Stories from the Country of Lost Borders by Mary Austin (review)

Reviews 73 homesteader of this period. The autobiography is a chronicle of economic failure, failure caused by unrealistic expectations of what western lands could produce, lack ofavailable markets, disreputable land speculators, and absurdly high interest rates. Omar Morse expresses anger toward the system on occasion, which we are told is a rare expression for the times, in which stoicism and acceptance of fate before God are more common. The rest of the book discusses at length the various myths surrounding the Westward Movement as put forth by Frederick Jackson Turner, Edwin Markham, Henry Nash Smith and others, carrying forth the theme of “dis­ possession”—being moved off the land by economic disaster and dreams of a “garden” just over the next hill. This is a study of agrarian disillusionment focusing more on forces working on the pocketbook than on the spirit. PENELOPE REEDY The Redneck Review of Literature Stories from the Country of Lost Borders. By Mary Austin. Edited by Marjorie Pryse. (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987. 267 pages, $30.00 cloth, $10.00 paper.) This volume is a reprint of two of Mary Austin’sbest books, The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909), each consisting of fourteen sketches and tales about the California desert, a region where Austin spent important years of her life. Marjorie Pryse’s introduction is informative and perceptive, with commentary on individual stories along with an overall critical view placing Austin in a tradition of American nature writers, especi­ ally Thoreau and Muir, as well as among nineteenth-century women regional writers such as Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett. The controlling center for all the sketches and stories is the land. Austin’s technique is to interweave the relationships of natural landscape, animal and human life, and her own writer’s consciousness and inner responses to those conditions, giving the sketches and stories a distinctive and original tone. The Land of Little Rain focuses primarily on animal and plant behavior and uses the form of the sketch. One of the most interesting pieces is “The Basket Maker,” in which Austin identifies with Seyavi, the Indian woman artist, whose superb baskets were the result of the woman’s intimate relation to the land: “The weaver and the warp lived next to the earth and were saturated with the same elements.” Lost Borders concentrates especially on human behavior, with a focus on the courage and integrity ofwomen, both white and Indian, often exploited by the men, but usually able to endure and overcome adversity because of their kinship with the land. Here Austin employs a form closer to the conventional 74 Western American Literature short story, but still, the desert itself enters as a character and determines Austin’s vision and that of her characters. The final story in the collection, “The Walking Woman,” concerns an independent woman who has become a wandering philosopher of the desert. After Austin as narrator listens to the woman’s tale, she writes: “There ensued a pause of fullest understanding, while the land before us swam in the noon, and a dove in the oaks behind the spring began to call.” Publisher and editor deserve thanks for reprinting these unique sketches and stories. THOMAS W. FORD University of Houston Stories We Listened To. By John Haines. (Columbia, SC: The Bench Press, 1986. 66pages, $8.) John Haines is the author of six major collections of poetry, most recently News From The Glacier: Selected Poems 1960-1980, and a book of reviews, essays, and autobiography entitled Living Off The Country. Now, in a new collection selected from a work-in-progress and entitled Stories We Listened To, we are offered six new essays dealing with the life he led while home­ steading in Alaska during the 50s and 60s. On one level, Stories We Listened To tells of living off the land, of the passing of seasons, of the rituals of hunting and fishing. Haines repeatedly strikes a dark and resonant chord about what it means to live in the heartland of one of North America’s last great wildernesses. In the process, he displays a familiarity with the natural world that...