Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature ed. by Dick Harrison (review)

Reviews 325 crews were a hard commodity, a gravel mix of drifters, drinkers, gripers, not a few mental cripples, and an occasional steady worker. . . . It was a mark of Dad’s crews that they generally went out of the bunkhouse to the school section and the creek fence and a dozen other jobs just as if the work had been their own idea all along.” Perhaps the finest thing about this book is the writing itself, the richness of thought and image and phrasing. In this it is like two other interpretive books about the West — Stegner’s Wolf Willow and Graves’ Goodbye to a River. Line after line reads fresh as Montana morning. Driving across a northern prairie at night, “Dad puzzled through the darkness along fainter and fainter scuffs of prairie road. . . . notched his chin ahead another full inch and choked the steering wheel as if it had betrayed him.” Or, of a home sheepcamp high on a mountain ridgeline: “Alone here on our abrupt tiny shelf, the three of us eased through May and the first twenty-six days of June secure as hawks with wind under our wings. Once a week, the camptender from the home ranch would come the dozen miles of trail to us. The blaze-faced sorrel he rode and the packhorse haltered behind would plod in from the shadows which pooled in our valley under the shouldering slopes. . . .” This House of Sky is the book I wish I could have written about the pioneer Montanans among my own family. It says clearly and with passion much that I might have said of them. The book is one that urges facing the past, knowing the old people. The faith is that knowing them we may also define ourselves, remembering clearedged, we may intensify our own experi­ ence. DAVID REMLEY, Albuquerque, Neiv Mexico Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature. Edited by Dick Harrison. (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1979. 174 pages, $10.00.) At one point in his treatment of Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House, (in a paper read at the conference from which these proceedings were gathered), Robert Kroetsch turns to the dance scene in each novel, suggesting that on the Great Plains “the one night that offers a smidgen of hope for sexual harmony (be it ever so chaotic) is dance night.” Quite apart from Kroetsch’s argument — contentious as it was, and still is— there is much about Crossing Frontiers that is like ritual dance night: throughout these proceedings one senses the two component groups, scholars of the American West and the Canadian West, eyeing one another 326 Western American Literature warily, glancing away as eyes meet, shuffling, grinning, and looking at their feet. It remains to be seen whether or not the sexual harmony of which Kroetsch speaks will be achieved, but one thing is certain from Crossing Frontiers: the mating dance has begun. Held during April 1978 in Banff, Alberta, Crossing Frontiers brought together scholars of both wests to pool and compare their literary and historical knowledge. The result, owing largely to the herculean efforts of organizer Dick Harrison, was a remarkably fine conference that exceeded all expectations. Published here are papers by Don D. Walker, Howard R. Lamar, Lewis G. Thomas, Robert Kroetsch, Leslie Fiedler and Eli Mandel and, significantly for the readabilty of the volume, the responses to each paper by Delbert Wylder, Earl Pomeroy, Sandra Djwa, Jack Brenner and W. H. New. Also included are four summary reactions to the conference as a sort of epilogue. Reading Crossing Frontiers, I was struck by the wellconceived structure of the conference itself, which closely focused each session through a major paper yet, concurrently, small discussion groups — spun off from and following each paper — allowed for comparative interchange between participants. And through the style and quality of thought the conference exhibited, this volume, unlike many others, recreates the excited — if tentative — atmosphere of intellectual curiosity that characterized the conference itself for the benefit of those who did not attend. Because each scholar spoke from his own vantage point, both geograph­ ical and disciplinary, the majority...