Stories We Listened To by John Haines (review)

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 few writers since John Muir have achieved and one that could only come from having lived in an area for a long period of time. On another level, however, it is a book of recovery and reconciliation. Though set almost exclusively in the interior of Alaska, in and around the Tanana River valley, it goes well beyond its local geography and history to rescue the mysterious and oftentimes terrifying intimacy that comes about when the old psychic links between man and the natural world are re-estab­ lished. The result is a book both haunting and memorable, one that ultimately devotes itself to the retrieval of what William Carlos Williams called “the ground sense necessary.” The real character in Stories We Listened To is the land, the extensive and peculiar geography of the north. It can be felt in Haines’s relentless and exacting imagery of the cold, the snow, and the wind—a land so stubborn that it is oftentimes broodingly indifferent to anything human. We are constantly reminded that we are part of a larger, more significant context than our daily routines suggest—one defined by seasonal turnings and the yearly migrations of animals. Stories We Listened To takes a strong moral stance against the Reviews 75 often mindless excitation of our technological age. Like many writers before him, Haines reminds us again that with the death of the wilderness comes the death of something in us, a psychic link to our original home ground. Beneath all the snow and the cold of these essays lies the vision of a world locked in natural unity, one so fully integrated that little or no distinction exists between subject and object, land and speaker. Through Haines’s quiet and unpretentious prose, we are able to look into the original grandeur and mystery that has been lost to us since the frontier closed and our culture turned toward industrialism and urbanization. He points us again toward a landscape abundant with those fundamental and governing shapes, a “still, cold world, something like night, with its own fixed planets and stars.” ROBERT HEDIN Wake Forest University The Men in My Life. By James D. Houston. (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1987. 163 pages, $14.95.) According to James Houston, the struggle against one’s own arrogance and philistinism is difficult and long—especially for a WASP male born into an essentially patriarchal and patriotic, football-loving America. As a college freshman Houston loves his football uniform (read image) but dislikes playing the game (he’d rather play music on a stringed instru­ ment). As a college sophomore, hungry to belong to a fraternal society, he loves the...