The Men in My Life by James D. Houston (review)

Reviews 75 often mindless excitation of our technological age. Like many writers before him, Haines reminds us again that with the death of the wilderness comes the death of something in us, a psychic link to our original home ground. Beneath all the snow and the cold of these essays lies the vision of a world locked in natural unity, one so fully integrated that little or no distinction exists between subject and object, land and speaker. Through Haines’s quiet and unpretentious prose, we are able to look into the original grandeur and mystery that has been lost to us since the frontier closed and our culture turned toward industrialism and urbanization. He points us again toward a landscape abundant with those fundamental and governing shapes, a “still, cold world, something like night, with its own fixed planets and stars.” ROBERT HEDIN Wake Forest University The Men in My Life. By James D. Houston. (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1987. 163 pages, $14.95.) According to James Houston, the struggle against one’s own arrogance and philistinism is difficult and long—especially for a WASP male born into an essentially patriarchal and patriotic, football-loving America. As a college freshman Houston loves his football uniform (read image) but dislikes playing the game (he’d rather play music on a stringed instru­ ment). As a college sophomore, hungry to belong to a fraternal society, he loves the idea of being accepted as an equal by big brothers, but he doesn’t like their initiatory games; he falls in love with a Japanese-American woman who has been victimized by racial discrimination, and he decides he isn’t actually a “joiner.” As a lieutenant in the Air Force, he loves his uniform, but when he handles a nuclear bomb for the first time he is forced to recall that, as a boy, he felt“shame and loneliness”after shooting a squirrel. As a more or lesssettled husband and father, he has an overriding interest in his male precursors (especially those who left their wives and children to wander alone). As a lover of Count Basie’s immortal music, he goes to see the Count perform live but momentarily feels gypped when he realizes the mortal Count is so aged he can’t play the piano and only sits in front of the instrument so the audience can get the glimpses it paid for. As a writer who struggles with his inherited values and attitudes, he is troubled that G. Gordon Liddy, a convicted and unrepentant felon, can become a successful American author; and as a man who seems aware that the barrier between himself and other men is often his own “little arrogance . . . creeping in,” he is frustrated to have found within himself a “vacant place, a yearning for a certain kind of [male] comradeship, along with the fear it would always elude me.” A book of nine autobiographical essays, three character sketches, and a pointless fictional encounter with Cortez (this doesn’t belong in the collection, 76 Western American Literature except as—what it is—a filler), The Men in My Life offers several perceptual slants on its main subject: i.e., how it was to be James Houston growing up as an American WASP, learning gradually he is “not a joiner,” and wishing he had his male progenitors—especially those who lit out for the territory—to talk with, maybe even walk with, in a time when a man’schoices were simpler, more easily made, with fewer considerations than those facing him in 1987. DAVID A. CARPENTER Eastern Illinois University Stephen Crane. By Bettina L. Knapp. (New York: The Ungar Publishing Company, 1987. 198 pages, $15.95.) This volume, like others in the publisher’s Literature and Life series fea­ turing American writers, is intended as a “critical-biographical introduction” to the author’s “life, work, and place within a literary tradition.” The book’s fast-moving, easily-read, contemporary English should appeal especially to young readers whose study or interest is in American literature. Knapp, an author and a teacher, has distilled the large volume of mater­ ial by and about Crane and, throughout the book, relates Crane...