The Southwest
Introduction
THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST is a region of sun, space, and
silence. As one travels across the area, moving toward the setting
sun from Texas to Arizona, prairie grasslands shade off into
high plains which in turn give way to basin and range, desert and distant mountains.
The features of the earth change, but always there are the big
sky arching overhead and the chronic or sporadic aridity that,
in one way or another, has shaped the look of the land. In the
Southwest, as Ross Calvin has truly said, "sky determines."
In this region, as in the American West as a whole, the immensity
of nature, of earth and sky, dominates the imagination.
The human history of the Southwest is storied and colorful. Native
Americans have dwelled on the region's soil for at least twenty-five
thousand years. Their cultures flourished in the area for millennia
before the arrival of the first Europeans a mere four and a half
centuries ago. These Europeans, the Spaniards, brought with them
a pastoral, easygoing way of life that blended well with the
conditions imposed by the natural elements in the Southwest.
Reminders of the Indian and Spanish past are everywhere apparent
in the region. But the Southwest is nothing if not paradoxical;
it is both ancient and new, the home of centuries-old civilizations
and now, increasingly, a place of sprawling urban concentrations
and of high-tech industrial complexes that sit uneasily upon
the land. Man's relationship with nature has long been a theme
of southwestern life, but so, as the twentieth century draws
to a close, are the abrasions and dislocations of modern urban
existence.
In terms of the social organization of human life, the Southwest
today is, first and foremost, a borderland, a transition zone
in which AngloAmerican culture from the North meets and mingles
with Hispanic-Indian culture from the South. As in any borderland
there is conflict, but there is also rich cultural interchange,
borrowing and lending, voluntary and involuntary, of language,
customs, attitudes, and values. Anglo civilization in the Southwest
is different from that of other regions–even other subregions
of the American West–because, from the beginning, it has
rubbed against the culture of the Native American, the culture
of the Mexican-American, and (in the eastern reaches of the area)
the culture of the black, and in the process has been irrevocably
changed. There is too much ethnic strife in the Southwest to
claim that it is a model of the American melting pot, but no
other region in the country, it seems safe to say, has contained
more radically different cultures that have had to learn to accommodate
one
another–and to interact with and learn from one another.
The literature of the Southwest
has, inevitably, been formed by the natural, social, and historical
environments from which it emerged. There is scarcely a southwestern
book that does not, in some way, mirror the immense power of
land and weather. And certainly a major subject–perhaps
the major subject–of southwestern writing is the collision
of cultures, the forced, and sometimes fortuitous, melding of
disparate ethnic and cultural groups. The first work of printed
literature to issue from the Southwest, Alvar Núñez
Cabeza de Vaca's La Relación, published in Spain
in 1542, clearly sets forth these shaping themes and ideas.
Shipwrecked off the coast of Texas in 1528, Cabeza de Vaca and
three companions wandered for eight incredible years through
the coastal marshes, the plains and mountains of what is now
the American Southwest. They were eventually rescued by fellow
Spaniards in northern Mexico in 1536. Following a brief stay
in Mexico City, Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain where he composed
La Relación as a kind of report to his king, Charles
V, on his adventures in the New World. Though it was published
in Europe, Cabeza de Vaca's account was molded in the crucible
of a new and strange environment, and as a result, it is a peculiarly
American–and southwestern–document.
La Relación, even
when read in translation, is plainly a work of art, laced with
laconic subtlety and ambiguity, and it has intrigued readers
for centuries. In the Relación Cabeza de Vaca chronicles
his odyssey through a vast emptiness, a land of awe-inspiring
dimensions, of unfamiliar flora and fauna. He tells how he ultimately
reached physical safety and–by implication, at least–spiritual
maturity. Cabeza de Vaca's account is the prototype of one of
the most common vehicles of American literature: the journey
inward, a journey in which the physical ordeal is but the outward
manifestation of an underlying spiritual trial and discovery.
Much of Cabeza de Vaca's spiritual growth was apparently assisted
by the Native Americans he met along the way. Experience by experience,
year by year, Cabeza de Vaca shed the hauteur of the conquistador
as he acquired respect, and even love, for the people of an alien
culture. In the search for exemplary models of southwestern writing,
the Spaniard's La Relación seems a good place to
start.
Historically the Southwest is both old and new; the same may
be said of the region as a literary entity. It is old in that
it has been the home of notable literature for thousands of years.
It is new in that only in the last half-century or so has it
produced literary artists who have gained at least a measure
of general recognition as competent belles lettrists. The
oldest southwestern literature, of course, is that of the Native
Americans. In all comers of the region many groups of Native
Americans generated, long before the arrival of Europeans, unique
inventories of prose tales and poetry that gave creative voice
to the American Indian's philosophy and world-view. The Native
Americans' literary tradition was an oral tradition, and while
many of their stories and songs have been translated and recorded
in print, most have no doubt been lost–or remain untranscribed.
Native American literature is discussed in detail elsewhere in
this volume, but it must at least be mentioned in passing in
any general survey of southwestern literature.
The first Euro-Americans to write about the Southwest–beginning,
as mentioned, with Cabeza de Vaca in the mid-sixteenth century–were
the Spanish. Such narratives in Spanish as Pedro de Castañeda's
chronicle of the Coronado expedition and Gaspar Pérez
de Villagrá's history of Oñate's colonization of
New Mexico are fully as imaginative and "literary" as betterknown
contemporary works, in English, by John Smith and William Bradford.
