Publishing in the West: Alan Swallow ed. by William F. Claire (review)

Reviews 259 in the bed of this same Laverne, while the neglected wife, Naomi, finds her outlet in secretly writing pornography for an underground publisher. The “sneaky people” of the title — and all the characters can be included under this label — are sneaky in ways that both appall and amuse. The final chapter, for example, brilliantly combines black comedy with poetic justice. While Buddy desperately tries to reverse at the last minute a plan to have his wife murdered, the hired killer is on his way to California with Buddy’s money and the best car on his lot, and the young son is in bed with the mistress for whose affections the murder was planned., Berger’s book might be favorably compared with work of other con­ temporary purveyors of the absurd, but he has not written it as a contempor­ ary novel; it is not a retrospective view of the thirties from the seventies, but rather a novel of the thirties, one that might have been written in 1939. Its most interesting and distinctive element may be this ability of the author to transplant himself into the world of his characters and thus achieve a genuine thirties tone. There is no hint of then and now contrasts or of changes to come in American society. The novel is anchored in 1939; entirely typical of that year are the attitudes and actions of the businessman, the salesman, the housewife, the teacher; the mores of teenagers; the racial attitudes and epithets. In tone, if not in content, Berger in this novel is perhaps closer to Nathanael West than to any writer of his own generation. Every one of these sneaky people could have been picked out of the mob in the final apocalyptic scene in The Day of the Locust, which was written at the same sad moment in history to which Berger so successfully transplants himself. Sneaky People is not another Little Big Man, but it is an immensely entertaining novel. The thoughtful reader may wish to draw his own moral from the book, or none at all. ROBERT D. HARPER, University of Nebraska at Omaha Publishing in the West: Alan Swallow. Edited by William F. Claire. (Santa Fe: The Lightning Tree, Inc., 1974. 80 pages. $6.00.) Alan Swallow’s importance to the history of American publishing, particularly to publishing in the West, is considerable. By encouraging and publishing writers of quality even when (particularly when) their work had little commercial appeal, Swallow nurtured significant voices in American culture, among them Vardis Fisher, Frank Waters, Yvor Winters, Alan Tate, Anais Nin, and James Schevill. In this brief volume Nin and Schevill have provided essays of praise to bracket selected letters from Swallow’s corre­ spondence, letters which highlight Alan Swallow’s theory of publishing and his publishing career. 260 Western American Literature William F. Claire, in his aim “to place in some historical context the importance of the Swallow experiment in the development of our con­ temporary literary culture,” has chosen letters carefully to assure that the multiple facets of Swallow’s publishing role are suggested. Among these letters, sequences written to Alan Tate and Ann Stanford are particularly interesting. The letters to Tate, written over a period of two decades (19431964 ), are full of the business of publishing, and they also reflect the blos­ soming friendship of the two men. The letters to Stanford reveal Swallow at work with a young poet, explaining the practicalities of book binding and appearance, suggesting a stylistic break from her teacher (Yvor Winters), discussing the reputations of other American poets, and always encouraging the pursuit of literary excellence. Letters to Natalie Robins, Roger Hecht, and Richard Gillman also reveal Swallow’s fine touch at reassuring and encouraging his authors. A letter to A. H. Reiter, written in 1958, is the single best example of Swallow’s independent, hard-nosed attitude toward commercial publishing houses and their marketing practices. Swallow’s letters to his individual authors, of course, offer no syste­ matic comment on his career as a publisher, but Claire has used four news­ letters sent from Swallow to all of his authors in the 1960’s which serve to recapitulate...