Notes

Abstract

Notes To the Editor, WAL: I wish to take exception to five points raised by John D. Nesbitt in his review of my book, The American West in Fiction (New American Library, 1982), in the May, 1984 issue. First, Professor Nesbitt claimed that my Gen­ eral Introduction to this book might be adjudged “a bit esoteric for college students” because I draw “ideas from Jung, Mircea Eliade, Hesiod, and historians of antiquity; likewise, he translates Heine, La Rochefoucauld, and Count Joseph de Maistre.” My first response to this was disbelief. I have taught courses in a number of colleges and universities, for undergraduates as well as secondary teachers, and I did not find these names “esoteric” when I mentioned them. When I was a sophomore in college, I had to read Hesiod in Greek and I read Heine’s complete works in German my senior year. Jung died in 1961 and I was a junior when I began corresponding with Ludwig Binswanger about him — at the time Binswanger’s Daseinsanalyse was all the rage among undergraduates. W'hen I taught an undergraduate course a few years ago, I assigned Tolstoy’s War and Peace, de Maistre’s book in French, and Isaiah Berlin’s book comparing their ideas about historiography. Based on the number of his books which are read and the number of students who go to the University of Chicago just to take his courses, I do not think Mircea Eliade is esoteric, either. In fact, this criticism points up what I object to in much which is written about western fiction by academics: it is far too pro­ vincial and chauvinistic. I wrote that General Introduction for an audience acquainted with the basic repertoire of world literature, for use in eastern schools as well as those in the West, and for the European market. I have had a number of educators write to me thanking me for this international perspec­ tive so that they might overcome the prejudice rampant toward western fiction as fundamentally a literature intended for the illiterate or, at best, the remedial reader. Second, I am not so much a snob that if Hoot Gibson had something to say about the many Western films he made that is relevant to my subject that I should nonetheless not mention it, because in a previous part of my General Introduction I mentioned John R. Milton’s name. Moreover, many of the courses in which this book is used also feature Western films and students do not seem to be similarly offended. Third, my Prefaces to the stories may strike Professor Nesbitt as “gratui­ tously personal,” but based on my mail from readers this is the part of the book which they have most enjoyed: it helped them place the authors in a human context and it evoked a better image of each author and what he was Notes 309 about than an impersonal resumé of biographical data. When I told Louis L’Amour that he had more corpses than characters in one of his novels, and he smiled, and brushed this off with the comment that he would have to go back and count them but that he didn’t think his readers would really mind, that told me something about L’Amour as an author and perhaps, as well, something about his readers! Fourth, I left out mention of what Professor Nesbitt termed “standard books” in my recommended reading section because, as he quoted me, I lim­ ited myself to “books about which I have no serious reservations.” I did not include in my references the titles Professor Nesbitt cited, to wit, Cawelti, Folsom, Etulain and Marsden, and Pilkington, because I do have serious reservations about these books and have gone into critiques of great detail concerning them in The Frontier Experience: A Reader’s Guide to the Life and Literature of the American West, due out this fall from McFarland. It was in this book that such critiques belong and not in the small, recom­ mended reading section of my anthology. Further, I am criticized for “gen­ erously” including four of my own books in a space of ten pages and reference to well...