Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 23

OP. _Cactus Culture_, Orange Judd, New York, 1932. Now in revised edition.

SILVIUS, W. A. _Texas Gra.s.ses_, published by the author, San Antonio, 1933. A monument, of 782 ill.u.s.trated pages, to a lifetime's disinterested following of knowledge "like a star."

STEVENS, WILLIAM CHASE. _Kansas Wild Flowers_, University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 1948. This is more than a state book, and the integration of knowledge, wisdom, and appreciation of flower life with botanical science makes it appeal to layman as well as to botanist. 463 pages, 774 ill.u.s.trations. Applicable to the whole plains area.

STOCKWELL, WILLIAM PALMER, and BREAZEALE, LUCRETIA. _Arizona Cacti_, Biological Science Bulletin No. 1, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1933.

Beautifully ill.u.s.trated.

THORNBER, JOHN JAMES, and BONKER, FRANCES. _The Fantastic Clan: The Cactus Family_, New York, 1932. OP.

THORP, BENJAMIN CARROLL. _Texas Range Gra.s.ses_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. A survey of 168 species of gra.s.ses, their adaptability to soils and regions, and their values for grazing.

Beautifully ill.u.s.trated and printed, but no index.

WHITEHOUSE, EULA. _Texas Wild Flowers in Natural Colors_, 1936; republished 1948 in Dallas. OP. Toward 200 flowers are pictured in colors, each in conjunction with descriptive material. The finding lists are designed to enable novices to identify flowers. A charming book.

{ill.u.s.t. caption = Paisano (roadrunner) means fellow-countryman}

31. Negro Folk Songs and Tales

WEST OF A WAVERING line along the western edge of the central parts of Texas and Oklahoma the Negro is not an important social or cultural element of the Southwest, just as the modern Indian hardly enters into Texas life at all and the Mexican recedes to the east. Negro folk songs and tales of the Southwest have in treatment been blended with those of the South. Dorothy Scarborough's _On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs_ (1925, OP) derives mainly from Texas, but in making up the body of a Negro song, Miss Scarborough says, "You may find one bone in Texas, one in Virginia and one in Mississippi." Leadbelly, a guitar player equally at home in the penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana, furnished John A.

and Alan Lomax with _Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly_, New York, 1936 (OP). The Lomax anthologies, _American Ballads and Folk Songs_, 1934, and _Our Singing Country_, 1941 (Macmillan, New York) and Carl Sandburg's _American Songbag_ (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927) all give the Negro of the Southwest full representation.

Three books of loveliness by R. Emmett Kennedy, _Black Cameos_ (1924), _Mellows_ (1925), and _More Mellows_ (1931) represent Louisiana Negroes.

All are OP. An excellent all-American collection is James Weldon Johnson's _Book of American Negro Spirituals_, Viking, New York, 1940.

Bibliographies and lists of other books will be found in _The Negro and His Songs_ (1925, OP) and _Negro Workaday Songs_, by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1926, and in _American Negro Folk-Songs_, by Newman I. White, Cambridge, 1928.

A succinct guide to Negro lore is _American Folk Song and Folk Lore: A Regional Bibliography_, by Alan Lomax and Sidney R. Crowell, New York, 1942. OP.

Narrowing the field down to Texas, J. Mason Brewer's "Juneteenth,"

in _Tone the Bell Easy_, Publication X of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1932, is outstanding as a collection of tales. In volume after volume the Texas Folklore Society has published collections of Negro songs and tales A. W. Eddins, Martha Emmons, Gates Thomas, and H. B.

Parks being princ.i.p.al contributors.

32. Fiction--Including Folk Tales

FROM THE DAYS of the first innocent sensations in Beadle's Dime Novel series, on through Zane Grey's ma.s.s production and up to any present-day newsstand's crowded shelf of _Ace High_ and _Flaming Guns_ magazines, the Southwest, along with all the rest of the West, has been represented in a fictional output quant.i.tatively stupendous. Most of it has betrayed rather than revealed life, though not with the contemptible contempt for both audience and subject that characterizes most of Hollywood's pictures on the same times, people, and places. Certain historical aspects of the fictional betrayal of the West may be found in E. Douglas Branch's _The Cowboy and His Interpreters_, in _The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels_, by Albert Johannsen in two magnificent volumes, and in Jay Monaghan's _The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline_ Buntline having been perhaps the most prolific of all Wild West fictionists.

