"HE'S FOR A JIG or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps." Thought employs
ideas, but having an idea is not the same thing as thinking. A rooster
in a pen of hens has an idea. Thought has never been so popular with
mankind as horse opera, horse play, the main idea behind sheep's eyes.
Far be it from me to feel contempt for people who cannot and do not want
to think. The human species has not yet evolved to the stage at which
thought is natural. I am far more at ease lying in grass and gazing
without thought process at clouds than in sitting in a chair trying to
be logical. Just the same, free play of mind upon life is the essence
of good writing, and intellectual activity is synonymous with critical
interpretations.
To the constant disregard of thought, Americans of the mid-twentieth
century have added positive opposition. Critical ideas are apt to
make any critic suspected of being subversive. The Southwest, Texas
especially, is more articulately aware of its land spaces than of any
other feature pertaining to itself. Yet in the realm of government,
the Southwest has not produced a single spacious thinker. So far as the
cultural ancestry of the region goes, the South has been arid of thought
since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the much talked-of mind of John C.
Calhoun being principally casuistic; on another side, derivatives from
the Spanish Inquisition could contribute to thought little more than
tribal medicine men have contributed.
Among historians of the Southwest the general rule has been to be
careful with facts and equally careful in avoiding thought-provoking
interpretations. In the multitudinous studies on Spanish-American
history all padres are "good" and all conquistadores are "intrepid," and
that is about as far as interpretation goes. The one state book of
the Southwest that does not chloroform ideas is Erna Fergusson's _New
Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples_ (Knopf, New York, 1952). Essayical
in form, it treats only of the consequential. It evaluates from the
point of view of good taste, good sense, and an urbane comprehension of
democracy. The subject is provincial, but the historian transcends all
provincialism. Her sympathy does not stifle conclusions unusable in
church or chamber of commerce propaganda. In brief, a cultivated mind
can take pleasure in this interpretation of New Mexico--and that marks
it as a solitary among the histories of neighboring states.
The outstanding historical interpreter of the Southwest is Walter
Prescott Webb, of the University of Texas. _The Great Plains_ utilizes
chronology to explain the presence of man on the plains; it is primarily
a study in cause and effect, of water and drought, of adaptations and
lack of adaptations, of the land's growth into human imagination as well
as economic institutions. Webb uses facts to get at meanings. He fulfils
Emerson's definition of Scholar: "Man Thinking." In _Divided We Stand_
he goes into machinery, the feudalism of corporation-dominated economy,
the economic supremacy of the North over the South and the West. In
_The Great Frontier_ (Houghton Mifilin, Boston, 1952) he considers the
Western Hemisphere as a frontier for Europe--a frontier that brought
about the rise of democracy and capitalism and that, now vanished as a
frontier, foreshadows the vanishment of democracy and capitalism.
In _Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and a Myth_ (Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950) Henry Nash Smith plows
deep. But the tools of this humanistic historian are of delicate finish
rather than of horsepower. To him, thinking is a joyful process and
lucidity out of complexity is natural. He compasses Parrington's _Main
Currents in American Thought_ and Beadle's Dime Novels along with
agriculture and manufacturing. Excepting the powerful books by Walter
Prescott Webb, not since Frederick Jackson Turner, in 1893, presented
his famous thesis on "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History" has such a revealing evaluation of frontier movements appeared
As a matter of fact, Henry Nash Smith leaves Turner's ideas on the
dependence of democracy upon farmers without more than one leg to stand
upon. Not being a King Canute, he does not take sides for or against
social evolution. With the clearest eyes imaginable, he looks into it.
Turner's _The Frontier in American History_ (1920) has been a fertile
begetter of interpretations of history.
Instead of being the usual kind of jokesmith book or concatenation
of tall tales, _Folk Laughter on the American Frontier_ by Mody C.
Boatright (Macmillan, New York, 1949) goes into the human and social
significances of humor. Of boastings, anecdotal exaggerations,
hide-and-hair metaphors, stump and pulpit parables, tenderfoot baitings,
and the like there is plenty, but thought plays upon them and arranges
them into patterns of social history.
