marshall, Edison, 519 Marshall, George, 268 Marshall, Robert, 243, 245, 1249 Martinson, Harry, 813, 817 Marvin, Lee, 53 Marx, Karl, 486. See also Communism Marx, Leo, 431 Masters, Edgar Lee, 304, 402, 654, 671, 1188 Masterson, Louis, 168, 173 Masterson, Peter, 1239 Matalene, H. W., 473, 477 Mather, Cotton, 68 Mathews, John Joseph, 1029, 10501052, 1059 Matsuda, Ted, 1125 Mattes, Merrill J., 76 Matthews, Brander, 152, 1293 Matthews, Cornelius, 1288 Matthews, Washington, 22 Matthiessen, F. O., 900 Mattingly, Garrett, 907, 909 Maule, Harry E., 155 Maximilian, Alexander Philip, Prince of Wied-Neuwied, 221, 226227, 234 Maxwell, Lucien, 553 May,Karl, 159, 162, 163 167, 168, 173 Maynard, Ken, 267 McCall, Tom, 466 McCarthy, Joseph, 484, 899, 900 McCarthy, Mary, 473 McCarthyism, 192, 484, 541, 808 McCloud, Susan Evans, 857 McClung, Nellie, 1009 McClure, Michael, 335, 482, 1237 McClure, Ron, 1192 McCluskey, Sally, 750 McCormick, Cyrus, 578 McCourt, Edward, 1006 McCoy, Horace, 334 McCoy, Joseph 6, 521, 1314 McCoy, Tim, 267 McCrea, Joel, 1258, 1273 McCunn, Ruthanne Lum, 1130
McDaniel, Wilma Elizabeth, 1021, 1145, 1180, 1214 1215 McDermott, John Francis, 77, 93 McGinnis, John, 578 McGrath, Thomas, 659660, 806810, 1168 McKay, Allis, 332 McKinley, Georgia, 511 McKinley, William, 294 McKinney, Eugene, 1237 McLaren, Floris Clarke, 1008 McLaughlin, Marie, 1044 McLaughlin, John, 83, 87, 1003 McLure, James, 1239 McMurray, George, 1193 McMurtry, Larry, 323, 510 511, 528529, 543, 612 619, 1022, 1024, 1221, 1237, 1311, 1315 McNickle, DArcy, 1029, 10511053, 1059, 1191 McVickers, Mary Louise, 542 McWhorter, Lucullus, 1048 McWilliams, Carey, 330, 1026, 1171, 1300 Mech, David, 1252 Medoff, Mark, 12381239 Meears, G. A., 850 Meek, Joe, 85, 332, 908 Mellen, Grenville, 1285 Melville, Herman, 146, 153, 324, 349, 795, 996, 1289 Mena, Mara Cristina, 1089 1090, 1092 Mencken, H. L., 332, 417, 546, 899, 904, 1299 Mendez, Miguel, 512, 1030, 1035 Menken, Adah Isaacs, 344 Mercer, A. S., 831 Meredith, George, 865 Meriam, Lewis, 1045 Merriam, Harold G., 873, 1006 Meston, John, 1266 Metalious, Grace, 484 Mtis, 10081009 Mexican-American culture, 337338, 496, 499, 622 632, 1030; in Anglo fiction, 530, 532, 551, 580581, 628630; folk-
1343