Some "Westerns" have a kind of validity. If a serious reader went through the hundreds of t.i.tles produced by William McLeod Raine, Dane Coolidge, Eugene Cunningham,. B. M. Bower, the late Ernest Hayc.o.x, and other manufacturers of range novels who have known their West at firsthand, he would find, spottedly, a surprising amount of truth about land and men, a fluency in genuine cowboy lingo, and a respect for the code of conduct. Yet even these novels have added to the difficulty that serious writing in the Western field has in getting a hearing on literary, rather than merely Western, grounds. Any writer of Westerns must, like all other creators, be judged on his own intellectual development. "The Western and Ernest Hayc.o.x," by James Fargo, in _Prairie Schooner_, XXVI (Summer, 1952) has something on this subject.

Actualities in the Southwest seem to have stifled fictional creation.

No historical novel dealing with Texas history has achieved the drama of the fall of the Alamo or the drawing of the black beans, has presented a character with half the reality of Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, or Sallie Skull, or has captured the flavor inherent in the talk on many a ranch gallery.

Historical fiction dealing with early day Texas is, however, distinctly maturing. As a dramatization of Jim Bowie and the bowie knife, _The Iron Mistress_, by Paul Wellman (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1951), is the best novel published so far dealing with a figure of the Texas revolution. In _Divine Average_ (Little, Brown, Boston, 1952), Elithe Hamilton Kirkland weaves from her seasoned knowledge of life and from "realities of those violent years in Texas history between 1838 and 1858" a story of human destiny. She reveals the essential nature of Range Templeton more distinctly, more mordantly, than history has revealed the essential nature of Sam Houston or any of his contemporaries. The wife and daughter of Range Templeton are the most plausible women in any historical novel of Texas that I have read. The created world here is more real than the actual.

Among the early tale-tellers of the Southwest are Jeremiah Clemens, who wrote _Mustang Gray_, Mollie E. Moore Davis, of plantation tradition, Mayne Reid, who dared convey real information in his romances, Charles W. Webber, a naturalist, and T. B. Thorpe, creator of "The Big Bear of Arkansas."

Fiction that appeared before World War I can hardly be called modern.

No fiction is likely to appear, however, that will do better by certain types of western character and certain stages of development in western society than that produced by Bret Harte, with his gamblers; stage drivers, and mining camps; O. Henry with his "Heart of the West" types; Alfred Henry Lewis with his "Wolfville" anecdotes and characters; Owen Wister, whose _Virginian_ remains the cla.s.sic of cowboy novels without cows; and Andy Adams, whose _Log of a Cowboy_ will be read as long as people want a narrative of cowboys sweating with herds.

The authors listed below are in alphabetical order. Those who seem to me to have a chance to survive are not exactly in that order.

FRANK APPLEGATE (died 1932) wrote only two books, _Native Tales of New Mexico_ and _Indian Stories from the Pueblos_, but as a delighted and delightful teller of folk tales his place is secure.

MARY AUSTIN seems to be settling down as primarily an expositor. Her novels are no longer read, but the simple tales in _One-Smoke Stories_ (her last book, 1934) and in some nonfiction collections, notably _Lost Borders_ and _The Flock_, do not recede with time.

While the Southwest can hardly claim Willa Cather, of Nebraska, her _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ (1927), which is made out of New Mexican life, is not only the best-known novel concerned with the Southwest but one of the finest of America.

Despite the fact that it is not on the literary map, Will Levington Comfort's _Apache_ (1931) remains for me the most moving and incisive piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found.

If a teller of folk tales and plotless narratives belongs in this chapter, then J. Frank Dobie should be mentioned for the folk tales in _Coronado's Children, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver_, and _Tongues of the Monte_, also for some of his animal tales in _The Voice of the Coyote_, outlaw and maverick narratives in _The Longhorns_, and "The Pacing White Steed of the Prairies" and other horse stories in _The Mustangs_.

