In Time and Place by Floyd C. Watkins (review)

Reviews 293 he did, for he, and his kind, may become America’s Don Quixote—more admirable in his misplaced “cowboyishness” than his utilitarian detractors who try to force him into “reality.” OLENA H. SACIUK Inter American University of Puerto Rico San Germán In Time and Place. By Floyd C. Watkins. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1977. 250 pages, $10.50). Floyd C. Watkins’ In Time and Place is a study of eight novels selected —neither absolutely nor arbitrarily—to represent different cultures. The purpose is to examine the relation between authenticity and aesthetics. Specifically, does an accurate representation of culture seem to be a part of good art? Does a failure to get the facts right lead to a failure of art? Watkins concludes that artists must know the intimate details of the time and place they write about in order to write successful art, readers must know the cultural territory of a novel in order to read well, and critics should know the cultural details of a novel or disqualify themselves from writing about it. A preliminary chapter asserts that the community tradition is now dead. Cities are cold and impersonal. Citizens in the mass share no common language. The second chapter argues that The Grapes of Wrath “is often false and vague, so the characters are false also.” Over twenty errors are cited, for example the fact that “Muley eats prairie dogs in eastern Okla­ homa, where prairie dogs have never lived.” Other chapters argue that Gone With the Wind (which gives a propagandists, idealized, and Puri­ tanical picture of the South) and Main Street (a message novel, inaccurate to the reality Watkins finds by reading contemporaneous newspapers) are also artistic failures because they are not authentic. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Watkins believes, is inconclusive since there is no way to judge its authenticity. My Antonia is said to be a “simple book,” sometimes “nearly melo­ dramatic and nearly sentimental”; but, for reasons unexplained, it is “peculiarly American” and therefore successful. Watkins’ chapter on Death Comes for the Archbishop is largely a negative report. The good bishops are shown to be too good. The portrait of Father Martinez is “religiously wrong” because it contradicts Catholic ideals, and Cather is inaccurate to history in making him an evil priest, one guilty of “violent rebellion” against Americans. 294 Western American Literature Watkins, in brief, is advocating the same critical standards advocated by Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, and many others; and he encounters the same difficulties. Do the standards of authentic art mean, for example, that good people do not exist in history or, if they do, must be dirtied up a bit by the novelist? Why are Cather’s good bishops too good? If Paul Horgan’s biography of Bishops Lamy and Marchebeuf is accurate, it seems to me, then Death Comes for the Archbishop is also accurate. Watkins’ comments on Cather’s version of Father Martinez are even more disturbing, suggesting, apparently, that it is virtuous and realistic to accept conquest and racism. As always, the case for authenticity leads to retreat: fidelity to the facts is a standard for art and is not a standard for art; the artist must be a native to write well, and the artist does not have to be a native. Still, I am sympathetic with Watkins, and I value and recommend In Time and Place. The chapters on House Made of Dawn and As I Lay Dying are both superb, and Watkins’ knowledgeable use of authentic detail as a basis for intelligent criticism constitutes a powerful argument for his posi­ tion. Since an aesthetics of authenticity can produce two such fine essays on two excellent novels, we would all do well to share Watkins’ concern for further study of the relation between art and culture. MAX WESTBROOK, The University of Texas at Austin The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. By Jack London. Completed by Robert L. Fish. (New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 184 pages, $1.95.) “I have 20,000 words done on ‘The Assassination Bureau’,” Jack London wrote late in 1910 to Sinclair Lewis, who had sold him the idea for the story, “and for the first time...