Walter Van Tilburg Clark: Critiques ed. by Charlton Laird (review)

Book Reviews259 Germany once had several overlapping so-called national bibliographies. The plan to replace them by one national bibliography was finally successful in the 20's and 30's. (Due to the partition of Germany, we have now two national bibliographies again, one from Frankfurt, the other from Leipzig). Nevertheless, there may be some hope that one day some complete Germanistik bibliography will come into existence, as the basis and backbone for the still necessary selective works. PETER R. FRANK Stanford University CHARLTON LAIRD, ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark: Critiques. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1984. 296 p. Way back in the olden days, even before video games, I was given an assignment in a freshman English class: read The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. I had mixed feelings about the assignment. On the one hand, I was delighted that I would get to read a cowboy story for a college class. After all, I had grown up on Zane Gray adventures, and felt I could find my way around the corral with the best of them. On the other hand, I had to wonder about the wisdom of getting a college education where students were asked to read trivial books instead of literature. Surprise. What I thought was "just another western" turned out to be a benchmark against which I came to measure other "modern" writers; the freshman class exercise forced me to consider the eternal verities about justice, human interaction, internal turmoil, as well as the more mundane problems of character, plot, setting. Wallace Stegner once said, "Civilization is Walter Clark's theme; the West is only his raw material." I internalized the importance of this statement only after reading Clark's other two novels, The City of Trembling Leaves and The Track ofthe Cat. By coincidence, I read his novels in the order they were published, and was unwittingly treated to the spectacle of an author's growth and skill as it developed. Along the way, The Ox-Bow Incident came to mean less to me. But it had already proved its value. Clark's growth as a writer was not lost on anyone who read his three novels. In fact, Clark himself purportedly preferred his third major novel, The Track of the Cat, as his finest longer creation. The recollection of Clark's influence on the development of a young collegiate mind was occasioned by a new offering from the University of Nevada Press, Walter Van Tilburg Clark: Critiques, edited by Charlton Laird. I am not a relation of Walter Clark's, and my taste in "westerns" now runs more to Tom Robbins, Edward Abbey, and E. L. Doctorow, but this book is pleasant reading and will spark old memories for others who had a similar freshman experience. It is fitting that an important Nevada writer of fiction should be celebrated by an important Nevada writer of nonfiction. Charlton Laird has been contributing to studies in language and philosophy for nearly forty years. He knew Clark personally, perhaps even well. And his collection ofessays for this book was well chosen. The heart of the book is based on a series of lectures about Clark's literary influence; the lectures, sponsored by the Hilliard Fund, 260Rocky Mountain Review were delivered shortly after Clark's death from cancer in 1971. In one place, we have collated an essential contribution to Clark scholarship. The book contains, for the first time in print, the nearest thing we have to Clark's beliefs about the responsibilities of a writer to his craft. The excerpts are from a letter Clark wrote to his son, Robert, who in 1965 was expressing misgivings about his own efforts at writing. Robert Clark himself is an important part of the book. In addition to assisting Laird with editing the articles, he contributed two essays of his own to the volume. In addition, Robert Clark provides a chronology ofhis father's life which will help explain why this fine writer seemed to leave the world before the corpus of his work grew very large. Other essays by such people as Nevada historian James Hülse, Max Westbrook, Wallace Stegner, Laird, and even Clark...