The Woman Lit by Fireflies by Jim Harrison (review)

148 Western American Literature New Mexico, published poetry and journalism about the Southwest during her writing career. Drawing on her personal acquaintance with the writer, on Austin’s autobiography, Earth Horizon (1934), on the extensive documen­ tary holdings in the Austin collection of the Huntington Library, and on her other writings, Church has shaped a chronicle of this remarkable writer’s first twenty years. This is the fullest account I know of young Mary Hunter’slife among her Carlinville, Illinois relatives. As a small child she recognized in herself a singular empathy with nature. Church follows her as a young woman as she emigrates with her family to the San Joaquin Valley, an experience that heightened her conviction of her mystical connection to the desert landscape. The Mojave Desert and its inhabitants found their chronicler in her most acclaimed work, The Land of Little Rain (1903). Church shows the early formulations of the naturist impulse in extensive quotes from “One Hundred Miles on Horseback,” Austin’s lyrical account of the family’s journey to their homestead in Southern California in September of 1888. Of particular interest is the inclusion of a previously unpublished manuscript, The Friend in the Wood, another of Austin’s many formulations of her mystical awareness. “The Friend is neither form nor symbol,” Austin writes of her spiritual companion, “it is the substance of experience.” Editor Shelley Armitage’s illuminating introduction places in context the early, formative years within the large and various Austin career, encompassing as it did the activities of writer, folklorist, lecturer, feminist, and tireless crusader for the preservation of Indian and Hispanic culture of the Southwest. ESTHER LANIGAN The College of William and Mary The Woman Lit by Fireflies. By Jim Harrison. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/ Seymour Lawrence, 1990. 247 pages, $19.95.) Almost too quickly after his remarkable Dalva, Harrison presents a trio of novellas equal to those of Legends of the Fall, his most famous work. As in the previous collection, the title novella is magnificent, the other two superb. In all three, Harrison’s characters, suffering from dead-ended lives, reinvest the usable past in order to determine how best to live in our time. In “Brown Dog” the title character, a loaf-about-the-fort who isprobably Indian but doesn’t really know, creates his own past when he finds and adopts as his father a dead Indian at the bottom of Lake Michigan—an arresting twist on the notion of water as a life-giving force. In “Sunset Limited” a group of now-mostly-upper-middle-class sixties pacifists who once went to jail for vandalizing a draft board office attempt to free their former leader, who has Reviews 149 never given up his causes, from a Mexican prison. Those who make it out alive briefly, if not cleanly, confront the promise they once imagined for their lives. In the title novella, Clare, a middle-aged intellectual, faces the harshest of personal truths, understanding fully that the last person on earth who could be her best friend is her husband. She buries herself in the mud of an Iowa cornfield for a spiritual journey deep into the past and herself before emerging into a world lit by fireflies intent on salvagingwhat remains of her life. Harrison is excellent here: the husband is not a villain. He is a man in America in the last gasp of the twentieth century. He has accepted the flow of capitalism without question and has ceased to be the human he once was. Although his perceptions are shallow, he is not without heart. But ordinariness will not sustain Clare. Reversing manifest destiny, Clare goes east to the Paris of her youth. Americans, it seems, can no longer imagine a West to grow to. These stories work toward resolution in human terms. We are not left with isolates contemplating their next move in a universe of infinite possibility. Life, Harrison seems to be saying, has to be lived here and now, an admonition perhaps too dangerous to take seriously. DEXTER WESTRUM Ottawa University Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. By Wallace Stegner. (New York: Ran­ dom House, 1990. 525 pages, $21.95.) In his introduction to...