lore and folk literature, 205, 329, 498, 512 627, 631, 1030, 1033, 1079 1086, 1088, 10901093, 1095,1108,11091110; modern literature, 512, 632, 10301031, 1035, 10791098, 11011116, 12151216, 1240 Mexican-American War, 90, 93, 95, 171, 319, 623, 624625, 908, 1081 Mexico, in fiction, 935936, 1092; folklore, 538539; history and culture, 439, 10791080, 1083, 1085 1086 Meyer, Roy W., 1009 Michaels, Leonard, 1186 Michaux, F. Andrew, 225 Micheaux, Oscar, 1032, 1034, 1141 Michigan, 447449, 451, 642, 676 Midland, 668, 669, 1294, 1299 Milburn, George, 506 Miles, Elton, 500 Miles, Josephine, 355, 1163, 1179, 12111212 Miles, Nelson A., 106, 107, 292 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 402 Miller, Alfred Jacob, 92, 907, 908 Miller, Arthur, 204, 1237, 1257 Miller, David, 1273 Miller, Henry, 355, 485, 1188 Miller, Hugh, 360 Miller, Joaquin, 7, 180181, 183, 197, 205, 308, 330, 332, 340, 352353, 850, 1290, 1291, 1294 Miller, Nellie Burget, 182, 191, 192 Miller, Perry, 489 Miller, Vassar, 12211222 Mills, Enos, 241243, 1246 Milton, John (poet), 426, 436, 1295 Milton, John R., 136, 426, 428, 550, 556, 590, 591, 798, 989, 1022, 1023, 1182, 1307, 1313 Minasian, Khatchik, 1033, 1214 Mining, 19th century, 329, 339348, 383, 385386, 824825; 20th century, 32, 825, 935939 Minnesota, 648, 651, 655, 660, 716717, 723, 727 732, 754, 798, 800, 813; Minneapolis, 797798 Mirikitani, Janice, 1131 Mirrielees, Edith, 431 Mirrielees, Lucia, 873 Mississippi River, 638639 Missouri, 123 Missouri River, 221, 223, 226227, 914915 Mitchell, Ken, 1010 Mitchell, Langdon E., 850 Mitchell, S. Weir, 289, 293 Mitchell, W. O., 1010 Mitford, Mary Russell, 1288 Mitgang, Herbert, 477 Mix, Tom, xvi, 267, 268, 1264 Miyamoto, Kazuo, 1127 Modern Language Association, 1299 Modernism, 322, 588, 592 Mogen, David, 1194 Mllhausen, Balduin, 163, 167, 168 Momaday, N. Scott, 2324, 69, 512, 1029, 1051, 1055, 10581064, 1070, 1182, 1188, 1307, 1309 Monk, Thelonious, 485 Monroe, Harriet, 416, 749 Montag, Tom, 1170 Montalvo, Garcia Ordonez de, 328 Montana, 824, 827, 830831, 838, 842843, 913917, 1204; Butte, 32 Montgomery, Vaida and Whitney, 180 Montoya, Jos, 1030, 1104 1105, 1216 Montross, Lynn, 672673 Moody, William Vaughan, 138, 204, 208209 Moore, Julia A., 1293 Morabito, Mary Matosian, 1033 Morecamp, Arthur. See Pilgrim, Thomas Morgan, Dale L., 77, 8687, 747 Morgan, Speer, 1191 Morgan, William, 1042 Mori, Toshio, 1032, 1124, 1131 Mormonism, 85, 96, 138, 195196, 351, 826, 829, 831832, 839, 868, 871, 900, 902, 908, 975, 1000; in fiction, 163, 166, 168, 172, 205, 849858, 975; folklore of, 42, 4647, 5052, 56 Morris, Rosalie, 1211 Morris, Wright, 69, 657658, 777785, 1018, 1308 Morrison, John W., 121 Morrison, Theodore, 729, 919920 Morrison, Toni, 1194 Morrow, W. C., 1296 Moss, Sidney Albert, 329 Mossberg, Christer L., 1034 Mott, Frank Luther, 749 Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857), 831832, 838, 851, 856 Mountain men, 6, 79, 8189, 9192, 94, 225228, 499, 624, 829, 830, 914; in fiction, 170, 172, 550 551, 553, 745746, 800, 836, 878879, 919924. See also Fur trade, western Mourning Dove (Okanogan), 1048, 1059 Movies, 156, 159, 211, 266 271, 334, 1141, 1256 1261, 1265, 12691276; from literature, 614617, 959, 1011. See also Hollywood; Westerns, popular Muench, David, 608 Muilenburg, Walter J., 669 Muir, John, 221, 222, 232, 234237, 239, 241, 243, 251, 252, 340, 354, 1246, 1312 Mulford, Ami Frank, 108109 Mulford, Clarence E., 153, 517, 518 Mulford, Prentice, 308, 340, 344 Mller, Max, 741 Mullin, Susan, 4849 Mumford, Lewis, 756 Munger, Dell, 668
1344
INDEX
Murie, Adolph, 246247, 1252 Murie, Margaret E., 245 Murie, Olaus, 243, 244, 245 247 Murieta, Joaquin, 119120, 631, 1038 Muro, Amado. See Seltzer, Chester Murphy, Jim, 122 Muss, Rudolf, 167 Myers, F. W. H., 742, 748 Myres, Sandra, 1179 Mysticism, 234238, 248, 360,429, 438, 485, 487 493, 741, 1307, 1309; land, mystical attitudes towards, 686696, 792, 935950 Myth, literary use of, 405 406, 409, 771, 1306, 1312, 1314 Nabokov, Vladimir, 781 Nachbar, Jack, 156 Nasby, Petroleum V., 833 Nash, Roderick, 139 Nathan, George Jean, 475 National Endowment for the Arts, 1187 Native American Theater Ensemble, 1240 Natonabah, Andrew, 13 Naturalism, 135, 321, 374, 377, 384, 475, 649, 677 678, 1292, 1295, 1297 Nature and nature writing, 221256, 354, 359366, 496, 505, 509, 540541, 548, 604609, 961, 967 969, 10701071, 1246 1253; ecology, study of, 234238, 242246, 249, 252, 253, 361, 363364, 427, 1248. See also Conservation and environmentalism; Landscape in literature; Mysticism Navajos, 12, 1618, 21, 508, 567, 570572, 943, 1060, 1073, 1193 Navarro, J. L., 1182 Nebraska, 182, 647, 650, 652, 658, 676, 686689, 705 706, 764767, 773, 777, 778, 780
Negro Ensemble Company, 1241 Neider, Charles, 128 Neihardt, John G., 19, 137, 182, 187, 579, 645647, 739751, 772, 1029, 1299 Nelson, Ralph, 1259 Nelson, Willie, 1280 Neruda, Pablo, 813, 815, 816 Nervo, Amado, 1087 Neumann, Erich, 815 Nevada, 824, 841, 991992, 997, 10401041; Virginia City, 343345, 351 Neville, Lee, 853 New Criticism, 748, 1309, 1312, 1314 New Deal, 825, 838, 902 New Humanists, 1299 New Mexico, in fiction, 506 507, 525, 550554, 579582, 588, 593, 632, 701705, 939941, 11091110, 1234; history and description, 4041, 89, 94, 364366, 506, 546549, 623624, 626, 1079, 1082; literature of, 187189, 502503, 546554, 575583, 1079, 10821083, 1090 1091, 12241226; Albuquerque, 552, 575, 576; Los Alamos, 944; Roswell, 575577, 581, 582; Santa Fe, 569570, 576 577; Taos, 82, 89, 187, 213, 400, 941, 945 New York City, 192, 371, 482483, 484, 485, 902, 1296, 1305 Newcomb, Horace, 1268 Newell, Robert Henry, 344 Newlands Reclamation Act (1902), 827 Newlove, John, 1002, 1010 Newman, Paul, 1258 Newspapers and magazines, 307, 536, 537, 539, 570, 797, 899900, 902904, 917, 1047, 1124, 1167 1175, 1299; fiction published in, 125, 156, 515 521, 717718; foreign language, 717718, 726,
10871088, 1120, 1121, 11491150; 19th century, 81, 92, 93, 110 111, 287288, 291292, 341350, 830, 832833, 12831289, 1294 Niatum, Duane, 1069 Nichols, John, 511, 1017, 1192 Nicolet, Jean, 638 Nicollet, Joseph N., 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1297 Niggli, Josephina, 10921093, 1104 Niven, Frederick, 1005 Nixon, Richard, 1269 Nobel Prize, 333, 424 Noguchi, Yone, 197, 349, 1031, 1123 Nolan, Philip, 624 Nonpartisan League, 672673 Norris, Frank, 136, 312, 319, 321, 327, 330331, 332 354, 370377, 434435, 750, 837, 866, 871, 881, 1188, 1291, 1292, 1295 1298, 1302, 1303, 1314 North Dakota, 278280, 659, 672673, 679, 680681, 806809 North-West Company, 1001 1002, 1008 North West Rebellion (1885), 1009 northSun, nila, 1067, 1072 Nostalgia, 130, 288, 305306, 417, 777, 783, 994, 1087, 1091, 1095 Nuttall, Thomas, 223225 Nye, Edgar Wilson, 353, 833, 1289 Nye, Nelson, 128 Nye, Russell, 515 Nye, Wilbur S., 1054 Oandasan, William, 1029 OBrien, Lynne, 750 Occidental College, 399 OConnor, Carroll, 1258 OConnor, Flannery, 410 ODonnell, D. D., 109 Odum, H. T., 486 OFlaherty, Liam, 402 Ogden, Peter Skene, 83, 1003 OHagan, Howard, 1006
1345

