Jean Stafford by Mary Ellen Williams Walsh (review)

Reviews 259 to such readers, but it is somewhat laborious in detailing the Sackett gene­ alogies and the chronology of their inter-related stories. There seems to have been a compulsion to sort out L’Amour’s sloppy, nonchalant method. Also, this chapter suffers from charitable comparisons between L’Amour and writers of unquestionably bigger league, such as Balzac, Galsworthy, Jules Romains, and Faulkner. Gale is right on target, though, in characterizing L’Amour as melodra­ matic rather than epic, “as he [L’Amour] tends wrongly to define himself” (p. 96). He also shows a good sense of L’Amour’s egotism and superficial wisdom, and he concludes reasonably that L’Amour is a “self-aggrandizing phenomenon on our current literary scene” (p. 118). He is; and this book should therefore be welcome and useful to general readers of Westerns, to L’Amour enthusiasts, and to Western American literary scholars. JOHN D. NESBITT Eastern Wyoming College jean Stafford. By Mary Ellen Williams Walsh. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985. 113 pages, $16.95.) Professor Walsh of Idaho State University is the first in the field with a book-length study of a superb but neglected writer. This is a small book and its aims are modest: to demonstrate that Stafford’s fiction “is often highly autobiographical,” and to show that “her exploration of the human condition begins with an exploration of what it means to be female.” Arranging her discussion of Stafford’stotal fictional output—three novels and forty-five short stories—in chapters successively titled “Childhood and Adolescence,” “Young Womanhood,” and “Maturity and Old Age,” Walsh shows Stafford revealing herself in the process of portraying the several stages of a woman’s life. Walsh’s ability to penetrate her author’s fictional disguises is impressive. But, because she has excluded from consideration many important sources of information about Stafford’s life, her “readings” are sometimes partial and occasionally wrong. For example, she is unaware that Emily Vanderpool, Stafford’s comic heroine in four of her stories, is not just a self-portrait, but a composite of Jean and one of her sisters. Emily will serve to illustrate another limitation of Walsh’s approach, one that stems from her feminist perspective. Anyone who sees Emily as only another instance of an adolescent whose suffering is attributable to her being female is missing too much. It’s like seeing Huck Finn solely as a juvenile delinquent. Still, it would be unfair to give the impression that Walsh’s book is nar­ rowly programmatic. She distinguishes clearly between a doctrinaire feminist and a writer of “women’s literature,” and assigns Stafford to the latter cate­ 260 Western American Literature gory. And, if she attempts neither a full-fledged “life” nor an exhaustive critical study, parts of her first chapter (“Life and Art”) and of her last (“Critical Assessment”) point the way toward both. Writers on Stafford who come after Walsh will wish to acknowledge her achievement. WILLIAM LEARY La Selva, California Zane Grey: A Photographic Odyssey. By Loren Grey. (Dallas: Taylor Pub­ lishing Company, 1985. 213 pages, $19.95.) For a black-and-white coffee table book to hold its own in the market against even mediocre color, its must offer something extraordinary. Loren Grey’s collection of photographs of and by his father succeeds rather well, for a while, by offering visually excellent and historically important views of Grey’s youth and developing career as a writer, many of which have never before appeared in print. Unfortunately, the latter part of the book, which is devoted to Grey’sdeep-sea fishingexperiences, isa tawdry depiction of screech­ ing reels, sweaty biceps, and thousand-pound fish carcasses. The best part of the accompanying text is the use of extensive quotations from Grey’s own writings, many of which are thought-provoking, vivid, and exciting. The rest is an adoring son’s pitiful attempt to sustain the mythical self-image begun by the father, in which Grey explores the most forbidding terrain, catches the biggest fish, writes the best books and sells the most of them, sets this record and that one, and on and on. The factual inaccuracies, the exaggerations, and the unmerited superlatives pile...