William Everson: The Life of Brother Antoninus by Lee Bartlett

Abstract

78 Western American Literature as it is. On the other hand, the novel, “A Part of the Institution,” tries to compress too many years into too few pages, and the stories about childhood strike this reader as trivial. Except for “Visiting,” set in Colorado, the Midwest is the locale of all these stories. Even in “Visiting” the West figures only as an alien environment, at most an escape from a way of life rejected as repressive and thwarting. Suckow will probably never regain the stature she enjoyed when Mencken called her “the most remarkable woman . . . writing stories in the republic,” but it is good to see more of her work back in print. ROY W. MEYER Mankato State University William Everson: The Life of BrotherAntoninus. ByLee Bartlett. (New York: New Directions, 1988. 272 pages, $25.95.) “The biographer is a presence in life-writing,” Leon Edel has said, “in charge of handling the material, establishing order, explaining and analyzing the ambiguities and anomalies. Biography is dull if it’s just dates and facts: it has for too long ignored the entire province of psychology and the emotions. Ultimately, there must be a sense of inwardness of human beings as well as outwardness: the ways in which . . . fantasies become plays and novels and poems....” Mindful of the above, readers will understand what I mean when I say that—beyond his thorough research into the dates and facts included in this largely anecdotal biography, and beyond his stiff prose—Lee Bartlett isn’t a presence in William Everson: The Life of Brother Antoninus. His chrono­ logically ordered presentation islock-step;he avoids even attempting to analyze or explain any of the huge ambiguities in Everson’s life; and since he avoids analyzing Everson’s psychological and emotional life, there is only a meager sense here of the poet’s extraordinary inwardness. (Instead of discussing Everson’s marriage to Mary Fabilli, who chose the Catholic Church over her husband and then led him there, Bartlett writes: “No mention of the poet’s second wife ... was made in deference to her wish for privacy.” Why not at least discuss the relationship insofaras it isportrayed in Everson’spublished poems?) As in his earlier pamphlet, William Everson, here Bartlett only para­ phrases poems in those few instances when he offers more than passing nods to various poems’ titles. Although he mentions the poet’s “belief in the value of poetry as a transformative principle,” Bartlett seems not only uninter­ ested in Everson as a poet, but unmindful of how his poetry transformed his life or vice versa. Mentioning that Robinson Jeffers w'as Everson’s “master” does not explain how this fact shaped the younger man’s life and writing. No discussion here either of Everson’s artistic development. According to Reviews 79 Bartlett’semphases, Everson was a master printer who wrote poems in hisspare time; but such a simplistic, misleading and dull portrait does an injustice to the depth and complexity of Everson and his remarkably American poetry. Nothing new here, though, since the Western Literature Association has failed for years to recognize this poet’sachievements. DAVID A. CARPENTER Eastern Illinois University Sketches of California in the 1860s: The Journals of Jesus Maria Estudillo. Edited and Annotated by Margaret Schlichtmann. (Fredericksburg, Texas: The Awani Press, 1988. 180 pages, $10.00.) The journals of a young Californio, Jesus M. Estudillo, are pretty much what one would expect from a provincial young man, born in 1844, who grew up in what is now San Leandro (south of Oakland) and went to college at the University of Santa Clara. Here we have a teenage student’s account of what time he woke up, whom he visited, and the ups and downs of college life:“Class as usual, but again our teacher is changed in our arithmetic class . . .” etc., etc. This is local history on a small scale indeed. Margaret Schlichtmann (who, with Irene Paden, previously wrote The Big Oak Flat Road to Yosemite) gives an overview of the times in her introduc­ tion (“By the fall of 1849, while great pumpkins, squashes, peppers, red beans and onions continued to ripen on the still-warm earth, ominous clouds began...