Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East by Darwin Payne (review)

Reviews 257 The passage of time reveals perceptual changes, however. Murie and Penfold, writing in 1955, speak hopefully of plans for dams at Cross Mountain and Juniper—the dams that Stegner now fears—because such dams might improve the fishing in the Monument by clearing the water of much silt. Since those days, aquatic ecosystems have gained our respect enough so that keeping (and appreciating) them undisturbed is more important than making them more productive of certain preferred game fish. But that does not reduce the book’s value, or the utility of a reprint at this time. This is Dinosaur should always be in print as a reminder of an extraordinarily important episode in American environmental history, and as a celebration of of a little-appreciated national treasure. PAUL SCHULLERY Livingston, Montana Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East. By Darwin Payne. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985. 377 pages, $24.95.) The dust jacket of Darwin Payne’sbook depicts a young dandy taking his ease in a wooden chair. He is impeccably, even daintily, dressed in a tailored dark suit cut to emphasize his lean, masculine physique. His hands, below spotless shirt cuffs, seem carelessly but ostentatiously displayed to show the absence of callouses, broken fingernails, or other signs of toil. His carefully trimmed beard and moustache, set off by a high collar and elegant cravat, are neither academic nor rustic. Rather, they are theatrical—a publicist’s slyly self-mocking impersonation of frontier virility. The broad-brimmed hat, above the humorous eyes and straight brows, is obviously a prop, as are the highheeled boots, one of which iscocked up toward the camera, revealing a spotless underside, with no signs of the horse corral. Which one is this, anyway—the chronicler of the West, or the gentleman of the East? The dandy on the dust jacket isOwen Wister, of course—and very clearly, he is neither a gentleman nor a chronicler, although he played both roles, and even played them off against each other. Unfortunately, Payne’s book con­ fuses him with some of the roles he played. Wister was a resourceful, talented illusionist with a genius forcatching the confused, urgent yearnings of the public imagination, and giving them back again, heightened and orchestrated, in colorful stories about love, heroic con­ flict, and the mythic region of the West. Payne tries to make him out a “curmudgeon” who took refuge in an imagined world of chivalry because he felt out of place in the real one. Payne’streatment of his subject isclear, coher­ ent and wrong-headed. He achieves clarity and coherence largely by ignoring the complication and magnitude of Wister’svery considerable achievement as a writer. The wrong-headedness is harder. It requires willful ignorance (or at least misunderstanding and underestimation) of the influence and judg­ 258 Western American Literature ments of writers like W. D. Howells, William and Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, Frederic Remington and Ernest Hemingway (all of whom were important to Wister), and of circumstances like the general unrest of the 1890s, the Spanish American War and World War I (all of which touched his career in important ways). Much of the information presented is irrelevant (a long account of the 1892 Johnson County Cattle War, which Wister neither witnessed nor wrote about, for instance) and some isembarrassingly mistaken (calling Wister’svolume of short fiction, Members of the Family, Members of the Wedding). The book’s treatment of history is inconsequential, and its attempts at literary criticism are worse. If you must buy the book, be sure to spend some time studying the inter­ esting fellow on the dust jacket, who, very plainly, isnot contained between his unbent hat brim and his unstained bootsoles. You won’t find much evidence of him inside, except as a frontispiece. BEN M. VORPAHL The University of Georgia Louis L’Amour. By Robert L. Gale. (Boston: Twayne, 1985. 153 pages, $13.95.) Louis L’Amour’s writing has elicited a variety of responses—among his masses of loyal readers, slack-jawed admiration; among journalists, celebra­ tion as a popular entertainer; among literary commentators, irony at best and sneering contempt at worst. In this Twayne volume...