Charles and Kathleen Norris: The Courtship Year ed. by Richard Allan Davison (review)

Reviews 189 For these newcomers, Gish provides a com plete list of Horgan’s works and a listing of the libraries where these collections are housed. JOHN DONAHUE Champlain R egional College, Quebec Charles and Kathleen N orris: The Courtship Year. Edited by Richard Allan Davison. (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1993. 167 pages, $85.00.) In his 1983 Twayne’s edition on Frank Norris’s brother Charles, noted scholar Richard Allan Davison admits that his “is a pioneering effort. There are no other books on Norris.” A decade later, Davison gives us what is regrettably only the second such book, this time presenting the fascinating epistolary courtship of one of Am erica’s most successful literary couples, Charles and Kathleen Norris. The author of eleven m eticulously researched, issue-oriented novels, Charles wrote with a social conscience equal to those of his friends and fellow western writers Sinclair Lewis, Mary Austin, and Upton Sinclair. Kathleen, a relative of the Pulitzer-winning Benêts, was herself an im m ensely popular author of over eighty romances. Their poignant and intimate letters, written almost daily during the year of their engagement when he lived in New York and she in San Francisco, reveal through D avison’s caring selection the bi-coastal literary life as it existed in 1908-09. D avison’s presentation, despite his assurance that one should easily find the familiar suspense of the epistolary novel, may initially frustrate the reader. D ivided into sections covering Spring and Summer 1908, September to December 1908, and January to April 1909, the book presents en m asse first Charles’s letters from each period and then Kathleen’s. A strict letter-by-letter chronology would, however, be more confusing than illum inating, for the let­ ters were written with daily regularity and usually crossed in their six-day transcontinental journey. D avison’s deftly crafted narrative thus succeeds in moving beyond the courtship plot, of which the reader already knows the end­ ing, and into the emotional and social context surrounding each correspondent. Additionally, Charles’s letters shed new light on his key contributions to his brother’s reputation, particularly concerning his efforts to negotiate the publi­ cation of Vandover and the Brute and a collection of Frank’s The Wave stories. D avison’s subtly understated conclusion to the “Introduction” suggests that “the constant shadow of Frank Norris is reason enough to read their writ­ ings and to savor them .” Of course, this handsome collector’s volum e, richly bound in cloth and printed on exquisitely fine paper, offers a far more com ­ pelling reason. Through these letters we receive a revealing glim pse into the 190 Western American Literature opening moments o f two intertwined careers that did much to shape the liter­ ary marketplace o f their time. NICOLAS WITSCHI U niversity o f Oregon E cological L iterary C riticism : Rom antic Imagining and the B iology o f Mind. By Karl Kroeber. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 185 pages, $16.00.) In E cological L iterary C riticism , Karl Kroeber seeks to dispute New Historical interpretations of English romantic poetry by exploring the roman­ tics’ b elief that “humankind belonged in, could and should be at home within, the world of natural processes.” Extending an argument first developed by Jonathan Bate in Romantic E cology (1991), Kroeber exam ines what he calls the “proto-ecological” view s o f W ordsworth and C oleridge, the romantic characteristics of Thomas M althus’s Essay on Population (1798), and the revision of the first generation of romantics by Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The term “proto-ecological,” writes Kroeber, “is meant to evoke an intellectual position that accepts as entirely real a natural environment existent outside of one’s personal psyche,” an environ­ ment that “can be fully appreciated and healthily interacted with only through im aginative acts o f mind.” These im aginative acts are the central contribution of the romantics to our time, according to Kroeber, because romantic imagining anticipates the biolog­ ically materialistic understanding of mind offered by contemporary scientists. In his final chapter, therefore, Kroeber outlines the “Neural Darwinism” of biologist...