Owen Wister Research Articles

Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the Contemporary Western

O n ene of the more interesting aspects of the Western is the way southerners have figured centrally in the genre's development. Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian, for instance, is widely credited with introducing Americans to the cult of the cowboy in a story that features a transplanted southerner who joins forces with a group of powerful Wyoming cattle ranchers in order to make the West safe for frontier capitalism. Philip French long ago attempted to account for the genre's interest in the southerner, pointing out that a large part of the new itinerant labor force in the post-Civil War West was made up of former Confederate soldiers. For French, this development partly explains why the dispossessed Southerner has come to figure so prominently as the model for the chivalrous cowboy (94). More recently, Peter Stanfield has traced the southern origins of another western icon, the singing cowboy. Emerging out of the Dixie medicine shows of the 1930s and 1940s, the singing cowboy served an important function in American culture, ridding southern vernacular music of its racial connotations in order to

The Cowboy Businessman and "The Course of Empire": Owen Wister's The Virginian

The Cowboy Businessman and "The Course of Empire": Owen Wister's The Virginian

"Peeping Toms on History": Barry Hannah's Never Die as Postmodern Western

In his thoughtful essay Home by Way of California: The Southerner as the Last European, Lewis P. Simpson explores what seem to him basic differences between the mind of the South and its western other. The latter, contends Simpson, has corollaries in the artistic vision of northeasterners--Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, and the father of the popular western, Owen Wister--who create fictions in which a hero transcends history amid the pristine, naturally democratic vistas of the American landscape. In contrast, the former extends a tragic European outlook that sees the individual as a creature trapped, the hapless victim of history. Simpson's paradigm has been very influential in southern studies, and one can indeed see how the tragic ethos he identifies informs to grand effect the body of southern writing produced during the fabled Renascence, a literature acutely concerned with the past in the present (to paraphrase Allen Tate's famous formulation) and the doomed yet heroic efforts to cope with or survive history, not escape it--reflected in Faulkner's famous proclamation in the Nobel speech that humanity will not merely endure, but prevail. Yet this South-versus-West theory tells only part of the story, for the West has, since the early nineteenth century, occupied a special place in the southern imagination. Historian Richard Slotkin notes in particular how southerners have mythologiz[ed] ... the Frontier ... as a new Garden of Eden; he locates this mythos in a Jeffersonian agrarianism in which the frontier ... promises complete felicity, the satisfaction of all demands and the reconciliation of all contradictions (69-70). No less a canonical southern text than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)--identified by both Tate and Louis D. Rubin as the first modern southern novel--bears out this representation, as Simpson himself tacitly admits. Huck's account shows that life is satisfying only when marked by a pastoral plenitude beyond the artificial and hypocritical constraints of southern (read eastern) culture, a realization that ultimately impels him to light out for the of the western frontier. Twain's story may lack the gunplay of the novels that were already beginning to gain popularity in the 1880s, but in its fusion of the southern pastoral and the unadulterated frontier, it is in many ways the prototypical western. Its influence continues as contemporary southern fictionists, including Charles Portis, Richard Ford, Ishmael Reed, and Cormac McCarthy, stake out territory west of the Mississippi. The popularity of McCarthy's The Border Trilogy confirms most decisively how alluring the West remains for southern writers and readers alike. Such recent authors, however, offer a more complicated version of the western than does Twain. Whereas the modern (or proto-modern) Huckleberry Finn helped establish the cultural authority of a mythologized West, its successors have done much to question that authority. In this respect, they might be called postmodern. The western's role as a totalizing construction that organizes history into a coherent, satisfying set of that essentialize American identity marks it as an example of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls metanarrative.(1) For Lyotard and other noted theorists, postmodern art exhibits a thoroughgoing incredulity toward metanarratives and usually strives to undermine these overarching stories from within. Linda Hutcheon has shown that postmodern novels about the West, in particular, exhibit a contradictory attraction/repulsion to structure and patterns that uses and abuses the western as a genre, ultimately destabilizing the historical, political, and personal fantasies it tries to fulfill (133). One of the most well-known novels by a southerner to do this is McCarthy's prelude to The Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian (1985). This fascinating account of exploitation and violence parodies Huckleberry Finn and later westerns. …

Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry

What has the western of literature and film contributed to American culture? Richard Etulain, the leading cultural historian of the West, answers that question by tracing four distinct storytelling traditions and exploring the indelible images each has left in the public's mind over the past 125 years. Our images of cowboys, lawmen, outlaws, and Indians come from a collage of sources, including Buffalo Bill, Frederick Jackson Turner, Calamity Jane, Mary Hallock Foote, Geronimo, Mourning Dove, Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Walter Noble Burns, John Ford, Louis L'Amour, Wallace Stegner, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Larry McMurtry. Etulain begins with the dominant image conveyed in Wild West shows and dime novels of the late nineteenth century--the West as a place of adventure and danger. In the early twentieth century stories by women and Indians appeared, but they were soon overlooked and not rediscovered until the 1970s. The period from the 1920s to the 1950s represents the classic era of western movies and novels--of cavalry charges to save the day and heroes in white hats. But since the 1960s a counter story has emerged, one of ambiguity and complexity that often turned upside down our notions about what really mattered in how we look at the West. Etulain carefully explores why stories of the frontier and American West still rival those of the American Civil War as the country's most popular tales, and he shows how narratives that persisted relatively unchanged for a century have moved in notable new directions since the 1960s.

The Aeneid and The Virginian: copywriting, origin myths and their consumption

Literary art is often embraced by a people because it provides answers to life’s questions and showcases idealized heroes who function as respected role models. By analyzing the popularity of universally loved literary masterpieces, it becomes possible to gain a greater understanding of how a specific people respond in uniform fashion to symbolic communications. In order to examine this phenomenon, parallels between Virgil’s The Aeneid (which was addressed to ancient Romans just as the Empire was being established) and Owen Wister’s The Virginian (which provided a symbolic hero for the USA at exactly the time when that country was emerging as an industrialized world power) will be compared. Significantly, in many cases, almost all members of a culture react to stimuli in parallel, universal, or identical ways. This tendency is important for marketers who seek to influence a wide and diverse market in similar ways. The implications of this analysis are of value to strategic planners who want to understand how consumers respond to symbolically charged products.

