Nature’s Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard and Gary Snyder by James I. McClintock (review)

Reviews 315 Nature’s Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold,Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, AnnieDillard, and Gary Snyder. ByJames I. McClintock. (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1994. 180 pages, $39.50/$12.95.) In Nature’s Kindred Spirits, James I. McClintock points out that with a few notable exceptions, “[c]ontemporary American nature writers . . . have received almost no extended study,”an oversight that thisworkisintended in partto remedy. In this slim but carefully researched and documented study of Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder, McClintock makes no pretense about writing the definitive critical history of modern American nature writing, limiting the terms of his inquiry to the ways in which these five writers have derived some of their deepest spiritual insights from their experiences in nature. McClintock argues convinc­ ingly that despite obvious differences, these writers share a common worldview, one based on a “mythic view—an integrated worldview in which their experience and knowl­ edge of the natural world are consistent with their social and political vision, their spiritual lives, and their aesthetic.” McClintock’s proposition that these writers share acommon spiritual worldview isa challenging one. Despite their shared love ofnature, there are clear differences between the affirmative ChristianityofDillard, the pantheism ofLeopold, and the Zen Buddhism ofSnyder. Itisoften these differences in spiritualworldviewthatstandout mostclearly, as illustrated byaletter that EdwardAbbeywrote to GarySnyder: “Dear Gary, Iadmire your work too, except for all that Zen and Hindu bullshit.”However, as McClintock discusses the themes of myth-making, religion, and nature study that link these writers, it becomes evident that their common spiritual experience in nature can be—indeed, should be— construed broadly enough to accommodate widely differing religious perspectives. Nature’s Kindred Spirits will undoubtedly appeal to those who approach nature writing from a literary or historical perspective, but McClintock’s intended audience is primarily “readers drawn to these essays, poems, and fiction because individually and collectively the literature, based upon experience in nature and written in the last halfof the twentieth century, offers acritique ofmodernity and apositive vision.”AsMcClintock points out, the perspective offered by these writers isa literaryand spiritual alternative to that generally presented in our mainstream literary tradition. This alternative vision offers away to turn thoughts of despair to those of beauty, as McClintock illustrates with a wonderful passage from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, describing an instance where her thoughts of mortality and nature’s pervasive cruelty were transformed by the sight of a maple leaf twirling in the wind: “[i]f I am a maple leaf falling, at least I can twirl.” DANIEL G. PAYNE Cottekill, Nejo York Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics. By Forrest G. Robinson. (Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press, 1993. 158 pages, $25.00.) Robinson defines “self-subversion”as “bad faith, the reciprocal deception ofselfand other in the denial of departures from leading public values” and maintains that the unresolved contradictions account in large part for the popularity of the works he ...