The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington ed. by Peggy and Harold Samuels (review)

330 Western American Literature why. There are no gynecologists in Blanco. But there are in San Antonio, where June lives and where she meets the other major character of the novel, a man that she marries. His name is Cage. If Turk and his momma derive from Southern fiction, June has a different lineage; she’s straight out of Joyce Carol Oates. June is a daughter of gynecological fiction. In such novels a woman is traumatized by visiting a gynecologist, after which she begins to do odd things like wear mink coats without any underclothes, engage in what used to be called self-abuse, take picture of her breasts, pudendum, knees, etc., in cheap bus-station photo-booths, and drive big cars on the freeways while combining the first two activities listed above. The epigraph, from Wallace Stevens, suggests that “the madness of space” is to be the theme of the novel, but it is the author’s literary educa­ tion, I suspect, and not the small, empty town of Blanco, that is the source of all the unearned nihilism of this smoothly written but pretentious fiction. DON GRAHAM, University of Texas at Austin The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington. Edited by Peggy and Harold Samuels. (New York: Doubleday &Co., Inc., 1979. 649 pages, $19.95.) In 1882 George R. Buckman wrote in Lippincott’s Magazine of the exodus from the East of collegians and professionals: “It may safely be said,” he opined, “that nine-tenths of those engaged in the stock-business in the Far West are gentlemen. Here is a fascinating, health-restoring and profitable occupation for the great army of broken-down students and professional men, and in crowds they are turning their backs upon the jostling world to secure new life and vigor upon these upland plains.” Although Buckman may have anticipated unduly the station of some of his westering emigrants, many of them went on to give substance to his claims. Noteworthy among the participants in that early 1880s surge were four young men who later distinguished themselves in American life and literature: Theodore Roosevelt, Emerson Hough, Owen Wister, and Fred­ eric Remington. Ask a reasonably literate citizen to identify a principal work of each member of this quartet and few would miss on Wister’s The Virginian and Hough’s The Covered Wagon. Perhaps a smaller percentage might come forward with Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, or alternatively, The Winning of the West. The real stickler would have to be Frederic Remington. After all, Remington was an artist, not a writer! Remington’s literary output — 111 appearances in periodicals and one novel — was impressive by any standard, and especially so when viewed in Reviews 331 the light of his primary occupation of artist. His articles and stories, journal­ istic, historical, fictional, were published in the leading magazines of his day, and his novel, John Ermine of the Yellowstone, published by Macmillan, was made into a play. Seven other books combined 47 of his magazine pieces. It is this entire body of material that Peggy and Harold Samuels have assembled in this monumental book. Remington’s work is presented chronologically, supported by a catalogue of the more than 400 illustrations for his writings, of which 140 are reproduced in the book. As the editors note, “much of his writing was, and was expressly intended to be, an intro­ duction to his art.” Such pieces as “Massai’s Crooked Trail” and “A Scout with the Buffalo Soldiers” illustrate why many of the leading critics and personalities of his times praised Remington’s work. His “With the Fifth Corps,” filed from Cuba during the Spanish American War and published by Harper’s Monthly in November 1898, drew justifiable kudos from many quarters. But it is his western material — word and picture — that stands out; a whole generation formed its perception of the American West through Remington’s work. That his audience had to deal with his flaws and fancies does not compromise his work. He was, after all, a product of his times. One might question whether the editors shoud have sacrificed subject groupings in favor of chronological presentation. And today’s reader would have...