This Stubborn Soil: A Frontier Boyhood by William A. Owens (review)

218 Western American Literature discovered beneath the superficialities of American civilization. They seek to restore the role of poet as performer and bard, and to live in harmony with enduring human values. All have been influenced by the anthropologist Stanley Diamond, and have been associated with the journal Alcheringa. This volume, added to The Lost America of Love and Olson’s Push, com­ pletes a trilogy on contemporary poetry. Paul refuses to treat avant-garde artists, by definition explorers and frontiersmen, as museum specimens to be left fixed and wriggling on a pin. He will be a frontiersman himself, dedicated to openness and exploration. In Search of the Primitive is written as dated journal entries, evolving meditations on his subjects. As another strategy for “the thwarting of ends,” each section ends with a letter from the poet in response to Paul. (The Antin chapter also has a note from critic Marjorie Perloff, with whom Paul had differed.) Gary Snyder has the last word in the book, and provides an accurate summary of Paul’s method. Sherman Paul is working on himself in these meditations more than on me. Isn’t this what it isall about? So I’ll say he’sdoing a new kind of literary interpretation and explication here. He’s trying to break the blocks down, digest some, return the nutrients to the little ones. The poems pass into the detritus cycle, the cycle that supports “cli­ max.” A Coyote-name for Sherman Paul’s admirable method: “De­ composition Criticism.” In Search of the Primitive shows great learning and intellectual courage. Do not expect, however, an easy tour of Antin’s talking at the boundaries, Rothenberg’s Poland/1931 and Snyder’s Rivers and Mountains Without End. Paul’s book lacks the comfortable equipment of footnotes, index, and other concessions to the greenhorn. If you do not recognize a term or a reference, do not expect Paul to interrupt his journey to explain it to you. Since Paul is “working on himself,” the prose, while elegant, is writer-centered; it makes few concessions to the reader. You struggle, as Paul intends. For a few rugged adventurers, the trip will be worth it. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University This Stubborn Soil: A Frontier Boyhood. By William A. Owens. (New York: Nick Lyons Books, 1986. 307 pages, $17.95.) This book was first published in 1966 and is well worth the current reissue. Its genre might be labeled the growing-up narrative, a form that goes back at least as far as Davy Crockett’s Autobiography and reaches classic level in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. Reviews 219 Mr. Owens’s book, like other such works, traces the author’s life from rural poverty to the first step toward success in the larger world. William Owens didn’t rise quite as far as Abe Lincoln, but he did become a successful author and an administrator in a major university. This is one of the most moving accounts of an underprivileged childhood that I have read. If the theme is not original, the sincerity of the tone and the simplicity of the style are exactly right. The star-crossed Owens family barely subsists on a marginal cotton farm outside a tiny East-Texas town with the unlikely name of Pin Hook. William, the youngest child, is born in 1905, on the day his father dies. Even as a small boy he is forced to spend more time in the cotton fields than in the very poor rural school. There is rarely any cash available in the household and frequently not enough food. There are no good years. William differs from his brothers and his classmates in one important respect—he loves books and is forever trying to borrow one of the few avail­ able in the area. It is his reading that finally saves him, when he persuades the president of the nearby teacher’s college to let him take the entrance examina­ tion which generally requires the formal education he has not had. He places second in a group of more than one hundred and his real life begins at the age of eighteen, as the...