OHara, John, 1304 OHara, Mary, 137 Ojibways, 16 Okada, John, 337, 1031, 1032, 1128, 1131, 1182 Okamoto, Daniel, 1032 Oklahoma, 10461047, 1050 1051, 1053, 1140, 1143 Okubo, Mine, 1031 Oliphant, Dave, 1221, 1223 Olsen, Tillie, 336, 1163, 1179, 1184 Olson, Charles, 1007 Olson, Paul, 750 Olson, Ted, 181, 191 Omahas, 740, 743 OMeara, Walter, 1001 Omohundro, Jack, 93 Oate, Juan de, 4, 498, 623, 1079, 1081 ONeill, Eugene, 138, 204, 209, 211, 212 Oregon, 4041, 4849 ,57, 85, 86, 331332 336, 416421, 460, 466 OregonTrail, 40, 6061, 76 77, 88, 92, 95, 229, 879, 922, 1004 Ortiz, Simon J., 20, 24, 1029, 1058, 10631064, 1067, 1075, 1182, 1223 Osages, 10501051 Osborn, Carolyn, 512 Oskison, John Milton, 1049 1050, 1052, 1059 Ostenso, Martha, 674, 718, 1009 stergaard, Kristian, 1153 1154 Otis, Elizabeth R., 427, 428 Ott, Evelyn Reynolds, 428 Ouspensky, P. D., 748, 1299 Out West. See Land of Sunshine Outlaws and lawmen, 119 130, 163, 373374, 625, 1038; Robin Hood theme, 119123, 127, 130 Overing, Robert, 773 Overland Monthly, 7, 346 354, 474, 1294 Owens, William A., 506, 1315 Pacifism, 400401, 463, 484 Paddock, Cornelia, 850 Painting, 291292, 578579, 629, 838, 945 Paiutes, 10401042 Palmanteer, Ted, 1067 Palmer, Joel, 1004 Palu, Francisco, 1081 Palumbo, Linda, 1024, 1164 Papagos, 11, 14, 18, 364 Paredes, Amrico, 512, 631 Paredes, Raymund, 1030 Park, Charles, 120 Parker, Arthur C., 1042 Parker, Charley, 485, 488 Parker, Cynthia Ann, 598 Parker, Norton S., 853 Parker, Quanah, 598 Parker, Robert Leroy, 121, 129130 Parkinson, Thomas, 355 Parkman, Francis, xvi, 68, 89, 90, 93, 9596, 292, 905, 906, 908, 1001, 1004 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 303, 304, 313, 1300 Pastoralism, 130, 385387, 431432, 1190 Patchen, Kenneth, 354 Pattee, Fred Lewis, 1298 Pattie, James O., 499, 624 Pattullo, George, 517, 525 Paul, Alice, 362 Paul, Rodman, 303 Paulding, James Kirke, 1285, 1288 Pavelka, Annie Sadilek, 686, 705 Paytiamo, James, 1046 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 1311 Pearce, T. M., 69, 182, 273 274, 303, 305308, 310 311 312, 505, 578, 1303 Pearson, Lorene, 854 Peck, Gregory, 270 Peckinpah, Sam, 1258, 1259, 1261, 1273, 1274 Pecos Bill, 50 Peden, William, 153 Pearanda, Oscar, 1032, 1132 Penn, Arthur, 1275 Prez de Guzmn, Fernn, 1108 Perkins, Charlotte, 312 Perry, George Sessions, 506 Peters, DeWitt C., 88 Pettigrove, Francis W., 57 Phantom, D. S., 1174 Phillips, Henry Wallace, 516 Phillips, Roland, 390 Phillips-Wolley, Clive, 1005 Phinny, Archie, 1042 Phoenix, John. See Derby, George Horatio. Photography, 778780, 781 782 Picaresque fiction, 418, 420, 538, 602, 965 Pickett, Bill, 1139 Pierce, Shanghai, 500 Pike, Albert, 182 Pike, Zebulon, 5, 84, 498, 1081 Pilgrim, Thomas, 523 Pilkington, William T., 1022, 13141315 Pimas, 1055 Pioneers and homesteading, 639643,649653, 668669, 687696, 716726,757759, 764767, 1148, 1157; folklore of, 29, 4042 Piper, Edwin Ford, 729 Planck, Max, 748 Playboy 484 Plummer, Henry, 831 Poe, Edgar Allan, 152153, 342, 829, 1002, 1288, 1291 Poetics, 405406, 464465, 742, 745, 748, 808809, 889 Poetry, 416 Pointe du Sable, Jean Baptiste, 1026, 1139 Poirier, Richard, 582 Pokagon, Simon, 1048, 1059 Politics and literature, 278 281, 289290, 374376, 432437,546547, 666667, 672673, 806810, 899904, 11111112; social protest, literature of, 362, 814816, 836837, 11011103 Polk, James K., 1004 Pollack, Sidney, 1275 Pollock, Edward, 342, 1289 Pond, Peter, 1001 Ponge, Frances, 816
1346
INDEX Popkes, Opal Lee, 1058, 1063, 1064 Populism, 289, 320 Porter, Clyde and Mae Reed, 91 Porter, Edwin S., 266 Porter, Eliot, 98 Porter, Katherine Anne, 559 565, 1093, 1179, 1303, 1310 Porter, Kenneth Wiggins, 1140 Porter, William Sydney, 137, 155, 501502, 516, 626 627 Portis, Charles, 129, 1182 Portola, Gaspar de, 328329 Posey, Alexander, 10461047 Posnett, Hutcheson Macaulay, 1295 Post-modernism, 135 Postl, Karl. See Sealsfield, Charles Potts, Daniel, 83 Potts, John, 79 Poulsen, Ezra J., 856 Poulsen, Richard, 59 Pound, Arthur, 676 Pound, Ezra, 489, 1204, 1312 Powell, A. Clayton, Sr., 1144 Powell, John Wesley, 5, 71, 9699, 976977 Powell, Lawrence Clark, 112, 323, 504, 518 1166, 1305 Powell, Walter W., 1162 Powers, Alfred, 274 Prairie Schooner, 307, 1299 Pratt, E. J., 1009 Pratt, Richard Henry, 1045 Prescott, William Hickling, 89 Proenneke, Richard L., 1251 Progress, idea of, 130, 144, 149, 289290, 319, 410, 488, 492, 604605, 609, 754761, 913, 926, 940, 961 Progressivism, 755, 758 Prosser, Gabriel, 1142 Provost, Etienne, 83 Pryor, Elinor, 855 Psychology, 813817, 870, 1267, 1270, 1298 Publishing, 154, 156, 180, 182, 868, 876, 877, 10221023, 11631164, 11671175, 11791180, 11861187 Puccini, Giacomo, 208 Pueblo Indians, 13, 21, 188, 364365, 626, 941, 943, 944, 1046, 1060 1067, 1073. See also Hopis Pulitzer Prize, 181, 210, 214, 215, 332, 46 433, 473 474, 487, 567, 574, 697, 751, 923, 971, 1058 1143, 1234, 1238 1239 Purchas, Samuel, 142 Puritanism, xv, 143, 208 209, 320, 386 Pynchon, Thomas, 778, 1188 1189 Quaife, Milo Milton, 94, 108 Quick, Herbert, 651, 668669 Quinto Sol Publications, 11031110 Rail, DeWayne, 1214 Railroads, 374376, 554, 825, 1009 Raine, William MacLeod, 123, 155, 518, 835 Ralph, Julian, 292 Ramrez, Francisco, 1087 Ramsey, Jarold, 1028 Randolph Bourne Council, 484 Ransom, John Crowe, 1309 Ray, David, 814, 1174 Ray, Nicholas, 269 Read, Opie, 1294 Realism, 135, 145147, 321, 648649, 664, 666, 837, 1289, 12921298 Reardon, T. H., 350 Rechy, John, 511, 1030 Red River Rebellion (1869), 1008 Redmond, Eugene, 1033 Reed, Ishmael, 335, 354, 1033, 1144, 1184, 1194 Reese, Michael, 347 Regionalism, xvii, 211, 216, 303315, 424425, 447455, 512, 574575, 643644, 668, 994995, 10201022, 1163, 1167, 1172, 1285, 1295, 1300, 1303, 1310 Reid, Ian, 154 Reid, Mayne, 167, 168, 171 172, 173, 850 Remington, Frederic, 107, 273, 277, 283, 288, 291 294, 515, 1306 Remley, David, 1184 Rexroth, Kenneth, 192, 199, 335, 354, 483, 485, 12081210, 1218, 1220, 1312 Rezner, Jacob, 915 Rhode, Mary, 1239 Rhodes, Eugene Manlove, 119, 125, 141, 155, 156, 501, 517, 525526, 592, 626, 920 Rice, Stan, 1223 Richards, Robert F., 893 Richardson, David E., 857 Richter, Conrad, 506507, 528, 530, 994, 1311 Richter, Harvena, 507 Ricketts, Edward F., 251252, 427428, 430, 432, 435, 438440 Rickey, Don, 108 Ricou, Laurence, 1010 Ridge, John Rollin, 120, 183, 10381039, 1059 Ridge, Major, 1038 Riel, Louis, 10081009 Riggs, Lynn, 138, 206, 211 213, 214, 216, 501 10531054 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 817 Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur, 485, 487 Ringwood, Gwen Pharis, 1010 Rintoul, William, 1185 Ros, Herminio, 1108 Ritt, Martin, 1258, 1272 Rivera, Toms, 512, 631632, 1030, 1035, 1105108, 1113, 1182 Robbins, Tom, 337, 1017, 11891190 Roberts, Leonard, 55 Robertson, Frank Chester, 853 Robertson, Kirk, 1218 Robinson, Charles, 1169 Robinson, Edward, 915 Robles, Al, 1032, 1132 Rockwell, Norman, 777778
1347

