Santa Fe & Taos: The Writer’s Era, 1916–1941 by Marta Weigle, Kyle Fiore

Abstract

Reviews 185 Santa Fe & Taos: The Writer’sEra, 1916-1941. Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore. (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1982. 229 pages, $15.95.) Santa Fe, New Mexico, and its northern neighboring town, Taos, have long and romantic histories comprised of the interrelationships of three cul­ tures—Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo —with that special landscape seemingly perceived as “enchanting” byall those who stayed or passed through. Conquistadors, mountain men, explorers, priests, merchants, soldiers, and artists, all under various loyalties and for differing motives, have been lured to northern New Mexico. Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore give the modern reader a sustained and panoramic glimpse (but it is only a glimpse) into New Mexico in their fine book on Santa Fe and Taos as artists’ colonies between the two great wars. Although they are comprehensive in the perspective given, the authors know there is much more to say about these two old and romantic towns and the artists who reside there even today in the 1980s, not to mention centuries past. To be sure, the era Weigle and Fiore focus their attention on — namely, 19161941 — is a renaissance period in southwestern letters. The very source for the arrangement, title, and scope of their book, Van Deren Coke’s 1963 study, Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist’sEnvironment, 1882-1942, is evidence that the authors are likewise fully aware that the lives of painters in these places, or today the presence of such an important cultural institution as the Santa Fe Opera, as well as the cultural and racial mixture of New Mexico’s citizenry at large, reciprocally affect the lives of writers. But there is only so much any one book can accomplish. In the three major sections of this book (i.e., “A Chronicle,” which pro­ vides a running, historical narrative of the artists in these two towns in the 1920s and 1930s; “Portraits and Self Portraits,” extracts and full-length essays about the New Mexico literary scene in those days; and in “Publications Ephemeral and Exemplary,” the section which reproduces original columns and clippings from then contemporary publishers and publications like the Rydal Press, “Laughing Horse,” “The Horse Fly,” “The New Mexico Senti­ nel,” and “New Mexico Quarterly”), the names which dominate the scene are the famous ones of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, Alice Corbin, Witter Bynner, D. H. Lawrence, and Willa Cather. To be sure, what Mabel Dodge Luhan was to Taos, Witter Bynner was to Santa Fe in their own unique, flamboyant cordiality which attracted such illustrious guests as Robinson Jeffers, Thornton Wylder, Carl van Vechten — and from the more southern regions of Albuquerque and beyond that Roswell and Alamagordo, the Fergussons (Harvey and Erna), Paul Horgan, and Eugene Manlove Rhodes. The names of lesser luminaries and their impact appear throughout in fascinating networks of acquaintanceship. As Horgan himself insists in an excerpt reprinted here, each artist must develop along his or her own lines;but there is a decided exhilaration involved in breathing the same “climate’ of one’s own kind, the air of artists mingling with each other. 186 Western American Literature One aspect of that climate is a salient feature of Weigle’s and Fiore’s triptych. And that is the number of small newspapers and literary journals, presses and bookshops, and group ventures which sprang up both before and after the depression. There were things, people, and places in abundance to write about, an exciting urge to write about them, and numerous publications in which to appear. The flowering of the literary “desert” of the West — as wide and varied as that place of mind and word is— owes much to what went on during the “writer’s era” of 1916-1941 in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Santa Fe and Taos — the same mountains which surrounding the secret of Los Alamos anticipated more ominous and profound wastelands. Thanks to Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore and their assembled glance at one small region of America’sliterary history, that at once innocent and portentous climate can still be inhaled and relived. ROBERT GISH, University of Northern Iowa Happy Hunting Grounds. By Stanley Vestal. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1981. 219 pages...