In addition to a formal literary tradition, the Spanish brought
with them a rich folk heritage which evolved, in the New World,
in interesting ways. Folk drama, such as Los Pastores (the
"shepherds' play," concerning the nativity of Jesus, that
to this day exists in many versions across the Southwest), and
corridos, border ballads springing largely from AngloMexican
conflict, are two literary forms of the Hispanic folk culture
that developed in the region from the seventeenth century on.
However, as is true of American literature generally, it is widely
believed that the first real southwestern literature was composed
in English and began to appear only when–in the case of
the Southwest, in the nineteenth century–Anglo-Americans
began to settle the area. Zebulon Pike's Expedition (first
published in 1895, though written much earlier) and Mary Austin
Holley's Texas (1833) set the tone for this early "literature."
Nineteenthcentury southwestern writing comprises an abundance
of narratives of exploration, travel accounts, promotional tracts,
letters, journals, histories, and an assortment of miscellaneous
materials of the kind. Most of these works are not "literature"
at all. They are historical documents that possess, in varying
degrees, incidental literary value. Many of them are merely tedious
chronicles of everyday life and experiences–grist for the
historian's mill perhaps, but scarcely sustained achievements
of the creative imagination.
Luckily there is a handful of works of this type from the nineteenth
century that transcend the usual level of such books. There are,
for example, memorable narratives by mountain men who invaded
the Southwest: James O. Pattie's Personal Narrative (1831),
George Frederick Ruxton's Life in the Far West (1848),
and Lewis H. Garrard's Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail
(1850). There are a few inspired pieces of journalism, such as
George W. Kendall's Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition
(1844). There is the classic journal of the Santa Fe Trail
by Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies
(1844). There is the well-known account of the founding of the
Texas Republic by a survivor of Goliad, John C. Duval, entitled
Early Times in Texas
(1892). And perhaps most accomplished of all, in terms of literary
quality, there is a batch of memoirs by observant and perceptive
women who came to the Southwest in the nineteenth century: Down
the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, 1846–1847 (first
published in 1926), by Susan Shelby Magoffin; The Land of
the Pueblos (1889), by Susan Wallace, wife of General Lew
Wallace; and Vanished Arizona (1908), by Martha Summerhayes,
are notable examples of the genre.
In terms of national literary and cultural significance, the
most important historical event to occur in the Southwest in
the nineteenth century was the development, in the last three
or four decades of the century, of the cattle ranching industry
and the emergence of the cowboy, the central figure of that industry,
as a national folk hero. The cattle ranch and the cowboy were
created in their most recognizable forms after the Civil War,
in South Texas, as the result of increased demand for beef in
the North. Cattle drives from Texas to the Kansas railheads were,
of course, the immediate answer to that demand. Later vast ranching
operations and expansion of the nation's network of rail transportation
supplied more permanent answers. Most of the equipment and terminology
that quickly became associated with ranching and the cowboy evolved
along the Texas-Mexican border, as Anglo stockmen adapted Mexican
ranching techniques to their own peculiar conditions. The cowboy
and all his accoutrements quickly spread northwestward, and by
the turn of the century the cowboy was a folk figure associated
with the entire West. Historically, however, he originated in
the Southwest, specifically in Texas.
Gallons of ink have been spilled by historians and other interpreters
of the cowboy in an attempt to set the record straight, to preserve
the cowboy in print as he really was. Some of the best nonfiction
on the cowboy may be found in the memoirs and autobiographies
of cowboys themselves. A very handy and useful work of this genre
is The Trail Drivers of Texas (1924), a collection of
more then two hundred homely reminiscences by old-timers who
had gone up the trails from Texas in the late nineteeth century.
The classic cowboy memoir, however, is Charles Siringo's A
Texas Cowboy
(1886), a volume Will Rogers once called "the cowboy's Bible,"
indicating the degree to which Siringo shaped the late nineteenth-century
cowboy's image of himself. Many old-time cowboys left behind
accounts of their adventures, only a few of which can be mentioned
here. Perhaps the most literary of these accounts is J. Frank
Dobie's A Vaquero of the Brush Country
(1929), Dobie's reworking of the reminiscences of the Texas cattleman
John Young. Lucky 7: A Cowman's Autobiography (1957),
composed by Will Tom Carpenter and edited by Elton Miles, is
one of the best firsthand descriptions of the cowboy's day-to-day
activities. From the Pecos to the Powder: A Cowboy's Autobiography
(1967), by Bob Kennon as told to Ramon F. Adams, is another
excellent firsthand account of ranch life in the Southwest. For
pioneer ranching from a woman's perspective, No Life for a
Lady (1941), Agnes Morley Cleaveland's well-known chronicle,
cannot be topped.
As for formal history of the ranch and the cowboy, many titles
could be mentioned, but a few stand out above the rest. Walter
Prescott Webb's The Great Plains (1931) is interpretive
history at its best, and is required reading for anyone interested
in understanding the origins of the plains cattle kingdom. J.
Frank Dobie, in The Longhorns (1941) and Cow People
(1964), tells many artful tales of the ranch country, some
of them authentic, others considerably embellished by the author's
active imagination. J. Evetts Haley, a historian who has been
neglected and much underestimated as a writer, is the author
of The XIT Ranch of Texas (1929) and Charles Goodnight
(1936), the stories of a legendary ranch and a legendary
ranchman. Another celebrated cowman, Shanghai Pierce, is the
subject of an entertaining biography, Shanghai Pierce: A Fair
Likeness (1953), by Chris Emmett. The King Ranch (1957),
by Tom Lea, is the official history of that famous spread by
one of the Southwest's best-known writers.
