Romantic Lyric Form and Western Mormon Experience in the Stories of Douglas Thayer

Abstract

B. W. JO R G E N S E N Brigham Young University Romantic Lyric Formand Western Mormon Experience in the Stories of Douglas Thayer The place of Mormon fiction in either the broad tradition of English and American literature or the narrower regional tradition of western American literature has only recently begun to be mapped.1So far, interest has centered mainly on the somewhat belated regionalism and expatriation of Mormon novelists in the 1940s; this essay explores the relation between one contemporary Mormon short story writer and a central poetic strategy of the Romantic tradition. It can be maintained that before the 1970s there was no viable, visible, literarily serious tradition in Mormon short fiction: from the 1890s to the 1940s the stories mainly published in church outlets were also mainly senti­ mental, thematically trivial, and artistically weak; the more serious and skillful writers from the 1950s and 60s (David Wright and Wayne Carver, for instance) were expatriated and largely invisible to the community that had nourished their beginnings. But in the mid-1960s, when a revitalized BYU Studies and the nascent Dialogue began to offer Mormon-oriented but non-Church-supervised outlets for serious Mormon fiction, a pioneer generation of writers such as Douglas H. Thayer, Eileen Gibbons Kump, and Donald R. Marshall began to create a serious tradition of short fiction out of their own experience as Utah Mormons, their understanding of their peculiar religious heritage, and those elements of their larger literary heri­ tage that spoke most deeply to their private sense of experience, that inter­ preted it and offered ways of working with it.2 Douglas H. Thayer, a native of Provo, Utah, and a veteran of both the U.S. Army of Occupation in Germany and, soon after, a Mormon proselyting mission in the same country, studied at Stanford, the University of Maryland, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 1965 he began publish­ 34 Western American Literature ing short stories, mainly in Mormon-oriented periodicals such as Brigham Young University Studies and Dialogue, but also in Colorado Quarterly and Prairie Schooner. He collected his Mormon stories in 1977 in Under the Cottonwoods, and in 1983 published his first novel, Summer Fire, the story of a Mormon youth’s discovery of his own violence during a summer working on a Nevada ranch. He has recently completed a collection of western stories, With Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone.3 Thayer’s craft is severe, his style deliberate, chiseled, almost mannered, his tone almost never humorous before the cowboy tall-tales of Summer Fire; his protagonists in the novel and stories alike are upward-mobile Provo boys or men nearly fanatic about righteousness and perfection. As a short story writer, Douglas Thayer seems to have adapted, con­ sciously or otherwise, a major form of Romantic lyric poetry to western Mormon experience and consciousness, but in ways that also question and undercut this form. Thayer’s characteristic strategy in the stories of Under the Cottonwoods, which is to follow the introspective and retrospective processes of a male protagonist through some brief, decisive interval in his life, seems to me a fairly clear translation of what M. H. Abrams has called “the greater Romantic lyric” (“Lyric” 201-29) into the terms of the short story, usually handled in a third-person limited-omniscient or “central con­ sciousness” point of view. This strategy, which may derive most directly from such a story as Irwin Shaw’s “The Eighty-Yard Run” (which Thayer admired and often taught in short story courses in the sixties), so con­ sistently operates in Under the Cottonwoods as to become a sort of signature or hallmark that some readers have found irritatingly repetitive—here’s another “Thayer story.” Insofar as all the stories in the volume do play variations on that strategy, such a response is valid; but perhaps it is also rather like a partially-trained listener’s reaction to a series of string quar­ tets: large similarities of structure and treatment may seem to outweigh subtle differences in texture, key, motif, which only patient re-hearing may disclose. For me, Thayer’s use of the Romantic strategy raises two somewhat more serious literary questions. First...