And To Think That It Happened on Mt. Auburn Street: Dr. James, Harvard, and the Making of Manhood

And to Think That It Happened on Mt. Auburn Street: Dr. James, Harvard, and the Making of Manhood Mark C. Carnes (bio) Kim Townsend. Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. 318 pp. Figures, bibliography, notes, and index. $29.95. Oh, the thinks they did think! Hear the Honorable Curtis Guild, Governor of Massachusetts and a member of the Harvard Class of 1881, as his words rumble across Harvard Yard: “Whatever patriotism of American manhood comes to the fore, Harvard memory, Harvard ideals, instinctively rise, because Harvard is not merely Massachusetts, Harvard is not merely New England, Harvard is the ideal of America” (p. 10). See the great James Russell, arms outstretched in embrace of the Class of 1865: “These hold great futures in their lusty reins / And certify to earth a new imperial race” (p. 17). Behold Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., bedecked in commencement regalia, polishing the best fruit of Harvard, vintage of 1895: “The measure of power is obstacles overcome, to ride boldly, at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray not for comfort, but for combat” (p. 60). Oh, yes, and there’s more, much more: Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, describes the essential trait of the successful college president as “the capacity to inflict pain” (p. 84). Professor Barrett Wendell invokes Harvard’s hallowed traditions to deprive women of them: “There has never before been a deviation from the principle that the influences amid which education should be obtained here must remain virile” (p. 228). Henry Cabot Lodge, arbiter of the nation’s foreign policy, on football and the ascent of civilization: “The time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing-field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors” (p. 103). And from high atop the evolutionary heap at Harvard Yard, the bellow of that big-sticking Yertle, Teddy Roosevelt, exhorts those below to exertions both fearless and fecund: “If we stand idly by . . . then the bolder and stronger [End Page 594] peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully.” 1 Wonderful nonsense, all of it, and with every footnote Kim Townsend pulls more delicious mischief out of the hat. But this is not a new trick. Quotes such as these have appeared in garish profusion since the 1960s and 1970s, long before the taxonomists of our profession thought to give men’s history its own genus. In The Inner Civil War (1965), George M. Frederickson cited Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Francis Parkman, Francis A. Walker, and other dignitaries of Harvard to show how the men of the post-Civil War generation were plagued with doubts as to whether they measured up to their heroic fathers. In the late 1970s, several pioneering works in men’s history anticipated other elements of Townsend’s thesis. In 1976 G. J. Barker-Benfield’s The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America documented a pervasive misogyny among educated men. In 1979 came two signal works. In Be a Man! Males in Modern Society, Peter N. Stearns described the “considerable complications in the masculine world of the middle class” (p. 96) caused by the maturation of the industrial economic system in the second half of the nineteenth century, and, in A Man’s Place: Masculinity in Transition, Joe Dubbert attributed the popularity of the novels of Frank Norris (A Man’s Woman, The Pit, McTeague) and Owen Wister (The Virginian), and the iconic appeal of Teddy Roosevelt, to increased anxieties about the state of manhood at the close of the century. 2 Townsend makes similar points with many of the same figures and some of the same quotes. Yet everywhere in the thickets of Victorian discourse on manhood, Townsend perceives the massive footprint of Harvard. Previous scholars may have cited the words of Holmes and all the rest, but none noticed the centrality of Harvard in this...

The Primitive and the Civilized in Western Fiction

L E V I S. P E T E R S O N Weber State College Tke Primitive and tke Civilized in Western Fiction Among the many patterns of significance that may be observed in what one might appropriately call the renaissance in Western fiction, one of the most interesting is that this new fiction demon­ strates an intense cultural debate over the conflicing values of the civilized and the primitive. The Western novel has become the testing ground for the relative worth to humanity of these con­ flicting values. It has captured the sense of ambivalence that Amer­ icans feel about their vanished frontier. On the actual frontier, Americans found a retreat from civilization. The historical frontiers­ man was often removed from the civilized values of love and mar­ riage, chastity, sobriety, non-violence, and lawfulness. A serious question before the actual frontiersman was whether he would respond to the civilized impulses he had acquired in the society left behind him or whether he would continue in the simpler, more elemental, cruder and more violent life of the wilderness. This question has continued to infuse our frontier fiction. It works out as a debate, a statement and counter-statement over the worth of the primitive and the civilized. The first side of the American debate over the worth of the primitive and the civilized is the affirmation of the primitive. The simple affirmation of frontier removal from civilized values is the attitude that traditionally and most abundantly characterizes Amer­ ican frontier fiction. The simple affirmation begins with Cooper, 1This is an essential portion of a thesis submitted to the English Department, Uni­ versity of Utah, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of a Doctor of Philosophy Degree. 198 Western American Literature who, despite a more complex attitude in the earliest of the Leatherstocking Tales, gravitates in his later novels to an unbridled ad­ miration for the primitive scout and hunter, Natty Bumppo. Al­ though Natty Bumppo is civilized enough to be deferential to the genteel men and ladies who people the novels in which he appears, he possesses the primitive qualities of freedom, lawlessness, and violence. There is no evil in Leatherstocking’s practice of these values, for his is a perfect rectitude. Furthermore, these values are exalted by the fact that Leatherstocking is a heroic character. Far from an ordinaiy man, Leatherstocking bears the superlativeness of a hero. The heroic mood has continued in frontier fiction since the day of Leatherstocking. The simple affirmation of the primitive values of freedom, lawlessness, and violence as the attributes of heroes has flourished to the latest moment. We can observe the course of this affirmation through heroic novels of the nineteenth century such as Charles Webber’s Old Hicks the Guide, Charles Averill’s Kit Carson; Prince of the Gold Seekers, and innumerable dime novels written between 1860 and 1915. We can trace this affirmation through Owen Wister’s The Virginian and Clarence Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy stories, and through the novels of men like William MacLeod Raine, Ernest Haycox, and Luke Short, whose fifty or sixty novels have helped swell the stream of popular cowboy novels that flood the literary market to this day. Unfortunately, the fiction which has treated the primitive fron­ tiersman as heroic has for the most part remained of a sub-literary quality. It is more significant that in our own century the simple affirmation of freedom, lawlessness, and violence has appeared in a handful of novels of a realistic, non-heroic bent. Andy Adams’ The Log of a Cowboy, Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ novelettes like The Trusty Knaves and Paso Por Aqui, Forrester Blake’s Johnny Christ­ mas and Wilderness Passage, and Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cow­ boy and Fire on the Mountain all affirm primitive values without the distractions of the heroic formula of invincible and superhuman manhood. It is worthwhile to examine two of these works in some detail. Forrester Blake’s Johnny Christmas is a celebration of the primitive values of the mountain man. His central character, Johnny Christmas, is infused with wanderlust. His desire to feel new winds and hear strange waters leads him afar through the southern Rocky The Primitive...