Virtually all of the works mentioned so far are history, biography,
and memoirs, most of them from the nineteenth century. As already
indicated, they are not literature in the strictest sense of
the term. If literature is defined in the usual way–as comprising
works of some genuine imaginative and artistic merit that were
created within the Euro-American literary tradition and were
composed with the intention that they be considered and judged
as literature–then southwestern literature is largely a
phenomenon of the twentieth century. The relatively few pre-twentieth-century
attempts to create a fiction, poetry, or drama of the Southwest
usually turned out to be technically and intellectually immature.
Beginning with the anonymous novel L'heroine du Texas, published
in Paris, France in 1819, nineteenthcentury fiction set in the
Southwest was for the most part melodramatic and wildly unrealistic.
Southwestern poetry of that period tended to be sentimental and
metrically unimaginative. Obviously there are exceptions to any
such sweeping generalizations as the foregoing. One that comes
to mind immediately is Adolph Bandelier's The Delight Makers
(1890), a novel which remains readable and relevant. Even
Charles H. Hoyt's popular play A Texas Steer ( 1890), a
work which helped create many of the Texas stereotypes that abound
today, continues to stand up fairly well (certainly it is as
much a work of art as Larry L. King's Best Little Whorehouse
in Texas, written and produced in the 1970s).
Chronologically, then, southwestern literature is preponderantly
a literature of the twentieth century. Generically it is a literature
of prose. Novelists, short story writers, folklorists, historians,
journalists, and practitioners of various kinds of expository
prose have flourished within the region's borders throughout
most of the present century. Until very recent years–the
last decade or so–poets and playwrights have not. Again
there are exceptions to this generalization. Poets such as Glenn
Ward Dresbach, Arthur Sampley, and Fray Angelico Chavez practiced
their craft honorably and sometimes well during the early and
middle years of the century. And, in New Mexico especially, a
group of talented immigrant poets from other parts of the country–Witter
Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, Haniel Long, Winfield Townley
Scott, and others–wrote verse that was at least partially
shaped by the poets' experiences in the region. Probably the
only southwestern playwright of any significance in the early
decades of the century was Lynn Riggs, whose Green Grow the
Lilacs was transformed into one of the most popular American
musicals ever to be staged, Oklahoma.
If poetry and drama have not flowered in the Southwest, fiction
is the literary genre that has flourished in the region in the
twentieth century. Immediately after the turn of the century
fiction writers began to appear in profusion. Most of the best
of the early southwestern fictionists deal with life in the cattle
kingdom. Andy Adams's Log of a Cowboy (1903), Emerson
Hough's Heart's Desire (1903), Stewart Edward White's
Arizona Nights (1904), and Eugene Manlove Rhodes's many novels
and stories set in southern New Mexico all illustrate the generalization.
A writer whose contribution to the literary depiction of the
southwestern cattle country is sometimes overlooked is William
Sidney Porter (O. Henry).
Porter was a southerner by birth–a North Carolinian, to
be specific– and later an adopted son of New York, a city
he portrayed memorably in some of his most famous stories. As
a young man, however, Porter spent two years on an isolated ranch
in southwest Texas near the U.S.-Mexican border, working in a
desultory way as a cowboy and a sheepherder. He later lived in
the cities of Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. When Porter became
O. Henry, he naturally began to draw on his experiences and observations
as the stuff of his fiction, to transmute those experiences into
literary gold. Not surprisingly, the Texas years form the backdrop
for a sizable number of his tales.
Most of O. Henry's southwestern stories were collected in Heart
of the West (1907). Their portrayal of South Texas ranch
life at a time when the West was still at least semi-wild is
as accurate as the author's powers of observation and absorption
could make it. Among the more notable tales in the collection
are "The Higher Abdication," "The Princess and the
Puma," "The Hiding of Black Bill," "Hygeia at the Solito,"
and "The Last of the Troubadours." Of the final work named,
no less an authority than J. Frank Dobie has said–in his
Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest–it
is "the best range story in American fiction." While that
seems an overstatement, "The Last of the Troubadours" is
an interesting and authentic narrative of Texas ranch life in
the late nineteenth century. In terms of lasting influence, one
of O. Henry's most important stories is "The Caballero's
Way," which features as a character the Cisco Kid, who has appeared
and reappeared throughout the twentieth century in film, radio,
and television. In praising "The Caballero's Way" in his
Guide, Dobie focuses on the author's knowledgeable use
of background detail: "nobody," says Dobie, "has written
a better description of a prickly pear flat."
At the height of his celebrity O. Henry worked with astonishing
speed, turning out more than a story per week. Such haste could
not possibly contribute to the attainment of high literary quality.
To satisfy the demands of his many readers, the author inevitably
slipped into the use of the melodramatic, the sentimental, the
plot formula, the cheap, pat surprise ending; these are qualities,
needless to say, that have not enhanced his reputation among
recent critics of American literature. In addition, his facile,
flowery style grates against the modern reader's sense of aesthetic
rightness. Still, O. Henry was a born storyteller whose words
have pleased millions through the years. Certainly his southwestern
tales are worth reading. They are, for example, "realistic"
in that he ordinarily wrote only about things of which he had
some firsthand knowledge. Though they are perhaps too glib and
cheery to be realistic in the deeper sense, O. Henry's southwestern
stories and sketches are valuable portraits of the cattle kingdom
at the end of an era–the age of the open range.
