Friday. April 20, 1962
University Daily Kansan
Page 7
Parkman, Haggard, Shaw, Zola: All Available
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THE OREGON TRAIL, by Francis Parkman. Signet Classics, 50 cents.
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Some regard Parkman as a literary-historical curiosity today, and read his history of the Anglo-French conflict purely for its style. This may be his true place, but there is always "The Oregon Trail," which has fascinations for the adult reader as strong as for the boy of 10 or 12.
It is the endlessly magical tale of a young man seeing America when America, too, was young, when the country in which we Kansans now live was frightening prairie to a boy from Boston. Before the Oregon trail really took its place in history, Francis Parkman ventured forth on it, as far as Wyoming of today, then cutting south and returning through the Colorado and western Kansas country.
THERE WAS MUCH emigration then, for Parkman was making his trip in what DeVoto calls "the year of decision: 1846." The rough westerners, the trappers, easterners headed for an El dorado, Mormons heading for the Great Basin, and always Indians—this is what Parkman describes for us. He describes it with prejudices, particularly for the Mormons, of whom he saw little, and the Indians, of whom he saw much. His prejudice for the Indians was a raw one. Here is Parkman on the Arapahoes:
"I looked in vain among this throng of faces to discover one manly or generous expression; all were wolfish, sinister, and malignant, and their complexions, as well as their features, unlike those of the Dahcotah, were exceedingly bad."
HE SPENDS CONSIDERABLE time among the Indians of the plains, and he helps to fulfill his own prediction that "the buffalo will dwindle away, and the large wandering communities who depend on them for support must be broken and scattered." For to Parkman an animal is there to be killed. He also sees the prairie degs, whose mounds might cover the plains for miles.
Nature provides some magnificent backdrops, and one description, chosen purely at random, is Parkman's writing of Pike's Peak: "Before sunrise in the morning the snow-covered mountains were beautifully tinged with a delicate rose color. A noble spectacle awaited us as we moved forward ...Pike's Peak and his giant brethren rose out of the level prairie, as if springing from the bed of the ocean."
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CARRINGTON, by Michael Straight. Dell. 50 cents.
This is a psychological western by an author well known to readers of the New Republic, but not for his fiction. His hero is not a conventional hero at all, being an army colonel who is most concerned with achieving peace with the Indians and not wiping them out.
One reads the novel, in fact, with first of all a contempt for what seems the intrinsic cowardice of Carrington and a growing admiration for him. He is the essence of stubbornness, and we can applaud him for this, especially when disobedient junior officers go out and get themselves wiped out by the Sioux under Red Cloud.
the reduction of potentially noble human beings to the level of animals. These are animals, in a perpetual rutting season, driven to sexual intercourse as the only thing that comes free, taking love where they can get it, and be damned if anyone is looking on.
This is a vivid story, exciting and well-written, far superior to most novels of the West.
* *
GERMINAL, by Emile Zola.
Doubleday Dolphin, $1.45.
Our naturalistic writers were as vigorous as Gene Stratton Porter or Harold Bell Wright alongside Emile Zola. This is the grimmest, ugliest, most humorless, most impressive book about class warfare I have read. There is none of the symbolic appreciation of the land that one finds in Norris" "The Octopus," none of the derring-do of Jack London
"GERMINAL" HAS A horrifying climax, as coal miners, men, women, children alike, are trapped in the mines which have been flooded by a Socialist agitator. It has a particularly chilling sequence in which a storekeeper's body is mutilated by a maddened mob. It has the contrast Zola is providing for us—of fat, cheerful, indolent members of the upper classes who own or control or run the mines.
This is savage and brutal. The horror builds up as one reads about the long coal strike, the starving, the greed, the avarice,
Read this, you roaring young liberals, solving all the world's problems, and you, too, you dashing young folks of the right who are busily carrying the banner of Life, Liberty and Senator Goldwater.
* *
WALDEN TWO, by B. F. Skinner (Maemillan, $1.80)—a modern tract in the utopian tradition which first appeared in 1948. This utopia is not the utopia of More or Fourier but is one which has all the scientific appurtenances of Bellamy's "Looking Backward," though it is set in the modern era.
* *
THE VILLAGEVOICE READER;A MIXED BAG FROM THE GREENWICH VILLAGE NEWSPAPER (Doubleday,$2.50)—a paperback being published simultaneously with a hardback version. It is a potpourri that includes Feiffer cartoons and writings by such persons as Steve Allen, Norman Mailer, Gilbert Seldes and dozens of lesser names.
SHE, by H. Rider Haggard. KING SOLOMON'S MINES, by H. Rider Haggard. Doubleday Dolphin Books, 95 cents each.
Every once in awhile one must cast aside the cares of the present and take off into the romantic past—the past of one's boyhood, if possible. And what better way than through the pure nonsense of H. Rider Haggard?
"She" and "King Solomon's Mines" are sheer fantasy. Neither can pretend to literary significance, but it's likely that they will continue to be read for a long time. In the first, Haggard takes us on a wild foray into a hidden valley in Africa (back in the days when Africa was really Darkest Africa) where lives a native tribe ruled by a woman who is about 3,000 years old. "She" bathes herself in an eternal flame, and awaits the man who will be the reincarnation of the Egyptian she stabbed to death back in the good old days.
WELL, OUR HERO, a monumentally ugly man, and his ward, who just happen to be the reincarnation old "She" is waiting for, go to the hidden valley. And some wild times result. Enjoyable times, too, and completely uncomplex.
"King Solomon's Mines," as almost everyone should know, also takes place in Africa. The movie producers were able to utilize the fabled giant Watusi, who portrayed the amazingly tall African warriors who live in the valley where King Solomon had his diamond mines.
Allan Quatermain is Haggard's hero, a short, not especially attractive, aging white hunter (scarcely the Stewart Granger type), who is persuaded by two Englishmen to go into Africa and search for a missing brother and, incidentally, King Solomon's mines. It's a wild adventure, and that old kidder Haggard uses the eclipse trick (what a literary standard this has been!) to impress the savage natives. Oh yes, the explorers find the diamonds. -CMP.
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SELECTED SHORT STORIES, by Irwin Shaw. Modern Library,
$1.95.
Shaw has written radio serials, plays, and Hollywood scripts, but he is primarily a short-story writer. His short stories have appeared in "The New Yorker," "Esquire," "Collier's," "Story" and other magazines. This book is a collection of those stories published between 1935 and 1960.
Shaw's short stories are written in the third person. There is little action or violence, but some conversation about it. The stories involve Americans, whether the setting is in America, Europe or the Middle East, and the stories are not hard to read since they follow a chronological pattern and usually take place within a short period of time.
THE CHARACTERS are believable. Although they are the soldiers, World War II fighter pilots and college professors whom we are accustomed to see and hear about, a facet of their personality to which we are not accustomed is sometimes exposed.
In some of Shaw's stories people such as Christian Darling are unable to comprehend the changing world they are living in. Darling, the forgotten football hero, goes back to his alma mater and runs down the football field pretending he is making the eighty-yard run he made fifteen years before.
In other stories Shaw's characters can never quite accomplish what they would really like to. They are in situations which would make heroes of greater men, but through lack of courage they fail miserably. In "Hamlets of the World," Lieutenant Dumestre is afraid to act according to his own judgment because it is contrary to his orders. For this weakness he is murdered by his own men.
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