Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 24

JOHN W. THOMASON, after fighting as a marine in World War I, wrote _Fix Bayonets_ (1926), followed by _Jeb Stuart_ (1930). A native Texan, he followed the southern tradition rather than the western. _Lone Star Preacher_ (1941) is a strong and sympathetic characterization of Confederate fighting men woven into fictional form.

In _High John the Conqueror_ (Macmillan, 1948) John W. Wilson conveys real feeling for the tragic life of Negro sharecroppers in the Brazos bottoms. He represents the critical awareness of life that has come to modern fiction of the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action, without creation of character, in most older fiction of the region.

33. Poetry and Drama

"KNOWLEDGE itself is power," Sir Francis Bacon wrote in cla.s.sical Latin, and in abbreviated form the proverb became a familiar in households and universities alike. But knowledge of what? There is no power in knowledge of mediocre verse.

I had rather flunk my Wa.s.serman test Than read a poem by Edgar A. Guest.

The power of great poetry lies not in knowledge of it but in a.s.similation of it. Most talk about poetry is vacuous. Poetry can pa.s.s no power into any human being unless it itself has power--power of beauty, truth, wit, humor, pathos, satire, worship, and other attributes, always through form. No poor poetry is worth reading. Taste for the best makes the other kind insipid.

Compared with America's best poetry, most poetry of the Southwest is as mediocre as American poetry in the ma.s.s is as compared with the great body of English poetry between Chaucer and Masefield. Yet mediocre poetry is not so bad as mediocre sculpture. The mediocre in poetry is merely fatuous; in sculpture, it is ugly. Generations to come will have to look at Coppini's monstrosity in front of the Alamo; it can't rot down or burn up. Volumes of worthless verse, most of it printed at the expense of the versifiers, hardly come to sight, and before long they disappear from existence except for copies religiously preserved in public libraries.

Weak fiction goes the same way. But a good deal of very bad prose in the nonfiction field has some value. In an otherwise dull book there may be a solitary anecdote, an isolated observation on a skunk, a single gesture of some human being otherwise highly unimportant, one salty phrase, a side glimpse into the human comedy. If poetry is not good, it is positively nothing.

The earliest poet of historical consequence the only form of his poetical consequence--of the Southwest was Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. He led the Texas cavalry at San Jacinto, became president of the Republic of Texas, organized the futile Santa Fe Expedition, gathered up six volumes of notes and letters for a history of Texas that might have been as raw-meat realistic as anything in Zola or Tolstoy. Then as a poet he reached his climax in "The Daughter of Mendoza"--a graceful but moonshiny imitation of Tom Moore and Lord Byron. Perhaps it is better for the weak to imitate than to try to be original.

It would not take one more than an hour to read aloud all the poetry of the Southwest that could stand rereading. At the top of all I should place Fay Yauger's "Planter's Charm," published in a volume of the same t.i.tle. With it belongs "The Hired Man on Horseback," by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a long poem of pa.s.sionate fidelity to his own decent kind of men, with power to enn.o.ble the reader, and with the form necessary to all beautiful composition. This is the sole and solitary piece of poetry to be found in all the myriads of rhymes cla.s.sed as "cowboy poetry."

I'd want Stanley Vestal's "Fandango," in a volume of the same t.i.tle.

Margaret Bell Houston's "Song from the Traffic," which takes one to the feathered mesquites and the bluebonnets, might come next. Begging pardon of the perpetually palpitating New Mexico lyricists, I would skip most of them, except for bits of Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Haniel Long, and maybe somebody I don't know, and go to George Sterling's "Father Coyote"--in California. Probably I would come back to gallant Phil LeNoir's "Finger of Billy the Kid," written while he was dying of tuberculosis in New Mexico. I wouldn't leave without the swift, brilliantly economical stanzas that open the ballad of "Sam Ba.s.s," and a single line, "He came of a solitary race," in the ballad of "Jesse James."