It seems clear that a major chronological dividing line in southwestern
writing was the 1920s. In fact it was during that time that the
region's literature began to emerge from its primitive stage,
to mature and come of age. In Texas and New Mexico, especially,
the decade of the 1920s was a fruitful literary period. In New
Mexico immigrant artists, writers, and intellectuals first began
to congregate in Santa Fe and Taos at about that time. As early
as 1918 Mabel Dodge (later known by her married name, Mabel Dodge
Luhan) and Mary Austin had moved to northern New Mexico. Luhan
would eventually produce Winter in Taos (1935) and Edge
of the Taos Desert
(1937), autobiographical accounts that attempt to describe the
author's mystical attachment to the Southwest. Austin's southwestern
volumes of note include The Land of Journeys' Ending (1924)
and One-Smoke Stories (1934).
Willa Cather, though only a brief
resident in New Mexico in the 1920s, was inspired by her experiences
there to write one of the best of all southwestern novels, Death
Comes for the Archbishop (1927). The most famous literary
immigrant to New Mexico during the decade was, of course, the
British novelist D. H. Lawrence, who lived sporadically on a
ranch near Taos from 1922 to 1925. Lawrence once wrote that,
when he first saw the brilliant light of northern New Mexico,
"something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend."
Though the Southwest directly influenced only a couple of Lawrence's
short stories, much of the material in his excellent collection
of essays, Mornings in Mexico (1927), was drawn from his
time in New Mexico.
In Texas during the 1920s' J. Frank Dobie began to publish the
results of his forays into southwestern folk culture. In so doing,
he ushered in a literary and cultural era that the state's writers
and intellectuals are still attempting to come to terms with.
Dobie's career spanned many decades, but the roots of everything
he accomplished are in the pioneering work in Texas and southwestern
folklore that he did in the 1920s. Unquestionably Dobie's major
achievement was that almost singlehandedly he made southwesterners
of the 1920s and 1930s, when very little southwestern literature
as such existed, aware of the literary possibilities of their
folk heritage.
At the beginnings of his career, Dobie helped provide direction
and vigor for the young Texas Folklore Society, editing its annual
publication from 1922 to 1943. The Society remains today, thanks
in part to Dobie's influence, one of the state's most important
literary and cultural groups, and its long list of publications
is a rich store of regional folk materials, both original and
interpretive. In recent years Dobie has been chastised severely
by the so-called "scientific folklorists," who deplore the
Texan's lack of devotion to folklore as a systematic and rigorously
precise discipline. (Dobie's professed, and only half-joking,
attitude toward the collection and publishing of folk materials
was that he never let the truth stand in the way of his telling
a good story.)
But despite Dobie's contributions to the collection and study
of southwestern folklore of various kinds, he was not himself
essentially a folklorist, and it is at this point that the criticisms
of the "scientific folklorists" miss the mark. Certainly
he was an avid collector and aficionado of folktales, but he
used those tales as raw material and inspiration, not as finished
products safely preserved in an index and properly cross-referenced
by theme and motif. Stories filtered through a writer's intelligence
and transmuted by an artist's imagination are naturally going
to be changed from their original form. Dobie did not attempt,
as would the academic folklorist, to transcribe faithfully the
folktales he had gathered from field research; he strove instead
to transform them into literature. He saw himself in the grand
tradition of oral storytellers he had known and felt that he
was handicapped by having to use a pen rather than his voice.
In a sense he modeled his works after the style and organization
of the great taletellers he had listened to. His books often
seem choppy and disorganized because they are composed of many
short tales clustered around a common theme; with good reason,
he called his works "mosaics." They are meant to approximate
the breaks in thought, the abrupt disconnections of the storyteller's
monologue. The best of Dobie's books are successful, however,
because their hidden and underlying threads are never broken,
and each tale included develops and enlarges an overall pattern.
Dobie's method worked best when he wrote on the vast lore concerning
the Southwest's lost mines and buried treasure–Coronado's
Children
(1931) and Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver (1939) are his
two books structured around that general topic–and when
he allowed his imagination to wander through the myriad of folktales
and traditions having to do with southwestern animals, as he
did in The Longhorns, The Voice of the Coyote (1949),
and The Mustangs (1952). Finished just before his death
in 1964, Cow People is also one of his better books; it
is a delightful compendium of tales of eccentric southwestern
ranchers and stockmen and springs from the author's firsthand
knowledge of such people as well as from extensive reading about
them. Some may downgrade Dobie's efforts and others dismiss him
altogether, but his books will be read and his influence will
endure as long as there are people who love the lore and legendry
of Texas and the Southwest.
Though Dobie possesses the best claim to the title of "Mr.
Southwest," as Lawrence Clark Powell has called him, he is often
linked in the popular mind with his colleagues and contemporaries,
Walter Prescott Webb and Roy Bedichek. One of the things that
united this triumvirate of friends–so different in temperament
and specific interests–was a determination to explore the
various aspects of Texas and southwestern history and culture.
Of the three, Dobie was the most prolific, and his dominating
influence as a public figure as well as a literary personage
ensures his historical importance. Webb was the most original
and fertile thinker. Bedichek was perhaps the best writer. As
a historian, Webb–who taught for three decades at the University
of Texas at Austin–must be judged elsewhere, though it seems
safe to say that an understanding of his ideas is basic to any
study of the history of the American West; as a writer, Webb
was a creator of luminous and flowing prose, and unquestionably
his books are literary accomplishments that deserve to stand
alongside those of Dobie and Bedichek. In the writing of each
of his major works–The Great Plains (1931), The
Texas Rangers (1935), and The Great Frontier (1952)–he
began with a shaping concept, then chose the appropriate language
in which to frame his ideas. The results of his labors were books
of provocative intellectual scope composed in a vivid, readable
style.