Rocky Mountains, 822824 Rodgers, Richard, 211, 215 Rodrguez, Fray Agustn, 4 Rodriguez, Richard, 1115 Roe, Frances M. A., 112 Roemer, Kenneth M., 8 Roethke, Beatrice OConnell, 450 Roethke, Theodore, 192, 447455, 465, 893, 1007, 1202, 1206, 1309 Rogers, Harrison G., 87, 744 Rogers, Roy, 267, 1264, 1265 Rogers, Will, 499, 10471048 Rojas, Arnold R., 10951096 Rollins, Phillip, 523 Rlvaag, Jennie Berdahl, 721 Rlvaag, Johan, 719, 722 Rlvaag, Ole E., 304, 321, 649650, 669, 677, 716 727, 729, 731, 792, 801, 1034, 1155, 1300 Roman, Anton, 180, 341, 346347, 349 Romanticism, 135, 161, 172, 648, 1087, 1091, 1263, 12831286, 12881289 Rome, Harold, 215 Ronald, Ann, 1022 Roosevelt, Theodore, 92, 122, 273, 276288, 290, 292 294, 303, 515, 518, 519, 835, 1297, 1306, 1314 Roripaugh, Robert A., 842, 1184 ,1185 Rorty, James, 400 Rose, Ed, 83 Rose, Stanley, 587 Roseliep, Raymond, 563 Rosen, Gerald, 1019 Ross, Alexander, 1003, 1008 Ross, C. Ben, 873 Ross, Sinclair, 1010 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 344 Roth, Philip, 777 Rothenberg, Jerome, 21, 814 Rothwell, Kenneth, 750 Rough Riders, 279 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 142 144, 160, 168 Rowell, Galen, 1249 Rowlandson, Mary, 143, 146 Royce, Josiah, 643 Rule, Jane, 1007 Rulfo, Juan, 1106 Ruppius, Otto, 162 Rusk, Ralph Leslie, 274, 323, 1299 Russell, Charles M., 836, 837838 Russell, Norman, 1029 Russell, Osborne, 83, 87, 227228, 234 Rutsala, Vern, 1203, 1205 1206 Ruxton, George Frederick, 50, 68, 89, 9091, 98, 170, 172, 499, 550, 745, 830, 919 Rydell, Mark, 1259 Ryden, Hope, 1165, 1251 1252 Ryga, George, 1006 Sacagawea, 75, 7778, 1075 Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 900 Sage, Rufus B., 745, 829 St. Louis, 76, 81, 95 St. Olaf College, 721, 727, 729 St. Vrain, Ceran, 88, 94 Sakamoto, James Y., 1124 Salgari, Emilio, 167 Salinas, Luis Omar, 1115, 1214 Salisbury, Albert and Jane, 77 Sallis, James, 1023, 1167, 1175 Salt Lake City, 138 Salt Lake Theatre, 205 Salverson, Laura Goodman, 1009 Sampley, Arthur, 501 San Francisco, 7, 182, 308 309, 329330, 333, 335, 339355, 370372, 375, 482492, 1039, 1208 1210, 1217, 1289, 1297 San Francisco State Poetry Center, 484 San Francisco State University, 1187 Sanchez, Father Jos, 86 Sanchez, Thomas, 330, 336, 1183 Sandburg, Carl, 416, 425, 724, 1301 Sandoz, Jules, 764767, 772 Sandoz, Mari, 69, 322, 645, 647, 652, 657, 764773, 905, 1179, 1308 Santa Fe Trail, 6, 82, 84, 88 89, 92, 93, 94, 1081 Santee, Ross, 529, 628 Santos, Bienvenido, 1032, 1127, 1132, 1182 Saroyan, Aram, 355, 472, 477, 478, 1033 Saroyan, William, 138, 156, 214, 327, 332333, 355, 402, 472479, 587, 592, 1033, 1034, 1213, 1304 Saskatchewan, 672, 972, 976 977, 1010 Satanta (Kiowa), 601 Satire, 149, 211, 341, 343 347, 350353, 462, 590 592, 756758, 759, 833, 855, 1047 Saturday Evening Post, 515 517, 519520 Saturday Review of Literature, 506, 899, 900, 902, 903 Sauer, Carl, 1220 Savage, Sherman, 1140 Say, Thomas, 226 Sayre, Robert F., 750 Scandinavian-American literature and culture, 32, 716726, 1009, 1033, 1034, 11481158 Scarborough, Dorothy, 506, 530, 1179, 1311 Schaefer, Jack, 152, 156, 270, 293, 521, 529, 840, 958 969, 1028, 1168, 1182, 1185, 1278 Schiller, Friedrich, 403 Scholes, Robert, 661 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 645 Schramm, Wilbur, 729 Schreiner, Olive, 1295 Schulberg, Budd, 334 Schultz, James Willard, 1006 Schulz, Mrs. A. M., 342 Schweitzer, Albert, 164 Science fiction, 137, 1194 1195, 1260 Science, attitudes towards, 387389, 427428, 429, 430, 432, 591593, 758, 888, 890, 893, 943, 944 Scientific study of the West, 19th century, 5, 75, 96 98, 223227, 230, 235;
