Understanding Chicano Literature by Carl R. Shirley, Paula W. Shirley (review)

Reviews 167 Fully realizing the difficulty of trying to capture a writer as diverse as Kenneth Rexroth in fifty pages, Lee Bartlett writes, “A brief pamphlet can hardly do justice to Rexroth’s life and works, though maybe here I can offer a kind of guidebook which will at the very least hint at the range of his achievement” (6). A hinting guidebook it is! I don’t know what else, given the breadth and depth of Rexroth’swriting, Bartlett might have done, but the booklet reminds me of a graduate course in which the professor flashed sec­ ondary sources. Bartlett does a bit more than flash Rexroth’s works, however. He moves from an examination of Rexroth’sfive longer poems to the shorter lyrics, to his prose, to his translations, lamenting that “in general Rexroth’s work has been neglected” (45). While Bartlett argues that variations of the quest permeate Rexroth’s longer poems, he divides the shorter works into “three, often over­ lapping, categories: love poems, philosophical poems, and political poems” (25). The five-page discussion of Rexroth’s six collections of essays reveals in a nutshell his ideology, but indicates precious little of the genuinely charming wit of his essay style. The translations (roughly fourteen collections) are handled in four pages. In addition to his influence on the San Francisco and the Beatmovements, so much of Rexroth is worth examining. The fact that Bartlett can merely skim the surface is to point out the weakness of the Western Writers Series (or seeing Europe in five days). A guidebook, however, is better than no guidebook, and these five mono­ graphs are excellent springboards for further critical analyses of five diverse visions of the American West. CONNIE WHITE Salisbury State University Understanding Chicano Literature. By Carl R. Shirley and Paula W. Shirley. (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. xvi + 237 pages, index, reading list, bibliography, $19.95/$9.95.) This book, according to the “Editor’s Preface,” is part of a series called Understanding Contemporary Literature and is intended to give “uninitiated readers ... an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works . . . what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed” (ix). The book under review cannot accomplish such a task, given the volume of material that it must cover. In their own preface, however, the authors identify the book as a survey (xi). 168 Western American Literature As a historical and descriptive survey ofthe major literary works produced by writers of Mexican descent in the United States, Understanding Chicano Literature has considerable merit. It can be used as a supplementary text for courses in Chicano literature, and it isuseful not only for the Anglo reader but for mejicano students as well. The bibliography and the list of suggested read­ ings should be quite helpful to any beginning student in Chicano literature. The authors’ comments as to the history of the word chicano are merci­ fully brief. Too much has been written about the subject by writers with too little knowledge either of Mexican cultural history or of the history of Mexican Spanish. On the other hand, the role of the Chicano Movement and of pioneer publishers of Chicano literature such as Octavio Romano in California and Nicolas Kanellos in Texas deserves a fuller treatment. From the 1840s to the 1960s, Mexicans in the United States did a good deal of writing, both good and bad. Their efforts were stifled, however, by geographical and social isola­ tion and by the lack of publishing outlets willing to consider writing about Mexicans that did not fit the prejudiced stereotypes of their editors. The Chicano Movement revitalized literary creativity among Mexicans in the United States. Chicano presses encouraged such creative work by provid­ ing a broader readership for Chicano writers, and—indirectly—they brought them to the attention of establishment presses. Hence the existence of books like Understanding Chicano Literature. AMERICO PAREDES University of Texas, Austin John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. By R. S. Hughes. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989. 218 pages, $18.95.) This useful volume is also an unusual publishing event: the appearance of the second study of John Steinbeck...