The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet’s Autobiography by Richard Hugo (review)

174 Western American Literature The Mexican Pet. By Jan Harold Brunvand. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986. 221 pages, $13.95.) Teachers of American folklore and students of American popular culture will find Jan Harold Brunvand’s latest book welcome reading. The Mexican Pet: More “New” Urban Legends And Some Old Favorites offers additional urban legends to be added to those given by Brunvand in his popular books The Vanishing Hitchhiker and The Choking Doberman. One other Brunvand book, The Study of American Folklore, isthe standard for introductory studies of American folklore. The title tale concerns a sewer rat found south of the border and brought back by a caring person who thinks it is a small dog. I’m not sure what future sociologists will say about an American society that passes a story like thiswhen more and more immigrants are moving here from Mexico, but I am sure that readers today will enjoy the story for ingredients found in other traveling anecdotes found across the country: topicality in subject and illusion of reality in plot. Wasn’t it the uncle of a friend of a friend who actually experienced this on a trip to Tijuana? Or was it Juarez? Brunvand’s latest addition to his impressive list of folklore publications is obviously for both a general audience and for students. At one point in his preface, the writer’s tone is similar to that found in many popular movies. If this is number three in a series of works, can number four be far behind? Once again Brunvand has provided American folklorists with modern Ameri­ can traditions and beliefs. And he has given the folk, in a form they will enjoy, valuable information about contemporary life. Excuse me while I raid my son’sM&M candy jar of green M&M’s, which we all know are aphrodisiacs. JIM HARRIS New Mexico Junior College The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet’s Autobiography. By Richard Hugo. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986, 261 pages, $16.95.) Everything about this book speaks to how much love Richard Hugo had, fought for, and inspired in his many friends, fellow-poets and readers. Planned as a collection of essays but unfinished at Hugo’s death in 1982, this auto­ biography was finished and edited by people Hugo trusted and loved: Ripley, his wife; James Welch, one of his students, and Welch’swife Lois. The intro­ duction by poet William Matthews and the final interview, by writer William Kittredge, reinforce this collaborative, nearly communal effort to put together the pieces of Hugo’s life with honesty and care. I doubt if Hugo could have asked for better, even from himself. Reviews 175 In some ways, the book is a memorial, with famous essays published in Hugo’s life (“The Anxious Fields of Play,” “Ci Vediamo”) reprinted here. In other ways this is a book of secrets revealed. Connections between his life and art, once problematic, become clearer: between Hugo’s bleak early life and his later psychological problems, between his Grandfather Monk and Hugo’s love of fishing, between his early loneliness and fear and his famous later gregariousness and great affection. Hugo was always honest about his feelings in his poems, but also equally honest about how poems allow a poet to lie, to change the facts or “truth” for the sake of the music of language. Here, the distance between fact and music becomes clearer, and Hugo’s often painful life and artistic achievements gain a haunting grace. I cannot help but wonder, had Hugo lived to complete his autobiography, if he would have included all the wonderful photographs: childhood, base­ ball teams, fishing trips, family. Probably not; he was painfully conscious of his own success (one essay is entitled “The Problem of Success”) and of the way a poet’s autobiography “should” proceed. But the photographs add a perfect sense of family to this extended meditation on art and life. For, more than anything else, Dick Hugo loved the small details that make humans love each other, and the photographs—like the many poems included in the vol­ ume—only help to bring that love home. “Home” was a word that haunted...