The Peripatetic Reviewer

by Edward Weeks

THE ART OF THE OLD WEST
by Paul A. Rossi and David C. Hunt
Knopf, $25.00 until December 31, $30.00 thereafter

This, the most readable and sumptuous picture book of the year, celebrates the treasures to be found in the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The man who brought them together was part Indian, and when he was nine, he and each member of his family received an allotment of 160 acres in the Creek Nation. His land happened to be in the center of the first major oil field, a few miles southwest of Tulsa. On its initial earnings he educated himself, and with the fortune he later amassed he began to collect the paintings, manuscripts, and artifacts which, taken together, would illuminate the westward movement of the white man in North America.

From 1910 to shortly before his death in 1962, Gilcrease had assembled more than 5000 works of art by the great Western artists: Catlin, Russell, Miller, Moran; twenty-two paintings and bronzes by Remington; and the exceptional canvases of lessknown men. For documentation he gathered 60,000 books, manuscripts, journals of individual exploit, and it is from these two sources, the pictorial and the written, that the director of the Institute, Paul A. Rossi, and the curator, David C. Hunt, have composed a social history blazing with action and authentic.

The collaboration is a happy one: Mr. Rossi, a native of Colorado, contributing his knowledge as horseman, rancher, and a famous collector of saddles; and Mr. Hunt, his connoisseurship and his facile pen. They have divided the book into twelve chapters beginning with “The Wilderness” and the early engravings of fauna, flora, and the idealized native, then moving on to “The Indians of the Plains.” their dances, their hunting, and their large, undisturbed settlements, as George Catlin saw them in the 1830s. Their peace is reflected in the unbelievably lovely canvas Indian Camp at Dawn by Jules Tavernier. In “Trappers and Traders" we follow the men sent out by John Jacob Astor and the Hudson’s Bay Company, the mountain men who followed the beaver and lived with the Indians in a kind of alcoholic truce until the furs became scarce. We follow the wagon trains to the California Crossing, so beautifully pictured by W. H. Jackson, where the South Platte was more than half a mile wide but seldom more than four feet deep, the oxen and prairie schooners like white fleets in the distance. The chapter “Troopers West” holds the violence of Remington and of Charles Schreyvogel, with Remington remarking to the captain of the squadron with whom he had been riding for thirty miles, “Captain, I’ve got the heart of a cavalryman, but the behind of a nursemaid.”

All through this book one feels the sense of loss: the loss of Indian wisdom as their captivity hardened; the loss of the multitudes of wildlife, the buffalo in particular (see Herd on the Move by William Hays) which once covered the tawny plains in the millions; the loss of the silent wilderness as in Sierra Nevada Morning, one of the greatest canvases by Albert Bierstadt. C. M. Russell and O. C. Seltzer paint the round-up, the dance hall, and the shoot-out, and at the close we have the artists who settled near Taos to depict the Indian semiadjusted and resigned. The prose blends the fortitude of the frontiersman with the prophetic view of the European explorers, the perspective is sound, and no reviewer can overemphasize the chain reaction which leaps from the picture to the text to the imagination—action so often stirring and tragic.

DEAR SCOTT/DEAR MAX:
The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence edited by John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer
Scribner’s, $7.95

In the spring of 1918 Shane Leslie, the Irish novelist and critic, wrote Charles Scribner II that he was sending him a manuscript which expressed “real American youth” by “an American Rupert Brooke.” The unknown author was F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the description was apt, for no one since Byron has created such a dramatic appeal by what he wrote and the way he lived. The manuscript, entitled The Romantic Egotist, eventually became This Side of Paradise, and Maxwell Perkins, who abetted its revision, was the most sapient book editor of his time.

The friendship between Scott and Max, like that between Byron and John Murray, or more recently, that between Henry Mencken and Alfred Knopf, was for life. In the case of Fitzgerald and Perkins, it was deeply dependent upon their letters, as Scott had no permanent residence and was constantly in flight. Their correspondence, of course, deals with dollars and cents, since from 1920 on Fitzgerald had embraced a way of living which, even with his popularity, he could not afford; he was perpetually in debt, and Perkins bailed him out with infinite patience. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer have cut and edited the letters as a running narrative, as indeed they are, a narrative which is remarkable for the intimacy and insight with which the two men judge the literary renaissance of which they are a part: for Scott’s eagerness in calling Max’s attention to writers of promise in London and Paris, most notably the unknown Ernest Hemmingway (as Scott invariably spelled it); and finally for its revelation of how Max encouraged and strengthened a major writer whose aspiration was matched by bouts of depression.

