Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner ed. by Anthony Arthur (review)

156 Western American Literature expense of, say, Gertrude Atherton, Samuel Clemens, E. W. Howe, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sinclair Lewis, and William Saroyan. Though the editors expli­ citly decline to judge the relative merits of the Popular Western and the Novel of the W'est, their egalitarian format tacitly upgrades the high muckamucks of horse opera — many a regional writer’salbatross. With few exceptions, the entries in this big critical collection are wellwritten . The prose is lucid, the ideas reasonable, the facts vital. For good or ill, the essays typically carry signs of the contributor’searlier expositions on the same writer. The best biographical sketches, of course, shape the writer’s life, offer an impression of inner development. The less successful pile up external fact: few readers need to know, for example, that Mary Austin’s ex-husband late in life “was a retired sales agent for the American Potash Company in Los Angeles.” The Major Themes category tends to split content and form, but the finest discussions view ideas both within and without aesthetic wholes. Interpretations of “theme” range all the way from the ingenuous (“The theme of violence is commonplace in the popular Western, and L’Amour’s work is no exception”) to the reticular (“The first theme, tripartite and remarkably inclusive albeit unified as Indian belief, Momaday expresses both symbolically and explicitly”). In western literature, the locus of critical attention shifts too easily from letters to landscape. Literary criticism isnever at its best when it chiefly judges literature on such nonliterary criteria as racism, sexism, or ecology. Since most contributors naturally champion their subjects, negative assessment sometimes appears only in the Survey of Criticism sections. These surveys are instructive, and the self-conscious objectivity of a contributor’scomments on his own work sometimes amusing. Routinely, it seems, scholars declare that the subject writer deserves serious attention, more attention, or a different kind of atten­ tion. The Surveys of Criticism chart problems for future research. The detailed Bibliographies move students in the right direction. Richard D. Altick once pointed out that bibliographies are prime examples of “inherent obso­ lescence,” but Fifty Western Writers answers the need for a basic sourcebook in the field and will be a good place to start many kinds of regional literary studies for some time to come. MARTIN BUCCO Colorado State University Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner. Edited by Anthony Arthur. (Boston: G. K. Hall &Co., 1982. 227 pages, $28.50.) Claiming that he was lucky to be “brought up without history” so that he could “make” the western past, Wallace Stegner argues that “writers in a new tradition, in a new country, invariably . . . become hooked on the past, which in effect doesn’t exist and therefore has to be created. . . .” From an Reviews 157 interview with David Dillon included in Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner, this quotation could serve as an epigram for any one of these fine articles. Although varied in approach, they present a coherent sense of Stegner’sdevel­ opment as a writer because they focus on the same concerns, which Stegner himself summed up in an essay titled “History, Myth, and the Western Writer.” In this essay, Stegner says that “millions of westerners, old and new, have no sense of the personal and possessed past, no sense of any continuity between the real western past which has been mythicized almost out of recognizability and a real western present. . . .” As these critics demonstrate, Stegner has searched the past for a usable cultural tradition, persistently rejecting the reductive western myths, showing that an acceptance of the links between past and present, and of the significance place has in shaping the human character, allows the modern westerner to “possess” himself. The essays explore what Merrill and Lorene Lewis claim, in Arthur’s words, is the central theme in Stegner’s work: “the quest for identity in the personal, regional, cultural, and artistic senses of that word.” They also show how Stegner has contributed to the “creation” of western history and a western tradition, and they lend sup­ port to Richard Etulain’s assertion that “many commentators have come to consider [Stegner] our best contemporary western writer.” This collection, representing, Arthur says, “perhaps half the...