Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner by Merrill Maguire Skaggs (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 2 0 9 The poems are concerned with cultural identity, the mythic, and suffused with healing. An example of this is his famous “Family Photograph” where Vizenor brings these elements together. The speaker’s father is among the “totems” and a “spruce,” “corded for pulp / by federal / indian agents,” at “white earth.” The sacred and the profane are jammed together. The poem progresses through the swindling of land by agents, his father’s dislocation in the city, eradication of religion, the desecration of the land, and ravaged indigenous cultures. The infant Vizenor in the photograph is “a smile,” a “new spruce,” from “half-white earth.” Vizenor suggests that the greatest resistance to the dominant culture is to survive and continue forward, “survivance.” Word-touchstones and iconic symbols of his tribal ancestry (birch, blue, spruce, crane, cat, dance, cruel, stories, tease—to name a few) are layered within the poems throughout the book, resonating with a lifetime of Vizenor’s obsessions. Vizenor’s poetry is worth reading for his poetic mastery of image, sonic integrity, and precise lines, and because this compassionate trickster has the transformative capacity to enlighten. Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner. By Merrill Maguire Skaggs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 202 pages, $40.00. Reviewed by Jeffrey Bilbro Baylor University, Waco, Texas While few scholars have considered clear, historical connections between Willa Cather and William Faulkner, Merrill Skaggs finds a fascinating con­ versation that unfolds between their writings. Beginning with Cather’s One of Ours (1922), Skaggs attempts to show how Cather incorporated Faulkner, both the man and the writer, into her works and how this favor was returned by Faulkner. Skaggs supports her argument by describing similarities between the authors’ characterizations, portrayals of war, narrative structures, and particular characters. Her vivid details make her argument credible: Victor Morse, Kit Carson, and Tom Outland are seen as possible Catherian char­ acterizations of Faulkner, and Skaggs points out striking similarities between Faulkner’s Compsons and Cather’s Shimerdas and between Cather’s Burdens and Faulkner’s Bundrens. The mutual borrowing continues, according to Skaggs, even after Cather’s death with the posthumous publishing of “Before Breakfast” (1948) and Faulkner’s response in The Reivers (1962). Many of Skaggs’s links seem astoundingly clear, but others are more ques­ tionable. In one chapter, Skaggs spends twenty pages linking several works textually after admitting that the publication timeline seems to render her analysis impossible. She accounts for this by “positing the possibility that by this time they are both able to anticipate the moves or thoughts of the other” (79). This supposition seems too speculative, and her other explanation—that literary agent leaks provided Cather and Faulkner with prepublication drafts or 2 1 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 sketches of these works—would be more believable if she were able to provide evidence of such an exchange. What nevertheless ensures the significance of Skaggs’s study is her refusal to be content with simply showing similarities between the two authors. She constantly searches for the cause of their banter and borrowing, and her proposition that “each aspired to be America’s greatest” writer is plausible (xv). As Skaggs acknowledges in her introduction, however, “The facts [about this relationship ] are skimpy” (xii). And while her readings of Cather and Faulkner are thorough and incisive—potentially changing the way these central American authors are understood—at times she seems to be reaching for a connection that in actuality is subtler than she desires it to be. Skaggs’s strength is also her weakness; her analysis proves fascinating and significant because of her insistence on a close and conscious link between Cather and Faulkner, but the lack of positive evidence connecting them weakens the credibility of Skaggs’s claims. She does qualify her causal links, but many of the supposed borrowings between Cather and Faulkner may not stem directly from their close readings of each other but from the common literary culture in...