Fitzgerald was a slashing critic. He thought T. S. Eliot the finest poet of the century, admired Dreiser, said Sherwood Anderson had no ideas but could write superb prose, and overestimated Gertrude Stien, as he called her—she probably talked him into it. His contempt for novels of the soil which he thought were bogus in America breaks out in a glorious diatribe entitled “History of the Simple Inarticulate Farmer and his Hired Man Christy,” the shrewdest, funniest devastation of the bucolic novel ever written.

His moments of elation about himself usually have a wry stinger in them: “I feel I have an enormous power in me now, more than I’ve ever had in a way but it works so fitfully and with so many bogeys because I’ve talked so much and not lived enough within myself. . . . Also I don’t know anyone who has used up so much personal experience as I have at 27.” And of The Great Gatsby, “I honestly think that when its published I shall be the best American novelist (which isn’t saying a lot) but the end seems far away.” When T. S. Eliot wrote him that he’d read Gatsby three times and considered it “the 1st step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James,” Scott added, “Wait till they see the new novel!” Tender Is the Night was what he had in mind; it was written and rewritten over seven painful years while he was losing Zelda. Max’s buoyancy in that critical time was indispensable. Their friendship, as the editors have skillfully emphasized, was Scott’s anchor in a stormy career.

WE SPEAK NO TREASON
by Rosemary Hawley Jarman
Little, Brown, $8.95

To be believed in, a historical novel must cast a spell of verisimilitude; it must pronounce the difference in speech so that the words, as in Chaucer’s time, are as fresh as dew and vital; it must make us believe in the quaintness, the human longing, and the brutality of a time when life was not as nice as it is today. In We Speak No Treason, Miss Jarman has turned the clock back five hundred years to entice us into medieval England. Her hero is the much maligned King Richard III, and her story, beginning with the romance of his youth, moves into the struggle for power, the drawing and quartering of the victims from the Tower, and the sanctuary which the Church alone offered to the widows. Richard was the last of the Plantagenets, and in the author’s eyes, a brave and loyal man whose spirit was stronger than his body and who was dogged by misfortune from his boyhood. Miss Jarman knows her period. “I would have been perfectly happy in the fifteenth century,” she said, “and during the writing of this book I literally lived in it.”

Her romance is told in the form of the reminiscences of three people, each of whom was attracted to the court of Edward IV, the sunny, amorous older brother, and each of whom came to serve and love Richard in his various way. The first reminiscence is that of an old nun who in the infatuation of her youth became Richard’s mistress, who bore him a daughter, and later lived in her convent, waiting for death and grieving for a King slain in treachery. The second reminiscence, less sentimental, more bawdy, is that of Patch, the court Fool, who witnessed at close hand the scheming and killing in the Wars of the Roses and whose life was spared because he could make men laugh. Patch had observed Richard’s development ever since the boy was being trained for war at the age of twelve by the Kingmaker, Warwick. The Fool respected Richard’s unshaken loyalty to his brother the King; he had likewise observed Richard’s passion for the Maiden, for whom he too had a hopeless love.

The third reminiscence is that of a farsighted young knight, a champion with the long bow and a gentlemanusher in whom Richard puts his trust. His testimony is the most acute. The three show us, as it were, the different facets of the young diamond who was to be a sturdy fighter and an unhappy King. We see him as they saw him, thin, sober, and gracious, the right shoulder, because of his long training with the sword and mace, stronger and higher than the left. We see his valiance and why they loved him. The charm of their recollections comes in part from the language in which they are written, a pleasing blend of old French and AngloSaxon, and by dovetailing the three accounts, the author clarifies the intricate and bloody struggle for the Crown. A good romance, like a good opera, begins with bliss on earth, but as one watches the lovers, one knows that whether in Camelot or in London of the fifteenth century they are inevitably separated and condemned.