Writing the Northwest: A Reporter Looks Back by Hill Williams

Abstract

441 Reviews Haycox had begun to expand his work by writing novel-length magazine serials, and in time, stand-alone novels. Late in his too-short career, Haycox began to scratch against the walls of the formula western. Richard Etulain, an established scholar of Western literature who has produced over fifty books, discusses in Ernest Haycox and the Western how Haycox struggled to become a more artful writer. Etulain evaluates this effort and has chosen not to be a serious critic but instead to be a kind of writing instructor afterthe -fact. Much of the text evaluates various Haycox stories — how a character is weak, a plot thin, a purpose muddled. Because it is not easy to find many Haycox stories outside of a few large Western-literature library collections, there will not be ready means for anyone to actually examine the stories Etulain grades. He also posits that Haycox’s cowboys endure a “Hamlet complex” when they cannot decide between the dark-haired woman with “elemental ” needs and the blonde one who must be won. Hamlet might not have suffered so had that been his dilemma. In 1923, Haycox graduated from the University of Oregon, where his writing mentor, Professor W.F.G. Thatcher, had encouraged him to write commercially. Through yearsofcorrespondence, Thatcher remained Haycox’s confidant and adviser. In the excoriating essay “Status Rerum,” written by fellow Oregonians H.L. Davis and James Stevens, however, this same Thatcher is mocked as an “honorable mention in the list of winners in a Chicago tire-naming contest.” All the region’s writers were mocked as producers of, well, horse manure. This reader was frustrated by Etulain’s use of the term “regionalism” to separate Haycox from Stevens and Davis. Etulain writes, “Haycox was not interested in becoming a regional writer.” Instead, he was “avoiding the regional path and embracing the Western” (p. 46). The semantics here are foggy. What does he mean by regional? No writer wants to be called regional, but good writers, like Davis and Stevens, observed their regions closely, published in respected national magazines, and created universal literature. Etulain , in an epilogue, does get around to defining regionalism. It is a fine critical epilogue that discusses Haycox in more contemporary terms than had the preceding text, which could have been written in the mid 1950s, just after Haycox ’s death and after his last novel appeared. Daniel Lamberton Walla Walla University WRITING THE NORTHWEST: A REPORTER LOOKS BACK by Hill Williams Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2017. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. 186 pages. $22.95, paper. Hill Williams is a curious man. Over more than four decades as a newspaper reporter, his curiosity gave readers insights on the world from Seattle’s Skid Road to the World War II– ravaged island of Saipan. As the Seattle Times science reporter from 1967 to 1991, Williams did not confine himself to interviewing scientists in lab coats. He went to sea in a Native American whaling canoe, watched a nuclear bomb test in Nevada, and walked through hot ash in the crater of Mount St. Helens a year after the mountain’s catastrophic 1980 eruption. In this thoroughly readable memoir, his third book, Williams tells how he covered some of those stories and sets them in their historic background. He also takes us into the world he grew up in — southeastern Washington during the Great Depression, when newspapers printed from lead type were king of the information world. There, his first newspaper job — doing work that no longer exists — was in the print shop of the weekly Pasco Herald, owned by his father. His description of the newspaper-creating process in that era is a gem of time travel. Williams began his reporting career on the Kennewick Courier-Reporter in 1948, moved into daily journalism a year later when the Tri-City Herald began publishing, and joined the Seattle Times in 1952. Surprisingly, he has little to say about the early days of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, although he later covered numerous nuclear-related stories. Williams’s science writing — and his book — seem to benefit from his lack of a scientific 442 OHQ vol. 119, no. 3 degree. (He is...