1348
INDEX
20th century, 243246, 251252, 12511252 Scornberger, Judith, 1180 Scott, Randolph, 270, 1257, 1258, 1273 Scott, Sir Walter, 161, 1283, 1284, 1286, 1293, 1295 Scott, Winfield, 171, 501 Scowcroft, Richard, 855 Seager, Allan, 447, 450 Sealsfield, Charles, 162, 163, 173, 727 Sector, Bob, 472 Sedillo, Juan A. A., 1091 Segun, Juan, 1089 Seitz, George B., 268 Selkirk, Lord, 1008 Seltzer, Charles Alden, 123, 153, 518 Seltzer, Chester, 154, 622, 630631, 1173, 1185, 1186 Sergel, Roger, 749 Service, Robert, 331, 1005 Sewid, James, 19 Sexuality, attitudes towards, 485, 489, 549, 612619, 688, 690, 693695, 704, 778, 785786, 799, 837, 840, 863864, 874875 Shakespeare, William, 142, 161, 487, 539, 540, 728, 1289, 1295 Shange, Ntozake, 354 Shapiro, Karl, 1170 Sharp, Paul, 1011 Shaw, George Bernard, 209 Shaw, Quincy, 95, 96 Sheean, Vincent, 402 Sheffield, Carlton, 428 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 540, 541, 748 Shelton, Richard, 12261227 Shepard, Sam, 138, 204, 1017, 1024, 1164, 1232, 12341237 Sheridan, Philip B., 92, 111, 769 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 601 Sherwood, Robert E., 213 214 Shiels, William, 182 Shine, Ted, 1241 Short, Luke. See Glidden,
Frederick D. Shoshonis, 75, 78 Shrake, Edwin, 511 Shuman, R. Baird, 216 Siegel, Don, 1274 Sierra Club, 354 Sierra Nevada, 230232, 234236 Sievers, W. David, 211 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 24, 69, 136, 512, 1029, 1051, 1058, 10601061, 1063, 1067, 1072, 1179, 1182, 1194 Sill, Edwin Rowland, 183 Simon, Paul, 1238 Simpson, George, 1003 Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy. See Bower, B. M. Sinclair, Bertrand, 1005 Sinclair, Upton, 425, 836, 1298, 1303 Sioux, 15, 19, 21, 105, 110, 111, 114, 747, 768, 800, 10431045, 1054, 1063 Siringo, Charles, 499 Sitting Bull, 114, 645, 1000 Skelton, Red, 53 Skelton, Robin, 1007 Sky, Gino, 843, 1189 Sledge, Linda Ching, 1130 Sloan, John, 568 Sloane, William, 920 Slocum, Joshua, 388 Slotkin, Richard, 1311 Small towns, culture of, 614, 653656 Smeall, Joseph F. S., 806 Smith, C. W., 530 Smith, David, 1250 Smith, Erwin, 517 Smith, George Winston, 89 Smith, Henry Nash, xvi, 147, 150, 155, 274, 303, 312 314, 515, 13041305 Smith, Jedediah, 71, 77, 81, 83, 84, 8687, 744, 746, 747, 879 Smith, John, 498 Smith, Joseph, 349, 831, 832, 854, 858, 871, 900 Smith, Rebecca W., 274, 306, 307, 1303 Snell, George D., 853 Snively, W. D., Jr., 76
Snow, Eliza Roxy, 182, 832 Snyder, Gary, 3, 140, 197, 336, 354, 482493, 1168, 1209, 1217, 1220, 1312 Socialism, 209, 385, 389 Sonnichsen, C. L., 50, 104, 310, 626, 1023 Sorenson, Virginia, 855 Soto, Gary, 1031, 11121114, 1145, 1214 South Dakota, 716717, 719722 724, 1203, 1205 Southwest Review, 307, 312, 537 Spanish-American War, 370, 1088 Sparks, Jared, 1285 Spear, Roberta, 1214 Speck, Gordon, 82 Speer, Laurel, 1185 Spencer, Herbert, 665, 1297 Sper, Felix, 204 Spettigue, D. O., 1009 Spillane, Mickey, 484 Spiller, Robert E., 887 Spohn, George Weida, 729 Spotts, David L., 110 Sprague, Marshall, 92, 93 Spring, Agnes Wright, 90 Stafford, Helen Cortez, 855 Stafford, Jean, 840, 1179, 1315 Stafford, William, 198, 458 467, 1007, 1168, 1202 Stahl, Jesse, 1139 Stallard, Patricia Y., 111 Standing, William, 1054 Standing Bear, Luther, 1044 1045 Stanford, Ann, 1163, 1211 Stanford University, 426, 971, 1187 Stanley, O. F. G., 1009 Stansbury, Howard, 228230, 234 Starkweather, Charles, 786 Stauffer, Donald, 887 Stauffer, Helen, 751 Stead, Robert J. C., 1009 Stedman, E. C., 1298, 1300 Stefanile, Felix, 1171 Steffens, Lincoln, 355, 402, 425, 518
1349

