ARIZONA LITERARY HIGHLIGHTS

Exploring Arizona's Literary Trails

How many books are there about Arizona? Probably several tens of thousands. Among the subjects represented, two are dominant: history and geography. This is only natural, for Arizona's history is heroic, exciting, and dramatic; and her geography is spectacular and colorful. These are things that attract writers and readers. History tells us that Arizona's original owners, the Indians, were dispossessed, at least those who resisted encroachment by the whites. The Navajo relocation and the Apache subjugation have inspired an endless amount of writing. Yet in spite of its unhappy beginnings, Arizona's Indian history has become brighter, as the once persecuted peoples now increase and prosper in this the greatest of all the Indian states.

An equally fertile source of books about Arizona lies in the struggle among the white settlers to possess the mineral, animal, and vegetable wealth of the land. This strife resulted in bloody frontier episodes, exploited today by Tombstone and Old Tucson, and it continues to engender writing whose quantity exceeds its quality.

Television has given new life to this rough aspect of Arizona's history.

So much for history. What about geography? Here is a quieter story and a more healthful body of writing about the state. Arizona's natural features its mountains, deserts, and rivers resist man's efforts to change them. While mining, agriculture, animal husbandry, and lumbering have contributed enormously to the state's development, making possible cultural resources such as the universities and colleges, they have had minor impact upon the land itself. Only the surface has been scratched, and where it has been disfigured, it will recover. The land was here before man, and it will be here after man has gone. There will be heartbreaking sunsets when there is no heart to break for them. That is a long while off.

All of this is only an introduction to what I really want to write about. As much as I am interested in history and geography, something else attracts me more, something that is a by-product of the two, an essence extracted from them called Literature. This is usually a quieter matter, lacking the violence of history and the color of geography. Although it attracts fewer writers and readers, literature has a power of survival possessed by few of man's creations. Consider the Greeks: their wars are forgotten, their stone temples wrecked, whereas the plays of Sophocles and the poetry of Homer are as fresh as when they were composed, thousands of years ago. Or the Chinese: their Great Wall falls, whereas their lyric poems, written when the wall was new, stand, untouched by time.

Why is this? Because, as the Bible says, in the beginning was the Word. Literature is made with words, and words are the form in which the spirit perpetuates itself.

Among the many who practice writing, to only a few is given the power to fashion words into forms that are lasting. There is no way to ensure or to transmit this gift. Nor can it be inherited or learned. It is only God-given.

Arizona's literary history is brief. Yet in spite of the fact that there is not much to say, even this little has not been said. The development of our young state by comparatively few people has been along other than literary lines. No shame need be felt that no one has written a literary history of Arizona, for neither of our neighbors, California nor New Mexico, has such. The reason is that writers on the Southwest have been engaged with matters of more interest to readers. Do I intend to write a literary history of these states? I do not. It is too late. I should have started thirty years ago. Then, however, I was collecting and reading books, not writing about them. Writing takes nearly full-time. What I am doing in these years in which I am blessed with more leisure than ever before, is helping to prepare the way for others to write these needed literary histories of the Southwest.I am making reconnaissances, marking new trails, pointing the way. I have written seventeen of a planned thirty chapter book, and have only a year to go. Four of these chapters are of special Arizona interest.

They are on four novels of Arizona significance. Reading them was not enough. I went on to trail each back to its origin, seeking what led to its writing, the circumstances of its creation, and its reception by the public.

Three of them appeared in rapid succession in 1927, 1929, and 1931. The first came earlier, in 1912 - Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey. Then Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, followed by Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy, and finally Apache by Will Levington Comfort.

I call them Arizona novels. They are also of Utah and New Mexico. The three regions, at least toward the center, are really one, so let's call them Southwest classics, the Southwest of which Arizona-New Mexico-Southern Utah are the heart and Texas, Oklahoma, and Southern California neighboring parts.

Were they written by natives or long-time residents of the Southwest? They were not. Place of birth, even residence, has little to do with the creation of great literature about a region. Zane Grey was an Ohioan who came to Arizona from New York and wrote his masterpiece in Pennsylvania. Willa Cather was born in Virginia, grew up in Nebraska, and wrote most of her best-known novel in New Hampshire. Oliver La Farge was a Rhode Islander who wrote Laughing Boy in Louisiana. Will Comfort came from Michigan and wrote his masterpiece in California. Literature derives from the impact of life, or history and geography, upon the imagination of a creative person. Though such impact need not be prolonged, it must be intensely powerful. This is what occurred when these four very different writers were struck by Arizona.

