California and the West by Charis Wilson, Edward Weston

Abstract

Reviews 69 concerning museums, libraries with special collections, and memorials, along with information on visiting hours, whether admission is charged, and street or highway directions. The volumes are organized by state, and an index is provided for each guide so that wandering authors like Hemingway and Twain can be followed. While indicating that the volumes are not comprehensive literary histories , Rita Stein provides a brief summary of each state's literature. These are useful starting points for the general reader. Others more familiar with western and southwestern writing will be frustrated by the emphasis oIl: a few popular major figures and works primarily from the past. The American Guide Series from the WPA Federal Writers' Project, as revised, is cited as one major source of information, and in both volumes consideration made of recent works and authors is uncertain. Vardis Fisher's large status in the literature of Idaho is properly noted, for example, while Walter Clark and A. B. Guthrie are identified as authors of The Ox-Bow Incident and The Big Sky, with their larger significance for Nevada and Montana literature going unrecognized. In general, the states of the interior West are dealt with sketchily and attention given to well-known writers passing through (such as Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, and Owen Wister), rather than to those more truly reflecting the actual experience of the area. In part, these questions of emphasis are related to the status of the non-urban West in American Jiterature, but they also point up the need for continued scholarly attention to developing recent, up-to-date studies of writers and significant works for the entire region. As guides to popular and major authors of past periods in their associations with particular states, these two volumes are very useful for the literary tourist stalking Tor House, the Zane Grey Cabin in the Tonto National Forest, or the canyon in Mesa Verde where Willa Cather was lost for several hours. Along with Jean Craighead George's The American Walk Book, these publications indicate that guidebooks are still valuable for those trekking the country in search of fulfillment or understanding. ROBERT RORIPAUGH, University of Wyoming California and the West. By Charis Wilson and Edward Weston. (Millerton , New York: Aperture, 1978. 188 pages, $25.00.) . Charis Wilson writes an unpretentious, engaging prose, both in the maIn text of this book which was first published in 1940 and in a "ForeWOr ?" added in 1978 for its republication. She was Edward Weston's companIon - and, by the end of the trip, wife - on a two-year, thirty-five thousand mile photographic journey through the West. Sixty-four of West- 70 Western American Literature on's selenium-toned photographs, some of them practically alive with rhythm especially those which depict trees and rocks, record their travels. They liked California best, because of the light and because of the equable climate in which they could camp out year-round, and so most of the book concerns that state. Wilson sees food, car, equipment, road conditions, weather, and so forth, with a traveler's new eyes. Her account of these Depression years is young spirited, happy. It didn't take much for her and Weston to live their dream of traveling and seeing. A $2,000 grant from the Guggenheim. Foundation got them going very well, and soon they had established a sim. pIe routine of driving, camping, walking out, always looking. Food for April, 1937, came to $33.97. At the end of a long day in the desert, during which they got by on dried fruit and nuts, Wilson would prepare a hot meal: "a jar of chicken egg noodles, cans of corn, tomatoes and tamales, with some jack cheese melted on top. Any surplus was stored in the jar and added to the next night's stew." Everything was done as efficiently and simply as possible, so that when the light was right, and seeing could occur, Weston would be ready. Charis Wilson seems to have made a good many of those moments possible, and her own expression of them is, in its way, as poetically evocative as Weston's. That their book is still genu., inely...