Stegner, Wallace, 323, 355, 728, 971986, 1019, 1187 1302, 1310, 1313; essays and histories, 5, 67, 69, 91, 98, 156, 275, 322324, 5159 719, 730, 844, 862, 913, 1001, 1011, 1024, 1307, 1308; fiction, 136, 213, 325, 327, 336, 680, 834, 840, 856, 1010, 1183, 1188, 1193 Stein, Gertrude, 781 Steinbeck, Carol Henning, 427, 436, 439 Steinbeck, John, 137, 211, 214215, 251252, 327, 330, 333, 336, 354, 377, 424441, 793, 1094, 1144, 1214, 1304, 1313 Steptoe, Edward J., 113 Sterling, George, 183, 330, 362, 402, 424 Stetler, Charles, 1212 Stevens, George, 270 Stevens, James, 50, 332, 417, 1306 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 330, 349, 370, 434, 438 Stewart, Edgar I., 105 Stewart, Ellen, 1240 Stewart, George R., 69, 303, 305, 310, 355, 1303 Stewart, Jimmy, 270, 1270, 1273 Stewart, Sir William Drummond, 83, 91, 9293, 908 Stiles, Knute, 484 Stilwell, Hart, 629 Stockton, Robert Field, 908 Stoddard, Charles Warren, 183, 308, 330, 349350, 362, 424 Stone, Irving, 354 Stong, Phil Duffield, 653 654, 674 Storm, Hans Otto, 1304 Stout, Hosea, 829 Straight, Michael, 990 Stratton, Joanna L., 1179 Stratton, Winfield Scott, 938 Street, Webster F., 428 Strenski, Ellen, 1193 Strindberg, August, 209 Strmme, Peer Olson, 718, 1152 Strubberg, Friedrich Armand, 162 Stumbo, Bella, 478 Styron, William, 781 Surez, Mario, 1030, 1093 1095 Sublette, Bill, 8486, 92, 892 Sublette, Clifford M., 1311 Suckow, Ruth, 652, 1299, 1300 Sullivan, Noel, 402 Summerhayes, Martha, 112, 499, 625 Sumner, D. Nathan, 461 Sunder, John E., 84 Sung, Betty Lee, 1031 Surmelian, Leon, 1033 Surrealism, 592, 813817, 1069, 1105 Suyemoto, Toyo, 1032 Swallow, Alan, 180, 191, 195, 806, 807808, 839, 873, 877, 887, 1168, 1309 1310 Swan, James G., 329 Swift, Jonathan, 55 Swigart, Ron, 1189 Synge, John Millington, 212 Tacitus, 149 Tagatac, Sam, 1032, 1132 Taggard, Genevieve, 181, 188, 190, 192, 199 Taine, Hippolyte, 740, 1288, 1291, 1295 Tall Mountain, Mary, 1058, 1071 Tapahonso, Luci, 10721073 Tarkington, Booth, 1292, 1300 Tashjian, James H., 477478 Tate, Allen, 447, 807, 1309 Tatum, Stephen, 1256 Taylor, Bayard, 90, 664 Taylor, J. Golden, 136, 1022, 1310 Taylor, Pat Ellis, 1179 Taylor, Robert, 113 Taylor, Samuel W., 855856 Taylor, Theodore, 1033 Taylor Grazing Act (1934), 828 Teatro Campesino, 205, 1101 1103, 1240 Teatro Carpa, 205 Technology, attitudes towards, 255, 609, 755760, 784 785, 1247 Temko, Allan, 1187 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 342, 347, 740 Terry, Douglas, 1192 Terry, Marshall, 512 Terry, Megan, 1242 Texas, in fiction, 530532, 582, 601602, 612617, 629632, 11051108, 12331234; history and description, 247250, 305306, 523524, 624627, 1080, 1082 1084; literature of, 501 505, 510512, 535543, 559565, 597, 602, 612 619, 1140, 1142, 1221 1223, 1239 Texas Christian University, 505 Texas Folklore Society, 503, 536, 538 Texas Institute of Letters, 559, 561 Texas Rangers, 122, 123, 624, 625, 626, 631, 1084 Texas Revolution (1836), 162, 1080, 1082, 1089 Thanet, Octave, 1294 Theatre Guild of New York, 209 Thomas, Audrey, 1007 Thomas, Augustus, 207208 Thomas, Dylan, 403 Thomas, Lorenzo, 1145 Thomason, A. P., 310 Thomason, John W., Jr., 506 Thompson, David, 1002 Thompson, Don, 1214 Thompson, Hunter, 1110, 1111 Thompson, Maurice, 664 Thompson, Stith, 536 Thomson, James, 1039 Thoreau, Henry David, xvii, 222, 232, 242, 250, 253, 486, 605, 743, 960, 961, 1051, 1220, 1250, 1251, 1289, 1312 Thorpe, Thomas Bangs, 340
1350
INDEX
Thrapp, Dan L., 105 Thurman, Wallace, 1027, 1032, 1143 Thurston, Jarvis, 156 Thwaites, Reuben Gold, 74, 638, 1001, 1004 Tinkle, Lon, 539, 540, 542 Todd, Edgeley W., 80, 750 Tolstoy, Leo, 1292, 1293 Toomer, Jean, 402 Torri, Julio, 1108 Toscanini, Arturo, 402 Tourgee, Albion W., 850 Townsend, Charles, 207 Townsend, John Kirk, 225 226, 227, 1004 Trakl, Georg, 813, 817 Trambley, Estela Portillo, 512 Transtrmer, Tomas, 813, 817 Travel and adventure narratives, 68, 7199, 221 228, 329, 497499, 623624, 829830, 10011004, 1081, 1249 1250 Travel literature, 346, 349, 438, 440441 Traven, B., 167, 1301 Trollope, Frances, 1287 Trout, Grace Wilbur, 850 Truman, Harry S., 484 Trungpa Rinpoche, 490, 1220 Trusky, A. Thomas, 138, 1180, 1211 Tsantangya (Kiowa), 601 Tsembo, Amy, 1130 Tsunieshi, Sheishi, 1031, 1123 Tudor, William, 1284 Turner, Frederick Jackson, xvi, 273274, 277, 282288, 290294, 698. See also Frontier Tuttle, W. C., 155, 520 TV Guide, 484 Twain, Mark, 69, 145, 154, 339355, 637, 850, 901, 905, 1284, 12891293; critical reception of, 346, 901, 1297, 12981299, 13011302; in the Far West, 7, 308309, 326, 329330, 339355, 833; and later authors, 206, 208, 209, 383, 516, 590,
654, 702, 704, 779, 781, 787, 927, 1010, 1247, 1302 Ude, Wayne, 1020, 1192, 1194 Umphraville, Angus, 1287 U.S. Army, 8990, 104115; blacks in, 105; in fiction, 112115, 834; memoirs of, 104112 U.S. Bureau of the Census, 3, 276 U.S. Geological Survey, 98 Universities, 7, 209, 211, 282283, 11691170, 1172, 1187 University of Iowa, 458, 729, 1187 University of Nevada, 991 992 University of New Mexico, 505 University of North Dakota, 211 University of Southern California, 399 University of Texas, 273, 505, 535537, 559 University of Washington, 211, 447, 449 University of Wisconsin, 282, 285 Urbanisation, 509511, 518, 547, 549, 612, 644, 656 657, 756757, 798, 825; city in literature, 370 373, 511, 615619, 657 Utah, 42, 4647, 5052, 605606, 825, 831, 849 857, 975; Ogden 900. See also Mormonism Utley, Robert M., 105 Utopianism, 602 Valdez, Luis, 205, 330, 338, 1021, 1024, 1030, 1035, 1101103, 1164, 1240 Vallejo, Cesar, 813, 817 Vallejo, Mariano, 1089 Vancouver, George, 1002 Van Doren, Carl, 653 Van Doren, Mark, 400 Van Dyke, John C., 239241, 625
Vasconcellos, Jos, 1030 Vasquez, Louis, 85 Vasquez, Richard, 1030, 1182 Vasquez, Tiburcio, 1240 Vaughn, J. W., 105 Veblen, Thorstein, 755 Vega Carpio, Lope Flix de, 1079 Venable, W. H., 12911292, 1299 Verlaine, Paul, 1296 Vestal, Stanley, 85, 506 Victor, Frances Fuller, 183, 332 Vidor, King, 268, 269 Vietnam War, 129, 325, 593, 660, 814816, 1102, 1112, 1162, 1167, 1238, 1239,1259,1269 Villa, Francisco Pancho, 353, 1093, 1097 Villa, Jos Garca, 1032, 1126 Villagr, Gaspar Prez de, 5, 498, 623, 1081 Villarreal, Jose Antonio, 338, 1030, 1035, 10961097, 1105 Virgil, 740, 744, 746 Vizenor, Gerald, 1058, 1062 Vliet, R.G., 510, 561562, 1165, 1223 Vonnegut, Kurt, 777 Wade, Mason, 96 Waggoner, Hyatt, 887 Wagner, Glendolin Damon, 109 Wagner, Richard, 289 Wagoner, David, 1007 Wah, Fred, 1007 Walker, Alice, 1163 Walker, Dale, 1297 Walker, Don D., 1022, 1184, 1314 Walker, Franklin, 7, 274, 308309, 311312, 1303 Walker, Jack, 1173, 1186 Walker, Joseph Reddeford, 80, 84 Walker, Theodore, J., 1250 Wallace, Big Foot, 306, 625 Wallace, Henry, 903 Wallace, Irving, 857 Wallace, Susan, 499 Walsh, Marie A., 850
1351

