The Texas Legacy of Katherine Anne Porter by James T. F. Tanner (review)

132 WesternAmerican Literature an angle on the rise of the sixties counterculture, and testifies to Ferlinghetti’s tremendous versatility. Accomplished in painting as well as poetry, impresario to much of the best postwar American writing, politically committed in better and worse times, Ferlinghetti has lived an astonishingly full life, and Silesky’s biography familiarizes the reader with many interesting avenues of American culture. In this study the poetry is occasionally used to gloss aspects ofFerlinghetti’s life or to illuminate a social context, but a direct evaluation of the work is pretty much put offuntil an appendix chapter, “The Work, The Life: Poets and Critics on Ferlinghetti.” This section is not really a critical review at all but rather a collection of generous commentaries by friends of the poet. Gary Snyder, for example, holds that political engagement is what distinguishes Ferlinghetti from other American writers: “His uniqueness . . . has been a kind of almost European intellectual, political, direct engagement in a vernacular mode, with maybe a little more lightness and a little more humor than Ginsberg has. . . . The Europeanness of Lawrence, or the non-Americanness, is in his role as a political man of letters, which very few American poets are willing to take on.” This is quite a useful book—fun, informative, and full of surprises. JOHN WHALEN-BRIDGE University ofSouthern California The Texas Legacy of Katherine Anne Porter. By James T. F. Tanner. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, Texas Writers Series, No. 3, 1990. 237 pages, $19.95.) In his critical-biographical study, James Tanner provides a controlled— sometimes highly insightful—overview of Porter, adroitly escaping the recent boring intensity of Omphalos Skepsis Texana. Although it takes Tanner almost forty pages of introduction to extricate himself from the peculiarly genetic-polemic-gendered-historical-biographicalcritical wrapping which has mummified this major writer (Is she or isn’t she “Texan”? Is she southern or western?), his unravelling is not without under­ stated clarifications and warnings. At one point he lets Glen Lich ask the question that most sane readers and critics have asked through the noisy skirmishes of this last decade: Lich recommends that “regional” texts ought to be studied like any other texts; students ought to be required to handle such matters as “action, plot, setting, characterization, imagery, point of view, struc­ ture, language, and style (right down to paragraphing and punctua­ tion) ,in addition to author-text, text-reader, and text-context relation­ ships.” Reviews 133 Tanner adds that “regional texts are fit for the classroom only if they are susceptible of something more than ‘authentic setting.’They must have literary value.” Amen! And Tanner’s presentation is duly predicated on those tenets. He follows his own advice: “The real argument of Texas regionalists is that a Texas storyteller should not subordinate ‘the local and the immediate’ in order to elevate ‘the timeless and universal.’ The true regionalist believes . . . that the local and immediate is, viewed rightly, the timeless and universal. . . .”Tanner’s treatment of Porter’s work and its connection to Texas is less a polemic than a critical analysis of how things Texan shed light on the stories. Again, a fine undertaking given the sponsorship of the series and the quagmire the author has had to wade to merely get to the stories. The work, which includes a selected bibliography and index, resembles the Twayne Twentieth Century series, but because of the summary of the critical background and the mini-biography (“Chapter 2”), it is better grounded than most of the more publicized series. Chapters on the works themselves are “Stories of Texas, the South, and Southwest,” “Stories of Mexico,” “Stories of New York and New England” (perhaps the closest Tanner comes to being a polemicist), “Stories of Germany: ‘The Leaning Tower’ and Ship ofFools. ” The biographical chapter is well integrated into the chapters on the works themselves, and the synthesis of critical perspectives is not merely a pastiche of sources to feign documentation. Tanner does provide some new warnings and perspectives. The editors at Denton have a right to be proud of this one. It is an examination of Porter’s universals through a close examination of her (Texas) locals. LEE SCHULTZ StephenF. Austin State...