Notes

Notes JAMES D. HART 18 Aprii 1911-24 July 1990 Jim Hart’sbig athletic frame hardly changed over the decades, nor his fine old San Francisco manners, always backlit and made less formidable by a kind of boyish humor. It was a shock to everyone to learn of his operation for cancer in 1989, but he was soon back at his office in the Bancroft Library, greeting scholars with the same warmth as always, and things were again, for a time, as they should be. When he died last July he had served the University of California, and all scholars of American literature, for over 50 years. James D. Hart was teacher, author, encyclopedist, editor, administrator, curator, and printing enthusiast, and left his own imprimature on each of these fields. He was the first and only editor of the Oxford Companion to American Literature, which went through five editions in half a century. Students of the West and its literature knew him as director of the Bancroft, that splendid and massive resource he helped build, and remember the generous assistance he offered to nearly everyone who passed through its doors. He was a scholar of Frank Norris, and the first president of the Frank Norris Society. His interest in his native state led him to create what were probably the first courses ever offered in California Literature; and his Companion to California, the indis­ pensable reference, is now in its second edition. Those of us who were his students, who were helped and kidded and prodded by his avuncular kindness, recall him with special affection. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University * * * * * 356 Western American Literature RUSTLING ON THE DOUBLE L When Robert Phillips’Louis 1/Amour: His Life and Trails was first pub­ lished in January 1989, it carried the subtitle of “An Unauthorized Biography” on the front cover and on the title page. Such a subtitle appearing on the biography of a celebrity, shortly after that person’s death (L’Amour died June 10, 1988), carries the connotation of notoriety and candidness. To those who were familiar with the barriers of reticence and self-styled legend that L’Amour had built around himself, it might seem that Phillips succeeded in getting hold of information that others could not. Not far into the book, however, some readers will find a large and probably inadvertent irony in the subtitle. In his “Foreword,” Phillips pays “special thanks” to Robert L. Gale, whose Twayne book on L’Amour was published in 1985. The thanks is small payment for the amount of material lifted from Gale’s book. I reviewed Gale’s book for WAL when it came out, and, as I had also reviewed his Twayne volumes on Luke Short and Henry Wilson Allen, I have developed an admira­ tion for the meticulous care and extensive work that he invests in these com­ pressed books. We have had an amiable correspondence, in the course of which he informed me of a lawsuit he felt compelled to file against Phillips’ “egre­ gious” plagiarism of the Twayne book. In an eleven-page brief (carefully prepared), Gale asserts that “Mr. Phillips habitually uses my words, critical insights, sequence of ideas, and biographical and bibliographical leads, all without acknowledgment.” When the assignment of preparing this note finally settled upon me, I read Phillips’ book until I hit a passage that sounded borrowed. It was on the second page of Chapter One. I checked in Gale’s book, and my hunch was right. And so on through the book. Phillips’ biography reads like a long and very poor college research paper, full of typos, misspellings of titles and names, misused pronouns, punctuation errors, syntax blunders, incoherent paragraphs, and weak continuity from page to page. And, to anyone accustomed to read­ ing such papers, there are many passages that seem to have come from an unacknowledged source—frequently but not always in and around references to Gale’s book. Gale’s complaint, that the book was prepared hastily by an opportunist who plundered another’s careful work, can be justified over and over again. Initially I had guffawed when I saw my own doctoral dissertation listed in Phillips...