Zane Grey and Images of the American West

The western novels by Zane Grey have been source of imagery about the American West for almost the entire twentieth century. The plots and characterizations of Grey's popular novels set in the American West have been thoroughly examined, but it is less clear how his work acquired fundamental role in the creation of western imagery. With the ability to influence much of the public, mass media dominate the molding of popular culture. A medium that repeatedly projects set of simple ideas can define the amorphous perceptual lenses through which people view landscape and fuse them into clear, uniformly perceived place image. Movies and television now often clarify place perceptions, but literature traditionally played key role. Speculation about the meaning of the American West, landscape that occupies center stage in American folklore, is more profitable with an understanding of the evolution of the ideas that are attached to the place. This article explains how Grey's distinctive combination of spatial, temporal, landscape, and social elements crystallized the enduring idea of mythical West and qualified him as place-defining novelist (Shortridge 1991). My mapping and analysis of Grey's settings lead me to contend that he shaped popular attitudes about the extent of the boundaries of the West and the location of its core. Furthermore, the temporal settings of these novels proved integral to continuing popular acceptance of the western myth. I also illustrate how Grey's evocative portrayal of the landscape and social characteristics of the region is representative of western imagery. I discuss modern ramifications of Grey's imagery in each section, and review of the western myth making that preceded Grey and his unparalleled record of popularity provides the context for understanding his power of place definition. DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN MYTHS The image of region as large as the West is complex. Its most central and enduring theme is that of the frontier, vast and stunning landscape where brave cowboys, rugged individualism, and dream fulfillment are the rule. Some of the common elements of popular western literature, especially pastoral innocence and deadly violence, may be traced to James Fenimore Cooper's Tales (Hart 1950). Dime novels by E. Z. C. Judson (alias Ned Buntline) and others created new heroes: Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill were bolder and younger than Leatherstocking and used horses and repeating rifles to battle the harsh elements of the Great Plains (Smith 1950). Novelists were not alone in shaping western myths. Newspapers extensively covered Billy the Kid's adventures and the shootout at the O.K. Corral (Estleman 1987). The Indian-killing and heroine-rescuing exploits of cowboys were adapted straight from dime novels into the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, which ran from the 1870s to the 1910s (Riegel 1947). The first wave of painters to popularize the West was epitomized by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. Their sweeping canvases of outstanding natural features depicted the region as an unspoiled and magnificent wonderland (Kinsey 1992). People, if even present, were reduced to insignificant figures standing in awe of nature. By the end of the nineteenth century, Frederic Remington and Charles Russell portrayed the landscape as spectacular but beginning to come under the control of mountain men, cowboys, and Indians. Even though the cowboy had become popular by the end of the nineteenth century, he did not supersede all other western heroes, and he was not always portrayed as hero (Boatright 1980). When dime novels acquired trashy reputation toward the end of the nineteenth century, eastern publishers searched for writer who could address the colorful characters of the West more seriously (Athearn 1986). The search culminated in 1902 with Owen Wister, a Pennsylvanian who sat in South Carolina to write book about Virginian living in Wyoming (Marsden 1978, 207). …

Unbridled Spirits: Short Fiction about Women in the Old West ed. by Judy Alter, A. T. Row

226 WesternAmerican Literature life, death, dreams and sex are pasted bit by bit to suggest the ambiguity inherentin the reconstruction offamilyhistory. Shigekuni’smasterful handling of multiple narrative voices, ranging from a young second-grader’svoice to a senile, cranky old woman’s, helps us navigate through her exploration of mother-daughter relationships. The novel has little to offer those looking for something ethnic: no haiku and no sushi. Rather, it offers a sharp picture ofthe mess thatwe call life, and it signals the emergence ofaverytalentedwriter, a much needed presence in the Japanese American literary scene after Hisaye Yamamoto, David Mura, and SylviaWatanabe. SEIWOONG OH Rider University Unbridled Spirits: ShortFiction about 'Women in the Old West. Edited byJudy Alter and A. T. Row. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1994. 365 pages, $17.95.) UnbridledSpiritscollects short fiction which depictswomen during pioneer days in the old West. The volume is divided into three parts: “Classic”women writers (Mary Hallock Foote, Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, DorothyJohnson); “Other” women writers: (Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin, Jeanne Williams, Carla Kelly,JudyAlter, MarciaMuller) and “Some”malewriters (BretHarte, O. Henry, Owen Wister, Charles Esten,Jack London,Jack Schaefer, Elmer Kelton, RobertFlynn, and Elmer Leonard).The divisionsreflectthe editors’suncertain aims: they seem to be unable to decide if the volume should make a political statement, orjust be a good read. And it is a good read, bringing briefly to life a spectrum of bright women. There’s Kathryn, the protagonist of Marcia Muller’s “Sweet Cactus Wine.” Instead ofgiving us awhodunit, as isher custom, Muller tellswhy the indepen­ dent widow commits murder by saguaro. Also, there’sMaryAustin’sTizessina, who defies tribal tradition and takes awhite lover. However, the title, Unbridled Spirits, is misleading. Women characters such as Elmore Leonard’s “Tonto Woman”—and others as well—are caught in the maw ofgenre, and most still relyupon men to rescue them from their predica­ ment, and relyupon marriage as the one happy ending. The book iscaught in expectation: who isa “classic”woman writer? How did Marcia Muller and Carla Kelly get “othered?”Why are the guys the most othered of all, consigned to a section wherein there are not even any “classics?” Maybe a simple arrangement byauthor’sbirth datewould have avoided the ghettoizing ofmale writers, or, ifthis volume were indeed to explore women in the West more deeply, the introduction should have explained itself and the Reviews 227 anthology carefully and at length to us. As it stands, the book is something less than ideal and indeed seems to project not the world of the old West but the less-than-ideal world of book publication or perhaps of book consumption, where compromise isthe watchword. UnbridledSpiritsremains a modest anthol­ ogywhich contains, nevertheless, some good yarns. CATHYDOWNS The University ofNorth Carolina BRIEF NOTICES Gunga Din Highway. ByFrank Chin. (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1994. 400 pages, $24.95.) With this novel Frank Chin returns to the theme ofhis debut novel Donald Duk (1991) of Chinese Americans wanting to shake off their heritage. Gunga Din Highway is situated in Hollywood and centers on Longman and Ulysses Kwan. Longman, “the Chinaman Who Dies”in countless movies, is despised by his son for his ambition ofsomeday playing Charlie Chan. Ulysses lives through four decades ofchange, coming across Hollywood legends and Chinese mythol­ ogy. Filledwith references to recent history, movies, and TV, this isa funny and entertaining novel. DesiringFlight. By Christianne Balk. (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1995. 96 pages, $12.95.) This, Christianne Balk’s second book of poems, was the winner of the Verna Emery Poetry Prize. The poems by this northwestern writer capture the spirit of nature mixed with human emotions. For instance, “The Road to Marshfield Lake” tells the story of the birth and subsequent death of her daughterjuxtaposed with images of nature; “Why I Did It”is about an abusive husband who at the same time taught her to love and admire hawks. This collection isfull ofgrief, but also full of love for the landscape. Another Green Grass Lover. By Sue Wallis. (Lemon Cove, California: Dry Crik Press, 1994. 70 pages, $9.95.) This collection of poetry is about nature and life and myths. In the latter part, Wallis uses Celtic...

