Wilderness Plots: Tales About the Settlement of the American Land (review)

reviews 131 praises. Aside from his essay on Hammett and the "American connection," Mr. Worpole's book is a survey of working-class writing in the twentieth century which emphasizes its diversity and its distinctness from the "caricature setting" that bourgeois novels provide for workingclass ¡,hemes. The degree of diversity is surprising if one considers the mammoth importance and position at the beginning of the century of Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the detailed life of a group of house painters in 'Mugsborough" (Hastings) in 1906 and the story of one worker, Owen, leading his fellows toward class consciousness, and understanding that "they were the enemy— those ragged trousered philanthropists who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to their miserable slavery for the benefit of others, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion of reform."2 That novel stands as a monument and signal achievement, and though Tressell remains a dominant figure in working-class fiction, and realism a dominant mode, the writers presented here cannot be understood as simply parading from Tressell's sharply satiric spirit of reform. This would be to read these writers as self-consciously setting up a shadow tradition, watching and reading themselves rather than the particular social situation surrounding them. Rather, Mr. Worpole links several groups of writers by loose affinities and shows us, in one essay, how three Merseyside writers (George Garrett, James Hanley, and Jim Phelan) have appropriated expressionism to shape a fiction of dislocation, rootlessness, and isolation in working-class life, or, in another, how three writers of the second world war (Alexander Baron, Dan Billany, and Stuart Hood) counterposed standard mythic figures and reference to past imperial glory in popular war fiction (such as the common figure of the RAF officer) with an emphasis on collective resistance aid a vision of a new world akin to the documentary work of Humphrey Jennings. Many of the titles in Mr. Worpole's survey are long out of print, and for most readers many of the names will be unfamiliar. The book then will be of primary value as an introductory reading list, and Mr. Worpole has sensed this by confining his discussion of individual titles to most elementary sketches. His remarks, however, are helpful and one can trust him to tell us when a book is simply unreadable. When he does speak up in particular praise of a novel, he best be heeded. Two writers he greatly admires, Baron and Hanley, are particularly deserving of a larger and lasting readership in this country and greatly expand, as Mr. Worpole would have it, the "range of understanding of the dominant forms of oppression and division" in British working-class life, structures of feeling ignored by mainstream fiction. PETER COPEK Notes xThe Novels ofDashiell Hammett (New York: Knopf, 1965), Introduction. 2The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (London: Grant Richard, 1914), p. 33. Scott R. Sanders. Wilderness Plots: Tales About the Settlement of the American Land. Illustrated by Dennis B. Meehan. New York: William Morrow, 1983. 128 pp. $9.95 (cloth). Wilderness Plots is a loosely-linked chain ofshort stories (none over 400 words) covering the settlement of the Ohio Valley in the years between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Each of the 50 tales focuses on one settler or family of settlers, and, while a few are about the famous (La Salle, General Anthony Wayne), most are about what Brecht called the "pyramid-builders": the surveyors and millers and preachers and tanners and farmers who first settled what was then "the West." Some of the stories have that raw folk humor we know from Twain and other frontier writers, but more are about death—not only from 132 the minnesota review war, but from fever, hunger, winter. One of the main themes of Wilderness Plots is the struggle with the wilderness. The tales move ahead slowly in time: many of the early stories are about Indians and clearing the land; by the end of the collection we are in a world of newspapers and embryonic cities. But the storiles are interlocked in life as well as in time: a brief tale of an enterprising woman who raises sheep for their...