Southwest Classics: The Creative Literature of the Arid Lands; Essays on the Books and Their Writers by Lawrence Clark Powell (review)

Reviews Southwest Classics: The Creative Literature of the Arid Lands; Essays on the Books and Their Writers. By Lawrence Clark Powell. (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1974. 370 pages, $12.95 clothbound, $6.95 paperbound.) Lawrence Clark Powell, longtime bibliophile and former dean of the School of Library Service of the University of California at Los Angeles, is viewed with suspicion in some quarters because he openly and unashamedly appeals to readers’ hearts as much as to their heads. Powell is a man who is not afraid to express strong opinions, to admit to deep emotional responses to the books he writes about. Though limited in certain ways I suppose, his kind of impressionistic commentary can it, seems to me, be extremely valuable; it often illuminates works of literature more brilliantly than the most detailed analytical criticism — and almost always it yields pleasurable reading fare. Speaking personally, I am proud to confess that some of the high points in my career as an aficionado of Southwestern writing have occurred while perusing Powell’s inspirational essays. The author’s most recent collection of essays is Southwest Classics, in which he confers the honorific of “classic” on twenty-eight Southwestern books. Powell’s “Southwest” is essentially New Mexico and Arizona, though his attention now and then settles on writers from adjacent states. The Southwest, he says, is a land of “desert, mountains, rivers and skies,” and of a history and culture that have “influenced writers of sensitivity and responsiveness, of stamina and genius.” His definition of the term “classic” is admittedly subjective: a classic is a book that possesses “an extra quality . . . an inner fire that lights the prose and which appears to come from a mystical union between writer and region.” An important, if rather arbi­ trary, criterion for inclusion on Powell’s list is that the author of a classic must be deceased. Most of Powell’s nominations of works to the Southwest’s literary hall of fame are unexceptionable. Certainly any catalogue of good books about the region must include, as Powell’s does, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Harvey Fergusson’s Wolf Song, and Will Levington Comfort’s Apache. In some cases the author spotlights works that ought 68 Western American Literature to be better known: examples are Haniel Long’s Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca, Ross Calvin’s Sky Determines, and Martha Summerhayes’s Vanished Arizona. I quarrel with the writer’s choices in only a few instances; in my view, for example, such overrated or near-worthless novels as Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage should have been replaced with, say, Edwin Corle’s People on the Earth and Alfred Henry Lewis’s Wolfville. I have nothing but praise for Powell’s organizational scheme. The essays, when read in the order in which they appear, build to a climactic statement, in that the author saves his best piece for last — a fine impassioned appreciation of J. Frank Dobie, whose classic work is said to be Coronado’s Children. Powell’s approach to these books, as is usual in his writings, is personal and sometimes prejudiced. His scholarship, however, is impeccable. He has employed the best texts, and has traveled far and wide to examine the papers and manuscripts of the writers he deals with. The biographical and biblio­ graphical information he has assembled is interesting and genuinely useful. In an article in the May 1974 issue of New Mexico Magazine, Powell says that his current goal, as scholar and critic of Southwestern literature, is “to lay groundwork on which someone can someday base a literary history that will do for the Southwest what Van Wyck Brooks did for New England.” I think that a significant part of that rather large order has now been filled, in a volume that is stimulating and pleasant reading. In sum Southwest Classics considerably enhances, in about equal portions, the reader’s pleasure and knowledge. One can hardly ask a book to do more. TOM PILKINGTON, Tarleton State University In This Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers. By James Shebl. (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976. 123...