Richard Shelton: A Voice in the Wilderness

V I C T O R C O N T O S K I The University of Kansas RichardShelton:AVoiceintheWilderness Migration has played an important role in the myth of the West. Many of the first settlers of America sought a new life close to nature and away from the traditional evils of civilization, and many of their descendants, finding the American East corrupted by the institutions of Europe, sought a new life in the American West. But such idealistic migration, which has characterized our country since its inception, has virtually ceased in the twentieth century for lack of an accessible frontier. The historically- and mythically-minded poet of the West finds himself therefore faced with the uncomfortable fact that civilization’s westward march came to a stop at the Pacific Ocean. Richard Shelton, who lives and works in the desert — not only the physical desert of Arizona but the spiritual desert of the twentieth century — finds the end of this westward movement worthy of extended treatment. His first two books are based on his own symbolic attempts at migration, and his more recent work condenses the knowledge he has gained from his journeys. 4 Western American Literature I C ir c u la r J o u r n e y s The Journal of Return (Kayak, 1969), his first book, begins with a journey from the desert to a presumably more fertile land near the sea, a land of water. “Starting Out” (p. 4), an excellent introduction to his entire work, begins: The gods of this desert whisper but I do not listen. They are no longer my counselors Salt calls me and I come. The poet leaves the desert “with hope in all my glands,” but it is not rain, fertility, which calls him to the new country; it is salt. Neverthe­ less he blithely sets out. Goodby skeletons dressed in alkali and walls full of razorblades. The clock in the river is willing I enter the borders of rain. Yet the Journal seems less a diary of an actual journey than notes on the concept of a circular voyage in space and time, for the journey is not only the poet’s personal trip toward the sea but the journey of civilization westward. In “Dark Galleries— 1968” (p. 28) Columbus sets out for America, and as if through inertia the momentum of his voyage continues through America farther west to Vietnam. Columbus, we have found the East you dreamed of. We sail west into history, into romance seen from a distance, into an opera of flies. As we disembark single file, each of us carries his dead innocence in a small white coffin. “The Last Village” near the end of the volume is not only the last village of the journey, but the last village of the earth. (It bears a marked resem­ blance to the first village.) The return of the title, then, refers not only Victor Contoski 5 to the poet’s personal return to the desert, but man’s return in time to the edge of the sea from which life first came. The poet begins his trip rather naively, but soon “the rusty motor of hope” breaks down (p. 10). He had seen an egocentric world in which he was necessary to the wind, in which the stone would suffer without him, but now nature is revealed in a different light; and the poet, precisely because he has lost hope, gains knowledge through sym­ pathy. His initial hope, therefore, was not the Christian cardinal virtue but the classical fault, the last and most vile evil in Pandora’s box be­ cause it prevents man from seeing life as it really is. But once such hope is discarded and man recognizes the limits of his life and his world, there is, paradoxically, a basis for another kind of hope, a realistic hope based on a world in which failure is paramount. And in Shelton’s work everything worthwhile is based on failure and the recognition of failure. In “Sonora” (pp. 30-47) he moves from fear of this newly dis­ covered nature to an acceptance of it. At first it threatens him. Then...