The Mountain of Gold by Max Evans (review)

Reviews 69 searchers, many more should still serve as source materials for those interested in the Plains Indians. But the book is also delightful to the ordinary reader for its presentation of a people whose honest expressions are recorded in all the freshness of their unpolluted, unrefined state. Reading them, one can, as Ruth L. Bunzel said of Grinnell’s Cheyenne tales, “. . . smell the Buffalo grass and the wood fires, feel the heavy morning dew on the prairie.” A l a n F. C r o o k s , Boise College The Mountain of Gold. By Max Evans, illustrated by Hugh Cabot III. (Dinwiddie, Ga.: Norman S. Berg, Publisher, 1965. 77 pages, $2.95.) A predominant theme running through Nobel Prize poet George Seferis’ work is the enormous handicap of being a modern Greek artist. With such a heritage to live up to, the poet, Seferis says, labors toward a day when at best he might conceivably equal the staggering artistic accomplishments of the ancients. He laments this lack of freedom Greeks inherit. Yet they seem not alone in attempting to establish a contemporary literature commensurate with the past, and though American literature did not establish the philosophy of aesthetics, we nevertheless labor under the same, if not identical, burden. I believe American writers want more than anything else to write a better mythological story than Moby Dick. Steinbeck sought this, as did Dos Passos, Wolfe, Dreiser; and Max Evans, in The Mountain of Gold, has tried his hand at making mythology— and failed. His book is unfortunately a kind of Moby Dick story with a pinch of Old Man and the Sea, “Flight” and The Pearl included for dramatic safety. Despite the fact that this long short story is badly written The morning sun was still hiding in the east when Benito crawled from beside the warm young body of his wife. He stepped softly through the curtain door into the kitchen and lit the wax candle . . . little . . . small soft glow . . . iron stove . . . iron handle . . . swiftly and deftly built a fire . . . [one paragraph] it seems finally to overcome its own clumsiness and, in the end, gains power one would not have predicted. The Mountain of Gold is Benito Anaya’s story of obsession. He coinci­ dentally stumbles upon a rock of gold while cutting timber one day in his youth. From that point on until his death years later, Anaya thinks of nothing else but the hidden gold. He attacks the mountain as though it had a mind and purposely prevented the discovery of the treasure it "hoards” within its heart. Therein lies the central (if simpleminded) irony of the book. But this mountain could also be a whale: “I must hurry. The moun­ tain has a million years, but what have I?” Benito is obviously an Ahab, raging away because he is mortal. Still, one is impressed with the magnitude of this author’s intentions, and, I must add, impressed with his very nicely drawn descriptions of the 70 Western American Literature American Southwest. He knows his land and his people, but not his language. It is apparent that, in this intance, Biblical dialect, even clothed in literal Spanish translation, is a very difficult thing to do. One comes away from this story feeling that had Mr. Evans struck even ten per cent of his descriptive words (and perhaps cut out those frequent sunrise passages), the story would have won out. But imagine Hemingway making the mistake of rendering each of the eighty-four days in which Santiago does not catch a fish, then continuing, and you have what I feel is the central problem with Max Evans’ ambitious Western set mythological yarn. For those who like such stories I suggest they return to John Steinbeck’s “Flight.” J o h n H e r r m a n n , University of Montana John Muir. By Herbert F. Smith, (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1965. 158 pages, $3.50.) Professor Herbert F. Smith’s main approach to the conservationists’ folk hero John Muir in number 73 of the TUSAS is that of a conventional literary analysis. Happily, this does not result in a sterile emphasis on belles lettres...