The characters in Harvey Fergusson's _Wolf Song_ (1927) are the Mountain Men of Kit Carson's time, and the city of their soul is rollicky Taos.

It is a l.u.s.ty, swift song of the pristine earth. Fergusson's _The Blood of the Conquerors_ (1931) tackles the juxtaposition of Spanish-Mexican and Anglo-American elements in New Mexico, of which state he is a native. _Grant of Kingdom_ (1850) is strong in wisdom life, vitality of character, and historical values.

FRED GIPSON'S _Hound-Dog Man_ and _The Home Place_ lack the critical att.i.tude toward life present in great fiction but they are as honest and tonic as creek bottom soil and the people in them are genuine.

FRANK GOODWYN'S _The Magic of Limping John_ (New York, 1944, OP) is a coherence of Mexican characters, folk tales, beliefs, and ways in the ranch country of South Texas. There is something of magic in the telling, but Frank Goodwyn has not achieved objective control over imagination or sufficiently stressed the art of writing.

PAUL HORGAN of New Mexico has in _The Return of the Weed_ (short stories), _Far from Cibola_, and other fiction coped with modern life in the past-haunted New Mexico.

OLIVER LAFARGE'S _Laughing Boy_ (1929) grew out of the author's ethnological knowledge of the Navajo Indians. He achieves character.

TOM LEA'S _The Brave Bulls_ (1949) has, although it is a sublimation of the Mexican bullfighting world, Death and Fear of Death for its dominant theme. It may be compared in theme with Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge of Courage_. It is written with the utmost of economy, and is beautiful in its power. _The Wonderful Country_ (1952), a historical novel of the frontier, but emphatically not a "Western," recognizes more complexities of society. Its economy and directness parallel the style of Tom Lea's drawings and paintings, with which both books are ill.u.s.trated.

_Sundown_, by John Joseph Mathews (1934), goes more profoundly than _Laughing Boy_ into the soul of a young Indian (an Osage) and his people. Its translation of the "long, long thoughts" of the boy and then of "shades of the prison house" closing down upon him is superb writing.

The "shades of the prison house" come from oil, with all of the world's coa.r.s.e thumbs that go with oil.

GEORGE SESSIONS PERRY'S _Hold Autumn in Your Hand_ (1941) incarnates a Texas farm hand too poor "to flag a gut-wagon," but with the good nature, dignity, and independence of the earth itself. _Walls Rise Up_ (1939) is a kind of _Crock of Gold_, both whimsical and earthy, laid on the Brazos River.

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER is as dedicated to artistic perfection as was A.

E. Housman. Her output has, therefore, been limited: _Flowering Judas_ (1930, enlarged 1935); _Pale Horse, Pale Rider_ (1939), _The Leaning Tower_ (1944). Her stories penetrate psychology, especially the psychology of a Mexican hacienda, with rare finesse. Her small canvases sublimate the inner realities of men and women. She appeals only to cultivated taste, and to some tastes no other fiction writer in America today is her peer in subtlety.

EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES died in 1934. Most of his novels--distinguished by intricate plots and bright dialogue--had appeared in the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_. His finest story is "Paso Por Aqui," published in the volume ent.i.tled _Once in the Saddle_ (1927). Gene Rhodes, who has a canyon--on which he ranched--named for him in New Mexico, was an artist; at the same time, he was a man akin to his land and its men. He is the only writer of the range country who has been accorded a biography--_The Hired Man on Horseback_, by May D. Rhodes, his wife. See under "Range Life."

CONRAD RICHTER'S _The Sea of Gra.s.s_ (1937) is a kind of prose poem, beautiful and tragic. Lutie, wife of the owner of the gra.s.s, is perhaps the most successful creation of a ranch woman that fiction has so far achieved.

DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH'S _The Wind_ (1925) excited the wrath of chambers of commerce and other boosters in West Texas--a tribute to its realism.

_The Grapes of Wrath_, by John Steinbeck (1939), made Okies a word in the American language. Although dated by the Great Depression, its humanity and realism are beyond date. It is among the few good novels produced by America in the first half of the twentieth century.