Ferlinghetti. The Artist in His Time by Barry Silesky

Abstract

Reviews 131 them have been documented in detail in The Sixth Grandfather (1984) by Raymond DeMallie, who considers them less significant than Neihardt’s re­ markable empathy with Black Elk. Julian Rice argues that Neihardt and Black Elk were essentially different because they derive from antithetical traditions. The Christian rejection of this world is at odds with the Lakota concern for it, for example, so the apparent Platonic dualism in BlackElk Speaksis Neihardt’s, not Black Elk’s. Neihardt, Rice claims, is “Western” and “psychologically” Christian, an assimilationist who praised Lakota culture only because he wanted to prove that Indians were capable of becoming Americans. Black Elk’s conversion to Roman Catholicism almost thirty years before Neihardt met him, Rice argues, was an act of social deception, so DeMallie’s careful documentation of Christian elements in Black Elk’s own language in the transcripts is simply inexplicable. It is not likely that anyone will ever be able to straighten out the question of Black Elk’s Christian experience. Rice’s strategy—to deny its significance alto­ gether—hardly reflects the conflicting evidence of the documents. Rice’s contention that traditional Lakota religion is radically different from the Christian premises of Western civilization cannot be denied, but his argu­ ment that any Christian elements in BlackElk Speakscan only be due to Neihardt because his other writings reveal them are something else. His chapter on “Neihardt’s Christian Matrix,”for example, is largely concerned with the argu­ ments ofaJesuit missionary which, he says, are as misguided as Neihardt’sin The Song oftheMessiah. Readers unburdened with ideological preconceptions will balk at the argu­ ment that a writer says something in one book because he says it in another and thus will find it difficult to accept Rice’s assumption that future students of Black Elk’s thought may consider Black Elk Speaks only a “curio” of a less enlightened era. They are advised to compare the transcriptions in DeMallie’s book with Neihardt’s text and tojudge for themselves. ROBERT L. BERNER Oshkosh, Wisconsin Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time. By Barry Silesky. (New York: Warner Books, 1990. 294 pages, $24.95.) This biography of Ferlinghetti is a wonderful read and will be enjoyed by fans and students of the poet, those interested in the San Francisco poetry milieu, and also by those concerned about politics and literature. In narrating the life of the living writer, Silesky describes the genesis and history of City Lights Books, documents the struggles against censorship in the fifties, provides 132 WesternAmerican Literature an angle on the rise of the sixties counterculture, and testifies to Ferlinghetti’s tremendous versatility. Accomplished in painting as well as poetry, impresario to much of the best postwar American writing, politically committed in better and worse times, Ferlinghetti has lived an astonishingly full life, and Silesky’s biography familiarizes the reader with many interesting avenues of American culture. In this study the poetry is occasionally used to gloss aspects ofFerlinghetti’s life or to illuminate a social context, but a direct evaluation of the work is pretty much put offuntil an appendix chapter, “The Work, The Life: Poets and Critics on Ferlinghetti.” This section is not really a critical review at all but rather a collection of generous commentaries by friends of the poet. Gary Snyder, for example, holds that political engagement is what distinguishes Ferlinghetti from other American writers: “His uniqueness . . . has been a kind of almost European intellectual, political, direct engagement in a vernacular mode, with maybe a little more lightness and a little more humor than Ginsberg has. . . . The Europeanness of Lawrence, or the non-Americanness, is in his role as a political man of letters, which very few American poets are willing to take on.” This is quite a useful book—fun, informative, and full of surprises. JOHN WHALEN-BRIDGE University ofSouthern California The Texas Legacy of Katherine Anne Porter. By James T. F. Tanner. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, Texas Writers Series, No. 3, 1990. 237 pages, $19.95.) In his critical-biographical study, James Tanner provides a controlled— sometimes highly insightful—overview of Porter, adroitly escaping the recent boring intensity of Omphalos Skepsis Texana. Although it...