Living in Words: Interviews from The Bloomsbury Review, 1981–1988 ed. by Gregory McNamee (review)

252 WesternAmerican Literature The letters brought Harte the attention he needed to attract eastern readers. Before these letters were published, only one of his stories— “The Legend of Monte del Diablo”—was published outside of California, appearing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862. If one is interested in certain aspects of San Francisco in the 1860s, the letters should be of some interest. They are not memorable pieces and they are not a boon to Harte scholarship. Scholars should note, however, Letters 6, 10, 15, 22, 24, 27, 28, and 29 enumerate the sources of eight of Harte’s stories and poems. Scharnhorst, noted scholar ofwestern American literature, does more than compile the thirty-seven letters. He carefully indexes Harte’s offerings and writes an informative introduction. His notes for each of the letters are knowl­ edgeable and supply explanations for 1866-1867 happenings, allusions, and obscurities. VIRGIL ALBERTINI Northwest Missouri State University Living in Words: Interviewsfrom The Bloomsbury Review, 1981-1988. Edited by Gregory McNamee. (Portland, Oregon: Breitenbush Books, 1988. 188 pages, $15.95/$8.95.) Published interviews with authors of the American West have contributed useful—sometimes vital—information that has enriched western literary stud­ ies. John R. Milton’s series and Richard W. Etulain’s Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature stand out as the best of the genre. Although Living in Words does not match the achievement of the Milton and Etulain interviews, Gregory McNamee has compiled a collection of atleast some use to students of western literature. It includes interviews with fifteen authors: Kay Boyle-(interviewed in 1981), William S. Burroughs (1981), Wendell Berry (1983),Joseph Campbell (1983), Douglas Adams (1984), Barry Moser (1984?), Robert Creeley (1984), Bernard MacLaverty (1986?), Margaret Drabble (1985), Farley Mowat (1984), Alastair Reid (1985), John Nichols (1981 and 1987), Raymond Carver (1986), and Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich (1987 and 1988). Each interview ispreceded by a brief introduction, runs for about ten pages, and is followed by a selected list ofworks by the interviewee. The volume begins with the editor’s three-page introduction and ends with information about the interviewers. Boyle, Nichols, Carver, Dorris, and Erdrich have written about the West, but few of the questions they were asked have anything to do with matters of place or regional identity. Some of the other interviewees mention western authors or topics of considerable interest to westerners, but much of the book has nothing to do with the American West. In his introduction McNamee Reviews 253 struggles to find a common theme or some reason thatwouldjustify publishing all these interviews in the same volume, but they seem to share only their initial publication in TheBloomsbury Review. Living in Words offers some readers an introduction to writers they might not have heard of before, and it will be a source of some use for scholars studying the work of any of the interviewees. However, different editorial decisions could have made the book more useful than it is. Compare, for example, the reading lists following the interviews with Kay Boyle in Living in Wordsand in Fiction! Interviews with Northern California Novelists (1976). JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University The Noble Savage in theNew World Garden. By Gaile McGregor. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. 357 pages, $33.95/ $16.95.) Gaile McGregor’s thesis is that “the American,” from the Puritans to the 1980s and almost certainly on into the future, was, is, and will be obsessed by an idealized and Edenic version of the wilderness. At the same time, “the Ameri­ can” is repelled and even horrified by the savagery that is found in the wilder­ ness and within the self. Therefore, McGregor concludes, “the American” is doomed to an ever-changing, always returning, love-hate relation with the one and only possible strategy for rationalizing this fundamental contradiction: the concept of the noble savage. Far from being just another popular story, the noble savage is a “necessary . .. component of the American myth,”temporarily dropped from time to time, but always re-invented to serve as a palliative, to mask but not to heal the wounds caused by a national value system that is “selfrighteous...