Mary Austin (1868-1934) is an interpreter of nature, which for her
includes naturally placed human beings as much as naturally placed
antelopes and cacti. She wrote _The American Rhythm_ on the theory that
authentic poetry expresses the rhythms of that patch of earth to which
the poet is rooted. Rhythm is experience passed into the subconscious
and is "distinct from our intellectual perception of it." Before they
can make true poetry, English-speaking Americans will be in accord
with "the run of wind in tall grass" as were the Pueblo Indians when
Europeans discovered them. But Mary Austin's primary importance is not
as a theorist. Her spiritual depth is greater than her intellectual. She
is a translator of nature through concrete observations. She interprets
through character sketches, folk tales, novels. "Anybody can write facts
about a country," she said. She infuses fact with understanding and
imagination. In _Lost Borders_, _The Land of Little Rain_, _The Land of
Journey's Ending_, and _The Flock_ the land itself often seems to speak,
but often she gets in its way. She sees "with an eye made quiet by the
power of harmony." _Earth Horizons_, a stubborn book, is Mary Austin's
inner autobiography. _The Beloved House_, by T. M. Pearce (Caxton,
Caldwell, Idaho, 1940), is an understanding biography.
Joseph Wood Krutch of Columbia University spent a year in Arizona, near
Tucson. Instead of talking about his _The Desert Year_ (Sloane, New
York, 1952), I quote a representative paragraph:
In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of
plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the
spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned,
would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of plant
against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting factor
is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if this is, perhaps, one of
the things which makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of peace one
does not find elsewhere. The struggle of living thing against living
thing can be distressing in a way that a mere battle with the elements
is not. If some great clump of cactus dies this summer it will be
because the cactus has grown beyond the capacity of its roots to get
water, not because one green fellow creature has bested it in some
limb-to-limb struggle. In my more familiar East the crowding of the
countryside seems almost to parallel the crowding of the cities. Out
here there is, even in nature, no congestion.
_Southwest_, by Laura Adams Armer (New York, 1935, OP) came from long
living and brooding in desert land. It says something beautiful.
_Talking to the Moon_, by John Joseph Mathews (University of Chicago
Press, 1945) is set in the blackjack country of eastern Oklahoma. This
Oxford scholar of Osage blood built his ranch house around a fireplace,
flanked by shelves of books. His observations are of the outside,
but they are informed by reflections made beside a fire. They are not
bookish at all, but the spirits of great writers mingle with echoes of
coyote wailing and wood-thrush singing.
_Sky Determines: An Interpretation of the Southwest_, by Ross Calvin
(New York, 1934; republished by the University of New Mexico Press)
lives up to its striking title. The introductory words suggest the
essence of the book:
In New Mexico whatever is both old and peculiar appears upon examination
to have a connection with the arid climate. Peculiarities range from the
striking adaptations of the flora onward to those of fauna, and on up
to those of the human animal. Sky determines. And the writer once
having picked up the trail followed it with certainty, and indeed almost
inevitably, as it led from ecology to anthropology and economics.
Cultivated intellect is the highest form of civilization. It is
inseparable from the arts, literature, architecture. In any civilized
land, birds, trees, flowers, animals, places, human contributors to
life out of the past, all are richer and more significant because of
representations through literature and art. No literate person can
listen to a skylark over an English meadow without hearing in its
notes the melodies of Chaucer and Shelley. As the Southwest advances
in maturity of mind and civilization, the features of the land take on
accretions from varied interpreters.
It is not necessary for an interpreter to write a whole book about
a feature to bring out its significance. We need more gossipy
books--something in the manner of _Pinon Country_ by Haniel Long (Duell,
Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1941), in which one can get a swift slant on
Billy the Kid, smell the pinon trees, feel the deeply religious attitude
toward his corn patch of a Zuni Indian. Roy Bedichek's chapters on the
mockingbird, in _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_, are like rich talk
under a tree on a pleasant patch of ground staked out for his claim by
an April-voiced mockingbird. In _The Voice of the Coyote_ I tried
to compass the whole animal, and I should think that the "Father
of Song-Making" chapter might make coyote music and the night more
interesting and beautiful for any listener. Intelligent writers often
interpret without set purpose, and many books under various categories
in this _Guide_ are interpretative.