THE DESERT

A Classic Begets A Classic

All Southwestern book trails lead to The Desert by John C. Van Dyke, published in 1901. Many writers on the Southwest have acknowledged their debt to it for having given them a clearer vision of the arid lands. In 1951 Franklin Walker's A Literary History of Southern California described John C. Van Dyke as the first to exalt the desert as a place of beauty.

Walker went on to cite the illustrious lineage of desert writers sired by Van Dyke, including Mary Austin, A. J. Burdick, George Wharton James, Idah Meacham Strobridge, J. Smeaton Chase, Stewart Edward White, and Zane Grey. Others continued to follow, such as Edwin Corle and Joseph Wood Krutch, all cited ultimately by E. I. Edwards, the desert's bibliographer. It was in the early 1950's that I talked about The Desert with Edwin Corle, at the time I was writing an Introduction to a new edition of Fig Tree John, his novel of the Coachella Valley.

"We desert writers," Corle said, "are forever in the debt of John Van Dyke. He saw it first and said it best. What I have never understood though is how an eastern art professor, a tenderfoot dude, could come out here and break a trail the rest of us have been following ever since."

A book's power of survival depends upon its appeal to later generations. The Desert is newly harmonious with our concern for preservation of the environment.

Van Dyke wrote knowingly of the geology, the vegetation and flora, the fauna and the weather; and above all of color dominating form. He referred to the effort of the French Impressionists, especially Corot and Monet, to escape the tyranny of form and "to suggest everything by tones of color, shades of light, and drifts of air. How they would have revelled in the dream landscapes of the Southwestern desert!"

Van Dyke found the power of healing that lies in desert solitude. He wrote as a naturalist, a romantic, and a prophet. He can be read today across a wide spectrum of interest. I had this brought home to me recently when in a single day I heard tributes to The Desert by two Arizonans who from differing viewpoints share a love of the region. Dr. William G. McGinnies, the ecologist and director emeritus of the University of Arizona's Arid Lands Studies, cited Van Dyke's accuracy in describing desert life, while Joseph Stacey, editor of Arizona Highways, said that he regarded Van Dyke as the most inspirational of all desert writers.

First published in 1901, it stands alone as the guide and standard for all desert writers, and a treasure for all desert lovers.

THE DESERT By John C. Van Dyke

Dr. Lawrence Clark Powell review and report of the book and its distinguished author, first printed in WESTWAYS magazine, as one of a series titled "Southwest Classics Reread," is now available in Dr. Powell's newest book sOUTHWEST CLASSICS, a collection of the author's favorite creative literature of the arid lands. Published by The Ward Ritchie Press, Los Angeles, California, soUTHWEST CLASSICS is available at book stores, hard cover $12.95; and paper cover $6.50.

How did I begin my quest for John C. Van Dyke? In the card catalog of the nearest library I found his full name and dates of birth and death: John Charles Van Dyke, 1856-1932. Then in Who's Who in America for 1932 the outline of his career: Occupation, university professor. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey; educated privately and at Columbia; studied art in Europe many years. Unmarried. Admitted to bar, 1877. Librarian, Sage Library since 1878; professor of history of art, Rutgers University since 1889. Lecturer Columbia, Harvard, Princeton. Numerous memberships and honors. And a list of his works, from Books and How to Use Them (1883) to In the West Indies (1932), representing a half century of creativity which yielded more than forty forty books.

At that point I admit to having paused to consider the state of my eyesight. Of the forty, I had read only the one. Reading them all might still not tell me who he really was and what had led him from art gallery to desert. Or how it happened that his last three books, which came at the end of his life, were on such widely separated areas as Java, Egypt, and the West Indies.

Curiosity motivated me to keep searching. I sought for his literary archives at the places of his professional appointments Rutgers University and the Sage Library of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. They proved meager. I wrote to Princeton and the Library of Congress.

