Writing for Her Life: The Novelist Mildred Walker by Ripley Hugo

Abstract

homesteading bust of the 1920s.Throughout her account, Murphy intersperses photographs of people, places, and landscapes, giving invaluable visual documentation to her narrative. She notes that the FSA photographers failed to document theworst years of theDepression since theydid not start theirwork in the stateuntil 1936.Yet, theirimagesofhomesteader housing inSheridan County, cowhands inRosebud County, andmin ers in Silver Bow County convey the impact of hard years of poverty and uncertainty onmany Montana workers. The second section of the book, "On the Road," is a close look at the four FSA photogra phers ?Arthur Rothstein,Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, and John Vachon ? who worked in the state. Murphy takes a biographical approach to the individualphotographers and theirbodies ofwork ratherthanoffering a close culturalanaly sis of theirwork and what it tellsus about the time and place aswell as about theartiststhem selves. She allows thephotographers tobe com plete individuals,frustratedwith their sponsor ingagency, therigorsofwestern travel,and their too-curious reception inmany communities. Sec tion 2, thus, isa refreshingdeparture from sev eral previous books about FSA photography, where authors havewritten as ifthe local context or thephotographers' own personal demons were immaterialto thefineartproduced by theproject. Ido have a fewquibbles with thisfinebook. I wish that Kinsey Flats, an FSA resettlement project inCuster County, had received some at tention.Like Benchland Farms,which Murphy covers well,Kinsey isstilla distinctiveplacewithin the landscape.Murphy does little with thepro found impactof theCivilian Conservation Corps on the stateand national parks and thenational forestsofMontana. In addition, the subtitle of thebook, "New Deal Photographs ofMontana, 1936-1942," ismisleading. The photography is from the FSA project; we see nothing from the work of theHistoric American Building Survey and fromotherNew Deal agencies such as the PublicWorks Administration (PWA).The PWA project, for example, included photographs of Gallatin County Courthouse, Helena High School, and a Glacier National Park bridge and threebreathtaking images of theFortPeck Dam and spillwayin its volume Public Buildings (1940). These criticismsaside,Hope in Hard Times is one of themost evocative books on Montana and thenorthern plains that Ihave encountered insome time. Itsblending ofphotography,analy sis,and testimonies from thosewho lived those years themselves make forcompelling reading. Writing for Her Life:TheNovelist MildredWalker ByRipley Hugo University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2003. Photographs, bibliography, index. 314 pages. $29.95 cloth. Reviewed byMary Clearman Blew University ofIdaho,Moscow Mildred Walker (1905-1998) published thirteenacclaimed novels between 1934 and 1970. Although largely forgotten until recently, when theUniversity ofNebraska Press reissued all thirteen novelswith criticalintroductions, dur ingher lifetime Walker won an Avery and Jule Hopwood Award and was nominated foraNa tional Book Award and threeof her books were LiteraryGuild selections.Her ninth novel, The SouthwestCorner,was adapted forthe stage and produced on Broadway with Eva Le Gallienne in the leading role.During much of the time that shewas writing thesenovels,Mildred Walker was leading the conventional social lifeof a doctor's Reviews 155 wife inGreat Falls,Montana, and keeping her writing lifeso secluded thather three children were hardly aware of her work and, as adults, had tohunt down copies ofherbooks insecond hand bookstores. InWriting forHer Life, Walker's daughter, thepoet Ripley Hugo, draws upon hermother's journals, letters, and notes, as well as her own memories, to re-create the writing life that was kept hidden forso long.Hugo isatherbestwhen she details the landscapes ? Vermont, upper Michigan, Montana ? inwhich hermother set her novels and when she describes the friends and neighbors who became models for her mother's characters. In a typescriptamongWalker's papers,Hugo found an explanation of how hermother came towriteWinterWheat, arguablyher finestnovel: "Ithad todowith thecountryfirst, then its people. ...These tiny wildflowers growingheedlessly out of thedrydirtof the flatsare pure color," Walker notes and then, "I saw a teacherage today, a one room school house, three miles from any other dwelling_The teacher isusually a girlfreshout of normal school, eighteen or twentyyears of age.... How does she stand the loneliness, fall andwinter and spring? What does itdo toher?" (pp. 139-40). Hugo wonders and finds no easy answer as to how a woman with Walker's sensi tivitytodetail, her awareness of thehuman con dition, also could be the woman who had seemed toher daughter tobelittle, even to sneer at, any one whose social standing or standards of taste failed...