Walsh, Marnie, 1067 Walsh, Raoul, 268 Walters, Anna Lee, 1058 Walworth, Jeannette Ritchie H., 850 War, attitudes towards, 592 593, 964. See also Pacifism War of 1812, 277278, 319 Warcaziwin (Sioux), 1045 Ward, Artemus, 833, 850, 1289, 1291 Ward, Douglas Turner, 1241 Ward, Maria, 849 Ware, Eugene F., 107 Warner, Edith, 944 Warren, Austin, 135, 140 Warren, Nina Otero, 1091 Warren, Robert Penn, 564 Washington (state), 47, 331, 449455, 12021204; Seattle, 449, 1123, 1124 Waters, Frank, 204, 792, 838, 935950, 990, 1019, 1028, 1168, 1183, 1194, 1305, 1307, 1310, 1312, 1313, 1314 Watson, Sheila, 1006 Watson, Wilfred, 1008 Way, Isabel Stewart, 674 Wayman, Tom, 1008 Wayne, John, xvi, 268271, 1257, 1259, 12701271, 1273, 1274, 1279 Weales, Gerald, 215 Weare, W. K., 197 Webb, George, 1055 Webb, Walter Prescott, 141, 303, 310, 500, 504505, 515, 523, 543, 626, 1021, 1311 Webber, Gordon, 679, 680 Weber, David J., 82 Weeks, Ramona, 1184 Weimann, Robert, 10 Weir, Bob, 482 Welbrock, Bill, 730 Welch, James, 842, 844, 1029, 1051, 1058, 1061, 1068, 10691070, 1192 Wellek, Ren, 135, 140, 1292 Wellman, Paul I., 105 Welsch, Roger, 46, 48 Wentworth, May, 182, 342 Wescott, Glenway, 658659, 671 675, 680 West, Celeste, 1164 West, George, 436 West, Jessamyn, 1181 West, Nathanael, 333, 334, 547, 587, 1019, 1188, 1304 West, Ray B., Jr., 319, 839, 1187 Westbrook, Max, 321, 771, 802, 1022, 1186, 1223, 13131314 Western Literature Association, xixxx, 1022, 1310 Western Review, 839 Westerns, popular, 119130, 152157, 274, 324 ,515 521, 588, 597, 605, 918, 989, 994, 10231024, 1182, 1187, 1189, 1263 1280, 1304, 1311; European (fiction), 147, 159173; (film), 159, 12581259, 12721273; formulas of, 6, 31, 119 126, 130, 152, 156, 962 963, 1263, 1268, 1270 1272, 1275, 1276, 12791280,1313; movies, 120, 124, 129, 266271, 12561261, 12691276, 1279; origins of, 119123, 143, 147 150, 152155, 207208, 266, 288290, 293, 1276; radio, 12631265, I279; science fiction, 609, 11941195; television, 129, 12651269, 1276, 1279; theater, 124, 127 Weston, John, 511 Wetherell, June, 1004 Wetzel, Donald, 1310 Weyland, Jack, 857 Whalen, Philip, 482, 485 Wharton, Edith, 972 Wheeler, George M., 5 Whipple, Amiel Weeks, 163 Whipple, Maurine, 854 Whipple, T. K., 1301 Whitaker, Herman, 519 White, E. B., 904 White, Gilbert, 222, 250 White, Stewart Edward, 155, 170, 501, 516, 520, 628, 919 White, William, 110 Whitebird, Joanie, 1173, 1221 Whitehead, Alfred North, 1308 Whitesides, Thomas, 1162 Whitlock, Brand, 1292 Whitman, Marcus, 85, 92, 908, 1003, 1004 Whitman, Walt, 7, 313, 344, 383, 400, 452, 454, 462, 487, 643, 665, 689, 741, 748, 816, 891, 1210, 1285, 1290, 1294, 1296, 1298, 1309, 1312 Whitney, Asa, 313 Whitney, Blair, 749 Whitney, Josiah, 235 Whitney, Orson F., 832 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 643 Wickenden, Dan, 554 Wiebe, Rudy, 1009 Wiggins, Oliver P., 88 Wild, Peter, 139 Wilde, Oscar, 1296, 1309 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 137, 1179 Wilder, Thornton, 402, 1237 Wilderness, responses to, 4, 148150, 221222, 227228, 233, 234256, 354, 383388, 408, 486, 488, 604609, 994, 12461250, 1270, 1275. See also Eden, America as Wilderness Society, 244, 245 Wilkes, Charles, 5 Willard, Beatrice E., 1247 Williams, John, 841 Williams, Sherley Anne, 1033, 1145, 1212 Williams, Tennessee, 204 Williams, William Carlos, 448, 465, 488, 808, 1169, 1204, 1312 Williams, William Shirley Old Bill, 83, 84, 89, 172 Willson, Meredith, 215 Wilson, Edmund, 476, 900, 13031304 Wilson, Elinor, 85 Wilson, Ethel, 332, 1007 Wilson, Garff B., 207
1352
INDEX
Wilson, Harry Leon, 211, 334, 851 Wilson, Keith, 12241226 Wilson, Lanford, 12371238 Wilson, Margaret, 669 Wilson, Sloane, 484 Wilson, Woodrow, 285, 294 Winans, A. D., 1169 Winegarten, Ruthe, 1179 Winnebagos, 13 Winnemucca (Hopkins), Sarah, 10401042 Winters, Yvor, 137, 181, 192, 1187, 1209, 1216, 1301, 13091310 Winther, Sophus Keith, 651 652, 676677, 718, 1034, 11561157 Winthrop, Theodore, 329, 332, 850 Wisconsin, 282283, 285, 655, 658 Wisconsin State Historical Society, 282 Wiseman, Adele, 1009 Wist, Johannes B., 718, 1154 Wister, Owen, xvi, 123, 136, 155, 167, 209, 273, 277, 287294, 313, 515, 516, 517, 524, 702, 704, 835, 1019, 1276, 1289, 1306, 1314 Witt-Diamont, Ruth, 484 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 780 Wittke, Carl, 162, 172 Woiwode, Larry, 661, 679, 680681 Wolcott, Frank, 289 Wolfe, Thomas, 779, 793 794, 873, 874 Wolfville genre, 516
Women on the frontier, 111 112, 499, 500, 624625, 628, 1179; in fiction, 530, 669, 686696, 724 725 Wong, Jade Snow, 1031, 1122 Wong, Shawn, 337, 1032, 1130, 1182 Wood, Charles Erskine Scott, 186187 Wood, Grant, 668 Woodberry, George Edward, 748 Woodbury, Lael J., 205 Woodcock, George, 1008 Woodman, Jean, 854 Woodruff, Wilford, 854 Woods, Walter, 124 Woodward, Arthur, 107 Woolley, Bryan, 511 Wordsworth, William, 1295 World War I, 186, 309, 362, 400, 401, 519520, 536, 677, 697698, 722, 971 973, 1049 World War II, 190, 191, 309, 401, 438, 484, 539, 587, 591, 592, 808, 893, 973, 1018, 1093 Wormser, Richard W., 857 Wouk, Herman, 484 Wounded Knee massacre (1890), 105, 111, 114, 292, 646, 660, 745, 747, 1043, 1068 Wright, Willard Huntington, 424 Wright, William, 344 Wurdemann, Audrey, 181, 332 Wurrtenberg, Paul Wilhelm
von, 163 Wyeth, John B., 1004 Wyeth, Nathaniel, 83, 224 Wylder, Delbert E., 115, 1022, 1193, 13101311 Wynn, Dudley, 361 Wyoming, 46, 289, 825, 828, 831, 835 Yale University, 141, 211, 230 Yalom, Marilyn, 1181 Yamamoto, Hisaye, 1032, 1131, 1182 Yamauchi, Wakano, 1131 Yaquis, 16, 18, 20 Yates, J. Michael, 1007 Yava, Albert, 13 Ybarra-Frausto, Toms, 1031 Yeats, W. B., 486 Yellowstone National Park, 79, 93 Yorgason, Blaine M., 857 Yost, Nellie Snyder, 1178 Young, Al, 1033, 1144 Young, Brigham, 56, 182, 849, 854, 871 Young, David C., 750 Young, Ewing, 83 Young, John, 500, 536, 538, 627 Young, Vernon, 364 Young Bear, Ray, 1029 Yung, Wing, 1122 Zen. See Buddhism Zigal, Thomas, 1173 Zinnemann, Fred, 270 Zola, Emile, 370, 871 Zwinger, Ann H., 12471249
1353
Typesetting by G & S, Austin Printing and binding by Edwards Brothers, Ann Arbor Design and production by Whitehead & Whitehead, Austin Drawings by Walle Conoly, Austin

