Western American Literature

Reviews 329 Watkins skillfully explains the power of the sea through his explanation of his own persona] relationships. In fact we leave the narrator living on a houseboat in Richardson Bay where he is at the mercy of the tides and more than slightly awed by being so close to the original giver of life. He also acknowledges that there are some personal problems, and thus some aspects of the sea, that cannot be discussed. He rightly chooses not to try to discuss the turmoil of his relationship with Joan. The point he is making is that there are some emotions stirred by living on the sea that simply can not be put into words. The illustrations help to support this point. Watkins also explains that his involvement with conservation has been an intellectual one, and that one does not have to sleep alone under a tree in the wilds to appreciate the necessity of wilderness as a reminder that we are “natural creatures living in a natural world.” This is just one example of the kind of truths that Watkins has packed into his concise and essentially unsentimental book about a growing relationship with nature. Having slept under a few trees in some of America’s wildest country I recog­ nize that truth of what Watkins says, but I never would have realized some of the particular truths without being told about them. KENNETH C. RISDON, Vermilion, Ohio Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather’s Uncollected Short Fic­ tion, 1915-1929. Edited with introduction by Bernice Slote. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. 183 pp. $6.95); Willa Cather: A Pic­ torial Memoir. Photographs by Lucia Woods and others. Text by Bernice Slote. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. 134 pp. $15.00) ; “Cather Family Letters, 1895,” edited by Paul D. Riley; “What Happened to the Rest of the Charles Cather Family,” by Mildred R. Bennett, Nebraska History 54 (Winter 1973), 585-618, 619-624; “Art and Religion in Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Mary Ann and David Stouck; “Prospective Focus in My Antonia,” by Mary E. Rucker; “Willa Cather’s Ironic Master­ piece,” by David C. Stineback, The Arizona Quarterly 29 (Winter 1973), 293-302, 303-316, 317-330. The centennial of Willa Cather’s birth was celebrated last year by an international seminar in Lincoln, in October, supported by the Foundation for the Humanities, a special concert in Lincoln in December by the Menuhins, the two books listed above, and a good-many more articles than those reported on here from Nebraska History and The Arizona Quarterly. Compared with the meager attention given Ellen Glasgow’s centennial in Virginia last year and absence of plans to mark Gertrude Stein’s 100th anni­ 330 Western American Literature versary this year, one might well conclude that Willa Cather is emerging as the major woman writer of this century. As Eudora Welty put it in her address to the seminar in Lincoln: Her work stands as “a monument more unshakable than she might have dreamed, to the independent human spirit she most adored.” Bernice Slote’s edition of seven uncollected stories now brings into print all the stories Willa Cather is known to have written. These join The Troll Garden and Youth and the Bright Medusa, published in her lifetime, and Virginia Faulkner’s edition of Willa Gather’s Collected Short Fiction, 18921912 (rev. ed., 1970). The latest volume is an uneven collection, beginning with “Consequences,” a ghost story written in 1915, and ending with “Uncle Valentine” (1925) and “Double Birthday” (1929). The last two were written in her most mature decade and are extremely good stories. Bernice Slote has introduced the collection with a remarkably lucid and illuminating essay. Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir is a splendid gift book for anyone who loves Willa Cather’s fiction. Besides the large number of photographs taken by Lucia Woods, an able professional photographer, there are dozens of pictures of people and places from various archives. The collection is arranged chronologically beginning with Miss Woods’photo of rural Virginia in the spring and ending with her evocative shot of a Nebraska cottonwood in autumn. For any writer who had as...