Roy Bedichek, the third member of the triumvirate, was for many
years director of Texas's University Interscholastic League and,
in that demanding position, had little time to write. In fact,
he began to publish his books only after retirement from directorship
of the League. By that time he was nearing seventy, and his mind
had ripened and mellowed. A lifetime of observing nature and
of wide and intelligent reading had produced a truly remarkable
understanding of the workings of the natural order. His Adventures
with a Texas Naturalist (1947) is a quiet statement of joy
in the observation and appreciation of southwestern plant and
wildlife; it is at once a philosophical treatise, a celebration
of life, and a minor classic in the field of natural history.
Karánkawuy Country (1950) and The Sense of Smell
(1960), sequels to his first book, are on only a slightly
lower level of achievement.
The era of Dobie, Webb, and Bedichek–which began in the
1920s and encompassed four decades–is now closed. Among
Texans and southwesterners, these three writers attained the
status of an institution, celebrities known and admired by thousands
who had never read any of their books. Perhaps, as has been charged,
their reputations during their lifetime were inflated far beyond
the bounds that a dispassionate study of their works would impose.
That point remains for future generations of readers and critics
to decide. But while the final dimensions of their accomplishment
have not yet been determined, it seems clear that their most
important function was to serve as literary pioneers. They demonstrated
that their native region contained cultural materials to satisfy
the imaginative requirements of the most curious and the most
talented, and that from these local and regional materials writers,
philosophers, and historians might construct art of the highest
order. The acknowledging of their example, then, appears at least
as important as the measuring of their various achievements.
One of J. Frank Dobie's most significant contributions to the
recognition and study of southwestern literature was his initiation
and teaching of a celebrated course at the University of Texas
at Austin: "The Life and Literature of the Southwest," first
offered in 1930. (From this course, incidentally, emerged Dobie's
bibliography, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest.)
Other earlyday classes in southwestern literature were taught
by Mabel Major at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and
by T. M. Pearce at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
The decade of the 1930s was a period of ebullient optimism concerning
the viability of the concept of regionalism as a key to understanding
the American experience, and the presence of such courses in
college curricula provided a cloak of legitimacy for the idea
of a coherent and unified southwestern culture. The mass media
provided further support. During the 1930s, for example, the
Saturday Review of Literature, the most prestigious literary
magazine of the day, devoted an entire issue to the blossoming
of southwestern writing.
Indeed the impetus supplied by Dobie and others in the late 1920s
and early 1930s issued into a kind of golden age of southwestern
literature. The four decades or so between 1925 and 1965 constitute
the region's classic literary period. The area's biggest literary
names come from this time. Katherine Anne Porter, Harvey Fergusson,
Paul Horgan, Oliver La Farge, and William Eastlake, for instance,
are each the subject of a full chapter to follow. Other southwestern
writers from these decades who ought not to be forgotten include
Dorothy Scarborough, Edwin Lanham, John W. Thomason, Jr., George
Milburn, George Sessions Perry, Ross Calvin, Haniel Long, Frank
Goodwyn, Stanley Vestal, Loula Grace Erdman, Tom Lea, William
A. Owens, Max Evans, William Goyen, and William Humphrey. Three
writers in particular from the period–Conrad Richter, Edwin
Corle, and Fred Gipson–though not treated in separate chapters,
deserve special mention.
A native of Pennsylvania, Conrad Richter resided in New Mexico
from 1928 to 1950. Like so many immigrant artists before him,
Richter was from the first fascinated by the Southwest, by what
seemed to him a lovely, exotic land. He traveled throughout New
Mexico and adjacent states, listened to tales told by the region's
old-timers, and dug through back issues of newspapers and into
manuscript collections. The results of his probings filled several
thick notebooks. The notebooks, in turn, supplied background
materials for a series of memorable and authentic stories and
novels set in New Mexico and the Southwest. Of his twenty-one
published volumes, only four are about the Southwest, but they
are among his best and most memorable works.
Richter's first southwestern book, Early Americana (1936),
is a gathering of short stories set in West Texas and New Mexico.
The second, The Sea of Grass (1937), is one of the region's
classic works. Historically and mythically The Sea of Grass
concerns the nineteenth-century conflict between cattleman
and nester, or more generally between the old West and the new
West. In terms of the story the conflict is shown dramatically
as a personal triangle: the cattleman Jim Brewton, his wife Lutie,
and the district attorney Brice Chamberlain, who champions the
nesters' cause. Interestingly the triangle extends into the next
generation, the Brewton children: Jimmy is a replica of his father;
Sarah Beth closely resembles her mother; and Brock looks and
acts like Brice Chamberlain (whose son he is). The narrative
spans about two decades, during which wrenching changes occur.
At first the cattleman rides tall in the saddle. Gradually, however,
the nesters gain control of the land, plowing under the native
grasses to put in their crops. Extended drought eventually proves
that dry-land farming is not feasible in the area, blows away
much of the topsoil, and drives out the nesters, leaving the
land, minus its precious grasses, for Brewton to reclaim. The
character in the book who arouses the most sympathy in the reader
is Jim Brewton, a circumstance that suggests that Richter's loyalties
were clearly with the old order, though the author could not
deny the historical reality of "progress" and change. However
arrogant and privileged he seems at the beginning of the novel,
Brewton ultimately shows himself to be a responsible and compassionate
human being, much more so than the self-serving and politically
motivated Brice Chamberlain.
