Pilgrim in the Sun by C. L. Sonnichsen (review)

Reviews 75 previously unpublished segments of books you’ll want to read. Dorris’s is especially intriguing because in this version, his main character from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water is male. All of these writers will reach inside you, twist you, tease you with a kind of deadpan humor you may find surprising. All of them deserve more readers. Don’t wait for the major presses to “discover” them; find them—and the dozens of other Native American writers—yourself. LINDA M. HASSELSTROM Hermosa, South Dakota Pilgrim in the Sun. By C. L. Sonnichsen. (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1988. 272 pages, $25.00/$15.00.) Although this new collection of previously published essays devotes rela­ tively few pages to fiction, the rationale is the same as for Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction (1978) :the study of popular fiction and folklore reveals “where we the people have been, where we are, and where we are going.” To disagree with this premise is to lose the essential Sonnichsen, although he can still be read with interest and pleasure. The essays cover a variety of southwestern (mostly Texas) local historical matters, colorful people such as Roy Bean and the controversial Tom Jeffords, and, near the end of the book, three chapters centering on popular fiction that embodies humor or treats the Apache in general and Geronimo in particular. Sonnichsen writes not as a literary critic or as a “library historian” but as a “ruminant grassroots historian.” The appellation is of special concern to him; his defense of it constitutes the original material in Pilgrim. The ruminative process—Sonnichsen’smethod of making a book—begins with a talk to audiences that respond with criticism and additional informa­ tion, then continues with a shaping of the material into an article or essay, and finally the book is put together when a sufficient number of ruminations have been through the first two stages. After forty years of collecting local history while traveling around Texas, Sonnichsen found the name for what he had become: “The Grassroots Histor­ ian,” first used in a luncheon speech to the Texas State Historical Association in 1969. Having been through the process of rumination, the talk now appears as “Blood on the Typewriter” in Pilgrim. The term refers to amateur historians who dig into local history, use sources ignored by formal historians, and have fun as they work. This kind of historian, Sonnichsen argues in his preface, is “worthy of respect and encouragement.” In his defense of the grassroots historian, and in the background informa­ tion that precedes each essay in this collection, Sonnichsen seeks to justify his 76 Western American Literature fifty-year pilgrimage as cultural historian. I find this justification unnecessary. Even though much of his work settles into a limited geographical area, the subjects he illuminates and the style in which they are presented are their own justification. JOHN R. MILTON University of South Dakota Section Lines: A Manitoba Anthology. Edited by Mark Duncan. (Winnipeg: Touchstone Press, 1988. 266 pages, $12.95.) Reading through an anthology like this, one is taken by the arm into new worlds of words that might be otherwise missed. As with other travels, the experiences are uneven. Still, the venture is worth the effort. In general, the fiction isstronger than the poetry in this collection of Manitoba writing, largely from the eighties. Traditional approaches predominate over experimentation. For example, the past and the land are two common themes which tempt some of the writers to clichéd presentations. Two of the best stories, though, hold to present adult life: David Arnason’s “Sons and Fathers, Fathers and Sons,” after a slow opening insightfully considers the problems of generational differ­ ences and middle-aged anxiety; Carol Shields avoids sentimentality through sharp, imaginative wit in “Flitting Behavior,” a story about the uneasy relation­ ship a writer finds between his writing and his wife’s terminal illness. Most of the others, including stories pleasurable to reread by Laurence and Ross, are constructed as childhood memories. They reflect Manitoba’s ethnic diversity and generally have a rural or small-town setting. The most humorous isArmin Wiebe’s “These Troubled Times,” a story about...