Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest | Page 6

novels based on an isolated society, books of history and fiction going
back to provincial simplicity will go on being written and published.
But I do not believe it possible that a good one will henceforth come
from a mind that does not in outlook transcend the region on which it is
focused. That is not to imply that the processes of evolution have
brought all parts of the world into such interrelationships that a writer
cannot depict the manners and morals of a community up Owl Hoot
Creek without enmeshing them with the complexities of the Atlantic
Pact. Awareness of other times and other wheres, not insistence on that
awareness, is the requisite. James M. Barrie said that he could not write
a play until he got his people off on a kind of island, but had he not
known about the mainland he could never have delighted us with the
islanders--islanders, after all, for the night only. Patriotism of the right
kind is still a fine thing; but, despite all gulfs, canyons, and curtains that
separate nations, those nations and their provinces are all increasingly
interrelated.
No sharp line of time or space, like that separating one century from
another or the territory of one nation from that of another, can delimit
the boundaries of any region to which any regionalist lays claim.
Mastery, for instance, of certain locutions peculiar to the Southwest
will take their user to the Aztecs, to Spain, and to the border of ballads
and Sir Walter Scott's romances. I found that I could not comprehend
the coyote as animal hero of Pueblo and Plains Indians apart from the
Reynard of Aesop and Chaucer.
In a noble opinion respecting censorship and freedom of the press,
handed down on March 18, 1949, Judge Curtis Bok of Pennsylvania
said:
It is no longer possible that free speech be guaranteed Federally and
denied locally; under modern methods of instantaneous communication
such a discrepancy makes no sense.... What is said in Pennsylvania

may clarify an issue in California, and what is suppressed in California
may leave us the worse in Pennsylvania. Unless a restriction on free
speech be of national validity, it can no longer have any local validity
whatever.
Among the qualities that any good regional writer has in common with
other good writers of all places and times is intellectual integrity.
Having it does not obligate him to speak out on all issues or, indeed, on
any issue. He alone is to judge whether he will sport with Amaryllis in
the shade or forsake her to write his own Areopagitica. Intellectual
integrity expresses itself in the tune as well as argument, in choice of
words--words honest and precise--as well as in ideas, in fidelity to
human nature and the flowers of the fields as well as to principles, in
facts reported more than in deductions proposed. Though a writer write
on something as innocuous as the white snails that crawl up
broomweed stalks and that roadrunners carry to certain rocks to crack
and eat, his intellectual integrity, if he has it, will infuse the subject.
Nothing is too trivial for art, but good art treats nothing in a trivial way.
Nothing is too provincial for the regional writer, but he cannot be
provincial-minded toward it. Being provincial-minded may make him a
typical provincial; it will prevent him from being a representative or
skilful interpreter. Horace Greeley said that when the rules of the
English language got in his way, they did not stand a chance. We may
be sure that if by violating the rules of syntax Horace Greeley
sometimes added forcefulness to his editorials, he violated them
deliberately and not in ignorance. Luminosity is not stumbled into. The
richly savored and deliciously unlettered speech of Thomas Hardy's
rustics was the creation of a master architect who had looked out over
the ranges of fated mankind and looked also into hell. Thomas Hardy's
ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey, but his heart, in accordance
with a provision of his will, was buried in the churchyard of his own
village.
I have never tried to define regionalism. Its blanket has been put over a
great deal of worthless writing. Robert Frost has approached a
satisfying conception. "The land is always in my bones," he said--the

land of rock fences. But, "I am not a regionalist. I am a realmist. I write
about realms of democracy and realms of the spirit." Those realms
include The Woodpile, The Grindstone, Blueberries, Birches, and many
other features of the land North of Boston.
To an extent, any writer anywhere must make his own world, no matter
whether in fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry. He must make
something out of his subject. What he makes depends upon his creative
power, integrated with a