Western American Literature

296 WesternAmerican Literature history. ‘The Greek Pioneers of 1902,”ostensibly about Barba, a patriarch, afolkhealer, an interpreter ofdreams, the father of the town mayor, and alawbreaking bootlegger of the 1930s (who is lionized as a pioneer by the local paper after his death in the late 1960s), brilliantly becomes the story of Barba’s wife, Efthimia, and all the other women forgotten by the public record. Real immigrant experience in the Westpresses hard against theAmerican Dream in these stories. The Melting Pot won’t melt Old-World tensions between factions of Cretans, Maniots, Peloponnesians, and central Greeks. Youngmen flee the povertyofthe old country in pursuit ofthe American Dream only to find themselves living lives ofexile in shacks made out of blasting-powder boxes, burdened with the need to supply dowries for their sisters and then their sisters’ children, crying for lost families and friends, mourning the loss oftheir language, vowingalwaysto return to their homeland, and then finally returning in old age only to wish they had remained in America. Women become old before their time, spiritually crippled bythe weight ofproverbs and family demands. They long for some cultural grace to lighten the drabness of their men’s economic struggles while living out their lives in old-fashioned black dresses and head-hugging cloches that their children later scream would be greatfor Halloween. The great imaginative truth of these stories is that documentable hardships are less significant to our experience than are the places of the soul where we live out our real lives amid memory and longing. In “Father Gregory and the Stranger,”a contemporary Greek priest, trying to negotiate a life between the pressures of a domineering mother and his own faded desire to be abishop, finds himselfimprisoned in his sense ofselfafter encountering a gay parishioner, “knowing, free,”who seeks expungement of his baptis­ mal record in protest of the Church’s position on homosexuality. A kind of freedom comes with such self-knowledge, as when Chris Stavros in another contemporary story, “My Son, the Monk,”recognizes in old age that he has become much like the old Greek uncle he once despised. ‘The FirstMeeting ofthe Group”beautifully reveals how Effie, a rich widow with a facelift, who apparently always got what she wanted even during the Depression, harbors in her heart the regret thatas a child she had to go to Greek school and unlike American girls couldn’t attend the senior hop. When reminded fifty years later how fortunate her long life has been and how grateful she should feel for having marriedawonderful man, Effie replies, “Well, I’m notgrateful! Thatdoesn’tmake up for not going to the senior hop!” These wonderful stories poignantly dramatize what fiction shows best: history that matters lives in the heart. FRANKBERGON VassarCollege Wintergreen: Listening to the Land’s Heart. By Robert Michael Pyle. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. 303 pages, $10.95.) The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland. By Robert Michael Pyle. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. 220 pages, $19.95.) RobertFrost’s“The Oven Bird”posesaquestion that today’snature writersalso face: “what to make of a diminished thing?” Early American nature writers sang of the Reviews 297 marvelous abundance of the New World. Turn-of-the-century writers rhapsodized about the beauty of favorite, unspoiled places, insisting that these scenic lands be preserved. Later nature writers sought out pockets of remaining wilderness or rural farmsteads, describing their intimacy with some out-of-the-way place whose exact location they rarely divulged. At century’s end, nature writers have had to learn to sing of damaged lands, to discover wildness in urban settings, and to vise their words to heal wounds. Robert Michael Pyle is one of these nature writers of the wounded age. Pyle is trained in biology, having earned a doctorate degree in ecology and environmental studies from Yale University. His firstsix books are on butterflies, including TheAudubon SocietyHandbookfarButterfly Watchersand TheAudubon SocietyField Guide toNorthAmerican Butterflies. In Wintergreen and The Thunder Tree, Pyle stretches his literary repertoire to experiment with more personal, lyrical, and reflective essays on place. Wintergreen, which won theJohn Burroughs Medal for the best natural history book of 1987, describes the seasons, the ecology, the people, and...