Condensed from "Southwest Classics" by Lawrence Clark Powell

Throughout this multiplicity of print the man remained shadowy. A curtain of academic reserve hung between him and the reader. Then as he neared sixty, he began to raise it a bit. In 1915 appeared The Raritan, Notes on a River and a Family. From the Library of Congress I obtained a Xerox of this privately printed rarity. In its Preface Van Dyke declared, "These notes have very slight historical or even genealogical interest. They mean nothing to the stranger."

I did not take that to apply to me, for as I continued to read his books, I felt no longer a stranger to John Van Dyke, and the bonds between us kept strengthening. From The Raritan I learned more than he had listed in Who's Who - that he was a cousin of the poet-essayist, Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933); and more pertinent to my quest, that he was a younger brother of Theodore S. Van Dyke (1842-1923) who had come to Southern California in the 1870's, written several books on the region and, after a newspaper career in San Diego and Los Angeles, had ranched on the Mojave Desert near Barstow and served until his death as Justice of the Peace in Daggett. There appeared to be the magnet that drew John Van Dyke to the Southwestern desert.

I learned also that their father was a distinguished New Jersey legislator and jurist who, at the age of 60, left public life and went with his wife and five sons to take up large-scale farming in Minnesota, on the Mississippi across from the mouth of the Chippewa.

As a lad of twelve. John took with a will to the wilderness, to forest, prairie, river and lake. The father's dream of an agrarian dynasty faded when all five boys spurned farming for professional careers the law, medicine and education. When their parents died, the sons left the land.

John developed as both an indoorsman and an outdoorsman in a fusion, he declared, of his Dutch-English-ScotchIrish blood. In The Raritan he wrote of himself, "The years of study have been interrupted by much travel on both hemispheres, by many returns to the sea, the mountains, the prairies, and the desert. Nature has proved the most lasting love of all and though the Younger has not yet broken away from civilization and gone back to the soil, he keeps threatening to do so and eventually it may come to pass. For with each succeeding spring the honk of the wild goose keeps-calling to the northern waterways and brings back memories of early Minnesota days, and the note of the sandhill crane unfolds the Montana uplands in their pristine glory when they were known only to the buffalo and the Sioux Indians. The spell of the wild grows with the years and becomes more insistent. What after all are the tales of books and art compared with nature nature before the page has been smeared by the hand of man!"

There were the forces that had made John Van Dyke a love of learning, a love of the land. Writing was the way he succeeded in unifying them, as his educated mind came to bear upon nature. The gift of style illuminated his prose. He had the perspective of a learned and sophisticated man, never merely a local observer. He became one of the most civilized of all writers on the Southwest, a forerunner of Dobie and Krutch, a successor of Lummis.

His writings on art are still being read by art students. They contain passages of flashing insight, such as this: "The pictures in a gallery are at best only the reminders of high aspiration and noble ideals. Unlike Shakespeare's pages they cannot be eternally revised, reproduced, and kept alive. They are fading slowly into ashes; and what they have to say to us, with all their beautiful ways of saying it, is becoming less legible year by year."

More slowly did I savor his books on nature which form a series beginning in 1898 with Nature for Its Own Sake, followed by The Desert, The Opal Sea, The Mountain, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado, The Open Spaces, and finally in 1926 by The Meadows. All are learned in content and graceful in expression. They are also attractive in format, bearing marginal captions in italic type.

In writing of art and nature in a manner both realistic and aesthetic, Van Dyke was a disciple of Ruskin, the greatest art critic of the 19th century. He was also a Ruskinite in his turning against the materialistic trend in society. In 1908 this produced a crow among swans when Van Dyke wrote The Money God: Chapters of Heresy and Dissent Concerning Business Methods and Mercenary Ideals in American Life.

This was highbrow muckraking, not aimed at such philanthropists as Rockefeller and Carnegie. Wearing his librarian's hat, Van Dyke rejoiced in the Carnegie benefactions whichText continued on page 14