El Morro by Lawrence Clark Powell (review)

86 Western American Literature For all these virtues, My Life As an Indian has a number of weaknesses for the strength of the fundamental narrative to overcome. Now and then a segment of idyll puts aside the other purposes of the work, and the scene verges on pastoral with the buffalo as herd animal. The stories interlarded here and there often have the range and feeling of truly Indian stories — as in one of the best of them, “The Story of Ancient Sleeper” — and some­ times are romanticized — as in “A Game of Fate.” Maybe we ought to remember that Schultz was writing for a public that still responded to Hiawatha. These characteristics of the book, together with Schultz’s some­ times artificial language in recording the emotions and experiences of the protagonist, create a gap of naivete which is never quite filled. The love story is often idealized, too, beyond the likelihood of the experience. Weakest of all is the link, when there is any link whatever, between the descriptions of freedom and happiness enjoyed by a wandering tribe with no real hardships and the descriptions of the brutal, unending warfare between neighboring tribes, which must have brought fearful suffering. No doubt there was a link between these extremes of life in the psychology of the Blackfoot, but the story­ telling ways of early twentieth-century white society cannot comprehend it. Which is still to say that this is a fascinating book, well worth reading in the late twentieth century too, and therefore we should be glad to see it reprinted and widely available. L. D. CLARK. University of Arizona El Morro. By Lawrence Clark Powell. (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1984. 129 pages, $7.95.) Lawrence Clark Powell’s third book of fiction continues the author’s preoccupation with contemporary versions of courtship and sexual love. William Stone, Powell’s elderly central character in El Morro, is a park ranger who values hard facts, reticence, and “life at first hand.” He has been entrusted by his respected superior, “the Secretary,” with escorting a young Englishwoman named Aria Bay on a two-week tour of sites of archasological interest in northern Arizona and New Mexico. In spite of his unease at per­ forming the assignment, Stone finds Aria “intelligent, responsive, beautiful.” She is eager to declare her devotion to Mary Austin’s The Land of Journeys’ Ending — which has partly inspired her visit — but soon learns that Stone’s encounter (as a young man) with Austin in person has induced him to read little more than a sampling of her “too imaginative” writings. It is clear from the beginning that Aria and her outwardly gruff traveling companion are opposites who nevertheless are destined to come together in spiritual and perhaps even sexual union. Powell’s deep regard for the southwestern landscape is especially evident in this novel, which traces Stone’s expert guidance of his guest through an Reviews 87 itinerary including such impressive landmarks as the Grand Canyon, the Betatakin Ruin, Chaco Canyon, and the towering sandstone Inscription Rock, also called El Morro. As Aria and Stone together explore these extraordinary natural features, an unlikely emotional bond between them strengthens. “Mysterious” is the expression Powell’s characters in El .Morro sometimes apply to the landscapes of their pilgrimage, and the mysteriousness seems often to indicate magical connections — between the ancient “spirits” of displaced Indian communities and our modern-day travelers, between Mary Austin’s book and Aria’s understanding of it, between Aria and Stone. Powell makes it painfully obvious that neither of his two leading char­ acters is a “whole” person. Aria feels responsible for a recent accident in England that has maimed her husband and rendered him incapable of sexual intercourse. Her “heavy mane” of “alive” red hair becomes an emblem of her powerful, often uncontrollable emotions and her latent, suppressed eroticism. Stone provides Aria with a much-needed steady influence. But he has his problems too, most notably the persistent recollection of his stormy, failed marriage to a sex-starved Mexican woman, whose appetites clashed disas­ trously with Stone’s self-attributed “conservative” personality. His most tell­ ing emblem is the ranger’s uniform he...