Tacey Cromwell (1942), the story of a bawdy house madam
who becomes a respectable "mother" and businesswoman, and
The Lady (1957), based loosely on the unsolved mystery
of Judge Albert J. Fountain's 1896 disappearance somewhere between
Lincoln and Las Cruces, New Mexico, are Richter's remaining southwestern
novels. The quality of Richter's southwestern fiction is admirable.
In particular the author's mastery of language– his ability
to suggest much in few words–was remarkable. Richter's daughter,
Harvena, once wrote that her father attempted to create "swift
pictures" that were employed "to compress the times and
spaces of a country into tight mythic structures." This indeed
was one of Richter's favorite literary devices, and when it succeeds,
as it often does in his narratives, even a brief passage may
unfold a suggestive complexity that works at once on the intellectual, imaginative, and mythic levels of awareness.
Another adopted son of the Southwest, Edwin
Corle, began to study the lore and history of the region in the 1930s, as a hobby to
break the routine of his job as a radio script writer. Eventually
he traveled widely in the area getting to know the people and
places as well as their history. His personal and scholarly knowledge
of the region is evident in two superlative works of interpretive
nonfiction, Desert Country (1941) and The Gila: River
of the Southwest (1951). It is also apparent in several works
of exceptionally good fiction.
Following Mojave: A Book of Stories (1934), an inauspicious
debut, Corle published Fig Tree John (1935), his masterpiece
and one of the finest of southwestern novels. The title character
of Fig Tree John is an Apache who in the early years of
the twentieth century uproots himself from his home in Arizona
and resettles in the Salton Sea area of southern California.
Isolated from his people, he grows increasingly bitter and vengeful,
as first his wife is murdered by a pair of white tramps and then
his son is gradually lured from the old ways and into the white
man's world. John comes to view the whites as the source of all
evil; the inevitable result of such a clash of cultural values
is hatred, violence, and ultimately the Native American's destruction.
Despite the author's penchant for commenting a bit too obtrusively
on the working of the "primitive mind," Fig Tree John
is a superbly realistic and powerful novel.
Though he never fulfilled the promise of his first novel, Corle
continued to publish creditable fiction for two decades–a
total of seven more novels. People on the Earth (1937)
and In Winter Light (1949) are readable and sensitive
fictional studies of the plight of the reservation Navajos immediately
before and after the Second World War, a time when the Native
American's traditional culture was being systematically eroded
by white teachers and missionaries. Burro Alley (1938)
is quite unlike any of the author's other books; it is genuinely
funny, a hilarious–some might say scurrilous–satire
of Santa Fe during the tourist season. Billy the Kid (1953),
Corle's last published book, is a provocative account of the
life of the notorious southwestern gunman. Based on thorough
research, the work, according to the author, should be considered
as fiction; it might, indeed, be called an early-day "nonfiction
novel." Corle, invoking the license of fiction, offers interesting
solutions to some of the enduring mysteries surrounding the Kid's
life. The one nearly unique aspect of the novel is that the writer
seems neither pro-Billy nor anti-Billy; unlike the myriad of
interpreters before him, Corle remains thoroughly neutral in
reporting the Kid's actions.
Corle died at the still young age of fifty. Even with such a
foreshortened career, however, his achievement is impressive:
one excellent novel and several very good ones, plus some nonfiction
that every serious student of the Southwest should be familiar
with. Corle has never been ranked very far up in the hierarchy
of southwestern writers. He should be. He produced more and better
work than many southwestern authors whose reputations are greater.
One of the most popular of southwestern writers in the 1940s
and 1950s, if not necessarily the best, was Fred Gipson. Gipson's
tales of the Texas "hill country" have charmed young and
old alike, in print and in film, for nearly four decades. Several
of his stories were made into motion pictures by the Disney company,
and these movies have no doubt done more to keep the author's
name alive than the books–though the books continue to be
read, particularly by young people. Gipson had the rare ability
to appeal simultaneously to many different levels of intelligence;
preteen children and sophisticated literary critics can read
his novels apparently with equal pleasure and appreciation.
Gipson's two best novels, by far, are Hound-Dog Man (1948)
and Old Yeller (1956). Both are narratives of the Texas
frontier, and both are initiation stories; the first is told by a twelve-year-old
named Cotton, the second by a fourteen-year-old, Travis. Hound-Dog
Man is structured around a threeday raccoon hunt during which
Cotton is initiated into the ritual of the hunt and into some
of the mysteries of adult life by Blackie Scantling, the "hound-dog
man" of the title. The novel is notable for presenting a memorable
array of "hill country" types who make cameo appearances
in the story.
Old Yeller, on which the best known of the movies made
from Gipson's works was based, is again a tale of growing up.
Young Travis assumes an adult role when his father leaves on
a months-long cattle drive to Kansas. With the aid of his beloved
dog Old Yeller, Travis successfully battles the elements and
a threatened plague of hydrophobia to keep family and farm intact
until his father's return. Gipson's remaining works of fiction–such
as The Home Place (1950) and Recollection Creek (1955)–do
not come close to matching the high quality of his two best novels.
Some critics have professed to see latent "literary greatness"
in Gipson's work. This seems, however, to claim too much. Gipson
was a topnotch storyteller, one of the best the Southwest has
spawned. He had a good ear for dialect and a light hand in transcribing
it. He handled well, if not very originally, that most familiar
theme in American fiction: initiation. He was conscientious and
honorable as a craftsman, and he will be read when writers with
flashier reputations have disappeared without a ripple. To say
that greatness eluded him is not to say that he failed.