From the book, "Death Comes To The Archbishop," by Willa Cather, published by Alfred A. Knopf - 1926.

The traveller dismounted, drew from his pocket a much worn book, and baring his head, knelt at the foot of the cruciform tree. The traveller was Jean Marie Latour, consecrated Vicar Apostolic of New Mexico...

The early direction of Zane Grey did not point to Arizona. He was a New York dentist with the urge to write. His first work included baseball and fishing stories and novels of the Ohio frontier. In 1906 he and his wife honeymooned at El Tovar on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. When his wife received a small legacy, he quit his dental practice and devoted full time to writing. Her money supported them. Then he heard a lecture by the old plainsman, Buffalo Jones, who was in the east to raise capital for an experiment in hybridizing buffalo and black Galloway cattle to produce a desert-hardy breed called Cattalo. In a moment of vision Grey saw his future. He offered to come west and write a book about Buffalo Jones and his work. Neither had the money to pay his way. His wife gave him the remainder of her legacy and sent him off alone. Back in Arizona, Grey joined a party of Mormons in Flagstaff en route to Lee's Ferry. He went on across the river to Buffalo Jones's ranch on the North Rim. He was in Arizona only a few weeks on this second visit. No more was needed. He was enthralled by the roar

Watson Lake sets like a jewel in its rocky environs. Located approximately one mile north of Prescott, Watson Lake is fed by Granite Creek which passes through the Granite Dells country, also north of Prescott.

These photographs were taken in July at the end of a dry season for the area, which accounts for the water level being lower than is normal after the rains. After the early August rains the grassy meadow shown at right was completely under water.

From the book "Apache" by Will Levington Comfort, published by E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc. 1931.

His right forearm was sheeted with blood, but that was Pindah's, not his own. The blood on his knife was not his own. He remembered the words of the Padre, and raised his dripping arm above his people. ... a voice sounded: "La-choy Ko-kun-noste!" The name Don-Hah and Dasoda-hae began to be forgotten from that moment, his new name being established on every lip. "La choy Ko-kun-noste - Red Sleeve!"

In corrupt Spanish, Red Sleeve translates; "Mangas Colorado of the river, the colored cliffs, hidden canyons and secret valleys, and the evidences of a vanished people at Betatakin and Keet Seel. At the same time that he was outraged by the ruthless domination of the Mormon men, he was excited by the knowledge of secret villages where young "sealed wives" awaited the coming by night of husbands whose faces they never saw.

The impact of this powerful experience on a sensitive, ambitious, and talented young man was tremendously creative. He returned east and in the space of a few years he wrote The Last of the Plainsmen, the story of Buffalo Jones, and his three greatest novels, The Heritage of the Desert, Riders of the Purple Sage, and its sequel, The Rainbow Trail.

Although Zane Grey lived another quarter century, wrote sixty more books, and became the most famous and wealthiest western writer of our time, he never surpassed Riders of the Purple Sage. Its greatness lies in the vividness of its setting in the colored canyon country where Utah and Arizona merge, and in the superhuman stature of its characters, dominated by the noble gunman, Lassiter. There is no finer moment in western fiction than when the heroine cries, "Roll the rock, Lassiter, I love you." And Lassiter proceeds to do just that to roll the balancing rock that destroys the pursuing Mormons and seals the man and woman and little girl in the high valley from which there is no way out.

Sex in literature need not be explicit to be exciting. Sex is implicit throughout Zane Grey and is part of his appeal to readers. Queen Victoria would have knighted him.

In a purely literary sense, many hold Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather to be the best of all Southwest novels. Here hero was Jean-Baptiste Lamy, Archbishop of Arizona and New Mexico. Because the episcopal seat was in Santa Fe, where Lamy built his cathedral, and because most of the novel's events transpire in that part of the Southwest, New Mexico has always claimed Miss Cather.

Arizona has a prior claim. Willa Cather came to Winslow in 1912, and lived there for several months, on her first visit to the Southwest. Why Winslow? She came there because her brother was a Santa Fe brakeman. Then a woman in her early 30s, she was already an established writer of stories and novels and the managing editor of McClure's, one of the great magazines of that time.

That Arizona experience in the spring of 1912, five years after Zane Grey's coming, hit her hard, so hard that it changed her life. Not only was it history and landscape, as she discovered them in that region from Walnut Canyon near Flagstaff eastward to the Painted Desert and the Little Colorado. She felt an even greater impact from a nearly overwhelming love affair with a young Mexican musician from Vera Cruz. Although never fated to marry, Willa Cather was no old maid. She submitted to her fate which decreed that the writer had priority over all else.

