Wind’s Trail: The Early Life of Mary Austin by Peggy Pond Church

Abstract

Reviews 147 Cather’s modernist experiments with point of view and her uses of “cinemagraphic techniques,” but Middleton’s chief concern is with Gather’s reliance on juxtaposition and the “unnamed” vacancy between things juxtaposed. Middleton gives this suggestive vacancy a name borrowed from science, where it refers to the cavity within a cell. The term she uses is “vacuole,” and she claims it to be the essence of Gather’smethod in writing the pared-down novel demeuble. Roughly half of the book is given to theoretical discussion and half to discussion of the three novels which are said to best illustrate Cather’s method, particularly her use of vacuoles to suggest more than is said and thus to determine reader response. The three novels discussed are A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, and My Mortal Enemy. While critics for years have been discussing Gather’s use of juxtaposition, point of view, and pictorial imagery, and her ability to evoke feeling through the thing not said, perhaps no one has verbalized the concept so thoroughly before. On the other hand, Willa Cather’s Modernism resists its own focus on this concept and keeps venturing into unrelated territory. The book does con­ tain a goodly number of fresh insights into Cather’s fiction, but some are only loosely and somewhat artificially connected to the book’s central concerns. Then, too, the book uses as its springboard for discussion mainly older pieces of Cather criticism, and, with a few exceptions, ignores more recent criticism that makes many of the points argued here. It is also unfortunate that a book about Willa Cather’s technique makes no reference to reports of Cather’s 1925 lecture at Bowdoin College on “The Talk About Technique.” Cather used the term differently than Middleton does, but her statement has application none­ theless. In that lecture Cather said that the term “technique” does not apply to the novelist’s art, for the novelist cannot repeat herself. The violinist or dramatist, conversely, develops technique by practicing the same thing over and over until it is perfected. Middleton suggests that Cather practiced and eventually perfected that vacuole technique, and she may be right. All in all, Willa Cather’sModernism isworth the reading. MARILYN ARNOLD Brigham Young University Wind’s Trail: The Early Life of Mary Austin. By Peggy Pond Church, edited by Shelley Armitage. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1990. 215 pages, $14.95.) “Her creative spirit was a wild Pegasus who resisted being put to bridle and saddle, a winged energy, preferring to soar among the clouds of fantasy rather than plodding the stony trails of earth,” writes Peggy Pond Church (1903-1986), a Santa Fe acquaintance of Mary Austin’s during Austin’s resi­ dence there in the early 1920s until her death in 1934. Church, a native of 148 Western American Literature New Mexico, published poetry and journalism about the Southwest during her writing career. Drawing on her personal acquaintance with the writer, on Austin’s autobiography, Earth Horizon (1934), on the extensive documen­ tary holdings in the Austin collection of the Huntington Library, and on her other writings, Church has shaped a chronicle of this remarkable writer’s first twenty years. This is the fullest account I know of young Mary Hunter’slife among her Carlinville, Illinois relatives. As a small child she recognized in herself a singular empathy with nature. Church follows her as a young woman as she emigrates with her family to the San Joaquin Valley, an experience that heightened her conviction of her mystical connection to the desert landscape. The Mojave Desert and its inhabitants found their chronicler in her most acclaimed work, The Land of Little Rain (1903). Church shows the early formulations of the naturist impulse in extensive quotes from “One Hundred Miles on Horseback,” Austin’s lyrical account of the family’s journey to their homestead in Southern California in September of 1888. Of particular interest is the inclusion of a previously unpublished manuscript, The Friend in the Wood, another of Austin’s many formulations of her mystical awareness. “The Friend is neither form nor symbol,” Austin writes of her spiritual companion, “it is the substance...