Taos: A Memory by Miriam Hapgood DeWitt (review)

Reviews 383 home humor. Corder’s phrase echoes a line from Dickinson—“After great pain, a formal feeling comes”—whose poem provides an interesting gloss on Yonder. ForCorder, the twentieth centuryiscertainly “the Hour ofLead,”a time when “Memory alwaysfails,”as he says in the chapter titled “Speak, Memory.” The “formal feeling”that comes inevitablyto us all, according to Corder, is nostalgia, “whatwe live once we fall into history.” But Yonderdoesn’t indulge in the comforts of a golden age gone by. Instead, with the clenched fist of a resistantprose reminiscent ofJoan Didion’sSlouchingTowardsBethlehem, Corder confronts our longingfor the “far side ofchange”:“Nostalgiaisalwaysaccompa­ nied by a conflict of tongues, by the failure of memory, and by the threat of personal invisibility.” Where these three elements collide, there we encoun­ ter—and perhaps counter—the longing for our misremembered topoi: “the beautiful home that was, that wasn’t.” In his search for “yonder,” Corder gathers together a deliciously eclectic round of conflicting tongues to craft his “scholarly sort of work written in a personal sortofway.” Rangingfrom LesDaniels’sComix:A HistoryofComicBooks in Americaor Peter Bowers’sForgottenFightersandExperimentalAircraft, to Harold Bloom’s The Breaking of the Vessels or Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, the voices clash in humorous or serious or earnestly bitter “competing rhetorics.” Out of these rhetorical transactions comes Corder’s realized assertion that “After a while and once in a while, you have to find a place where you can speakfor the self.” The heterogeneity of discourse here—elegy, epistle, lyric refrain, Whitmanian catalogue, literary criticism, diary, and more—raises Corder’s book above “memoir or autobiography.” To steal a phrase from Wallace Stevens (another voice muttering from Corder’s terrain), Yonderprovides one of “the edgings and inchings”toward healing the “wound ofmemory”inflicted by the blinding dislocations and dispossessions, both minutely personal and enormously public, of Corder’stwentieth century. Read it. You’ll see. MICHAEL HOBBS NorthwestMissouri State University Taos: A Memory. ByMiriam Hapgood DeWitt. (Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press, 1992. 125 pages, $16.95.) Taos: A Memory will most likely appeal to those scholars interested in the Taos artist circle and the Greenwich Village intellectual scene of the early twentieth century. Taos/Santa Fe buffs might also find the descriptions of landscape, native cultures and customs, and tourist encroachments of interest. Unfortunately, Miriam Hapgood DeWitt (1906-1990) died before she could complete her memoir. Whatwe get in Taos:A Memory, as her son Edward Bright 384 Western American Literature points out in the Afterword, is but a fraction of remembrances of her sporadic life in Taos from 1929 to 1942. Lois Palken Rudnick’sthorough and provocative Introduction provides the kind of context the memoir lacks. Rudnick argues that DeWitt’s unique per­ spective as an “ordinary person”viewing the Taos artist community from the outside “makes her book such adelightful contribution to the cultural historyof Taos.”We are tantalized by DeWitt’s cultural commentary, but her text skips from one topic to another and frustrates any attempts to follow her line of thought—let alone develop a useful history of Taos. Her family’s correspon­ dence—primarily that of her father Hutchins Hapgood and mother Neith Boyce—offers some interesting insights on Miriam’slife but she tends to give us more oftheir words than her own. DeWitt began her memoir too late, taking to the hospital notes she in­ tended to include in her recollections. Glimpses ofMabel Dodge Luhan’scircle (DeWitt stayed at Los Gallos), snatches of Pueblo and Hispanic life (how the Depression affected these cultures), tidbits of literati life (Ernest Hemingway was a Hapgood family friend), and various Taos trivia (the advent of telemark skiing) only piqued my interest. But in the end I found myself more disap­ pointed bywhat the memoir lacked than pleased bywhat it contained. BECKYJO GESTELAND University ofUtah Marietta Wetherill: Reflections on Life with theNavajos in Chaco Canyon. Edited and compiled by Kathryn Gabriel. Introductory essay by ElizabethJameson. (Boul­ der, Colorado:Johnson Books, 1992. 241 pages, $21.95.) During the 1950s,journalist Lou Blachly recorded the stories of Marietta Wetherill, wife ofthe rancherwho discovered in 1888 the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde and, eightyears later, the ruins ofPueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon. From Blachly’s...