Following the plethora of excellent southwestern writers that
appeared in the middle decades of the century, the 1960s proved
a watershed period in the region's literature. The 1960s were,
of course, a time of upheaval and change for the nation as a
whole, and the Southwest did not escape the cultural tremors
that shook the rest of America. The two predominating impulses
that had motivated and guided the region's writers up to that
decade were a preoccupation with an undeniably colorful past
and a passion, often ambivalent but nonetheless intense, for
a harsh and beautiful land. But in the 1960s these two traditional
subjects–history and landscape– began to seem increasingly
implausible. The romantic past had become ever more remote and
had begun to fade even from the memories of old-timers; there
were scarcely any left who remembered how it was before the turn
of the century. And though the region still possessed open spaces
in abundance, the landscape appeared to have been greatly diminished
by urban sprawl and by modern transportation and communication;
the country no longer seemed as formidable or as beautiful as
it once had.
During the last quarter-century, the most important social and
cultural movement in the Southwest has been from village and
country into the burgeoning cities, away from the land and the
beliefs and traditions it nurtured. This movement has given
birth to drastic and, to some extent, still unforeseeable consequences.
One clearly discernible fact, however, stands forth: the Southwest
is now predominantly urban, and many southwesterners have been
forced over the past couple of decades to adjust to a pattern
of life wholly different from the one in which they were reared.
Writers mirror their environment. In the past southwestern writers
have been mainly rural in origin, and as a result they have written
about their feelings for the land, about a past still vividly
remembered. But in recent years the southwesterner's roots–and
the writer's no less than his fellow's–have been wrenched
from the soil and planted in concrete. The southwestern writer's
image of himself, consequently, and his conception of his function
seem to be changing, perhaps radically. The region's authors
are still attempting, and no doubt many in the future will continue
to attempt, to take fresh views of the past and of a wonderfully
varied landscape. But at present the task that many southwestern
writers appear to have set for themselves is to come to grips
with a rapidly evolving society. In particular, they seem bent
on trying to understand the city, on absorbing its essential
qualities and incorporating those qualities into their books.
Exceptions to the foregoing generalization must be immediately
acknowledged. One of the Southwest's most accomplished novelists,
Benjamin Capps, who is discussed in a chapter that follows, continues
to explore the region's nineteenth-century history. So did R.
G. Vliet, who, before his untimely death in 1984, wrote a pair
of innovative novels about nineteenthcentury Texas, Rockspring
(1974) and Solitudes (1977). Elmer Kelton, himself
the son of a West Texas cowboy, has published more than a score
of novels during the last three decades that chronicle the cowboy's
evolving role in regional culture. Kelton's best books are The
Day the Cowboys Quit
(1971), The Time It Never Rained (1973), and The Good
Old Boys (1978). Of these The Time It Never Rained, set
during the disastrous West Texas drought of the 1950
Another seeming exception to the generalization is Edward Abbey,
whose writing career began with The Brave Cowboy in 1956
and is still flourishing in the 1980s. The recurring theme of
Abbey's work, in his own phrase, is the necessity to preserve
"wilderness and freedom." And yet the amount of space he
devotes to railing against population growth and technological
"progress" in the Southwest is indicative of the degree
to which these conditions have come increasingly to characterize
the region. Perhaps the career of Larry McMurtry supplies a more
suggestive paradigm of what has happened to the southwestern
writer in the past two decades. In the early 1960s McMurtry dragged
southwestern fiction, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth
century; McMurtry's salty language and racy subject matter were
unusual, if not unique, in the region's literature at the time.
In his first three novels, McMurtry wrote about rural and small-town
West Texas, deftly and effectively mixing nostalgia and social
criticism. In his fourth novel, Moving On ( 1970), however,
the author shifted his setting to an urban locale, Houston, and
he has not looked back since. In subsequent books he has continued
to write about Houston, and has laid his most recent fiction
in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas.
The urban milieu and its attendant social dislocations, then,
have gradually come to dominate southwestern writing, particularly
fiction. Dan Jenkins, Gary Cartwright, John Weston, Peter Gent,
Shelby Hearon, John Rechy, Bryan Woolley, Georgia McKinley, Laura
Furman, and Stephen Harrigan are but a few of the recent southwestern
novelists who have effectively used urban settings and developed
social themes in their fiction. Edwin Shrake's But Not for
Love (1964) and Strange Peaches (1972) are especially
vivid evocations of the southwestern urban environment. The first
set in Fort Worth, the second in Dallas, these novels accurately
project the rootless, valueless ambience of modern city life.
Even books set in relatively small cities often concern big-city
problems. An example is John Nichols's Chamisaville trilogy–The
Milagro Beanfield War (1974), The Magic Journey
(1978), and The Nirvana Blues (1981)–which deals
with racial conflict and existentialist angst in a thinly disguised
Taos. Moreover, the murder mystery, traditionally an urban genre,
has recently made an appearance in the Southwest. Tony Hillerman
in New Mexico and David L. Lindsey in Texas are mystery writers
who show promise of attracting large national followings.
In this ninth decade of the twentieth century, southwestern literature
appears in the process of ferment and significant change. In
addition to the increasing influence of the urban environment
on the region's writers, other changes are also occurring. For
instance, in the last few years poetry and drama have assumed
an importance in the area's literature that they did not previously
possess. The astonishing growth in the volume of poetry published
in the Southwest (if not in its quality) seems directly attributable
to the proliferation of small presses in the region. The expansion
of dramatic activity, however, has probably been stimulated primarily
by the muchpublicized financial success of a handful of recent
plays by southwestern playwrights, prime examples being Preston
Jones's Texas Trilogy and the aforementioned Best Little
Whorehouse in Texas.