Caroline Lockhart: Her Life and Legacy

Writer Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962) lived a life as colorfully picaresque and as successful as any of her bestselling Western adventure novels or her widely quoted newspaper column. Her popular novels, championing the region and the Old West culture of which she became a part, were compared favorably to those of Owen Wister, and one, The Fighting Shepherdess, was made into a movie. She also attracted national attention as the owner-editor of the Cody Enterprise. H. L. Mencken praised her outspokenness as an investigative reporter and as a critic of Prohibition, and Christopher Morley borrowed her witticisms verbatim for his column in the New York Post. Lockhart's devilishly honest humor, he said, could make the human lung crow like Chanticleer. Although her writings are little known today, Lockhart left a body of work that reveals her to be a first-class interpreter of the West in a time of economic and social transition. Necah Stewart Furman's informative and compelling literary biography intersperses a lively chronicling of Lockhart's life with an objective and probing analysis of her books, short stories, and articles. Furman has made thorough and judicious use of newspapers, interviews, and manuscripts, including personal correspondence and diaries, to detail the western sojourns, the civic controversies, the love affairs, and the real-life adventures that honed Lockhart's point of view and formed the basis of her fiction. From her Kansas childhood, to her early success as a reporter in Boston and Philadelphia, to the excitement of making it big as a writer-journalist, civic leader, and rancher based mainly in Cody, Wyoming, a remarkable portrait emerges of a woman who brokeconventions and made her own mark not only in a frontier setting but in a primarily masculine literary genre.

Elmer Kelton’s “Other” West

F R E D E R I S M A N Texas Christian University Elmer Kelton’s “Other”West The elements defining the mythic Western are well known. It is a story set somewhere in the American West, a raw and as yet untamed environment that nevertheless possesses great beauty and majesty. It focuses upon a distinctive central character—the larger-than-life West­ ern hero, intuitive, individualistic, and seemingly invincible, who re­ sponds with charismatic effectiveness to the challenges posed by the land and its people. And it offers a specific kind of action, a story of violent transition as the frontier yields to civilization, the wild becomes tamed, and the rural gives way to the urban.1These are the traits of the Western, and they control the best-known writings of Owen Wister, Zane Grey,Jack Schaefer, Louis L’Amour, and a host of lesser authors. What we often overlook, however, is a second but far from second­ ary form ofwestern fiction, which resembles the traditional version, but which tells of another, more mundane West. Hints of this “other”West often occur in the classics, where for every mythic hero we frequendy discover a less colorful counterpart. Behind the Virginian, for example, stands Judge Henry; behind Lassiter, Jane Withersteen; and behind Shane,Joe Starrett—all persons who operate in a workaday world more concrete and far less romantic than that of the myth. In our fascination with the vividly compelling heroes of the mythic West, we tend to pass over these persons, disregarding their role in establishing the authentic human context that gives the myth its meaning. These homely, realistic denizens of the “other” West are the per­ sons of whom Elmer Kelton (1926- ) writes. Though he began his career in the 1950s writing pulp Westerns in the traditional mode, publishing primarily in Ranch Romances, in eight major novels written since 1971 he shifts his focus from the mythic to the mundane West.2As 292 Western American Literature he does so, he draws upon the basic materials of the traditional Western, emphasizing land, character, and action, but he tempers them with an empirical knowledge of the actual West gained from his years as an agricultural journalist. The outcome is a substantial body of work very much a part of western literature, yet one that, in its focus upon con­ crete realities rather than romantic myth, gives the “other”West its due by emphasizing the quiet heroism of the far-from-mythic folk who really won the West.3 At the heart of the classic Western is the overall setting of the story: i.e., “the symbolic landscape [in which] the action takes place and the influence this landscape has on the character and the actions of the hero” (Cawelti, Adventure, 193). We know this land from many Westerns, and most particularly from the Western film, our vision of the West more often than not that of John Ford’s Monument Valley, where monoliths and saguaro cacti surround humanity with constant remind­ ers of the inherent power of nature. We see, literally or in the mind’s eye, a stylized western landscape, and we are subliminally prepared for the epic events that follow. Kelton’s land, in contrast, is that of West Texas, a setting as environmentally formidable as any in the traditional Western, but one that is a far cry from Ford’s visually stunning West or the abstract, symbolic landscape that Cawelti identifies. Kelton’s is, instead, an accurately drawn portrait of a bleakly unforgiving locale that must be accepted on its own demanding terms; it is a humanized West, to be dealt with by human means, but it is no less challenging for all its reality. That challenge appears in a variety of ways. For some of Kelton’s protagonists, it is the very size of the land; as he gets his first glimpse of the region, Gideon Ledbetter, the ex-slave Buffalo Soldier of The Wolf and the Buffalo (1980), “was jumpy like most of the others who rode through this strange and formidable land for the first time. It was . . . bigger than he had imagined the whole world to be” (50). For others, it...

OWEN WISTER: CHRONICLER OF THE WEST, GENTLEMAN OF THE EAST

Book Review| January 01 1992 OWEN WISTER: CHRONICLER OF THE WEST, GENTLEMAN OF THE EAST OWEN WISTER: CHRONICLER OF THE WEST, GENTLEMAN OF THE EASTPayne, Darwin Ben Vorpahl Ben Vorpahl Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Resources for American Literary Study (1992) 18 (1): 73–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/26366729 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ben Vorpahl; OWEN WISTER: CHRONICLER OF THE WEST, GENTLEMAN OF THE EAST. Resources for American Literary Study 1 January 1992; 18 (1): 73–76. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/26366729 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressResources for American Literary Study Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1992 The Pennsylvania State University1992The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Tony Hillerman by Fred Erisma, and: David Wagone by Ron McFarland, and: Joseph Wood Krutch by Paul N. Pavich, and: David Henry Hwang by Douglas Street, and: John Graves by Dorys Grow Grove

