BOOKS, PINON NUTS AND SHADOWS

Books, Piñon

The body of writing about the Southwest is immense. Much of it is as dry as the desert itself, and less nourishing. First of all, there are the Spanish diaries and chronicles, then the pioneer narratives and subsequent histories, the government reports, pamphlets, almanacs and frontier newspapers, and finally the academic dissertations, most of them merely factual and bare-boned, yet indispensable for writers who seek in novel, poem or play to re-create a past they personally can never experience.This is one of the most fascinating, frustrating, and sometimes rewarding experiences a novelist can have; to take a period and its historical personages and attempt to re-create in words the way things were, or to seek in a poem to evoke the spirit of a time or a place, so that the reader is swept backward up the stream of history, far from the muddy present to the crystalline headwaters of truth.

There are two ways of doing this, by research into the printed past and by field work in the tangible present. With plenty of imagination a writer could write a good work about the past by using either one or the other methods; or, given enough imagination, by using neither. Some years ago a professor of law in an eastern university wrote an imaginative novel about a nonexistent country called Islandia, in which he meticulously created the history, geography, customs, language, even the climate of a continent, which in the book attained a reality of absolute conviction.

Arizonans will of course be skeptical of a Cali-fornian who crosses the River and writes of ways he can never know as a native. And yet an outsider can often see them clearer than an insider. The best novels about Southern California-Ramona, Merton of the Movies, A Place in the Sun, for example-were not written by Native Sons of the Golden West. It does not seem really important where a writer was born, but it is essential that he put down roots in the land of which he writes. The deeper the root-system the more nourishment absorbed; and the more nurture a writer can stuff a book full of, the more and longer will readers be drawn and in their turn nourished by it. It is about some of these nourishing Arizona books of the recent past that I am writing here.

Nuts and Shadows

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SHIRLEY REED I read books for several reasons: the dictionary in order better to write and speak our difficult language. The encyclopedia and handbooks for definite information on various subjects. Mysteries and romances for entertainment, so-called escape from the cares of the present. Books of travel and history either to learn more about a region I have visited or something about a land I am going to visit. A few novels, based on history, true to regions and peopled by lifelike characters, combine all of these qualities, and more completely satisfy me than any other books.

Although I am a District of Columbian by birth and have lived in Europe at different times, most of my forty-seven years have been spent in that part of California which lies southeast of the Tehachapi Mountains, and which during all the years of my growing, until the expansion of Los Angeles motorized and industrialized it, had more in common with Arizona than with northernmost California. I know the way of life in a semiarid land where water is a god and should be adored. I know heat and drought and thirst and cloudburst too -and this is more the language of Tucson than of San Francisco.

So although I have never lived in Arizona, I find myself in sympathy with its cultural problems, and sense in the Flagstaff-Phoenix-Tucson rivalry one similar to that of Sacramento-San Francisco-Los Angeles. And although my living is made chiefly as librarian of the University of California at Los Angeles, my home city with its enshrouding atmosphere and thickening traffic, holds less and less spiritual nourishment for me, as I find myself drawn ineluctably by the lands east of the River.

These lands do not fit within the borders of the 48th state, but extend eastward through New Mexico and northward into southern Nevada, Utah and Colorado-the Pacific Southwest, its waters flowing ultimately into the Rio Colorado and the Gulf of California-a vast region of which Arizona is the heartland. Books are one key to it, increasing knowledge, widening understanding, deepening appreciation. And here now are a few key books which have done these things for me.

There is Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, already well on its way to becoming a classic American novel since its publication in 1927. Written in bare and unadorned prose-qualities I like to think of as Southwestern-this imaginative "biography" of that great pioneer churchman, Archbishop Lamy of New Mexico and Arizona, was inspired by the statue of the French ecclesiastic which stands before the cathedral in Santa Fé. It was documented by an obscure biography of Lamy's colleague, Bishop Machebeuf, published in the 19th century at Pueblo, Colorado, and was backgrounded by Miss Cather's visits to the Southwest through the dozen years before she felt impelled to write the novel.

There is need for more such inspirational monuments and fountains to the memory of Southwest pioneers. Two of the greatest were the Spanish Arizonans, Fathers Kino and Garces, who traversed this dry and wrinkled land long before the time of the auto club and the thermos jug. Tucson's City Hall Park contains a stone relief of Kino by Mahonri Young. On the grounds of the Yuma Indian School is a heroic statue of Garces, by the Fleck brothers of Fulda, Germany, erected in 1929 near the spot where Garces was martyred by the Yumans in 1781. The most beautiful of all Southwest monuments known to me is also of Garces, a noble limestone statue in a traffic circle in Bakersfield, carved on a W.P.A. project by John Palo Kangas, and commemorating the discoverer of the lower San Joaquin Valley.

