Mary Hallock Foote by Lee Ann Johnson (review)

Reviews 83 anger is frequently encountered in the poems). One exception: the threepage sequence of prose fragments, “Anna’s Song,” evoking familial memories that are, at least, not unhappy. Spare, stark, cryptic, Oberg’s poetry reflects a rather unusual sensibility and, for all their similarity to a good deal of contemporary, post-modern writing — will likely appeal to a very special kind of reader. SAMUEL IRVING BELLMAN California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Mary Hallock Foote. By Lee Ann Johnson. (Boston: Twayne Publishers/ G. K. Hall & Co., 1980. 180 pages, $10.95.) The bestowers of literary immortality may need more time to decide whether Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971) ranks among the masterpieces of American fiction, as I think it does; but I know many westerners w’ho say with certainty that Stegner’s novel was for them the most important literary creation of the 1970s. Since Angle of Repose includes a fictionalized treatment of the life of Mary Hallock Foote and since Rodman Paul’s superb edition of her reminiscences — A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West — appeared only a year after Stegner’s masterpiece, it was inevitable that someone would enter the older stacks of some library and shake some forty years of dust off Foote’s twelve novels and four volumes of short stories. In American Literary Realism (Spring 1972) and in the pages of this journal (May 1975), Richard Etulain’s bibliographical essays pointed the way for the long-overdue assessment of Foote’s contribution to western American literature. Now add to those outstanding tributes Lee Ann Johnson’s Mary Hallock Foote, number 369 in Twayne’s United States Authors Series. Johnson’s book follows the useful format of the Twayne Series: preface; chronology; biographical sketch; thorough summaries of the writers’ works; and a critical analysis of influences, themes, treatment, style, and imagery. Given her formidable competition — Angle of Repose and Foote’s auto­ biography — Johnson accomplishes her biographical task with admirable clarity and interest. She has little to say, however, about the divergence between the actual life of Mary Hallock Foote and that of Susan Burling Ward, her fictional counterpart in Angle of Repose. Perhaps Johnson had insufficient space for such a discussion or perhaps she felt that readers could consult Rodman Paul’s comments on the matter. She does engage in what she calls “psychobiography,” a speculative reconstruction of a writer’s emotional life based upon a reading of her fiction; and Johnson’s plausible psychobiography of Foote shows that Stegner’s Susan Burling Ward is certainly not a distorted rendering of Mary Hallock Foote. The lucid plot summaries in Johnson’s book are more detailed than those in my Mary Hallock Foote (number 2 in Boise State University’s 84 Western American Literature Western Writers Series), and her critical analysis provides unimpeachable support for her conclusion that “Mary Hallock Foote deserves a secure place in American letters” (p. 158). Especially helpful is Johnson’s discussion of influences, for Foote’s novels and short stories abound in allusions and are full of parallels to works by Tennyson, Hawthorne, Cooper, Kipling, Stevenson, Browning, and Harte. Surprisingly, though, Johnson doesn’t mention Foote’s allusions to Austen, Meredith, and Tolstoy. I could spot only a few such minor oversights, and they certainly do not mar Johnson’s cogent reading of Foote’s work. Seeing in her subject’s career an early period of apprenticeship and adherence to romantic formulae, followed by a middle period of experimentation leading to an eventual shift to realism, and capped with a successful late phase of excellent auto­ biographical fiction, Johnson places herself in the camp that regards Foote’s last works as her best. To dismiss Foote after reading only her earlier fiction would be like going no further with Faulkner than Soldier’s Pay. Let me mention just a few of the other strengths of Johnson’s book: a discussion of one of Foote’s uncollected short stories that has hitherto been overlooked; a perceptive explanation of a pattern in Foote’s fiction that Johnson calls “marriage by default”; some good brief comparisons of Foote’s works to those of her contemporaries; and a discussion of her considerable stature...