Life in the Upper Country. The Diary of Evelyn E. Amos

Abstract

Reviews 269 craftsmanship of the Hasting’s Chautaqua Pavilion photograph—the careful composition, the control of light, and the well-printed details—make it a pleasure to read, while also evoking the dignity of the structure’s purpose, though the dumpsters now present suggest Sunday School picnics rather than lectures. In this photograph and others, the dryness struggled against is not literal but metaphorical. Mostbuildings are presented asmonuments, grand or simple attempts to bring culture to a barren land. Bruhn imaginatively presents echoes between the more elaborate, urban public structures and private mansions and the rural houses, halls, and barns that through simple decorative features create buildings that shelter against more than winter storms. Poet Ted Kooser in his introduction observes that this collection “honors and in many instances reveres its subject.” Although true, Bruhn’s generally direct approach, especially to building exteriors, also limits the book’s emo­ tional range. He states in the preface that the use of black and white can evoke the archetypal and eternal, but at the same time it can also abstract, decontextualize, and evoke a formalist photographic tradition. Thus the photographer’s vision of this dry land at times seems overly serene. Nevertheless, Bruhn and the buildings he has photographed deserve to be honored for the sense of culture they have created. REGINALD DYCK University of Washington Life in the Upper Country. The Diary ofEvelyn E. Amos. (Boise, Idaho: cold-drill books, 1990. 122 pages, $12.95.) While reading this journal I kept asking myself, to whom is Ms. Amos writing? Who is her audience? The “you”in this diary disturbs me. This doesn’t seem to be a therapeutic exercise, since her feelings are almost entirely absent from its pages, nor is it a record of the past for her children, because her three sons are living this same life alongside of her, participating in everything she’s “instructing” her readers about such as hog butchering and sausage making: “(And maybe you think it doesn’t take a lot of elbow grease to turn that hand meat grinder).” Her husband kills a civet cat: “Boy, what a strong atomizer for a small creature—fetid scent billowed from the coop like smoke.” Much of this diary is written in a style like the above quote. I can forgive such silly mock 19th-century prose if what I’m reading gives me some worth­ while insight into a forgotten past or an unfamiliar landscape, but the period about which Ms. Amos is writing is 1948-1957, the period of my own childhood, 270 WesternAmerican Literature and I find the patronizing voice in these pages offensive, such as the cataloging of mundane chores addressed with an attitude of their being unusual hardship. She also takes pride in living in a dump when she receives an ad for a farm magazine subscription with home decorating suggestions, “I laughed at how these appealing ideas did not apply to m e....”She catalogs her canning shelves and says, “At the first glance, this list appears to be quite avariety, but actually it isn’t, as anyone who examines a canning recipe booklet can tell you.”Here we encounter that annoying “you”again. Canning doesn’t seem like an abnormal occupation to me, and it probably wasn’t unusual for most women during this period, city women included, so I have trouble jumping on the bandwagon here. As I scan her list of cauliflower pickles, pickled beets, etc., my experience tells me that she has probably wasted much of her precious time since most of these things may look great on a cellar shelf, and they even look nice in little crystal bowls on a lace tablecloth at family gatherings, but no one actually eats much of them. They’re scraped off polite people’s plates into the slop bucket. I kept hoping I’d get a glimpse of the woman Evelyn Amos in these pages, but she keeps her inner life quite strictly to herself, which I suppose is a survival trait of most farm women who feel that if they openly address their loneliness they will cease to be able to live with it. I do, however...