82 Western American Literature so obviously a regional poet, though Nordstrom argues that his “North Ameri­ can Sequence” was “the first cohesive synthesis of the ecological metaphor in the Northwest.” However, the sequence was publishd as a whole only in 1964, and Snyder had already published Myths & Texts (1960), which surely has a slightly prior claim as ecologically-centered poetry. I do not find Nordstrom’s argument for Roethke as a Northwest regionalist convincing. But his readings of Stafford are very sound, especially on the subject of the “Indian poems.” Nordstrom often uses poems from Stafford’s uncollected chapbooks and quotes them in full, which is preferable to yet another discussion of, say, “Travelling in the Dark,” excellent as that poem is. The Snyder discussion is also based on perceptive readings of poems. The commentaries on these major poets are supplemented by a survey of other Pacific Northwest poets, like Duane Niatum, James Welch and David Wagoner. The book shows an easy familiarity with major theoretical statements on western poetry by William Everson and Thomas J. Lyon, and the scholarship is thorough. Readers concerned with western poetry will find the lengthy bibliographies indispensable: in addition to full listings on the three principal poets, categories include comments on contemporary western poetry and prose, and on early western writing, bibliographies on Native American writing and environmental and ecological issues, and a list of Pacific Northwest poetry anthologies. In short, Nordstrom’s book is both readable and informative, a starting point for further work in the field as well as a stimulating guide to a delightful body of poetry. BERT ALMON University of Alberta Tony Hillerman. By Fred Erisman. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 87, 1989. 52 pages, $2.95.) David Wagoner. By Ron McFarland. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 88, 1989. 56 pages, $2.95.) Joseph Wood Krutch. ByPaul N. Pavich. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 89, 1989. 52 pages, $2.95.) David Henry Hwang. ByDouglas Street. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 90, 1989. 52 pages, $2.95.) John Graves. By Dorys Grow Grover. (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 91, 1989. 52 pages, $2.95.) Over the years, students of western American literature have come to expect quality monographs from the Western Writers Series, published at Boise State University. Though the paperbacks are thin in size, they are always fat in scholarship, the bibliographies alone worth the small amount of change it takes to purchase them. Although each work disavows any attempt at complete­ ness, there is no question that the series has become an important part of Reviews 83 western studies, with our finest critics and historians having written them and scores of students having read them. Whether the subject is a major historical figure like Owen Wister or Bret Harte, or a person whose impact is less dramatic like Mabel Dodge Luhan, the books are always worthy; they seem always to have been handled by good editors and appear to help fill in the immense mosaic that is the American West. Writers represent the epicenter of the West; I do not think it would be stretching it to suggest that the Western Writers Series may some­ day be thought of as a series that helped shake and shape the western landscape. The latest five books (Numbers 87-91) will take their places as valuable works and the group represents the range of interests found in the series. Tony Hillerman, by Fred Erisman, examines the life and work of a New Mexican fiction writer whose publications now appear on the New York Times Best Sellers lists. Erisman shows that here is a writer who is going to be around for a long, long time, that Hillerman’ssouthwestern detective stories have that magic quality that attracts both the popular audience and the academic audience. Ron McFarland’s David Wagoner considers publications of a poet and fiction writer who makes his home in the Northwest. Wagoner, never as popular as Hillerman has become, is a man who has been extremely productive in a variety of genres. And even within his poetry, McFarland writes, there...

Frederic Remington—Selected Letters ed. by Allen P. Splete, Marilyn D. Splete

Reviews 373 What delights, then, is not so much the subject of Foote’s art as it is the artistry of his depiction. “Since the early 1940s,” Wood says, “the plays of Horton Foote have been praised for the truthfulness of their language and characterization, for their realistic portrait of the Coastal Southeast Texas he knows so well. They have been favorably compared with the dramas of Strindberg, Ibsen and Chekhov . . .” (xiii). Amen! JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University Frederic Remington— Selected Letters. Edited by Allen P. Splete and Marilyn D. Splete. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988. 487 pages, $29.95.) The title of one of Remington’s own books, Men With the Bark On (1900), is better suited to this collection of letters to and from the artist-author than the accurate but unimaginative title it bears. The more than five hundred letters included in the volume give a vivid sense of the man in his times, from his boyhood to his death in 1909. Even as a youth, Remington was a prolific correspondent, and the letters selected, ranging from business letters and pro forma notes to relatives to others uproariously personal and uninhibited, do, indeed, show him with the bark on. Making their choices from over a thousand extant letters, the Spletes organize the materials into seven chapters: “The Formative Years 1861-1884,” “Visions of the West 1884-1889,” “The Recognized Illustrator and Beyond 1889-1894,” “Getting to See a War 1894-1899,” “Visible at Last 1894-1902,” “Fame 1900-1907,” and “A Brief Last Hurrah 1907-1909.” Each chapter opens with a historical narrative placing the letters in context, while footnotes gloss allusions or references; letters themselves occur more or less chronologic­ ally, but are clustered in groups when a particular development (e.g., Rem­ ington’s exchanges with Owen Wister as they work on “The Evolution of the Cowpuncher” [1895]) merits following in sequence. In the letters we see the self-consciously professional artist-illustrator at work, roaming the West in cold-blooded search of materials and imploring his correspondents to send him details and photographs. We see the political and military figure discussing frontier tactics with Lieutenant Powhatan Clarke, exchanging views with Theodore Roosevelt and blithely suggesting improve­ ments in military materiel to General Nelson A. Miles. And, more than any­ thing else, we see the living person in his element, wrestling constantly with problems of drink and his waistline (his wife endearingly refers to the threehundred -pound Remington as “Darlin” ), relishing the good things that fame brings, and dashing off unbuttoned, ill-spelled, irreverent letters to friends everywhere. Frederic Remington— Selected Letters, in short, is not a book to read at a sitting, but it is one worth repeated sampling. With all it reveals about Remington in his times, it belongs in the library of every student of western art and letters. FRED ERISMAN Texas Christian University ...

