Reviews 147 compromising this tradition through democratic statutory law, and proponents of the kind of romantic individualism reflected in Emerson’s “Politics.” In sea tales like RedRoverand TwoAdmirals (1842) successfuljuxtaposing of nature, law, and selfwas relatively easy for Cooper, since the ocean represented the higher order, a revelation offered to the hero “to ‘read’correctly the world, and thus realize his most profound self.” But land novels provided a context of moral chaos and conflict. “When the law divides man unnaturally into warring legal and nonlegal selves or when it facilitates the disruption of social bonds by individuals willing to manipulate legal forms and rhetoric for personal ends, the law,” Cooper felt, “loses its legitimacy.” This formula justified the Revolution, which in Lionel Lincoln (1825) Cooper tried to exorcise of violent personal interests. In Spy (1821) and Pioneerspatriarchs like General George Washington and Judge William Temple attempted, if inadequately, to rescue civil law from the moral myopia of deductive reasoning. The crisis period for Cooper and the nation was that between these “Founders,” who acknowledged linguistic documents (the Bible, wills, etc.) as emblems of “an order that takes its authority from time,”and the demagoguery eventually undermining the Constitution through state laws. In the Littlepage Manuscripts Cooper debated these adverse forces and sacrificed his art to them. On the eve ofLincoln and the CivilWar the dialogue between authority and the private self sought definitions beyond Cooper’s abilities, argues Adams,just as the stakes, slavery and sectional rights, eclipsed Cooper’s defense of an anti quated and parochial system of land ownership. There is double pessimism in these two studies of Cooper, one with refer ence to the novelist’s career and another with reference to his nation. JOHN J. MURPHY Brigham Young University Fox at the Wood’sEdge: A Biography ofLorenEiseley. By Gale E. Christianson. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990. 517 pages, $29.95/ $16.95.) Loren Eiseley: A Modem Ishmael, By Peter Heidtmann. (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1991. 133 pages, $25.00.) This is an intriguing pair of books which complement each other in useful ways. Christianson, an historian, provides a full account of Eiseley’s strange life; Heidtmann, a professor of English, deals with Eiseley thoroughly from the inside, suggesting ways to comprehend his aesthetics. Perhaps the two disparate approaches echo the man himself, something of a split personality with a distinct separation of personae. Eiseley appears to have a strange position in American letters. He has very 148 WesternAmerican Literature devoted followers, and his accounts of brown wasps, the evolution of flowers, and archetypal descents underground are known to two generations of college composition students. Yet he really does not seem to have a literary reputation. Although some readers admire his style, others deplore it as maudlin and selfindulgent . Appreciated by many as a writer who “bridged” science and the humanities, others find his science suspect or dismiss him as a mere popularizer . The Eiseley who emerges from Gale Christianson’sbiography is hardly the man we are led to expect from the essays and poems. Because his childhood— with a deaf, half-mad mother and an unfulfilled, unhappy father—was so dismal, Eiseley viewed reality harshly, and he withdrew into neurotic introspec tion, re-creating himself as victim and castaway (the “modern Ishmael” of Heidtmann’s title). He was a contradictory man: valuing privacy, he neverthe less sought public acclaim; in public, he affected a variety of self-protective poses. Christianson shows that Eiseley was a fascinating lecturer but disliked dealing with students (and was unsympathetic to those killed at Kent State),and he doubts that Eiseley ever finished his dissertation. As provost at Pennsylvania he was indecisive, and while he needed constant mothering by his wife Mabel and secretary Caroline Werkley, he was capable of negotiating publishing deals behind the backs of agents and loyal editors. Ironically, all the world loved the literary persona, and aided and abetted Eiseley’s self-deceptions, offering him academic honors and high administrative positions which he was incompetent to fulfill. All of this sounds as if Christianson set out to do Eiseley in—which is hardly the case. Indeed, occasionally disheartened by the very evidence he uncovers...