Thoreau and the American Indians by Robert F. Sayre (review)

176 Western American Literature about the song and its town. In what must be sincere attempts to make these people authentic, she too often makes them appear caricatures. The point here is akin to the advice given to writers of fiction: if you want it to be effective, use profanity sparingly so that it will have force. Or again the point is similar to Northrop Frye’s insistence that “To bring anything really to life in literature we can’t be lifelike: we have to be literaturelike. The same is true even of the use of language.” It becomes tedious to read reported speech (and for all I know these conversations may have been faithfully transcribed from a tape recorder, though I doubt it) and to hear the narrator’svoice giving forth trope after trope from chapter 1through 15; “you look as happy as a dead pig in the sunshine”; “you’re about as useless as fur on a snake”; “you don’t wear enough to wad a shotgun”; “rusty as a graveyard hinge”; “smooth as bear grass in a breeze.” Children are “house apes” or “rug rats.” These are all common as they are endearing, but repetition of the formula stultifies. Sometimes the author’s language is high flown: “The frivolous spring wind races through Horse Camp grotto. Sounds . . . punctuate its susurrus passing. . . .” (p. 75) This is the same narrator who tells us, “In the back right pocket of every pair of Buck’s jeans there was, and is still, a hole . . . where his latest harmonica has or will fall through.” (p. 87) Anybody who can use susurrus ought to be required by law to use the proper form of notional verbs with the appropriate auxiliaries. Again grammatical nicety is observed (p. 87) in the awesome construction “pretending to look for whomever I must be talking to,” but later (p. 95) an error sets the reader wondering again: “But he referred me to a Mr. Parks whom he thought had owned it. . ..” The format of the book makes it difficult to identify authors and titles of poems that too frequently interrupt the text for no clear reason. Notes are collected at the back of the book; a whimsical compendium of songs precedes the notes. LOUIE W. ATTEBERY, College of Idaho Thoreau and the American Indians. By Robert F. Sayre. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. 239 pages, $14.50.) The main concern of this easy-going, almost chatty book is to see how Thoreau’s ideas about Indians relate to the dominant 19th century ideology of savagism. Savagism, with its stereotyping of the Indian as an earlier, childlike stage of humanity and its emotionally comfortable stance of both pity and censure toward the Indian, is clearly something to outgrow, and Sayre argues that Thoreau did outgrow it, at least to an impressive degree. Reviews 177 Thoreau proceeded by study (learning that the Indians were farmers and social people and not lone forest travelers, for example) and to an extent by personal experience (observing his two guides, Joe Aitteon and Joe Polis, mainly). He had begun, Sayre says, with a rather theoretical (savagist) view, in which “ ‘the Indian’served as a point of view about nature and the past,” and was an “emblematic figure.” Gradually, Thoreau learned his subject, with typical sincerity taking thousands of pages of notes; by the time he went to Minnesota in 1861, “he was intellectually beyond savagism but not yet established in any new view,” according to Sayre, and this was essentially the end of the story— although, as reported by Ellery Channing, Thoreau’s last words were “moose” and “Indians.” Sayre also examines the assumption that Thoreau had projected an actual book on Indians — an assumption which he lays mainly to Franklin Sanborn — and finds that Thoreau’s difficulties in establishing a non­ derivative point of view (specifically, in developing a good way to use his experience with Joe Polis), gave him such pause that by 1858 he had apparently set aside any projected book. We may mourn the loss or nonexistence of Thoreau’s “Indian book,” when we ought to be noticing the Indianness of the books he did write. This seems a valid...