The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature (review)

Since the publication of the Western Literature Association’s landmark volumes A Literary History of the American West (1987) and Updating the Literary West (1997), western writers have been standing up straighter, shedding the cultural cringe that has seemed to accompany their being “regional.” John Daniel writes in his new book of essays, “like most authors—though many don’t know it or acknowledge it—I am a regional writer” (“To the Reader,” n.p.). Today the admission is less often avoided, or less bitter, than it was years ago when H. L. Davis, Wallace Stegner, and many others fought off such a designation as a literary kiss of death.

Casting off the old regional hex is easier now. Ours is a thoroughly peopled and wired West with its proportionate share of talent and constellations of writing, educating, and publishing activity. And there’s also the growth of writerly confidence, the certainty that a good, even a great, book has come from places like the writer’s own, the feeling that geography no longer means isolation, as it did to Theodore Roethke in Seattle in the late 1940s, claiming that there wasn’t another poet within a thousand miles. Writers today are easily in touch with many networks and currents that transcend regional disconnection, and yet they remain open to the freshness of their own place. The world still begins where a writer is.

Daniel, with a number of solid books to his credit, is a Northwest writer now, though he came from the East Coast and batted around the West as a young man before settling in Oregon. He’s rooted and has become a provincial, as are all of us, but he’s the right sort of provincial, as Josiah Royce defined it, alert to one’s home place and its cultural interpreters, as well as to wider orbits of significance, as is suggested in Daniel’s borrowing of his title from an earlier Northwesterner, Stewart Holbrook’s 1952 book Far Corner.

Holbrook’s aggressively regional take on Northwest differences was to find its highest literary expression more than a decade later in Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion (1964). Daniel, a Kesey wannabe in his youth, holds on to his debt to Kesey in his new The Far Corner while admitting that he later turned in Wallace Stegner’s direction while a student and teacher at Stanford, where he knew Stegner. Both the older writers are the subject of essays in the new book. So are their differences, in another pair of essays honoring rootlessness and rootedness. Still, one notes that the latter quality results in a much longer essay and one that is enhanced by its positioning near the book’s conclusion. There are moments of brilliance in the book, like the opening piece, “Cuttings.” (And “Cuttings” is a testament to the primacy of roots, not cuttings.)

I value the high quality and the range of Daniel’s work in these eighteen essays, a welcoming good read throughout. I note especially his attention to new subjects, as in “The Mother of Beauty,” a moving account of the death of his mother and others close to him, and the necessity of our eventual death to the beauty of life. I also welcome the strength of science, such as biology, hydrology, and geology that undergirds much of John Daniel’s recent work.