Tracks in the Snow: Essays by Colorado Poets ed. by Ray Gonzalez

386 Western American Literature Siringo. By Ben E. Pingenot. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. 232 pages, $29.50.) Charles A. Siringo (1855-1927) was a Texas cowboy, Pinkerton detec­ tive, private detective, and autobiographer, writing not one but three auto­ biographies. Siringo is a well-written and well-documented biography; it is both sympathetic to Siringo and judicious in its estimate of his character. Siringo’s life could be divided into four parts: the cowboy, the detective, the author, and the sunset Westerner. Thus we get from this book some picture of the range life of the 1880s and 1890s, of the industrial conflicts of the ’90s (Siringo was the Pinkerton man in the Idaho mining labor battles), and of the Hollywood circle of Westerners in the 1920s: such men as authors Eugene Manlove Rhodes and Henry Herbert Knibbs, outlaw Emmet Dalton, actor William S. Hart, and vaudevillian Will Rogers, about whom, as a group, someone should write a book. This biography captures what is uniquely interesting about Siringo’s career as a writer. What he had to sell was authentic adventure. He was a truly self-made writer, self-taught and self-promoted. He was engaged in legal battles with the Pinkerton agency, as a result of which he could not publish what could have been his most intriguing adventures. His last years in the Los Angeles area were a struggle to keep himself in lodging while he tried to publish his last autobiography. Charles Siringo is the sort of character that the Wild West myth has trouble with—the western hero who does not die with his boots on. Nor did he retire from the scene; he lived on into the twentieth century and became part of it. He published his first book, A Texas Cowboy, in 1885, the same year that Owen Wister came to Wyoming and discovered the cowboy. The next year, Siringo and his first wife and their daughter came to Chicago in time for the Haymarket riots. He had two more careers and three more wives before his twilight years in Hollywood. Ben Pingenot’s Siringo is a book that helps clarify our understanding of the passing of the West. Mr. Pingenot is a past president of the Texas State Historical Association. His bibliography is a good example of what the biographer needs to look for, where to look for it, and the fun of looking. ROSCOE L. BUCKLAND Western Washington University Tracks in the Snow: Essays by Colorado Poets. Edited by Ray Gonzalez. (Arvada, Colorado: Mesilla Press, 1989. 122 pages, $8.95.) In 1986 there appeared two small anthologies of Colorado poetry. One of these, City Kite on a Wire, was brought out by Ray Gonzales, a well-known Denver poet and editor. Now Mr. Gonzales has edited a collection of essays by Colorado poets, most of whom appeared in one of the earlier anthologies. Reviews 387 There are fourteen essays in the volume, ten by men and four by women. Although there is great diversity in these essays, each of them follows, roughly, a similar pattern. Each of the authors has something to say about modern poetry in general and about his or her own poetic background. Each essay is followed by one or more recent poems by the author, many of them very good. Mr. Gonzales, in his introductory essay, recalls his first serious contact with modern poetry in a university classroom and ties this in with his early life on the deserts of West Texas and New Mexico. Another contributor, Susan Tichy, found her poetic subject during a stay in the Philippines; and still another, Bruce Barton, grew up in North Dakota and populated most of his early poems with loons. Nearly all of the authors show how their poetic subjects relate to experiences of their early years. Although these poets now live, or have recently lived, in Colorado, there is little in their poems or their essays that would label them as western or regional poets. Their concerns range across the world. Many of the poems and a number of the essays are concerned with politi­ cal, social and moral issues and in this respect are unlike a...

Bazarov, Prince Hal, and the Virginian

M A X W E S T B R O O K The University of Texas at Austin Bazarov, Prince Hal, andthe Virginian In Owen Wister’s The Virginian, most of the hero’s literary prefer­ ences are predictable. He does not like the unnamed detective novel Molly loans him because he finds it a pointless contest between the author and the reader.1The Mill on the Floss “ ‘talks too much’” (122). Sir Walter Scott tells a “ ‘right fine story’” (132), but Jane Austen puts him to sleep (301). Two of the Virginian’s literary preferences, however, are not so pre­ dictable. His favorite heroes are a member of the royal family of England and a Russian nihilist. William Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and Ivan Tur­ genev’s Bazarov may seem, at first glance, unlikely choices for America’s paradigmatic cowboy hero. The Virginian’s preferences, however, are as basic to his character as his decision to work for Judge Henry rather than ride as an outlaw with Steve. He finds Prince Hal a “jim-dandy,” and Part I of Henry IV is “ ‘bedrock’” drama (302). The death of Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons has moved him so deeply that he “ ‘pretty near cried’” (122). Examination of the Bazarov and Prince Hal compari­ sons suggests that The Virginian is a literary and political con game. Pre­ sented to readers as the story of a just-plain-folks cowboy hero, the novel is, in actuality, a cynical attack on just plain folks and on anyone foolish enough to believe in the vote and in rule by law. If taken at face value, the Virginian is simply a cowboy hero. He is brave, judicious, responsible, honest, and intelligent. He embodies a patriarchical version of American values in the democratic form of a working cowboy. He begins with nothing and ends with everything—victory over his enemy, conquest of his lady, success in business—and is thus an encour­ agement to all of us who start out poor and dream of glory. If we ordinary 104 Western American Literature men and women could not give Balaam a righteous beating, we would certainly like to; and the vicarious satisfaction of seeing the Virginian beat him half to death gratifies some—depending on the individual reader— more or less conscious desire for primal justice. When the Virginian recalls his experiences in atavism, however, his readers become selective. Those who do not want to hear their cowboy hero say he would like to “ ‘become the water’” and “ ‘become the trees’” (428) simply blink and politely wait for the next act. When the Virginian is reduced almost to tears by the death ofTurgenev’snihilist, when it becomes clear that Wister’s folk hero is actually an aristocrat, a superior person who is proud of his superiority, most readers are courteous enough to silently pick and choose among what has been offered by a much-loved literary hero. To reject the Virginian because he is a male chauvinist with an ideologically-dictated blend of superiority, humility, idealism, and cynicism would seem to be easy; but the memory can be taught to reject any evi­ dence which does not confirm our prejudice. A few million readers simply like this paradigmatic folk hero and refuse to register information which might diminish or corrupt his image. Those who make a living by reading books and close readers in gen­ eral, of course, do not pass over discrepancies or, at least, when problems are discussed they tend to focus, to reconsider. America’s reading public, however, has long admired a supposed hero of democracy who finds his own heroes in the imperialistic son of a usurper, a cynical Russian intellec­ tual, and a boss who believes that the purpose of Christianity is to teach aristocrats a parlor trick they can use to control their inferiors.2 The Virginian’s literary preferences, furthermore, are not—as most readers must assume—innocent diversions, asides Wister put in among the events of the real story. The Virginian is compared to Prince Hal and then to Bazarov in ways that are specific and purposeful. Like Prince Hal, the Virginian is introduced as a hell...

Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (review)

BOOK REVIEWS179 Bloody Angle, fought hand to hand at Fort Stedman, and led Lee's last offensive at Appomattox. "For all their vices, weaknesses, and failings, Lee's Louisiana Tigers emerged from the Civil War with one of the most respected military records of any southern fighting unit." For theirheroics on the battlefield the Tigers paid a heavy price. They suffered a 23 percent mortality rate. Approximately 2,000 of them were killed or wounded in combat. Another 1,300 died from other causes. All units suffered extensive losses. This is an excellent work, thoroughly researched, and well written. Mr. Jones does a masterful job of retaining a constant focus on his major thesis—the role of the Louisiana infantry in the Army of Northern Virginia —while at the same time giving the reader a clear, concise picture of the setting for his story. Furthermore, Lee's Tigers is the first comprehensive study of all the Louisiana units operating under General Lee. "The wild looting Tigers . . . made not a pious crew, but they fought." A civilian who knew the Louisianians only by reputation wrote the above which happens to summarize perfectly the volume under review. John G. Barrett Lexington, Virginia Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Shveholding Family. By Malcolm Bell, Jr. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987. Pp. xxiv, 673. $29.95.) This is a truly remarkable book, exciting, rapid paced, detailed, containing a wealth of information, and covering a century-and-a-half of American history. Nearly half of the book focuses on the fortune-hunting, Irish-born Major Pierce Butler, an officer in King George Ill's Twentyninth Regiment of Foot prior to the American Revolution, who married South Carolina's Mary Middleton, heiress to a substantial fortune, and later became a Patriot, Georgia slaveowner, member of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and United States Senator from South Carolina . Subsequent members of the Butler family are also examined. Among them are what might approximate as nearly as possible an American aristocracy—Thomas Butler, Pierce's surviving and largely disinherited son who married Eliza de Mallevault, the daughter of a French noblewoman; Pierce Butler, a grandson who lived in Philadelphia (as did Major Butler), married the famous English actress Frances Anne Kemble, and became one of the wealthiest slaveowners in America before selling 436 of his Georgia blacks in 1859 for $300,205 to pay off gambling debts and stock market losses; and Owen Wister, the son of Pierce Butler's great-granddaughter, who became a friend of Theodore Roosevelt and a prominent novelist. 180CIVIL WAR HISTORY As with the Children of Pride's Charles C. Jones, the fortuitous circumstance of the Butlers being separated from one another, and the propensity of Major Butler, and subsequent generations, to write hundreds of letters have left a rich legacy for historical inquiry. But unlike Jones, Butler and succeeding generations (except briefly after the Civil War) were absentee plantation owners. Demanding as they did weekly reports on conditions at the three Butler rice, cotton, and sugar plantations in Mcintosh and Glynn counties, Georgia (near Darien on the Sea Island coast), and communicating often with various plantation managers, including Roswell King, Sr. and Jr., the Butlers also left detailed pictures of the internal workings of plantation slavery over a period of more than two generations. Despite admonitions to themanagers not to be unduly harsh, the brutal and oppressive nature of human bondage (including branding slaves with PB above their right breasts) becomes evident as the author explores the activities of plantation life. In his feeling for place and time—whether Butler's Island in Georgia during the War of 1812 (when Major Butler lost 138 slaves to the British, slaves who went mostly to Nova Scotia), Charleston and Savannah on the eve of the Civil War, or Philadelphia and London during various periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the author is matched by few historians. In his unravelling of various wills and estate documents, he displays a talent in the best tradition of the legal profession; and in his attempts to understand the experiences of blacks, he demonstrates sympathy and sensitivity. Unfortunately, with regard to thelatter, the author...

The Man Who Rode Midnight by Elmer Kelton

86 Western American Literature Blood Moon. ByK. Patrick Conner. (New York: Doubleday, 1987. 208 pages, $16.95.) K. Patrick Conner has woven a tense tale of murder and intrigue in Blood Moon. He has also managed to employ a place—California’s Sacramento Valley—as an active element in this, his first novel. Donny Cannon, the book’s protagonist, “was quickly seduced by Rancho Esquon’squiet isolation and the valley’s recurring, hypnotic rhythms, the relentless summer sun and winter’s chilling lowland fog, two enduring seasons broken only by a few turbulent weeks of storm and uneasy respite.” Cannon’s partner Michael Morrisey has been shot to death while flying sheriffs in search of marijuana patches in the Sierra foothills. His erratic, erotic sister, Megan, comes to Rancho Esquon tomake final arrangements, and Cannon is as swept by her allure as he is troubled by the circumstances of her brother’s death. Conner then braids the two related threads into a tale that is true to the dynamics of the region: water brokers and developers hover near the novel’s core, as do stucco motels and cafes with peeling paint, autocratic sheriffs and compassionate waitresses. If the novel is not entirely successful, if it drags a bit here and becomes confusing there, it is not because Conner’s talent seems deficient. On the con­ trary', he writes very well—even at small points: he is, for example, deft at creating similes—Megan’s beauty “sizzled like a wasp in a jar” ; “the phone hung on the wall as silent as the watermarks left by last winter’s rains”; “He felt raw as an open wound, his nerves as brittle as blown glass.” On the other hand, Conner uses so many similes that in places they interfere with his story’s flow. With a bit more experience, this interesting new western voice is apt to moderate his use of such devices and write even more effectively. K. Patrick Conner is not yet Robert Parker or Tony Hillerman, but he probably doesn’t want to be, for one senses that he is not interested in writing genre novels, but is in fact a regional writer of potential note, one who may evidence continued concern for place as his craft improves, and who may give readers more and even better pictures of his West. This, his first novel, is well worth reading. GERALD HASLAM Sonoma State University The Man Who Rode Midnight. By Elmer Kelton. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1987. 261 pages, $16.95.) To many people, if a Western includes automobiles and electric lights, it has betrayed the model which spawned it, a form based on conventions established by Owen Wister in The Virginian, formalized by Zane Grey, and imitated by countless writers after them. Yet many of today’s readers below Reviews 87 the age of thirty, not influenced by Western movies and television programs, lack empathy with much, if any, of the experience of the settling of the frontier. Instead these readers are drawn to fantasy, science fiction, Gothic romance, bodice snatching tales, spy thrillers, detective novels, and suddenly a spate of Vietnam War materials for their thrills. They certainly have found little to identify with in traditional Westerns. A novel which could change this attitude is Elmer Kelton’s The Man Who Rode Midnight. Wes Hendrix, the protagonist, is an older man well aware of his cowboying and rodeoing past who comes to realize the necessity of leaving the past behind to live in the present. Hendrix, like Charlie Flagg in Kelton’s highly acclaimed The Time It Never Rained, is not fighting rustlers or outlaws; and, in this case, Hendrix is not even fighting the weather and federal bureaucracy that plagued Flagg, Like Flagg, however, he must come to grips with being socially ostracized, abandoned, and even attacked by his former friends, who want Hendrix’sranch in order to build a recreational lake. The success of this novel hinges on a well-told story that touches us— the loss of a possession at the core of our being to what some label progress but others see differently. This situation is one of the major dilemmas of...