Several other poets have, of course, achieved something for mortals to enjoy and be lifted by. Their work has been sifted into various anthologies. The best one is_ Signature of the Sun: Southwest Verse, 1900-1950_, selected and edited by Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950. Two other anthologies are _Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp_, by John A. Lomax, 1919, reprinted in 1950 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York; _The Road to Texas_, by Whitney Montgomery, Kaleidograph, Dallas, 1940. Montgomery's Kaleidograph Press has published many volumes by southwestern poets.

Somebody who has read them all and has read all the poets represented, without enough of distillation, in _Signature of the Sun_ could no doubt be juster on the subject than I am.

Like historical fiction, drama of the Southwest has been less dramatic than actuality and less realistic than real characters. Lynn Riggs of Oklahoma, author of _Green Grow the Lilacs_, has so far been the most successful dramatist.

34. Miscellaneous Interpreters and Inst.i.tutions

ARTISTS

ART MAY BE SUBSTANTIVE, but more than being its own excuse for being, it lights up the land it depicts, shows people what is significant, cherishable in their own lives and environments. Thus Peter Hurd of New Mexico has revealed windmills, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri has elevated mules. Nature may not literally follow art, but human eyes follow art and literature in recognizing nature.

The history of art in the Southwest, if it is ever rightly written, will not bother with the Italian "Holy Families" imported by agent-guided millionaires trying to buy exclusiveness. It will begin with clay (Indian pottery), horse hair (vaquero weaving), hide (vaquero plaiting), and horn (backwoods carving). It will note Navajo sand painting and designs in blankets.

Charles M. Russell's art has been characterized in the chapter on "Range Life." He had to paint, and the Old West was his life. More versatile was his contemporary Frederic Remington, author of _Pony Tracks, Crooked Trails_, and other books, and prolific ill.u.s.trator of Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Henry Lewis, and numerous other writers of the West. Not so well known as these two, but rising in estimation, was Charles Schreyvogle. He did not write; his best-known pictures are reproduced in a folio ent.i.tled _My Bunkie and Others_. Remington, Russell, and Schreyvogle all did superb sculptoring in bronze. One of the finest pieces of sculpture in the Southwest is "The Seven Mustangs"

by A. Phimister Proctor, in front of the Texas Memorial Museum at Austin.

Among contemporary artists, Ross Santee and Will James (died, 1942) have ill.u.s.trated their own cow country books, some of which are listed under "Range Life" and "Horses." William R. Leigh, author of _The Western Pony_, is a significant painter of the range. Edward Borein of Santa Barbara, California, has in scores of etchings and a limited amount of book ill.u.s.trations "doc.u.mented" many phases of western life. Buck Dunton of Taos ill.u.s.trated also. His lithographs and paintings of wild animals, trappers, cowboys, and Indians seem secure.

I cannot name and evaluate modern artists of the Southwest. They are many, and the excellence of numbers of them is nationally recognized.

Many articles have been written about the artists who during this century have lived around Taos and painted that region of the Southwest.

Some of the better-known names are Ernest L. Blumenschein, Oscar Berninghaus, Ward Lockwood, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ila McAfee, Barbara Latham Cook, Howard Cook. Artists thrive in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas as well as in New Mexico. Tom Lea, of El Paso, may be quitting painting and drawing to spend the remainder of his life in writing. Perhaps he himself does not know. Jerry Bywaters, who is at work on the history of art in the Southwest, has about quit producing to direct the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Alexandre Hogue gives his strength to teaching art in Tulsa University. Exhibitions, not commentators, are the revealers of art.

A few books, all expensive, reproduce the art of certain depicters of the West and Southwest. _Etchings of the West_, by Edward Borein, and _The West of Alfred Jacob Miller_ have been noted in other chapters (consult Index). Other recent art works are: _Peter Hurd: Portfolio of Landscapes and Portraits_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950; _Gallery of Western Paintings_, edited by Raymond Carlson, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1951 (unsatisfactory reproduction); _Frederic Remington, Artist of the Old West_, by Harold McCracken, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1947 (biography and check list with many reproductions); _Portrait of the Old West_, by Harold McCracken, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1952 (samplings of numerous artists).

In February, 1946, Robert Taft of the University of Kansas began publishing in the _Kansas Historical Quarterly_ chapters, richly ill.u.s.trated in black and white, in "The Pictorial Record of the Old West." The book to be made from these chapters will have a historical validity missing in most picture books.

