204 OHQ vol. 122, no. 2 their tumultuous relationship — one that would forever change their lives, and their families’ futures, and would impact national events as it intersected with them. Much of the story Smith tells occupies the next sixteen or so years of Wood’s and Field’s lives. They were principally apart during that time and pursued their own interests as much as each other. Only after the realities of their individual lives and obligations to work, family, and children were messily sorted out could they finally be together. Wood (whose wife refused a divorce) left Portland in 1918 for California, where Field (acrimoniously divorced) then lived. They built a home and literary and artistic retreat in the hills above Los Gatos. Although they traveled to Europe once during their subsequent years together, they primarily remained on their estate, where they worked and entertained countless friends and personages. Field and Wood, in the hands of Smith, emerge as the complicated and contradictory people that they were. In the preface, Smith tells readers that her book’s aim “is neither to venerate nor to judge” its subjects (p. xv). And she in fact avoids doing so. Of course, Smith tells of what might be venerated about them — Field’s nationally recognized work for suffrage and her pursuit of fulfillment as a woman during a time when this was a fraught undertaking; and Wood’s support of the (albeit handpicked) downtrodden and of many friends and family members. Smith also plainly writes about their personal failures, selfishness, jealousy, occasional cold-heartedness — in Field’s case racism and classism, in Wood’s case philandering — their naggings, silent treatments, and threats to each other and to others. And, through the story, like all of us, they also experienced numbing tragedy. As such, and oddly so, given the title of the book and the way these two are often envisioned in this work, they are actually quite conventional people. Likewise, their views on and practices of sex, freedom, and the flouting of social conventions, while certainly horrifying to middle-class standards of the era, were in reality hardly novel. One especially arrives at such a conclusion when looking into vice reports, police ledgers, and the real lives of others at that time who were not so privileged as Field and Wood and who did not have the luxury of dressing-up their desires and self-interest in pretentious social theory. These are thoughts that Smith does not so much entertain, but they certainly occur to one while reading her book. Bohemians West is written in a wholly accessible style that does not forsake critical analysis. Only the most gifted and seasoned of historians can pull off such a feat. As stunning as the writing are the sources Smith sifted through. Thousands of letters between Field and Wood and also their friends and family have been preserved in several western archives — the vast bulk of them located at the Huntington Library in southern California. The nature of these documents makes the story an especially personal one. The time and care and dexterity to lift from them a seamless, intimate history that spans decades and some of the most remarkable events of history result in a volume that one does not want to set aside, given the conventionalities of one’s own life and to which one must inevitably return. Peter Boag Washington State University—Vancouver HOPS: HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE OREGON HOPSCAPE by Kenneth I. Helphand Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2020. Illustrations, photographs, maps, bibliography, 200 pages. $27.95 paper. Kenneth Helphand introduces his new collection of historic photographs of Oregon’s “hopscape ” by recalling his immediate fascination with “the lines of poles, the lattice of wires, and the density of green growth” when he first encountered a hop yard (p. ix). An emeritus professor of landscape architecture, Helphand embraces this aesthetic curiosity, setting out to understand the hops industry visually, rather 205 Reviews than through historians’ usual modes of narrative and analysis. The photographs document a rich human landscape through “environmental portraits: people in the setting of their activity, often accompanied by the tools of their labor” and are arranged not in...
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Sep 9, 2024
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