Pike’s Peak by Frank Waters

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62 Western American Literature acterizes much Western writing. “Nostalgia, however tempting, is not enough,” lie suggested: Disgust for the shoddy present is not enough. And forgetting the past entirely is a dehumanizing error. One of the lacks, through all the newly swarming regions of the West, is that millions of western­ ers, old and new, have no sense of a personal and possessed past, no sense of any continuity between the real western past which has been mythicized almost out of recognizability and a real western present that seems as cut-off and pointless as a ride on a merry-goround that can’t be stopped. The snowpeak on which Stegner has placed his cross-hairs, the goal toward which the virus infection of his own incurable Western disease has driven him has been, I suspect, the achievement of an artistic reconciliation between past and present: if you are any part of an artist . . . , if you have any desire to under­ stand and thus help to steer a civilization that seems to have got away from us, then I think you don’t choose between the past and the present, you try to find the connections, you try to make the one serve the other. In Angle of Repose Stegner has succeeded as well as any Western writer I know in doing just that. J. S. Bullen, Sonoma State College Pike’s Peak. By Frank Waters. (Chicago: The Swallow Press, lac., 1971. 743 pages, $8.95.) Frank Waters’ latest novel, which is a redaction of his autobiographical trilogy of 1935, 1937, and 1940,1 is interesting, on a number of levels. To the student of Western American literature, it illustrates powerful general trends and critical problems; to the student of Frank Waters, its being half as long as the original shows that something can be learned here about the author’s own critical standards; to the general reader, the novel tells a deeply felt family story in vivid images, with realistic detail. In The American Novel and Its Traditions (1957), Richard Chase found the mainspring of American fiction in the contradictions of the na­ tional experience, rather than in a shared consciousness of social or moral tradition. Following Chase, Leo Marx, in The Machine in the Garden (1964), argued persuasively that the central contradiction is between industrial, poweroriented civilization on one hand and quiet, green, loving pastoralism on the other. The American novelist, sensitive to the schizoid nature of his culture, spins a dialectic between civilization and wilderness, to put it simply. It is even more so in the West: the Western novelist commonly offers epitomic statements on this general American theme; in the grander and simpler physical and social landscape, the writer leaps more quickly, it seems, to the abstract and profound levels of consciousness which the dialectic encourages. Reviews 63 This is the terrain and direction of Pike’s Peak. The wild, soaring, tempting mountain, and the delving, insatiable civilized man, Joseph Rogier, are the poles of Waters’ story. Rogier lives in the West as an exile, looking for something that could root him to the alien landscape. He is always aloof, a strange, guarded man, a relic of a lost high civilization, that of the Old South. Its trappings are gone and by him not regretted; all he keeps is an impossibly cavalier honor. The sense of alienation and exile eats at him when he studies the Peak, and when he witnesses the spontaneous kinship with the land which the Indians displayed so effortlessly. He tries to resolve the tension by digging into the Peak, ostensibly for gold. He goes deeper and deeper, ruining his family financially, dragging his part-Indian son-in-law into a fatal situation, his quest finally degenerating into a pathetic, obsessive madness. Rogier is mind and will. The Peak is passive and eternal. Thus the white man on the spinal column of the new world, whose search relentlessly points outward, who ends as a monomaniac with froth on his lips, unknow­ ingly radiating death and destruction. Rogier notices the Indians, and seems to have a theoretical sense of how they live. But his proud, hard-bordered self keeps him blasting and digging...