Green Earth by Frederick Manfred (review)

Reviews 69 of himself critically appraising the cast of his shadow while riding a highspirited mount toward the Christmas celebrations in town, or the descrip­ tion of himself diving underwater to retrieve the tack from his drowned horse. We cannot forget either the brief vignette in which “Button” recalls the night Old Man Grimes took target practice at the flies on his bedroom ceiling and “squalled” into the darkness whenever he plugged one. It is interesting to note that while W. T. Hutchinson found Santee’s work valuable because it portrayed “the West-That-Was,” Walter Prescott Webb classified Santee as a writer who took his readers on a vacation from the “near country” of reality in order to detail the adventures found in the “far country” of the imagination. Although these judgments appear contradictory on the surface, Cowboy actually permits both views a claim to truth. There are enough “how to” chapters in the book to validate Hutchinson’s statement; there is the youthful first-person narrator recalling his exploits who serves to validate Webb’s remark. However, while we admire the uniqueness of Santee’s characters, the correctness of his point of view, the impact of his style, and the cohesiveness of his structure, we must recognize also the book’s failure to truly realize a significant theme. Cowboy lacks an awareness of landscape as potential correlative to the pro­ tagonist’s aspirations and dilemmas. And the book’s corresponding thin­ ness of social texture and genuine conflict prevents the fiction from sur­ passing the by-now-familiar initiation theme. While these reservations may be trifling when balanced against the book’s achievements, my own feeling is that Santee, more than Adams or Rhodes, just missed writing the cow­ boy Huckleberry Finn. STEPHEN TATUM, University of Utah Green Earth. By Frederick Manfred. (New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1977. 721 pages, $10.00.) “Who can see the green earth anymore as she was by the sources of Time?” asks Matthew Arnold as quoted on the title page of Frederick Manfred’s twentieth novel. Manfred answers in a preface and ninety-seven chapters chronicling the experiences of a young Iowa couple meeting, marrying, con­ ceiving, loving and lasting on a series of farms. The main flow of the novel follows the couple’s first-born son from birth to the morning he approaches the same age his mother is at the book’s opening. The chronicle winds through fields, farmhouse kitchens and bedrooms, 70 Western American Literature barns, schools, churches, first loves, weddings, and deathbed scenes as the hero’s days unroll to the climax. Piloting an open-cockpit airplane with a telescope pointing downwards over a patchwork of mid-America is a way of suggesting the experience this book offers. All the possible joys and sorrows of growing up seem to be here. And the moving growth to a vibrant, nurturing maturity of the hero’s mother just at the time the boy takes on the full mantle of self-responsibility makes for an interwoven ending as powerful as Manfred has ever written. Ada, the heroine, closely resembles the mother Manfred has described in his autobiographical poems. I know of no other author who has so thor­ oughly dissected the one who brought him into this world. She appears on the pages as out of an extended notebook of drawings by Leonardo — toes to soul. A sense of the overall basic strength of life itself floods the scenes — stronger than in any American story I remember reading. The reader walks the corn field rows or the schoolhouse floors as though he is growing up here himself. The presences of the Bible and the weather are constant referral points. The spread of experiences is enormous: After a flood the boy hero climbs a plum tree to come face to face with the open eyes of a dead girl hanging by her hair. And a few chapters later the boy sees and smells the endurance of past life as a well drilling bit brings up a mammoth’s bone, remnants of flesh still attached. The most intimate details — of boys and girls, men and women, death­ bed items, fecal colors and...