Writers Of The Purple Sage ed. by Russell Martin and Marc Barasch (review)

Reviews 185 Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Edited by John J. Murphy. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. 310 pages, $35.00.) Critical Essays on Willa Cather, edited by John J. Murphy, with an introductory history of Cather criticsm by Murphy and Kevin A. Synnott, puts before us selected critical essays that suggest a critic’s theoretical model of Cather criticism 1913 to the present, covering about as much represen­ tative criticism as one book can. John Murphy clearly has worked out his choices among considerations of importance, accessibility, various kinds of distinction, and simply the sense of what belongs in this collection, of what ways a given essay can help shape or “complete” the whole. I like this par­ ticular collection immensely, even though, if it were mine, I would choose— sometimes—differently both with regard to essays in themselves and to their suggesting a somewhat different overview. John Murphy’s book does repre­ sent both the choices and the overview of one of our foremost critics, and in many ways it speaks this distinction. Of the thirty-some critics included in the book, some are well known and some are not, and readers may find that their own discoveries within the book may come in surprising places. Dorothea Brand (1935) writes most beautifully her disappointment with Lucy Gayheart:“. .. Cather does sowell, we want her to do better, to give us what she herself has taught us to expect. And that is something as near perfection in art as the novel has been able to come.” Sometimes a phrase focuses an issue. Henry Longan Stuart (1927) speaks of “a superimposition of the novel upon history.” Eudora Welty (1974) tells us of the “deliberately fitted form for each novel’s own special needs.” David Stouck (writing for Critical Essays on Willa Cather) warns that when Cather “shapes” “emotion toward the expression of an idea, some elusive truth, then her writing becomes contrived and opaque.” To ask what John Murphy sees as the direction for Cather study in the future might well be to ask what will happen when David Stouck’s (and others’) reasons for unease with Gather’suse of symbolism and John Murphy’s (and others’) new work with subtexts come into contest. What will happen when these come into necessary confrontation? Until now the aim of essays on subtexts has been to identify Cather’s sources and to document their presence in Cather’s work. I think that in the time ahead there will be a long evaluation. We know now that Cather’s writing is not simple; perhaps all that can safely be ventured is that we will find or be taught new ways to read Cather better. JOANNA LLOYD, Rutgers University Writers Of The Purple Sage. Edited by Russell Martin and Marc Barasch. (New York: Penguin Books, 1984. 340 pages, $7.95, paper; $19.95, cloth.) Compared to other literary breeds, anthologists spend more than their share of sleepless nights. Theirs is an impossible task, likely to offend, both 186 Western American Literature by omission and commission. As gatherers and selectors, they never can reflect the whole completely. Beyond that, should they play it safe with an unruffling balance representing the sexual, social, and ethnic preferences of the day? Or should they, trusting their own best literary judgments, shed new light with their choices, knowing that the approach may heap coals of criticism on their heads? Fortunately for the editors of this anthology of contemporary prose from the Rocky Mountain West, their more important decisions of who and what to include cover the major bases and should please all but the most picayune. For instance, they rightly offer us work from American Indian writers N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, and James Welch. As to the Hispanic tra­ dition, they include, again wisely, a long passage from Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima. Noting in their introduction that many western authors are immigrants, as they call them, and hence often are nagged by doubts about their adopted but changing landscape, Martin and Barasch excerpt work by Edward Abbey, David Quammen, and John Nichols. Arguing, in contrast, that native writers tend to “substitute the strong presence of land...