Arizona's threefold impact of history, geography, and love, experienced in that brief period of maximum intensity, transformed an ordinary writer into a great writer. She quit magazine editing for creative writing and went on to become the immortal author of O Pioneers, My Antonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, those glories of American literature.

Yet unknown are the details of Willa Cather's sojourn in Winslow. No one has studied her subsequent use of the Arizona setting. Although her will forbade publication of and direct quotation from her letters, they may be read and paraphrased where they are preserved in libraries around the country. And there could be people still living in Winslow who would remember the brakeman's sister who "deadheaded" in the caboose on runs to the other division points at Flagstaff and Gallup.

We know that she never forgot her Mexican lover. Although she never wrote their story, she introduced him, grown old and gray, into her novel, The Song of the Nightingale; and when someone expressed wonder how Mabel Dodge Luhan could have married a Taos Indian, Willa Cather replied, "How could she not have?"

The origins of her Archbishop are to be found in that early Arizona sojourn. It was then that she first heard of those French priests in the Southwest whom she was to make the personages of her novel Fathers Lamy and Macheboeuf, called by her Latour and Vaillant. This annoyed Mary Austin who reproached Miss Cather for her French rather than Spanish bias.

They say that lightning never strikes the same place twice. This is not true of literary lightning, not true of Winslow. That same railroad town that played a decisive role in Willa Cather's career, also served as the setting for Laughing Boy. It was Oliver La Farge's first novel and its immediate success as a Literary Guild choice and Pulitzer Prize winner hung like the albatross around his neck for the rest of his life. Although he wrote many more books, he could never better his first one, nor could he get the public to associate him with anything but Laughing Boy. He came almost to hate it, and yet he owed everything to it.

La Farge intended originally to be an anthropologist. He was also bitten by the writing bug. As it did Zane Grey and Willa Cather, fate led him to the Southwest. He had gone to Harvard, planning to specialize in French archaeology. There he found the anthropologists engaged in Southwestern research. Accordingly his summer vacations were spent in the Southwest as a student with the field crew. He took to the pick and shovel, toughened up, fell in love with the land, and learned the Navajo and Apache languages.

His experiences of several summers in the early 1920's culminated in a long horseback ride across the northern desert, from Shiprock to Oraibi, during which La Farge lived as the Navajos lived. He was accepted by them and fondly called La Farchi. He looked like an Indian. As a boy, his mother had called him her little Indian man. Upon graduation from Harvard, La Farge went off to Central America with a Tulane University archaeological survey. This occupied him for several years. Then back in New Orleans, writing up his earlier Navajo research for a Harvard M.A., he succumbed to the seductive atmosphere of the French Quarter and began to write stories of the Southwest. An editor at Houghton Mifflin read one of these stories in a magazine and wrote to La Farge: How about undertaking a novel dealing with the Navajos?

No more was needed to detonate Laughing Boy. When he came to write it, La Farge believed that he had left the Southwest forever and thus Laughing Boy became for him a nostalgic farewell to a lost way of life. Not only his way; that of the Navajo people; for he saw that the railroad and the automobile had ended their immemorial ways.

Thus Winslow came to play a destructive role in the book, standing for all that La Farge hated in the white man's culture. Beauty lay to the north, in the land of the sacred mountain, the Rainbow Bridge, and the colored canyons, the land that Zane Grey celebrated in his earliest and best books.

La Farge proved wrong. He had not lost the Southwest. On the contrary, Laughing Boy led him back to it, on a government job in the Hopi country. He entered into a lifelong commitment to Indian welfare. Not only to the Indians of the Southwest. As the president of the Association of American Indian Affairs, Oliver La Farge worked during the rest of his life for all the tribes, from Florida to Alaska.

His final efforts, when he was dying, were on behalf of the Taos Indians in their suit to regain their sacred lands around the Blue Lake. He did not live to see the final victory. He died in 1962. Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge, United States Air Force Reserve, lies buried under a simple marker in the National Cemetery in Santa Fe. Laughing Boy lives.

The last of my Arizona quartet is Will Levington Comfort's Apache, a terse novel about the rimrock Mimbreno chieftain called Mangas Coloradas - Red Sleeves. It was the opposite of Laughing Boy, a first novel; Apache came at the end of Comfort's life, the next to last of his more than twenty books.

