A Literary History of Iowa by Clarence A. Andrews (review)

Reviews 187 fiction with which it will inevitably be compared. One of the novel’s four major characters, a house painter named either O. P. Dahlberg or P. O. Bergdahl (we are never sure which), who has two entirely self-consistent but logically contradictory pasts depending upon which name we assume is really his, puts the point explicitly. To the narrator’s wife Alice he says “I want to restore awe,” for “without awe we diminish, we trivialize, every­ thing we touch” (p. 113). For Morris the modem world, with everything in plain sight, has lost its very capacity for awe, and here perhaps is where Morris shares a common Western vision. The sentimentalized, nostalgically remembered good old days are an obvious staple commodity of much Western writing, which often mourns the loss of a romantic past. Morris’s near uniqueness among modern practitioners of Western story lies in his deeply felt belief that the capacity for wonder must constantly be renewed, and that nothing is so futile as regret. To him westering is not primarily seen in external terms: neither a geographical place nor a temporal era, it is instead an individual spiritual necessity. The past is dead: long live the future! JAMES K. FOLSOM The University of Colorado A Literary History of Iowa. By Clarence A. Andrews. (Iowa City: Uni­ versity of Iowa Press, 1972. 287 pages, $7.50.) One of America’s leading literary scholars, Robert Spiller, has argued on several occasions that notable literary history must be a judicious mixture of biography, cultural history, and literary criticism. If these ingredients are not carefully blended, Spiller contends, the product is often a half done mish-mash of background materials or an overly-cooked concoction of close readings. At first glance, the volume under review seems to follow the bill of fare that Spiller proposes. Andrews deals with the lives of the major Iowa writers, he includes scattered comments on the state’s cultural history, and he ventures a few interpretive points on several works. The author has obviously read widely in the primary and secondary works dealing with Iowa’s literary history, and his extensive index and bibliographical listings will be helpful to students and scholars. But a closer look reveals the limitations of the volume. Though Andrews provides numerous details about such writers as Alice French, Hamlin Garland, Herbert Quick, and Ruth Suckow, these discussions are often disjointed, full of extraneous material, and frequently not closely tied to the works of these authors. Even more vexing is the author’s tendency to provide extensive plot summaries and lengthy quotations from reviews— 188 Western American Literature but without advancing his views on the literature he is treating. First-rate literary history must contain more analysis than Andrews offers. One wishes too that the author had viewed his subject within a larger framework. For example, he discusses the state’s regional writers of the 1920s and 1930s without providing helpful comparisons and contrasts with other regional authors. In addition, Andrews mentions Davenport and Iowa City as notable sites of literary activity in Iowa, but we are not told how they compare as centers of western literature with, say, Carmel, Taos, or Portland. On other occasions Andrews makes statements that specialists in western literature will question. He argues that “From Garland to Kantor and Manfred, Iowa authors have been ahead of their fellows in their attempts to comprehend the Indian and be fair to him” (p. 26). This assertion over­ looks the perceptive early work of Joaquin Miller, Mary Austin, Charles F. Lummis, and Oliver LaFarge, for example. Moreover, Andrews is some­ times inconsistent. He suggests that Josephine Herbst “may well be the best novelist Iowa has turned out,” (p. 238) but he devotes less than three pages to her works and much more to several other novelists. Thus, while Andrews’ book provides a useful introduction to writing in Iowa, it is not the type of full-rigged literary history that Spiller has called for. This volume tends to be a guide to or an annotated bibliography of the state’s literature. As members of the Western Literature Association plan a full-scale literary history of the West and...