A Literary History of The American West

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The Western Literature Association

Texas Christian University Press Fort Worth

Copyright 1987 by The Western Literature Association.

A LITERARY HISTORY of the AMERICAN WEST

J. Golden Taylor (19121982)

Preface Max Westbrook Chronology Richard W. Etulain

Encountering the West

A Literary History of the American West

152 159 180 204 221 266 273 276 303

Settled In: Many Wests

A Literary History of the American West

Rediscovering the West

A Literary History of the American West

1246 1256 1263 1283 1317 1324 1330

A Literary History of the American West

A Literary History of the American West

A Literary History of the American West

I. A Historical Chronology of the Frontier and the American West

1922: 192324: 192428: 1928: 1929: 1930s: 1931: 1933ff: 1934:

1965: 1968: 1969: 1970: 1973: 197778: 1978: 1980:

II. A Literary Chronology of the American West

1810: 1814: 1822: 1823: 1826:

1844: 1846: 1847: 1848: 1849:

1850: 1851: 1853: 1854:

1857: 1858: 1860: 1861: 1864: 1865:

1870: 1871: 1872: 1874:

1875: 1876: 1878: 1879: 1881:

1887: 1888: 1890: 1891: 1892: 1893: 1894: 1895:

1899: 1900: 1901: 1902:

1904: 1905: 1906:

1907: 1908: 1909:

1910: 1911: 1912:

1913: 1914: 1915:

1916: 1917: 1918:

1920: 1921: 1922:

N THE LAST LINES

A Literary History of the American West

INTRODUCTION: ENCOUNTERING THE WEST

A Literary History of the American West

INTRODUCTION: ENCOUNTERING THE WEST

Boise State University

N THE LAST LINES

A Literary History of the American West

INTRODUCTION: ENCOUNTERING THE WEST

A Literary History of the American West

INTRODUCTION: ENCOUNTERING THE WEST

Boise State University

A Literary History of the American West

Boise State University

Native Oral Traditions

A Literary History of the American West

NATIVE ORAL TRADITIONS

A Literary History of the American West

NATIVE ORAL TRADITIONS

A Literary History of the American West

NATIVE ORAL TRADITIONS

A Literary History of the American West

NATIVE ORAL TRADITIONS

A Literary History of the American West

NATIVE ORAL TRADITIONS

A Literary History of the American West

NATIVE ORAL TRADITIONS