Images of America: Travelers from Abroad in the New World by Robert B. Downs (review)

Reviews 77 I See by My Get-Up. By Ron Querry. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. 151 pages, $19.95/$11.95.) On the literal level, Ron Querry tells the story of his metamorphosis from English teacher at the University of Oklahoma to cattle baron in New Mexico, to writer in Taos. Allegorically, the narrative celebrates fortitude, patience, and rashness as it interweaves the scenarios of the drifting cowboy who helps to save the ranch, of the tenderfootwho acquireswestern arete, and of the cow­ boywho is socompetent that he can stop being a cowboy—theVirginian motif. Morally, the tale recounts the way in which Querry is able to reconcile, in the process of writing the book, his desire to be a good old boy with his desire to use the academic training which the “real people” regard as womanly. The narrative is a bit weak anagogically, but characters and events are vividly and, as far as my experience reaches, accurately presented. The accounts of the Department Chair at the chili cook-off and of the first meeting of tenderfoot, bull, and squeeze chute do not depend on prior knowledge of the characters—I know the Chair but not Retardo Mountalbull, the two char­ acters least steady on their legs in this otherwise decorous narrative—but they are equally funny. Querry also has a real feeling for the landscape, people, and fauna of eastern New Mexico, and he conveys the passing of a generation whose legacy has been despoiled and abandoned by suburbanites for whom the West has become a picturesque diversion. The style exhibits the strengths (wryness of tone, vernacular rhythm, comic inflation) and weaknesses (vocabulary strained to archness, pseudo-oral padding, mock-self-deprecatory parentheses of southwestern humor.) More damagingly, this mode restricts Querry to stereotyped character and to anec­ dote, so that he is unable to make connections between events and their contexts. If Querry uses his own voice more consistently,' if he abandons the per­ sona of good old boy; and if he learns to trust his material and his reader— then in future work he can do more than entertain: he can tell us some important things about himself, about the West, and about those who read and enjoy his work. ROBERT MURRAY DAVIS University of Oklahoma Images of America: Travelers from Abroad in the New World. By Robert B. Downs. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 232 pages, $24.95.) In a career that extends over more than half a century, the author of this volume has contributed prolifically to the literature of American librarianship 78 Western American Literature and bibliography. During the past three decades Robert B. Downs has also successfully addressed a nonspecialist reading audience as a scholar-bookman, summarizing and commenting on groups of “great books” in Western culture —west, that is, of China. His Books that Changed the World (1956) is a classic of the genre. Images of America, Downs’s most recent offering, is a seasoned perform­ ance in the latter line. Here he introduces us to forty works, issued between 1770 and 1944, all describing parts of America as seen by foreign travelers. Following a general introduction, he devotes one chapter to each of the titles under review. The reports of “standard” visitors like Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, and Stevenson all receive treatment, but Downs makes productive forays into less familiar territory. His accounts of independent visits to the United States in 1857 by a Japanese, Yukichi Fukuzawa, and a Russian, Aleksandr Lakier, are especially recommended. Downs’s claims for Images of America as a work of scholarship are mod­ est. His research, cited in the bibliographical notes, is not extensive. His book contains no footnotes, nor do page-references accompany his quotations. His practice of allotting on average about 1250 words to each author necessitates painful omissions and unsatisfying summary comments. Of course, Downs does not pretend to be encyclopedic or definitive. Instead, he offers a pleasant, well chosen, intelligently edited sampler. As he moves from author to author he agreeably varies the mix of biographical background, summary, and quota­ tion. (Henry Nevinson’s Good-bye, America! [1922] is represented almost entirely by a single...