Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest | Page 8

listened to dronings over Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet, and other dreary creatures of colonial New England who are utterly foreign to the genius of the Southwest. If nothing in written form pertaining to the Southwest existed at all, it would be more profitable for an inhabitant to go out and listen to coyotes singing at night in the prickly pear than to tolerate the Increase Mather kind of thing. It is very profitable to listen to coyotes anyhow. I rebelled years ago at having the tradition, the spirit, the meaning of the soil to which I belong utterly disregarded by interpreters of literature and at the same time having the Increase Mather kind of stuff taught as if it were important to our part of America. Happily the disregard is disappearing, and so is Increase Mather.
If they had to be rigorously classified into hard and fast categories, comparatively few of the books in the lists that follow would be rated as pure literature. Fewer would be rated as history. A majority of them are the stuff of history. The stuff out of which history is made is generally more vital than formalized history, especially the histories habitually forced on students in public schools, colleges, and universities. There is no essential opposition between history and literature. The attempt to study a people's literature apart from their social and, to a less extent, their political history is as illogical as the lady who said she had read Romeo but had not yet got to Juliet. Nearly any kind of history is more important than formal literary history showing how in a literary way Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob. Any man of any time who has ever written with vigor has been immeasurably nearer to the dunghill on which he sank his talons while crowing than to all literary ancestors.
A great deal of chronicle writing that makes no pretense at being belles-lettres is really superior literature to much that is so classified. I will vote three times a day and all night for John C. Duval's Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace, Charlie Siringo's Riata and Spurs, James B. Gillett's Six Years with the Texas Rangers, and dozens of other straightaway chronicles of the Southwest in preference to "The Culprit Fay" and much other watery "literature" with which anthologies representing the earlier stages of American writing are padded. Ike Fridge's pamphlet story of his ridings for John Chisum-- chief provider of cattle for Billy the Kid to steal--has more of the juice of reality in it and, therefore, more of literary virtue than some of James Fenimore Cooper's novels, and than some of James Russell Lowell's odes.
The one thing essential to writing if it is to be read, to art if it is to be looked at, is vitality. No critic or professor can be hired to pump vitality into any kind of human expression, but professors and critics have taken it out of many a human being who in his attempts to say something decided to be correct at the expense of being himself--being natural, being alive. The priests of literary conformity never had a chance at the homemade chronicles of the Southwest.
The orderly way in which to study the Southwest would be to take up first the land, its flora, fauna, climate, soils, rivers, etc., then the aborigines, next the exploring and settling Spaniards, and finally, after a hasty glance at the French, the English-speaking people who brought the Southwest to what it is today. We cannot proceed in this way, however. Neither the prairies nor the Indians who first hunted deer on them have left any records, other than hieroglyphic, as to their lives. Some late-coming men have written about them. Droughts and rains have had far more influence on all forms of life in the Southwest and on all forms of its development culturally and otherwise than all of the Coronado expeditions put together. I have emphasized the literature that reveals nature. My method has been to take up types and subjects rather than to follow chronology.
Chronology is often an impediment to the acquiring of useful knowledge. I am not nearly so much interested in what happened in Abilene, Kansas, in 1867--the year that the first herds of Texas Longhorns over the Chisholm Trail found a market at that place--as I am in picking out of Abilene in 1867 some thing that reveals the character of the men who went up the trail, some thing that will illuminate certain phenomena along the trail human beings of the Southwest are going up today, some thing to awaken observation and to enrich with added meaning this corner of the earth of which we are the temporary inheritors.
By "literature of the Southwest" I mean writings that interpret the