Jumping-Off Place by Baine Kerr (review)

332 Western American Literature are technical masterpieces, with Textual Commentaries and Word-Division lists to please the most meticulous of scholars. In Switzerland, for example, we learn not only the measurements of Cooper’s notebook (16.7 cm x 21 cm) but also that one traveler’s guide Cooper used (Henry Keller, Carte Itinéraire de la Suisse) came to Cooper boxed, corrected, and linen-backed. In my opinion, Cooper’s major interpreters have given up on interpreta­ tion altogether, and have turned (perhaps from perplexity) to stodgy antiquarianism instead. Although, as stated, the books deserve — demand — a place on library shelves, it is this kind of drawing-room criticism which has given and continues to give Cooper a bad name. (Even Twain was, after all, merely functioning as inaccurate technician when he devastated Cooper in his hilarious essays.) Scholars have too long avoided the difficult task of attempting to under­ stand the immensity of the impact of Cooper’s writings not only in America, but in the world. Why, for example, did the French realists (of all people) take their perception of “The Real Indians” from Cooper? D. H. Lawrence remains, in my opinion, still the only major Cooper scholar to even half-way approach the significance of Cooper as cultural phenomenon; when he ascribed to Cooper a “myth-meaning” he pointed a way of understanding Cooper that later scholars have ignored. I am not attempting to re-write these introductions, and I say again praise be that Cooper is coming back into print — but I am reminded of a movie I once saw about a crack baseball player (a true-to-life movie). Near the end of the picture, the star won a national award for his brilliant play. At that point, I think, one of his team-mates suggested he buy a new mitt. The star’s reply was something like: “Hell, I could catch the ball with an old shoe box.” I believe that what is important for us in Cooper is that we read and interpret him — and that what should be important about Cooper criticism is that it lead us to an understanding of the writing, of the text, even if such criticism must be read on the yellowed pages of a cheap, old paperback. RICHARD C. POULSEN Brigham Young University Jumping-Off Place. By Baine Kerr. (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1981. 64 pages.) Baine Kerr’s stories open with the bristlecone pine of Nevada’s Great Basin and conclude with a vision of eagles at a canyon mouth on Colorado’s eastern slope. Between these two sections the reader traverses a good deal of Reviews 333 the country and the human heart. From California’s coast through Nevada on Highway 50; from San Antonio along the Goodnight - Loving Trail to Denver; from Nacogdoches, Texas, to Virginia’s tidewater to Amble, South Dakota; from Ft. Benning, Georgia, to a Colorado city where the plains begin stretching eastward, we are confronted with a series of quests for knowledge of human nature as reflected by the nature of place. With the first sentence in Jumping-Off Place the reader is faced with an unsettling notion: Anyone driving between California and the Rockies for the first time will realize he has been lied to all his life: the country has not been settled, the West not won. This fiction presents the contradictions inherent in any received set of ideas, invites us to test the limits of widely diverse ethical and social situations. “Jumping-off place,” defined by Webster’s New Twentieth Century Diction­ ary both as “any isolated or remote place regarded as the outmost limit of civilization” and as “the extreme limits of one’s ability to cope with a situa­ tion,” has a double meaning as place and consciousness weigh against each other and we assess their influences on human action. A search for “wholeness” and the difficulty any individual has in attain­ ing it threads through all of the stories. In “Rider” (included in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories of 1977) the geological and moral wilder­ ness of Nevada becomes a determining presence, a catalyst for action, during the narrator...