As for novels about the Indians of the Southwest, I lack statistics. There are many of them. Ramona was certainly one of, if not the earliest, and it remains one of the best. It has probably never been out-of-print since first published in 1884. What accounts for its long life? I think it is the vitality that animates it. Helen Hunt Jackson imbued her book with the passionate indignation she felt at the fate of the Mission Indians. In spite of the fact that her Ramona and Allessandro act and talk more like Castilians than Indians, the novel is essentially true to life and is a thundering conscience-voice of the white man's guilt.

Twenty-four years ago when I was a bright young college graduate, loaded with book learning and certain that all human problems could be solved on paper, my first job was the lowly one of shipping clerk in one of the Southwest's largest bookstores, Vroman's of Pasadena. I worked in the cellar and a sweet-smelling place it was, fragrant with pinewood packing boxes and the paper-and-ink perfume of new books. Shipments came sliding down the cellar chute from the alley above, and my job was to leap upon them, armed only with a nail-puller, unpack and stack and check in their mint-fresh contents. It was a good year for American publishing, that year 1929, producing A Farewell to Arms, Dodsworth, Look Homeward, Angel, The Sound and the Fury, and an Indian novel which I read then and have just reread now, Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge, and find it to be nearly perfect in conception and execution. This Navajo story did not make a great impression on me at the time. I was only twenty-three then, and it takes more years than that to give a man the measuring sticks to place a book in relationship to life to other books.

Like Willa Cather's masterpiece, Laughing Boy is classical in its freedom from overstatement, overwriting, and all those slick devices and synthetic emotions that spell Hollywood. From residence with the Navajos and library research La Farge became familiar with the tragic conflict between the two ways of life, Navajo and White. Into the love story of Laughing Boy and Slim Girl he imbued the essence of Navajo religion and ritual, family life and marriage, economic subsistence by sheepherding, silversmithing and weavingthose rich facets of a native culture contrasted with the synthetic White life along the railroad strip. I think this Laughing Boy will nourish a good many generations of readers, for in Navajo words In beauty it is begun.

In beauty it is finished.

Once upon a time the Navajos and the Apaches were one people, the Athapascan tribe said to have come down into the Southwest long ago from the Canadian wilderness. At some point they separated, the Apaches probably representing the predatory wandering element in the people. Southeastern Arizona and adjoining Mexico and New Mexico-the vast province of Sonora before it was shrunk to the present Mexican state-became Apache land, which they dominated until the migratory Whites wrested it from them. All the primitive cruelty of this savage people was accentuated by the perfidy of the Whites, the chronology and details of which have been set forth by Paul Wellman in Death in the Desert.

Geronimo is popularly regarded as the greatest of the Apaches. He was actually the least of the warrior chieftains. The greatest was Mangus Colorado-Red Sleeve-who rallied all the Apaches against the invaders a century ago. He was a natural leader, possessed of intelligence, strength and integrity, in every way superior to the riff-raff miners and trappers and all the frontier scum, rootless, greedy, and perfidious. Red Sleeve's tribe was the Mimbreño or Mimbres Apaches whose base was in the Pinos Altos Mountains at the headwaters of the Gila, overlooking the copper country which magnetized the Whites and led to the ruin of the Indians.

The great American warrior inspired a novel, first published in 1931, which in the ripe judgement of J. Frank Dobie "remains for me the most moving and incisive piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found." It came from the most unlikely of sources a writer of popular magazine fiction, best-selling philosophical novels, and inspirational essays, a native of Detroit and resident of Los Angeles. I refer to Will Levington Comfort who died at fifty-four, only a year after the publication of his masterpiece, Apache.

In his quest for truth and man's best way of life Comfort had travelled through the Southwest and had written one adventure novel called Somewhere South in Sonora. When his son John took a job with a Bisbee newspaper, Comfort came more frequently to Arizona, and there in the heart of the Apache country he became fired with the plan to write a fictionized biography of Red Sleeve. Field work first-talk with old-timers and traders and trips to the upper reaches of the Gila in order to get the lay of the land-its colors and cloud shadows and the kinds of green growing things in the mountains and brown dry growth on the desert belowand then library research to establish the historical and ethnological details.

Comfort was fortunate in having at hand, just across the Arroyo Seco from his South Pasadena home, one of the two great collections of Arizona books-in the Southwest Museum, high on the hill in Los

Angeles's Highland Park. It was originally the collection formed by Dr. Joseph Amasa Munk of Arizona and it was offered by him to the University in Tucson on condition that a fireproof room be provided. Year after year the University delayed and Dr. Munk finally lost patience and gave his books and pamphlets to the Southwest Museum, founded and headed then by Charles F. Lummis, the great eccentric who first gave our region the name "Southwest" and who originated the phrase "See America First." So accurately did Comfort document his novel with Apache customs and lore that the present director of the Southwest Museum, the venerable Dr. Frederick Webb Hodge, greatest living authority on the American Indians, has declared Apache to be utterly true to the Indian way of life.

Like Laughing Boy, Comfort's Apache is written in precise and evocative language, free of padding, technicolored emotions, and lengthy nature descriptions, and as the former is the prototypical novel of the northern Navajo so is the latter the classic expression of the southern Apache. Arizona has never inspired two finer books, published within two years of one another.

