The Song of the Lark (1915) the land inspires Thea Kronborg to be a great artist. In My Ántonia (1918), a drama of memory, the land helps sustain and in some measure compensates the title character. In A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor's House (1915), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Cather lamented the loss of the frontier's early potential. She gave her novels an apparent simplicity that masks an underlying complexity of style, structure, and material.
Many of the West's immigrants wrote novels about their experiences, often in their native languages. The best-known works of this immigrant fiction (much of it still untranslated) include Ole Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927), Sophus K. Winther's Take All to Nebraska (1936), and Herbert Krause's Wind Without Rain (1939). By mid- century, these works, as well as other pioneer-prairie novels such as Herbert Quick's Vandemark's Folly (1922), had created a literary West more akin to Greek tragedy than to the melodrama of Hollywood's silver screen.
The only Western novelist awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, John Steinbeck drew inspiration primarily from the Bible and Arthurian legend, rather than from Greek tragedy. As its title (taken from a line in Milton's Paradise Lost) suggests, Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936) depicts the hell of self-hatred, a parable ironically set in Edenic California, where Communist organizers battle rich farmers -441- and where both the Party and the farmers exploit migratory fruit pickers. Of Mice and Men (1937) focuses on two itinerant workers whose dream of having their own Western ranch falls victim to uncontrollable instinct and passion. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) follows the Depression wanderings of the Joad family, who are 'tractored off' their farm in Oklahoma and have to travel across the Southwest to seek work in California — a westering saga with parallels to the Book of Exodus.
Often labeled 'protest novels,' Steinbeck's works do protest against injustice, but like Cather's novels they also lament the lost potential of the frontier. Long after Steinbeck had received the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, some critics continued to fault him for his optimism and his 'apple-pie radicalism.' In expressing these sentiments, they seem to have forgotten his East of Eden (1952) and his evident commitment to Jeffersonian democracy.
How could a writer as competent as Steinbeck be so misread? Because the view of ontology held by Western novelists of the 1930s and 1940s is often not understood by people from other regions. In his landmark study of Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Max Westbrook explains the Western ontology:
The essential connections of man and his universe are not subject to the verbal abstractions of the intellect. If we insist on confining knowing to rational knowledge, then we can know nothing beyond our own powers to create; and man has created neither himself nor his universe, neither his reason nor his 'little man inside' ['the voice of intuition in the service of the unconscious']. Western artists do not propose a formula — they would not be worth study if they did — but they do offer a direction, a possibility. If we reason about our place in linear time and learn to intuit with the unconscious our more fundamental place in primordial time, we have the possibility of maintaining an individual ego while feeling the generative power of our archetypal selves.
Unfortunately, Western artists have to express their view of ontology within the context of a regional tradition that includes the stereotypes of the standard 'horse opry.'
In a letter written in 1959, Clark said the stereotypes had blocked his way, 'So, in part, I set about writing The Ox-Bow Incident [1940] as a kind of deliberate technical exercise. It was an effort to set myself free in that western past by taking all the ingredients of the -442- standard western (which were real enough after all) and seeing if, with a theme that concerned me, and that had more than dated and local implications, and a realistic treatment, I could bring both the people and the situations alive again.' All that and more comes to life in The Ox-Bow Incident, the psychological tale of a lynching, and in Clark's other two novels: The City of Trembling Leaves (1945), a Künstlerroman set in twentieth-century Reno; and The Track of the Cat (1949), the story of a hunt as richly symbolic as the one in Moby-Dick. Clark's novels and those of like-minded Western artists show, says Westbrook, that 'both a capacity for naked purity and a capacity for brute murder are within each one of us.'
What did some reviewers on the Hudson see in The Ox-Bow Incident? Just 'another cowboy story.' So, too, well into the 1970s did otherwise good critics misread and mislabel H. L. Davis's Honey in the Horn (1935, Pulitzer Prize) and Winds of Morning (1952); Harvey Fergusson's Grant of Kingdom (1950) and The Conquest of Don Pedro (1954); Vardis Fisher's Dark Bridwell (1931) and In Tragic Life (1932); A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949, Pulitzer Prize); Paul Horgan's Far from Cibola (1938) and Whitewater (1970); Frederick Manfred's The Golden Bowl (1944) and Riders of Judgment (1957); Conrad Richter's The Sea of Grass (1937); and Frank Waters's The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942) and The Woman at Otowi Crossing (1966). Writing sometimes of mountain men and pioneers, cowboys and Indians, these authors, like Clark, often found themselves ranked with Zane Grey and B. M. Bower, which is a good deal like placing William Faulkner in the same artistic category as Margaret Mitchell on the ground that they both wrote about the South.
Wallace Stegner and Wright Morris, two other Western artists whose novels began to appear before 1950, have earned national acclaim partly because Western ontology is not the dominant force in their work, but also because they are among the most skillful literary artists of our time.
Three of Stegner's novels had been published before The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), an autobiographical novel about his family's moves throughout the Northwest to Saskatchewan in search of the American dream. In that novel, feeling he should 'have lived a hundred years earlier,' Bo Mason (Stegner's fictional portrait of his -443- father) eventually moves his wife and two sons to Salt Lake City, where he supports his family on what he can make selling bootleg whiskey. Stegner says that a dozen years after he wrote the novel, 'I began to realize my Bo Mason was a character with relatives throughout western fiction. I could see in him resemblance to Ole Rölvaag's Per Hansa, to Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, to A. B. Guthrie's Boone Caudill, even to the hard-jawed and invulnerable heroes of the myth. But I had not been copying other writers. I had been trying to paint a portrait of my father, and it happened that my father, an observed and particular individual, was also a type — a very western type.'
Trying to understand his father, Bruce Mason writes: 'A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?' In all of his work Stegner traces as much of the curve as will reveal a connection between past and present. Yet it is not mere historical facts or ideas that Stegner seeks to convey. Rather, as he puts it, 'The work of art is not a gem, as some schools of criticism would insist, but truly a lens. We look through it for the purified and honestly offered spirit of the artist.'
One of Stegner's kindred spirits is surely Wright Morris, seven of whose novels had been published before The Field of Vision appeared in 1956 and won the National Book Award. Like Stegner, Morris writes mostly about the middle class, revealing the wonder of what is uncommon in the commonplace. Like Cather's, his narratives have an apparent simplicity that masks complexity. Like Hemingway and Faulkner, Morris makes his readers piece together a story from fragments that come from different points of view. The Field of Vision ostensibly centers on a Mexican bullfight, but the memories of five of the characters range far back into the past, dredging up bits of narrative that, taken together, tell the story of much of their lives. As in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the characters' thoughts reflect their temperament, education, and intelligence; and they show, too, that, as the novel's epigraph from Paradise Lost puts it, 'The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.' Morris also shares Faulkner's ability to create a mythic territory cot-444- responding to the actual home country of his memories. The Field of Vision, Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), and other Morris novels include characters who have lived in or had some connection with Lone Tree, Nebraska.
