Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture by Roberta Price

Abstract

B o o k R e v ie w s 23 1 Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture. By Roberta Price. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. 355 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma, Professor Emeritus In the old days, up through the beginning of World War I, say, the bildungsroman began in doubt and confusion and ended in a resolve to act or a spiritual or aesthetic epiphany. In contrast, development stories from the 1960s and ’70s counterculture tend to begin in absolute certainty that the narrator and friends are spiritually superior to a corrupt society and are certain that they can create a new and better one. The certainty gradually flakes away as the real world— sexual and financial complications, egos, drought, visions that interfere with practical work—abrades idealism. This kind of story ends, if not in tears, with protagonists emerging from the counterculture with some of the original ideals adapted to the society at large, moving into careers that would make parents proud. This, at any rate, is Roberta Price’s story set at the Libre commune north­ west of Walsenburg, Colorado, and told as a quest story. Price admits that hers is “a true account, but not always literal” (353). Incidents and characters are blended; conversations are re-invented; pan shots give a sense of simultane­ ous activities in the Huerfano Valley; cuts to the outside political and cultural world provide contrast. Price sometimes feels confused about values. When her husband has an affair, she is upset because it’s wrong to feel jealous. But he waited to tell her, and “it was still bad to be dishonest, so I could be legitimately upset about that” (188). Her very straight family is surprisingly supportive with visits and money. There’s always that old ace in the hole, as the song says. But at Libre, one straw falls on another. The Price’s house, symbolically built around a huge rock, never gets finished. On trips back east, Price and her husband show commune slides to Yalies, who grow less and less interested. At a commune meeting, someone says, “There isn’t going to be a revolution!” (343). The last straw drops when Price doesn’t have forty-seven cents to buy a Dobie pad for her kitchen. Then comes a fortunate fall—through the roof of a building. Recovering in Denver, Price gets involved with the Naropa crowd and comes to under­ stand that she can’t “fit what [she] was doing into any New World order, and ... crashe[s] into [her] puritan roots” (319). The peak experience at Libre involves the arrival of “half the beatniks still alive” from a gig at Naropa (329). As Allen Ginsberg plays his harmonium for “the fruit of his brain and words if not his loins,” she realizes, “Now that Allen’s come here, I know I can leave. When a dream comes true, it’s over too” (332). She kicks out the Beats, sheds husband and other encumbrances, becomes a lawyer, and, wondering whether “we were heroic fools or foolish heroes,” 2 3 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 decides it doesn’t matter (345). I’d reject both fools and heroes. She and her cadre did what they felt they had to do. Some survived it; some learned from it. It’s history. C o n t r i b u t o r s A u t h o r s Chadwick Allen is associate professor of English at Ohio State University, where he teaches postcolonial and comparative indigenous literatures. He is the author of Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (2002). Nathaniel Lewis, associate professor of English at St. Michael’s College, is the author of Unsettling the Literary West (2003), which won the WLA’s Thomas J. Lyon Book Award, and coeditor of True West (2004, with William R. Handley). John Lloyd Purdy is professor of English at Western Washington University...