Owen Wister’s West: Selected Articles ed. by Robert Murray Davis

278 Western American Literature and concluded that enough evidence of the battle remained to make a con­ trolled archaeological survey worthwhile and “perhaps address some of the still unanswered questions about the battle.” A two-year, two-phase project was then designed, and this book describes phase one, the archaeological inves­ tigations of 1984, conducted at Custer Battlefield National Monument. The text, while meeting professional requirements for reporting method­ ology, excavations, inventory summaries, and artifact descriptions and analy­ ses, has been written for general as well as scientific readers. However, the extreme care and attention to detail which archaeology requires may make portions of the text tedious reading for the non-scientist, although the firearms portion of chapter five should interest gun enthusiasts especially, as “it is the first time modern firearms-identific.ation techniques have been applied to a battlefield situation.” What would seem to be of most interest to Custer buffs and also liable to spark new debate about the century-old mystery is found in the last chapter, where the authors interpret their finds. First, they identify the firearms used by the Indians and offer “at least a partial answer regarding the minimum number of guns used by the Indians.” A chronology and sequence of the battle follows, “derived from the study of the spatial distributions of artifacts taken in combination with firearms-identification analysis and historical documenta­ tion.” Their scientific results negate some long-held opinions and should pro­ vide a base for further archaeological study of the area. Nearly fifty photographs, sketches, and maps contribute to an understand­ ing of the text. One very large map folded into an end pocket might also be used by on-site visitors to the Custer battlefield. DONALD E. GRIBBLE Hibbing, Minnesota Owen Wister’s West: Selected Articles. Edited by Robert Murray Davis. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. 170 pages, $22.50.) Davis has edited a collection of short pieces by Wister written largely between 1893 and 1904, which provide fascinating glimpses of a writer con­ tinuously creating and interpreting his views of the West. Was he in fact its official spokesman, as these essays suggest? If a reader is bothered by Wister’s establishment condescension and righteousness, he is advised to read the essays individually and well-spaced, for they contain enough patronizing and sermon­ izing to make a simple body thirst for change. Those irritations aside, the reader will find several themes which cannot be easily dismissed, for they provide a connection between Wister’s consciousness of the West and the reader’s own. Because Wister made several journeys to the West, he refers often to the young easterner who steps down from the stage, or off the train, to turn his back deliberately for a time on the East, its civilization and amenities, to take on Reviews 279 the challenge of the raw western land as a test of character. But it is the visual impact of the West he refers to most powerfully. Throughout his life, in visits west and in thinking about those regions when in the East, Wister maintained an admiration verging on awe for this landscape. Wister came to recognize a fraternity of men, not unlike himself, who had been out there, who responded to mysterious signals and understood. In “Concerning the Contents,” written for the volume of Frederic Remington’s drawings published in 1897, Wister analyzes the “spell” of the West. It is not danger, freedom, or the “immortal life and purity of that air.” Neither is it the splendor of Nature, nor the chance for riches, nor the chance for crime (though there was plenty of both); nor is it yet adventure alone. What then? The spell of the West, he says, is “wilderness with its archaic silence.” The romantic tone of this essay is accompanied by something psychologically sound. The frontier, he thought, has ever been our great national romance. Was he the first to point this out? He saluted the West as “the only great romantic thing our generation has known, the last greatly romantic thing our Continent holds.” The last essay, written in old age, recalls a joyous trip to Yellowstone in 1887, following the...

The American West as Living Space by Wallace E. Stegner

180 Western American Literature All this is not new, but it is humane. And it is universal in its impulse because it is aware of other regions and their intimacy: “For me, the authentic map of the universe is composed of these microcosms—domes and domes of specific human light, crossing all abstract political, geographic, economic, and racial boundaries.” CAROL S. LONG Willamette University The American West as Living Space. By Wallace E. Stegner. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. 89 pages, $10.00/$18.00 text edition.) Longtime readers of Stegner will have the feeling that they’ve encountered parts of this book before, and they’ll be right. This series of three transcribed lectures is a quintessence of his struggle with the West-as-it-is, a careful con­ densation of large themes into measured space. Two beauties coexist in this slim volume: it gracefully documents a lifetime of study and thought on the American West, and it was distilled by Stegner in his own voice. In the preface, he says, “I decided that I would rather risk superficiality and try to leave an impression of the region in all its manifestations, to try a holistic portrait, a look at the gestalt, the whole shebang. . . .” What results is a deeply engaged set of descriptions that is also engaging, even as it kicks the props from under large portions of western myth. It rings true, and will make both native Westerners and pilgrim/aficionados squirm, though for different reasons. “Living Dry” defines the territory and the terms. Stegner follows Powell in letting the landscape and its aridity be the starting point. From there, he ranges through history, popular illusion, governmental fallacy, anthropology and other pertinent regions, ending, like a lizard’s tail, with a point. And what do you do about aridity, ifyou are a nation inured to plenty and impatient of restrictions and led westward by pillars of fire and cloud? You may deny it for a while. Then you must either adapt to it or try to engineer it out of existence, (p. 27) “Striking the Rock” deals with the consequences of the latter choice. He aims at stupidity and greed, both western and federal, and finds no shortage of targets. In this diverting lecture, Stegner skins politicians, BuRec, the Forest Service, the BLM and subsidized agriculture with tight-lipped charm, com­ bining well-chosen specifics with rigorous logic. In doing so, he provides analyses of the feudal/fascist tendencies of the western establishment and the inevitability, given faulty premises, of boom-and-bust economics. His conclu­ sion finds little solace in open spaces: Reviews 181 . . . the West is no more the Eden that I once thought it than the Garden of the World that the boosters and engineers tried to make it . . . neither nostalgia nor boosterism can any longer make a case for it as the geography of hope. (p. 60) The concluding lecture, “Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur” is a study of culture and personality as they appear against the landscape, in a re-examination of ideas familiar from Letters from, an American Farmer. Stegner’s character sketch is more incisive than affectionate, a critique of the inability of a society to adapt to its own land. On that note, he looks at the literature of the West, starting with a cool evaluation of Owen Wister’s Virginian as a paid thug, and proceeding to the modern day with a series of raptorial swoops. His literary values—which include integrity—are expressed in a well-turned jeremiad that ought to be required reading for anyone intend­ ing to write about the West. Summing up this book isat least as difficult as Stegner’sattempt to sum up the region to which he has given a lifetime of study and devoted the major part of his art. The West is a difficult region to grasp, whether physically or spiritu­ ally. By either measure, Stegner’s work is a monument and this book—a vast treatment in a limited space—is essential reading. C. L. RAWLINS Boulder, Wyoming Entrepreneurs of the Old West. ByDavid Dary. (New York: Knopf, 1986. 416 pages, $22.95.) The Legacy of...