Black Wolf: The Life of Ernest Thompson Seton by Betty Keller (review)

152 Western American Literature never explains how one decides whether an instance is an instance of fact or an instance of fictionalization. The great power of Kerouac’s books comes from something common in them that elitist criticism despises as vulgar. Kerouac’s life is often dreadfully common and awful. “Why does he do that?” Clark lets the often embarrassing painfulness of it come through without apologizing for it and without rational­ izing it. Though his own attitude toward Kerouac is implicitly clear, he is true to his aim of letting the story tell itself. In this biography, the story comes through with clarity and force. JACOB LITITZ Kent State University Black Wolf: The Life of Ernest Thompson Seton. By Betty Keller. (Van­ couver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1984. 240 pages, $18.95.) Betty Keller prefaces her book by stating that she will not explore in any depth the place of Seton in the scientific world, nor analyze his animal stories; “Black Wolf is instead an intimate look at the private life of a creative genius.” She finds four yarns in Seton’s life, wound together by the cable of his will: “All things are possible to him that wills,” Seton wrote at the age of thirty. He knew what he wanted. At various times he willed to be a painter with his work hung in a Paris salon, a natural historian, a storyteller, and a teacher of young boys, through the Boy Scouts. Yet Seton’s private life reads as the story of a man searching for his own identity, perhaps driven by psychic forces he could not understand or control. If he always knew what he wanted, he sometimes did not know what he was. Here was a man who had visions, who identified with the “Winnipeg Wolf,” a creature who “lived just beyond the city limits, preying on dogs.” Here was a man who, throughout his life, wished to be a “frontier naturalist,” but also wished to be known in the cities for his scientific accuracy; a man who devel­ oped a formula for promoting his own books through a kind of road show, but was deeply offended when John Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt criti­ cised him as one who sought “to profit by the popular love for the sensational and the improbable.” Here was a pantheist who was willing to kill his own sacred animal, even after he vowed never to kill a big game animal again. As Betty Keller says, Yet wolves, and to a lesser degree coyotes, were in a different cate­ gory for Seton. It was somehow necessary to “meet them and beat them,” almost as if in destroying them he could establish his own identity, prove himself their superior, (p. 133) Here then was an enigmatic figure. Unfortunately, the author only begins to explore the mystery of Seton. MICHAEL P. COHEN Southern Utah State College ...