Shane by Jack Schaefer (review)

78 Western American Literature book. I take that back. The two quotations above — and a couple I used earlier — show what is really bad about Growing etc. The pompous intro­ duction and the vapid headnotes spoil what would otherwise be the usual sort of once-a-lustrum collection. Oh, one other thing. Why do anthologizers of the Southwest feel obligated to include something by D. H. Lawrence? I hope that custom can be honored in the breach and not in the observance when next someone throws together a “book of imaginative responses to the distinctive qualities of the land, the people, and the historical experiences. . .” (Introduction). JAMES W. LEE North Texas State University Shane. By Jack Schaefer. The Critical Edition, edited by James C. Work. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. xviii + 432 pages, $8.95 paper, $24.95 cloth.) One does not have to agree with all that Jacques Barzun says in “Scholar­ ship Versus Culture” (The Atlantic, November 1984) to feel ambivalent about that twentieth-century literary phenomenon known as the critical edi­ tion. Nevertheless, although the Vikings sang their sagas sans critical analysis, their barbarities were no less cruel than ours; and although Viking critical editions may not have reduced barbarity, no one has proven them a cause of its increase. Until Professor Barzun convincingly locates the Golden Age, most of us will continue to find critical editions useful in teaching; and teachers of western American literature will rejoice that the University of Nebraska Press has now joined Norton and Viking in publishing such texts. Nebraska’s first critical edition of a western novel is Jack Schaefer’s Shane. Edited by James C. Work, the Nebraska Shane is not, however, a perfect critical edition. More than fifty pages of introduction precede the novel; the critical essays are not arranged chronologically; and the footnotes in those essays refer to other editions of Shane. Worse yet, the criticism is mostly limited to discussions of the historical context, and Work does not provide a bibliography of his own selecting which could include some mention of other sorts of interpretation, such as the papers delivered at WLA meetings by Priscilla Oaks and Glenn Selander, and discussions of Shane in books such as Jay Gurian’s Western American Writing. More important than those weaknesses are the advantages of the Nebraska Shane. The large type used for the text of the novel comes as a great relief to those near-sighted Schaefer fans who have had to squint to make out the minuscule print in the Bantam edition. Moreover, remarks by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and essays by Michael Marsden, Chuck Rankin, and Marc Simmons are published in this critical edition for the first time, and the editor has included an excellent critical section on the movie version of Shane. Work also reports his significant discovery of an earlier publisher’s bowdleri- Reviews 79 zation of the 1954 edition of Schaefer’s novel. Added to those commendable features is the inclusion of most of the essays on Shane listed in Etulain’s Bibliographical Guide. Having taken seriously its responsibility to further the study of the region’s literature, the University of Nebraska Press deserves commendation for pub­ lishing Work’s edition of Shane. Ironically, a remark of Schaefer’s included in this edition seems to scoff at such ventures: “Scholarship strikes me as a dull and stupid waste of time. All that piling up of detail! And for what purpose?” Undoubtedly, some scholarship is a waste of time, but some of it sheds light on the literature, helping us to understand and appreciate it. And those like Barzun who feel that any scholarship smothers the work it is meant to illuminate should consider what Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren say in American Literature: The Makers and the Making-. “If a literary work has any artistic value it will always reveal itself to be in excess of the historical comment, speaking to the reader in its own mode and living its own life. [Such literature] is also lighting up history— is even changing history.” Just such a novel is Shane. JAMES H. MAGUIRE, Boise State University A Sender Of...