The Short Stories of Fray Angelico Chavez by Fray Angelico Chavez (review)

158 Western American Literature series. But often she pauses to discuss the astonishing changes in women’s fiction since the last century. For this Whitaker could hardly have had a better subject than Jackson, who was popular in her own day because she restricted her stories to happy, successful women characters in domestic settings, but who also impresses us today because she broke with the roles assigned to women when she started writing political essays championing the claims of Indians against the government. Although Whitaker’s study is generally well done, it throws one problem of organization at readers that could have been easilyfixed. Whitaker might have lifted a line from her conclusion and put it in her intro­ duction. She writes in closing that Helen Hunt Jackson’s “fame rests upon ironies” (45). That observation could have become the rhetorical ploy that would have given Whitaker’s writing much more clarity and force. RUSSELL BURROWS Utah State University The Short Stories of Fray Angelico Chavez. By Fray Angelico Chavez. Edited by Genaro Padilla. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. 139 pages, $19.95/$9.95.) New Mexico lays claim to a long list of writers who have responded to the historical and literary enchantments and inspirations of the state. And Fray Angelico Chavez has long occupied an esteemed spot at the top of such a roster—both as a historian of the Hispanic traditions of the state and as Catho­ lic chronicler of the spirit of that place known so variously and to so many cultures as region, province, territory, state, and land of myths. Now with The Short Stories of Fray Angelico Chavez (accompanied by a fine, scholarly introduction by Genaro M. Padilla and beautifully austere pen and ink illustrations by Betsy James) Fray Chavez once again blends the impulses of history and literature and here the traditions of cuento and parable —in some places tall tale—into a delightful dozen tellings which render the very heart and soul of the author’s beloved land. Many readers of Western American Literature will see striking parallels between the author’s mingling of the marvelous and the real in, say, his “New Mexico Triptych,” with narratives of other miraculous happenings out of the annals of New Mexico’s real and imagined past such as those told in Paul Horgan’s “The Saint Maker’s Christmas Eve,” or “The Devil in the Desert.” Chavez’s accounting of miracles as experienced by the most ordinary and humble personages claims none of the lyricism of Horgan’s descriptions and dramatizations; but Chavez shares with Horgan a devout and sincere belief in the transforming powers of religion and the rendering of these powers through words, through “stories.” If, however, there is ample sincerity and devotion in Chavez’s allegories and a small measure of Christian sermonizing, there is also humor and a keen Reviews 159 sense of the nostrum which man’s acceptance of his own folly allows. For Fray Chavez, God through Christ usually helps mankind triumph over mistakes and muddledom, over “sin”—whether it be a hunchback Madonna who after a lifetime of servitude is finally honored, or a newly-found decision to live which allows a defiant and silent bell to ring forth the songs of joy again. This is not to suggest that Fray Chavez’s stories are merely New Mexican or southwestern fictions. It is not to suggest that they are only his tellings. He has accomplished that kind of miracle of his own which only a truly inspired writer is allowed: to have the words speak beyond the individual and the local so that the writer as a kind of priest (in this instance priest as writer) might bless us all. ROBERT GISH University of Northern Iowa Western Trails: A Collection of Short Stories by Mary Austin. Edited by Melody Graulich. (Reno:University ofNevada Press, 1987. 309 pages,$22.50.) With the rise of feminism, environmentalism, mysticism, and liberal social outlooks generally, the stock of Mary Austin, who died in 1934, has soared. Furthermore, the author of the early desert paean, The Land of Little Rain, claims a sure place in western letters. At century’s turn...