Travels in Southern California by John Xántus (review)

188 Western American Literature but without advancing his views on the literature he is treating. First-rate literary history must contain more analysis than Andrews offers. One wishes too that the author had viewed his subject within a larger framework. For example, he discusses the state’s regional writers of the 1920s and 1930s without providing helpful comparisons and contrasts with other regional authors. In addition, Andrews mentions Davenport and Iowa City as notable sites of literary activity in Iowa, but we are not told how they compare as centers of western literature with, say, Carmel, Taos, or Portland. On other occasions Andrews makes statements that specialists in western literature will question. He argues that “From Garland to Kantor and Manfred, Iowa authors have been ahead of their fellows in their attempts to comprehend the Indian and be fair to him” (p. 26). This assertion over­ looks the perceptive early work of Joaquin Miller, Mary Austin, Charles F. Lummis, and Oliver LaFarge, for example. Moreover, Andrews is some­ times inconsistent. He suggests that Josephine Herbst “may well be the best novelist Iowa has turned out,” (p. 238) but he devotes less than three pages to her works and much more to several other novelists. Thus, while Andrews’ book provides a useful introduction to writing in Iowa, it is not the type of full-rigged literary history that Spiller has called for. This volume tends to be a guide to or an annotated bibliography of the state’s literature. As members of the Western Literature Association plan a full-scale literary history of the West and as they search for useful paradigms in laying out their research and writing, they will find Andrews’ study useful for its biographical facts and plot summaries, but it will not be a model for a top-flight literary history. RICHARD W. ETULAIN, Idaho State University Travels in Southern California. By John Xantus. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977. 212 pages, $12.95.) John (Janos) Xantus, the famed naturalist, and founder and director of the Budapest Zoo and Botanical Gardens, wrote numerous letters and diaries during his scant thirteen years in the United States (1851-1864). His first book, taken from the accounts of his travels and written in letters to his family, was published in 1858 in Hungary. It was translated into English by the Schoenmans and published by Wayne State University Press in 1975. Now, with Travels in Southern California, we have the second book of Xantus’ writings comprised of a diary kept during his tenure at Fort Tejon in the Southern California mountains and a journey down the west coast of Lower California to Cape San Lucas and back. Reviews 189 One wonders if these two seemingly disparate journeys are substantive enough to fashion a readable and cohesive book. True, both are written by Xantus but his fame as a great natural observer is not served by these accounts. He is often given to exaggeration and sarcasm as in his description of the landowners of Baja California who are, as he sees them, wholly given over to lounging about in hammocks while sipping cocoa and smoking cigars. More often than not, the narrative falters under the weight of the minutia of the logistics of travel. Knowing of Xantus’ great contribution to natural history, we, as readers, long for detailed descriptions of the wildlife and the flora. These are only occasionally forthcoming as Xantus, aware that he is writing for the layman, is more concerned with campfire tales about grizzlies and jaguars and horses that can gallop a hundred miles without rest. The structure of the book is disturbing as well, as it is equally weighted down with footnotes, a list of maps and illustrations, acknowledgements, an introduction, a superfluous note by John Hunfalvy at the end of the book about Aztec ruins that runs to six pages, a plea to Hungarian Scientific Institutions, an editor’s postscript, notes, a bibliography, and an index. All of this for so slim a volume when Xantus himself only required a foreword. There is no doubt that Xantus did much for the sciences of ornithology, botany and zoology. The fact that numerous birds in America are named...