MAGAZINES

The leading literary magazine of the region is the _Southwest Review_, published quarterly at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. The _New Mexico Quarterly_, published by the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, the _Arizona Quarterly_, published by the University of Arizona at Tucson the _Colorado Quarterly_, published by the University of Colorado at Boulder, and _Prairie Schooner_, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, are excellent exponents of current writing in the Southwest and West. All these magazines are liberated from provincialism.

HISTORICAL SOCIETIES

Every state in the Southwest has a state historical organization that publishes. The oldest and most productive of these, outside of California, is the Texas State Historical a.s.sociation, with headquarters at Austin.

HISTORIES

A majority of the state histories of the Southwest have been written with the hope of securing an adoption for school use. It would require a blacksnake whip to make most juve-niles, or adults either, read these productions, as devoid of picturesqueness, life-blood, and intellectual content as so many concrete slabs. No genuinely humanistic history of the Southwest has ever been printed. There are good factual histories--and a history not based on facts can't possibly be good--but the lack of synthesis, of intelligent evaluations, of imagination, of the seeing eye and portraying hand is too evident. The stuff out of which history is woven--diaries, personal narratives, county histories, chronicles of ranches and trails, etc.--has been better done than history itself.

FOLKLORE

Considered scientifically, folklore belongs to science and not to the humanities. When folk and fun are not scienced out of it, it is song and story and in literature is mingled with other ingredients of life and art, as exampled by the folklore in _Hamlet_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. In "Indian Culture," "Spanish-Mexican Strains," "Backwoods Life and Humor," "Cowboy Songs," "The Bad Man Tradition," "Bears," "Coyotes,"

"Negro Folk Songs and Tales," and other chapters of this _Guide_ numerous books charged with folklore have been listed.

The most active state society of its kind in America has been the Texas Folklore Society, with headquarters at the University of Texas, Austin.

Volume XXIV of its Publications appeared in 1951, and it has published and distributed other books. Its Publications are now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press in Dallas. J. Frank Dobie, with constant help, was editor from 1922 to 1943, when he resigned. Since 1943 Mody C. Boatright has been editor.

In 1947 the New Mexico Folklore Society began publishing yearly the _New Mexico Folklore Record_. It is printed by the University of New Mexico Press. The University of Arizona, Tucson, has published several folklore bulletins. The California Folklore Society publishes, through the University of California Press, Berkeley, _Western Folklore_, a quarterly. In co-operation with the Southeastern Folklore Society, the University of Florida, Gainesville, publishes the _Southern Folklore Quarterly_. Levette J. Davidson of the University of Denver, author of _A Guide to American Folklore_, University of Denver Press, 1951, directs the Western Folklore Conference. The _Journal of American Folklore_ has published a good deal from the Southwest and Mexico. The Sociedad Folklorica de Mexico publishes its own _Anurio_. Between 1929 and 1932, B. A. Botkin, editor of _A Treasury of Southern Folklore_, 1949, and A _Treasury of Western Folklore_, 1951 (Crown, New York), brought out four volumes ent.i.tled _Folk-Say_, University of Oklahoma Press. OP. The volumes are significant for literary utilizations of folklore and interpretations of folks.

MUSEUMS

Museums do not belong to the DAR. Their perspective on the past is constructive. The growing museums in Santa Fe, Tucson, Phoenix, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Denver, and on west into California represent the art, fauna, flora, geology, archeology, occupations, transportation, architecture, and other phases of the Southwest in a way that may be more informing than many printed volumes.

35. Subjects for Themes

THE OBJECT OF THEME-WRITING is to make a student observe, to become aware, to evaluate, to enrich himself. Any phase of life or literature named or suggested in the foregoing chapters could be taken as a subject for an essay. The most immature essay must be more than a summary; a mere summary is never an essay. The writer must synthesize, make his own combination of thoughts, facts, incidents, characteristics, anecdotes, interpretations, ill.u.s.trations, according to his own pattern. A writer is a weaver, weaving various threads of various hues and textures into a design that is his own.