Journal of the Southwest

California Classics: The Creative Literature of the Golden State by Lawrence Clark PowellReview by: John T. FlanaganArizona and the West, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring, 1972), pp. 72-73Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40168003 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 04:36

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Journal of the Southwest is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arizona andthe West.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.190 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 04:36:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS

CALIFORNIA CLASSICS: The Creative Literature of the Golden State. By Lawrence Clark Powell. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, i97i- 393 PP- $10.95-

There are two kind of librarians: one kind collects everything in squirrel fashion - books, pamphlets, periodicals, brochures, maps, broadsides, then rarely turns the covers; the other kind gloats over his treasures, fondles them, displays them, and finally strives to make the public share his enthusiasm. Obviously Lawrence Clark Powell belongs to this second group, since he is not only a profes- sional bookman but an erudite and urban writer who enjoys his excursions among masterpieces. In his most recent book he has chosen some thirty-one authors - Californians by birth, residence, or occupation - and has devoted an essay to a book by each author which to him represents a durable aspect of the Golden State. Fiction demands most of his attention, although poetry, history, auto-

biography, and even photography come in for their share. The authors, as one

might expect, include Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Frank Norris, Jack London, and

John Steinbeck, but also Aldous Huxley, Charles F. Lummis, Robinson Jeffers, and John Muir.

Few men know any region as intimately as Lawrence Powell knows Cali- fornia. He has followed the routes of the explorers, admired the ranches and

vineyards, climbed the mountains, and lived in the cities. He has read and reread Gertrude Atherton and Idwal Jones, and he has plunged into the tangled biography of Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Nathanael West. To readers who know California only as the land which spawned Lincoln Steffens, provided Clarence King with a mountain range to climb, and gave Upton Sinclair a rationale for his £PIC political panacea, California Classics will be surprising. To aficionados or boosters it will prove only what they thought everybody knew about the most populous state in the union.

There is to be sure a certain monotony about Powell's essays. Invariably about ten pages long, these "bio-bibliographical excursions" are a kind of mixed bag: some personal details, some biographical highlights, a more careful establishment of physical place, usually a quoted paragraph to show the author's command of

landscape description, exuberant impressionistic evaluation, and a final assertion that here indeed we are concerned with a classic.

[72]

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.190 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 04:36:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 73

But Powell is a cicerone rather than a critic, a propagandist rather than a

judge. Despite extensive reading in and about Mark Twain and Bret Harte, he

says nothing about either man which could not be anticipated. He is better at

getting at the core of Raymond Chandler or Mary Austin, best of all perhaps in his perceptive praise of the historiography of Herbert E. Bolton and Robert G. Cleland. Also, if he is not the first literary detective to identify Walter Nordhoff as the real author of The journey of the Flame, that remarkable Literary Guild success of 1933, he is an excellent interpreter of the spirit of Antonio de Fierro Blanco, the book's putative creator.

In these days when literary critics are by turns exhibitionists, pedestrian textual scholars, or symbol hunters, one can sincerely welcome a somewhat old- fashioned book for its enthusiasm and its frankly impressionistic judgments. It may not especially enlighten a reader to know that Lawrence Powell bought a second-hand copy of Gertrude Atherton in a Boston antiquarian bookshop, or that he read Mary Austin on a rainy day in Paris. Yet to a true bibliophile, books have associations often independent of their text. Powell is somewhat like a professional hunting guide explaining to a rapt audience exactly how to kill a kudu, or how many shots it takes to fell a Rocky Mountain sheep. In the long run the quarry is indispensable, but the cicerone's bravura performance merits his hire.

John T. Flanagan

The reviewer is a member of the English faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and an authority on American literature.

VICTORIAN LADY ON THE TEXAS FRONTIER: The journal of Ann Raney Coleman. Edited by C. Richard King. Norman: Univer- sity of Oklahoma Press, 1971. 206 pp. $4.95.

SAM HOUSTON'S WIFE: A Biography of Margaret Lea Houston. By William Seale. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970. 287 pp. $6.95.

After World War II, when paper became available and scholars began to bring out manuscripts in some quantity, there was a saying in Texas that writers should thank the Good Lord for the University of Oklahoma Press, since it was an outlet for publication of good books on Texas history. The list of Texas history subjects was rather long, and one remembers numerous outstanding publications such as William R. Hogan, The Texas Republic (1946), Joe B. Frantz, Gail Borden (1951), Wayne Gard, The Chisholm Trail (1954), and W. Eugene Hollon and Ruth Lapham Butler (eds.), William Bollaert's Texas (1956). The two books under consideration here give pleasant evidence that the good work of publishing Texas history continues in the grand manner in the Sooner State.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.190 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 04:36:26 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions