The Westering Experience in American Literature: Bicentennial Essays ed. by Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee (review)

Reviews 285 present a pleasant view of a sensitive and articulate man at the end of his career. Neihardt tells about his brief work as a hod-carrier in Bancroft, Nebraska, and as a reporter in Omaha; of his early decision to attempt an epic poem about mythological divinities in Spenserian stanzas; of his meet­ ing with various Omaha Indians, who called him Little Bull Buffalo; of fishing on trout streams in the Black Hills with only a stray dog as com­ panion; of early steamboats on the Missouri; of his marriage to the sculptress Mona Martinsen and of their home in Bancroft; and, with an admirable lack of bitterness, of his fugitive father who had deserted the Neihardt family and maintained contact only with desultory correspondence. Patterns and Coincidences is a low-keyed book with few dramatic scenes and no heroes. But details of events in a remote past are skilfully recalled and the pages are deftly written. A final impression remains. Neihardt talks about poetry, indeed about all literature, with devotion, with affection. He was understandably a success on the lecture platform for years. This reviewer regrets that he never had the opportunity to hear Little Bull Buffalo roar. JOHN T. FLANAGAN, University of Illinois, Urbana The Westering Experience in American Literature: Bicentennial Essays. Edited by Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee. (Bellingham, Washington: Bureau for Faculty Research, Western Washington University, 1977. 224 pages, $4.95.) In this admirable collection of essays developed from papers read at the 1976 Western Literature Association Conference, editors Lewis and Lee have assembled a milestone volume of critical essays in diverse, chiefly revisionist, examinations of the American Dream and its texturing myths. Max Westbrook’s excellent prologue sets the tone by relating the western hero to the American ideal of resisting tyranny to achieve a higher justice. The first group of essays explores critical perspectives; the second presents varying views of heroes, themes and processes; and the third focuses on Canadian and Chicano studies. The essays raise provocative, open-ended questions about the usefulness of the West to human experience, the validity of the hero, the definitive meaning of “West” as a literal or metaphoric journey, and the critical problems arising from the requirements of history and fiction. The section on critical views connects westering with mainstream American literature and removes it from the constrictions of regionalism, notably in John Ditsky’s concept of directionality. Don Walker’s witty 286 Western American Literature disposal of the contention that historians create a truer picture of the cowboy than fiction writers do supports his thesis that dissatisfaction with western literature arises from literary, not historical, criteria. Jack Brenner’s complementary essay pointing out problems and dilemmas for the western writer explains the West as a West of words, part of the “struggle toward consciousness” we realize through the “style and gesture” of language. The collection is actually a study in paradoxes and ironies, words that recur in most of the essays. The ironies of myth and fact appear, for example, in Jack Davis’s study of the Indian Oakatibbe and the inability of white men to appreciate the “advanced social techniques” of a culture in harmony with the environment. Martin Bucco’s ingenious analysis of east-west movement in Dreiser’sAn American Tragedy asks how far we have actually travelled, and George M. Armstrong’s skepticism about our learn­ ing from the past in his study of Beulah Land ends by suggesting that progress is a myth. Other essays, including studies of travel literature, also note the need to reassess the frontier myths. The paradox is balanced by repeated suggestions that westering was a unique experience, not to be ignored in American studies. The ironies focus ultimately in the western hero as delineated in various essays: the Virginian, Billy the Kid, Canadian Jesuits, the anti-heroes of Edward Abbey, the Mexican pachuco. Dick Harrison’s tragic hero, isolated by the violence that enabled him to establish order, points a basic irony, balanced by Max Westbrook’s competently drawn hero of commanding presence who reminds that “virtue in a democracy is voluntary.” The weaknesses of the collection noted by the editors — the neglect of women...