Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick by Esther Lanigan Stineman (review)

Carver scholar. Of particular merit are the interviews with Ford, Carver, Gallagher, Unger, and the Wolffs. DELORES WASHBURN Hardin-Simmons University 250 WesternAmerican Literature Mary Austin: Song ofa Maverick. By Esther Lanigan Stineman. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. 269 pages, $25.00.) “Mary Hunter Austin’s voice,” Esther Stineman asserts in her new biogra­ phy, “is one of the most unusual, gifted, eccentric, exasperating, tragic, enig­ matic, elitist, and idiosyncratic in American literature.” Despite this adjectival exuberance, Stineman’s own voice as biographer never quite brings her contro­ versial subject to life. The author of more than thirty books and a forceful advocate of women’s and Indians’ rights, ecological awareness and the preservation of indigenous American cultures, Austin was a complex personality. A feminist who often preferred the society of men—especialy ‘Jovian”father/hero figures “who knew her for the exceptional person she considered herself to be”—Austin loved the West but lived intermittently in New York City for fourteen (largely unhappy) years. Stineman attempts to update Augusta Fink’s biography I-Mary (1983) with an investigation of “the cultural construction ofgender”in Austin’slife and works: an investigation which turns slightly complacent. Stineman scolds Austin for her “essentialist”ideas about men and women and critic Van Wyck Brooks for his “anti-feminist bias.”Dutiful pricks ofconscience like this (hardly cardinal insights) stall what narrative sweep the book has. Stineman vividly evokes artists’ communities like Carmel, where Austin remembered “tea beside driftwood fires, or mussel roast by moonlight” with George Sterling (a.k.a. the California Keats) and “talk—ambrosial, unquotable talk!”She also reevaluates Austin’s unsuccessful marriage and adroidy examines her often stormy friendships with Jack London, Willa Cather, Mabel Dodge Luhan and Ansel Adams. It’s when she sees Austin as a cultural exemplar rather than a writer that Stineman’s criticism goes slack. Instead of patiendy explicating what one critic called the “magic of mood”in Austin’s work, Stineman often settles for vague, unhelpful encapsulations (“mere facts are transcended and observations trans­ formed into art”). Similarly, Austin’s The Land ofLittle Rain (1903) is a master­ piece, she contends, less because of its distinctive narrative voice than because Austin sensed “the alienation abroad in the land.” Stineman’s book (with its useful bibliography) may help dislodge the Reviews 251 “mythic MaryAustin”from the Carmel treehouse where many imagine her. But Austin the writer still stops somewhere, waiting for her true biographer. MICHAEL KOWALEWSKI Carleton College Bret Harte’s California. Edited by Gary Scharnhorst. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. 170 pages, $22.50.) BretHarte’s California, edited and with an introduction by Gary Scharnhorst, is a collection of thirty-seven letters (essays) published in Boston’s Christian Registerand the Springfield Republicanfrom February 17, 1866, to December 28, 1867, when Harte was serving as the California correspondent to these two Massachusetts newspapers. Eighteen are from the Register, nineteen from the Republican, and twenty-six of the thirty-seven are reprinted for the first time since the originals were published in 1866-1867. The letters vary in length from 534 words to 1390. Gathering many of his subjects from newspapers, topical interest, and local history, Harte adopts the tone of an expatriate and both praises and criticizes the California paradise mythology. He skeptically com­ ments throughout on the California weather, politics, religion, culture, race relations, materialism, and natural disasters. Harte mentions fervently and frequently Thomas Starr King, minister of the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco and a strong Harte literary supporter. He also laments the restraints on intellectual activity in the West, saying in Letter 31 that “the climate is fatal to abstract speculation.”Harte also states in Letter 35 that California has too many “pursuits and pleasures” and is not well adapted to encourage literature. He adds that more writers live in California than readers and that there are more contributors to the literary papers than subscribers. Harte uses four of his letters (23-26) to discuss the ten-day 1866 visit of Queen Emma, the dowager queen of Hawaii, to San Francisco. Four letters seem a bit much to discuss the reception of the queen, but Harte delights in expansively...