It should be apparent by now that my preference in literature is for works of essence, for books which distill truth from the bulk of human error and which smelt a handful of metal from a carload of ore. This supreme goal of the writer is attained by very few. It took Will Comfort a life's work of twenty books before he reached it in Apache. Not many historians or chroniclers of the Southwest give us essences. Too often they write of surface events, whereas the changes of history, the great decisions, are reached below surface, in the hidden places of the human heart. Women are often the clue to men's actions. Frank Dobie wrote in a recent letter to me, "Take all the pioneer women in the chronicles; not a single one of them has a breast, or a flank, or a perfume in the mouth; there is nothing of what passes in the heart of one of them in the darkness of illimitable space."

My wish for essential writing and Dobie's for insight into a Southwest woman's heart are wonderfully answered in an Arizona novel published in 1942. It is Tacey Cromwell by Conrad Richter, and in its 208 pages, each word of which was chosen with skill and fitted with love, there is more of the essence of human nature than in a hundred histories and a library of academic dissertations.

It is a Bisbee novel, laid there after the turn of this century. I have never been in Bisbee, but from reading Richter's book I know the lay of that steep and narrow copper town before and after the big fire, and I sense in a deeper way what a woman's love is and does. For Tacey Cromwell is a woman, a former "sporting house madam" who tries to leave the old ways in Socorro and start straight and new in Bisbee, and the story is of what the so-called respectable citizens did to herand of her final triumph. It is a fruitful and mellow book, destined I am sure for long life. The lore of childhood, of mining and gambling, of frontier marriage and burial, the very feel and look and smell of the Southwest in a raw time of prejudice and violence, are inseparable from the story itself.

Perhaps Conrad Richter grew up in Bisbee. I am not acquainted with his personal history. Whatever his origins, I would bet that his background reading was largely in the files of old Bisbee newspapers. Next to personal experience and observation, no other source pans richer in the writing of historical novels.

These then are a few of the Southwest books of recent years that I have found as good to the tooth as a bagful of piñon nuts. I hope it is not too fanciful also to see them as oasis springs for those who thirst, or as shadow-makers for Southwesterners who sometimes find too much sun a wearying thing.

PAGE

Here I first worked for steady employment. Here, on the chip gang, laborers who shovel me chips of matt that had spilled on the converter aisle floor, was my first taste of earning y livelihood, in June, 1940. This picture required cooperation with the craneman, his swamper nd the converter foreman who directed the pouring of the partly smelted copper matt. ighting consisted of available light (existing light) and 60 #3B flashbulbs. Camera: 8x10 alumet; Lens: 12" Ektar; Film: 8x10 Ektachrome; Shutter: Open 2 seconds at f:16.

OVER

Unless canned foods are available. Bring your own meats, or fresh vegetables with you. Camera: 7 Deardorff; Film: 5x7 Ektachrome; Lens: 8/½" Ektar; Shutter: 1/25th at f:12.

Sincerely

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS. Until recently our River and Grand Canyon. We knew and other scenic spots, industrial development's has a unique and attractive way of reaching people even beyond the oceans. Your very informative. Dr. Wyman of Boston al in selecting the right gift for his very number of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS we e in Beirut during a reception last year, agian, who generously donated $25,000 t. In a community meeting they spoke but that some of us knew so much about ARIZONA HIGHWAYS. Mr. and Mrs. Mehagian more gift subscriptions to friends abroad Ohannes Tilkian American University of Beirut Beirut, Lebanon (Syria) Beirut and to know we are spreading the desire to learn, too, of the good works of Arizonans.

Used here in various lectures and talks in ie at Worms/Rhine and in the Geography. Also I had the occasion to show them own people at Ems, Nassau, Frankfurt, a little talk on America, I select your honored sources of illustration. As someone one feel that the globe is smaller despite is so different from any regional feature. Disney showed his famous "Die Wuste e becoming very popular in Europe, which I am not particularly fond of.

Hans Rosenberg Berg-Nassau, Germany

RAINY NIGHT ON THE HIGHWAY

The car is like a snug cocoon Holding us safe and warm and dry While small Niagaras flood the glass And other traffic swishes by. Our headlights cut the night in wedges, Like yellow cheese, that stab the dark To show the roadway satin-black Framed by the windshield wiper's arc. And tight beside you on the seat, Hearing the wheels wash through the rain, This moment holds securityOur own small world, the right hand lane.

NIGHT ROAD

A ribbon of concrete with sequins of light, A glittering trail down the canyon of night.

WINGS OF TIME

Across the desert's bluebird sky, Like homing birds In flight, The hours wing by: Dove dawn... Canary noon Red robin sunset Then starling night.

LAND-PATTERN

Steadfast the hand that tends with toil The seasons and the waiting soil: Harvestmen by earth-dial know Time to reap and time to grow.