John G. Neihardt: A Critical Biography by Lucile F. Aly (review)

178 Western American Literature glimpses into the distinctive life styles of remote communities in the North­ west Territories, Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and Manitoba endangered by TV and creeping homogenization, admires the pull of Canada’s two great rivers, the Mackenzie and the St. Lawrence, wanders on the waters off British Columbia in a fishing boat and over the ice-choked Arctic Sea in a mammoth patrol plane, and lights down in Vancouver to sample the ambience of West Coast life, Toronto to contemplate the meaning of hockey for Canadians, and Montreal to pass on some of the gossip about its Englishspeaking literary community. In assembling such miscellanea, Purdy is consciously the nationalist. His previously unpublished essay “Bon Jour” is a direct reflection on the issue of Quebec separatism, and exhibits the qualities of sympathy and sweet reasonableness and the spirit of compromise that he believes will alone prevent the tragedy of a divided Canada. What does No Other Country offer the student of Western American literature? First, it provides an introduction to the Canadian fact today and to the characteristic Canadian nationalist in love with the vast and varied expanse of his country and the diversity of its people, and given to a knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Second, it includes a superficial essay on British Columbia’s celebrated twentieth-century Izaak Walton, Roderick Haig-Brown, and a moving, personal memoir of Malcolm Lowry, that proto­ typical questing lost soul who made Vancouver his home base long enough for Canlit to claim him as its own. Otherwise, this amiable book makes for pleasant though hardly pressing reading even given the context of crisis within which it appears. BRIAN W. DIPPIE, University of Victoria, B.C. John G. Neihardt: A Critical Biography. By Lucile F. Aly. Atlantic High­ lands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1977. 307 pages, $19.00.) In 1881 John Gneisenau Neihardt was born into a pioneer family living near Sharpsburg, Illinois. Called John Greenleaf by a father who idolized Whittier, Neihardt was soon to replace the poet’s name with an old family name, claiming his heritage and asserting his intention to be his own poet. It is Neihardt’s conscious decision to honor both his own and America’s past in his writing that makes a critical study of his life and work important. His life is fascinating as a testament to the poet’s courage and as a metaphor for the impact of the westering experience on the thoughtful mind. Lucile F. Aly says quite rightly that we would do well to read about Neihardt even “if he had never written a line of poetry.” Aly’s book documents the importance of the West to our creative and psychic lives; the frontier is gone, but its power to shape us — through stories about those who knew it — is not. Aly’s critical biography revitalizes our past, makes it accessible by Reviews 179 showing us its power in informing Neihardt’s life and work. Neihardt’s struggle to write, his commitment to living his own way, his physical and spiritual ties to the prairie and frontier, his triumphs over poverty, irregular schooling, and cold Nebraska winters override any reserva­ tions we might otherwise bring to the study of a given poem. Whether or not his work will last, whether or not he will be recognized — as he wished and as Lucile Aly argues— as America’s epic poet loses importance. What becomes significant is that he existed, that he wrote, that he found in his stamina, virtues, and strengths the same forces that produced the heroes about whom he wrote — Black Elk, Jed Smith, Hugh Glass, and the AshleyHenry men. Aly’s book comes at a good time, following as it does the reissuing of Neihardt’s major works and preceding the release of Patterns and Coinci­ dences (March, 1978; The University of Missouri Press), the sequel to Neihardt’s first volume of autobiography, All Is but a Beginning. Neihardt’s autobiographies reach only to 1908, and the poet’s death did not come until 1973. Aly’s book, while covering these years, also supplies data available no where else. Neihardt was a prolific and varied writer, producing histories, lyric...