The Selected Poems of Gwendolen Haste (review)

82 Western American Literature Since all of B. Traven’s early fiction was first published in Germany, Baumann asserts, “Whatever the original shape or form of the Erlebnistrdger ’s manuscripts may have been, Ret Marut put his signature and seal on them.” By careful study of Ret Marut’s known writing in Germany, before he disappeared in flight from a possible death sentence for revolu­ tionary political actions, Baumann can trace both philosophical and stylistic similarities in B. Traven’s works. Baumann also proves that Marut was under the influence of Max Stimer’s The Ego and His Own and that Stirner’s brand of philosophical anarchism undergirds much of the political and social thought in B. Traven’s fiction. Following the discussion of the identity question, Baumann devotes chapters to Traven as proletarian, philosophical anarchist, bilingual author, and “American.” Baumann carefully threads his way through many knotty problems and keeps an open mind on many issues that, at this point, cannot be given definitive treatment. This is not to say that Baumann does not write with great authority on many of the issues. For example, Baumann effectively traces out the many complex literary allusions in The Death Ship and demonstrates that B. Traven was a man of broad learning and a sensitive reader of world literature. His wide reading and research in Germany, as well as in the U.S., places Baumann in the forefront among B. Traven scholars. His style is readable, his textual scholarship meticulous, and his critical insights cogent. The main critical focus is on The Death Ship — one might wish that Baumann had treated other Traven works more fully, but this clearly was not his intention. Two useful Appendixes are included: “A Descriptive Survey of Traven’s Work,” and Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, as well as the usual notes, bibliography and index. All in all, Michael Baumann’s book serves well as an introduction for lay readers of Traven and as a highly valuable scholarly tool for professional scholars. ROBERT B. OLAFSON Eastern Washington State College The Selected Poems of Gwendolen Haste. (Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1976. 63 pages, $2.00.) Last fall Ahsahta Press, publishers of modern and contemporary poetry of the American West, issued its first volume, The Selected Poems of Norman Macleod. The second Ahsahta volume collects, along with other poems by Gwendolen Haste, selections from her only previous book of poetry, Young Land (1930). Some pieces from both sections of her Selected Poems — “The New Land” and “Later Poems” — appeared in periodicals Reviews 83 between 1922 and 1959. The forty poems here, finely printed on quality paper, were selected by editor Orvis C. Burmaster. Carol Mullaney’s concise “Preface” contains some biographical data, a sketch of the cultural context, and a few critical morsels. Gwendolen Haste was bom in Illinois in 1889 and grew up in Wisconsin. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1912, she lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then in Billings, Montana. In Billings she helped her father edit the Scientific Farmer. In 1925 she left Montana to work in New York City, first on a magazine and later in business. Once active in literary and western groups in New York, she currently lives in the Bronx. Her poems, as Carol Mullaney notes, “combine strong local flavor with universal feeling.” Though the verse occasionally evokes the Western sublime or the picturesque, mostly it recreates the bleakness of ranch life and the loneliness of ranch women. Stony hills, mournful winds, bent pines, rotting barns, broken fences, thin crops, last year’s weeds, wailing wolves — these are the dominant correlatives of Gwendolen Haste’s desolate souls. Our pleasure in reading this poet’s contributions to the Gloomy Farm Literature of the 1920s comes from her representation of dramatic dissonance through aesthetic harmony. However discordant the existence rendered, the persona’s sympathetic voice is gently lyrical, in command not only of stanzaic variety but of a high order of meter, rhyme, and consonance: They said she had no cause to die, but still The wind was always blowing on that hill. “The Ranch in the Coulee,” a lyric that shared The Nation poetry prize in 1922...