The West of the Imagination by William H. and William N. Goetzmann (review)

360 Western American Literature Duncan’s gifts as a delineator of character are obscured, however, by his pursuit of other aims. The book is larded with historical and biographical “background” material that satisfies approximately the needs addressed by an AAA travel guide. Moreover, Duncan is ever alert for new Insights about the West and the national destiny. He engagingly admits at the outset to a habit of “grand theorizing over the slightest information,” but this does not keep the many deep discussions that follow from being hackneyed and tiresome. One is tempted to skip over them, as is the case with a numbered list of general “Road Rules” that he infers from his travel experiences. These latter are vari­ ously shrewd, self-evident, laboriously comic, and unintelligible (Example: “The river of time is change’s passage, but it doesn’t always have to flow downhill”). An air of modest good humor and earnest effort pervades Out West, Duncan’s first book, but so does a sense of strain. It’s a worthy accomplish­ ment, but it suffers from the author’s compulsion to set down everything, to say more than he is well qualified to do. WAYNE R. KIME Fairmont State College The West of the Imagination. By William H. and William N. Goetzmann. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. 458 pages, $34.95.) This book looks like it belongs on a coffee table. It has lots of pictures, and the dust jacket announces that it is “The Companion to the PBS Series.” In truth, its 434 pages of text stand alone, and its real value lies in words rather than pictures. This story of visual artists in the West, from Charles Willson Peale in the 1790s to earth sculptors today, shows the scholarly author­ ity and graceful style that have been William H. Goetzmann’strademarks since Army Exploration in the American West (1959) and Exploration and Empire (1966). Aided by his son this time, Goetzmann embeds an astonishing amount of information about western artists (mainly painters, but also illustrators, pho­ tographers, filmmakers, and sculptors) in a reflective, thematically rich narra­ tive. We find, for instance, that in 1939 Grant Wood produced an ironic reformulation of Peale’s “The Artist in His Museum” (1822), that Luis Jimenez thinks Frederic Remington and Charley Russell produced “the most iconically powerful” western art, that John Ford’s cinematography depended heavily on Remington’spaintings, and that Georgia O’Keeffe created modern versions of the geological illustrations made by artists accompanying southwest explorations in the 1840s and 50s. In fact, the Goetzmanns stress the role of tradition as a particular strength of western art. Artists of the West, they point out, “have become willing Reviews 361 vehicles for the perpetuation of compelling images,” a fact which provides “the most jarring . . . facet of modern Western art because it flies in the face of the usual mandate that an artist must offer an original, not a derivative image.” In the West of the visual imagination, the emphasis on replication “runs closer to the great, lasting traditions in world art.” The book has two flaws. First, most of the reproductions are tiny (even though it would take poster-size plates to do justice to a Bierstadt or a Moran). Second, the book needs much better proofreading than it got. But its expan­ sive coverage (115 artists are represented in the plates) and lucid analysis —usually playing to the level of a general audience—make it something of a bargain. For literary studies, the book demonstrates obvious parallels in visual art. It also provides an eloquent reminder of the importance of myth (something “often lost in the litter of art criticism”) in understanding the role of the West in American culture. WILLIAM BLOODWORTH East Carolina University Urban Options. Photographs by William Pankey. (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1986. 64 black and white photographs, $35.00.) The Texas Outback: Portraits of a Wildly Weird Country. By Caleb Pirtle III. Photographs by Gerald Crawford. (Waxahachie, Texas: McLennan House, Inc., 1986. 162 pages, black and white photographs, $19.95.) The Texas landscape varies from sprawling cities like Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, and San Antonio to the well-watered piney woods of the Big...