How did it happen that this popular magazine writer, former war correspondent, and eventual Southern California cult leader, turned away from all of these activities, and from the alcoholism that was finally to kill him at 54, to write this noble tragedy? a novel that J. Frank Dobie said was the best of all writing about the Indians of the Southwest. La Farge judged it to be the truest thing ever written about the Apaches. "He has created for us the real Indian," La Farge said of Comfort, "His absurdity and his greatness, in a manner that few scientists and no other writers have achieved."

Again it was fate that brought Will Comfort to a theme that inspired him to a masterpiece. Until the late 1920's he knew Arizona only at second hand. Then his son, who had followed his father in journalism, got a job on the newspaper in Bisbee. He had, alas, also followed his father in a taste for the bottle. Comfort, who was living in Los Angeles, in a sober period, drove over occasionally to Bisbee to steady his shaky son.

He stopped in Tombstone and, as an old newspaper man, he dropped in at the office of the Epitaph, the celebrated newspaper founded in 1880 by John P. Clum and still being published. Its back files enthralled him. "Pure horn silver," he called them. He felt, he said, "like a returned native catching up on the home news." He also saw in them an article for the Saturday Evening Post, to which he had long been a contributor. Editor George Horace Lorimer responded enthusiastically with an offer of double the usual rate. Comfort made several trips from Los Angeles to Bis-bee, absorbing more lore and finding "Tombstone in enchanted sleep on its high mesquite mesa." He foresaw the Disneyizing of the town and deplored it. "Its past does not need to be restored from a showman's standpoint," he declared. "Its history is brutal, blithe, cagey, abrupt."

It was in the files of the Epitaph that Comfort first encountered the Apaches, the scourge of the territorial years. It was a discovery that transformed him. The journalist was replaced by the novelist. Here is how he told it: "The red glistening thread of the Apache wove constantly through the gray fabric of pioneer talk, far more interesting that the attempt to put the old town back."

His routine article on Tombstone appeared in the Post, as Comfort lost himself in a transcendent book about the Apaches. He began to read in earnest and, in his words, "The books tumbled over themselves" Bartlett, Cremony, Bancroft as he researched the libraries of Bisbee and Tucson. He was astonished to discover in his own neighborhood in Los Angeles the Southwest Museum's Munk Collection of Arizoniana, which made it unnecessary for him to seek further for printed material on the Apaches. Research in libraries was followed by field work in Arizona and New Mexico, and by talks with old-timers who remembered the Apache wars.

Through it all he came to perceive the dominant figure of Mangas Coloradas, greatest of the Apache chief-tains, who led his people in a vain attempt to deal with the whites who dishonored treaties and dispossessed the original owners of the land. "I stood aghast at myself," Comfort wrote later, "for the time I had spent fabricating stories when stories like this already exist; have already been lived and are already to be sung."

Apache is the story of Mangas in the form of a novel. It is more than a novel. It is a work of the highest creative art, wherein the writer entered into the heart of the Apaches and their homeland. I can explain Comfort's unlikely achievement only in mystical terms. When he came to write the book, so intensely had he conceived it that he actually experienced a change of identity and became Mangas himself. I talked last month with Com-fort's son-in-law, who was with Comfort at the time of his death 40 years ago. "He drew me to him," he said, "and declared 'I am Mangas. You are Cochise. We are blood brothers.' "

I have cited Dobie and La Farge on the authenticity of Apache. An even higher accolade was bestowed by Dr. Frederick Webb Hodge, the great enthnologist and director of the Southwest Museum, who said simply of the book, "It is true to the Apaches." In gratitude, Comfort gave the book's manuscript to the Southwest Museum.

Great literature has its roots only in reality, in the real world of history and geography, of life and landscape, and in the human heart. Its creator penetrates and illuminates and then by his power over words gives permanence to his vision. He brings the elements of his own and others' experience into focus. He overlays life with language so that they become transparently indistinguishable one from the other.

As in these four examples I have described, of Zane Grey, Willa Cather, Oliver La Farge, and Will Levington Comfort, there must be a union of strong forces on a sensitive person at the critical time. This does not occur often, and is why that among the myriad books published, there are only a few Southwestern classics.

The necessary elements are a beautiful, overpowering landscape, a conflict between vital men and women living and loving in the maelstrom of history, and a writer whose sensitivity and skill are in balance. When these elements are joined, the result is literature of the kind I have described. We are the grateful beneficiaries.

But we shall never be far from each other, he thought, always alone but never lonely. It was nearly dark when he climbed out of the head of the canyon onto the top of So Selah Mesa. There was only a day-old moon, and a cold wind blew across the open.