Another trend in contemporary southwestern literature that appears likely to extend well into the future is the
growth in the number of writers from the region's minority ethnic
groups. Mexican-American writers especially have been active
in recent years. "With His Pistol in His Hand": A
Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), by Américo Paredes,
longtime professor of English and folklore at the University
of Texas at Austin, was a pioneer book in its field, as much
a work of the creative imagination as of scholarship. Paredes
was the forerunner of a group of talented Texas Mexican writers
that includes Rolando Hinojosa, Tomás Rivera, Aristeo
Brito, and Estela Portillo Trambley. Rudolfo Anaya in New Mexico
and Miguel Méndez in Arizona are equally important contributors
to the rapidly expanding Chicano literature of the Southwest.
N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968) and Leslie
Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) are notable works of fiction
by contemporary Native Americans from the Southwest. Both Mexican-American
and Native American writers are discussed in detail elsewhere
in this literary history.
Another current trend in southwestern literature is the ever-growing
influx of writers from other regions. As mentioned above, literary
immigration is a phenomenon that has long been familiar to New
Mexico. Now, as the region as a whole prospers economically and
culturally, the migration of artists and writers to all parts
of the Southwest becomes more pronounced. In Texas especially
authors seem to materialize with the arrival of every incoming
bus. Carolyn Osborn, Marshall Terry, Shelby Hearon, Max Apple,
Laura Furman, Beverly Lowry, John Irsfeld–these are just
a handful of the gifted writers from other states who in recent
years settled in Texas, either permanently or temporarily, and
have written about the state. These writers bring to Texas and
southwestern literature a sophistication and cosmopolitan outlook
that, for the most part, it has lacked in the past. They also
help to nudge the region's literature more into the mainstream
of American writing.
But with every gain there is a corresponding loss. Unquestionably
the future of literature in the Southwest is bright. The future
of southwestern literature, on the other hand, is somewhat less
certain. The changes alluded to, many of which benefit southwestern
culture, and the increasing volume of writing and the sheer number
of writers in the region are signs that encourage those interested
in the advancement of southwestern literature. However, the question
remains: will the region continue to stimulate writing that smacks
of the flavor of the Southwest; or will southwestern literature
become more and more part of an homogeneous national literature?
The literary hopes and expectations of southwesterners who desire
the former are grounded most securely in the knowledge that the
Southwest is a unique place, a region that works strongly and
fruitfully on the imaginations of writers who were born or have
lived there. The region grows and changes, and yet the distinctive
sense of place that it emanates remains unchanged, a shaping
force on the cultural life that it supports. It seems likely
that there will always be a niche in American literature that
is recognizably southwestern.
WILLIAM T. P ILKINGTON, Tarleton State University
Anderson, John Q., Edwin W. Gaston,
and James W. Lee, eds. Southwestern American Literature: A
Bibliography. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1980. The most extensive
and up-to-date bibliography of southwestern writing.
Bennett, Patrick. Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews. College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980. Though limited
to Texas authors, the interviews collected here are revealing
and, for the most part, entertaining and useful.
Campbell, Walter S. The Book
Lover's Southwest: A Guide to Good Reading. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1955. A fascinating guide to browse in, though
now badly outdated. Campbell usually wrote under the pen name
of Stanley Vestal.
Dobie, J. Frank. Guide to Life
and Literature of the Southwest. Revised Edition. Dallas:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1952. A classic work. Though
out of date, Dobie's Guide is arguably the most humane and readable
bibliography ever compiled on any subject.
Fergusson, Erna. Our Southwest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. Still an excellent introdution to the region, by the sister of Harvey Fergusson, one of the Southwest's major authors.
Folsom, James K. The American
Western Novel. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press,
1966. Many of the novels referred to in Folsom's survey are by
southwestern writers.
Frantz, Joe B., and Ernest Choate. The American
Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. The best discussion
to date of the cultural and literary roots of the cowboy myth.
Gaston, Edwin W. The Early Novel of the Southwest. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1961. Scarce on analysis, Gaston's
book provides plot summaries of scores of nineteenth-century
southwestern novels.
Graham, Don, James W. Lee, and William T.
Pilkington, eds. The Texas Literary Tradition: Fiction, Folklore,
History. Austin: College of Liberal Arts of the University
of Texas and the Texas State Historical Association, 1983. Essays
by
writers, critics, and scholars that cover the spectrum of Texas
literature.
McMurtry, Larry. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on
Texas. Austin: Encino Press, 1968. Essays on topics cultural
and literary by one of Texas's best-known authors. See especially
the essay entitled "Southwestern Literature?"
Major, Mabel, and T. M. Pearce. Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with
Bibliographies. Third Edition. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1972. The most thorough reference tool available
to support the study of southwestern literature.
Milton, John R. The Novel of
the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1980. Particularly good on Harvey Fergusson and Frank
Waters.
Pettit, Arthur G. Images of the Mexican American in
Fiction and Film. College Station: Texas A&M University
Press, 1980. Helpful analysis of the portrayal of Mexican-Americans
in a wide array of southwestern novels.
Pilkington, William T. My Blood's Country: Studies in Southwestern Literature. Fort
Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1973. Critical essays
on a half-dozen of the region's most important authors.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Southwest
Classics. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press,
1974. Appreciative introductions to a score of classic southwestern
books.
Sonnichsen, C. L. From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on
Western Fiction. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1978. An opinionated–and
highly entertaining–discourse on western fiction. A majority
of the novels mentioned are by southwestern authors.
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.