In This Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers by James Shebl (review)

68 Western American Literature to be better known: examples are Haniel Long’s Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca, Ross Calvin’s Sky Determines, and Martha Summerhayes’s Vanished Arizona. I quarrel with the writer’s choices in only a few instances; in my view, for example, such overrated or near-worthless novels as Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage should have been replaced with, say, Edwin Corle’s People on the Earth and Alfred Henry Lewis’s Wolfville. I have nothing but praise for Powell’s organizational scheme. The essays, when read in the order in which they appear, build to a climactic statement, in that the author saves his best piece for last — a fine impassioned appreciation of J. Frank Dobie, whose classic work is said to be Coronado’s Children. Powell’s approach to these books, as is usual in his writings, is personal and sometimes prejudiced. His scholarship, however, is impeccable. He has employed the best texts, and has traveled far and wide to examine the papers and manuscripts of the writers he deals with. The biographical and biblio­ graphical information he has assembled is interesting and genuinely useful. In an article in the May 1974 issue of New Mexico Magazine, Powell says that his current goal, as scholar and critic of Southwestern literature, is “to lay groundwork on which someone can someday base a literary history that will do for the Southwest what Van Wyck Brooks did for New England.” I think that a significant part of that rather large order has now been filled, in a volume that is stimulating and pleasant reading. In sum Southwest Classics considerably enhances, in about equal portions, the reader’s pleasure and knowledge. One can hardly ask a book to do more. TOM PILKINGTON, Tarleton State University In This Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers. By James Shebl. (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976. 123 pages, $9.95.) This is a book of extraordinary interest, but severe limitations. Both are suggested by the title: Jeffers is likened to the rock which allows itself to be eroded by the “wild water” of war and controversy, while the “suppressed poems” are like chips which Jeffers’ publishers cut from the original manu­ script of The Double Axe. Thus Mr. Shebl explains Jeffers’ seeming acquiescence at what he aptly calls “The Double Axe Murder.” His inter­ pretation is poetic and persuasive, his book isgracefully written and readable. The core of the book (included in Chapters Three and Four) consists of the ten poems suppressed by the publishers and now printed in full, and the extended correspondence between Jeffers and Bennett Cerf and Saxe Commins, the president and editor at Random House. Of added interest Reviews 69 is the long preface which Jeffers wrote for the original volume but later altered, and the minor alterations to which he submitted several of the published poems at the urgings of his editors. These original materials are woven into the fabric of Mr. Shebl’s book, and are used to illustrate his interpretation of Jeffers’ philosophy (which he further develops in Chapters One, Two and Five). The limitations of the book are related to its poetic method. Clearly, much of the material is new and is here published for the first time. But the author does not fully document his material, nor does he relate it to other recently published poems of Jeffers, nor to still other unpublished manuscript poems; and worst of all he does not indicate clearly his omission of some of these manuscript materials from which he selects. To be specific: In February, 1976 (nine months before publication of his book) Harper’s Magazine,published four poems by Jeffers of this period, edited by Robert Ian Scott, who had also edited and published three poems in the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter for May, 1975. Mr. Scott specified that these four poems were selected from at least twenty-three manuscript poems. Three of these four are now republished among the ten “Suppressed Poems” printed by Mr. Shebl, who makes no mention of the others. “The Suppressed Poems” of his title, therefore, include only those ten...