Robert Gish

Line of Fall by Miles Wilson (review)

The dialogue continues in this superb collection of letters from his formaxad tive period, to the great benefit of students not only of Manfred’s work and of western literature, but of American culture in general. The letters span the period from his college years through his struggle with tuberculosis, his early loves and marriage, his development as a writer, to the appearance of his masterpiece, Lord Grizzly. In 1946, in a project initiated by Sinclair Lewis, Manfred began depositxad ing his papers at the University of Minnesota, and in 1982, prompted by fears of nuclear destruction, he designated Augustana College, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as a repository for duplicate copies of many of his papers. The collecxad tion has grown to some three thousand letters, virtually all of which are open to research. For this collection, the editors, with Manfred’s invaluable assistxad ance, have selected 161 which seem best to document his personal and intelxad lectual development. Manfred’s correspondents run the gamut from family members and colxad lege friends to editors and prominent writers and critics like Mark Schorer, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Van Wyck Brooks. Only Manfred’s letters, of course, are included; giving the other side of the dialogues would present intimidating logistical and legal difficulties. Still, one glimpses only with tantalizing incompleteness what people like Brooks and Warren thought of Manfred and his books. And one wishes the editors had included much more personal detail on people like Manfred’s college chum John Huizenga, to whom some of the most introspective letters in the entire collecxad tion are directed. Insights such as those remain alone for those fortunate scholars whose research takes them to the Manfred manuscript collections and to Manfred himself.

Growing Up in Iowa by Clarence A. Andrews (review)

Clarence A. Andrews’ Growing Up in Iowa: Reminiscences of 14 Iowa Authors is a natural companion volume to his earlier book, A Literary History of Iowa (1972) because here we have the first-hand accounts of how place does indeed contribute to the growth of a writer’s mind. And it’s important to stress, I think, as the subtitle does, that the reminiscences found in this book — in all their variety of temperament and form: fiction, essay, poetry — are the memories of authors, the recollections of the sites, sights, and society of Iowa as experienced from 1875 to the present by such native sons and daughters as Hamlin Garland, Frank Luther Mott, James Stevens, Phil Strong, Paul Engle, Frederick Manfred, Richard Bissell, Paul Corey, Julie McDonald, Richard Lloyd-Jones, Robert Boston, Winifred Mayne Van Etten — and Andrews himself. As Andrews jokingly comments in his “neighborly” introduction, Iowa grows poets as well as pigs. In the narrow sense, an editorial choice which some might lament, Andrews has not compiled a people’s autobiography, a people’s history of younger days in Iowa; no “case study” reports here from farmers in the fields and sloughs, or small town merchants at work, or women in the home, or kids at play; and (regrettably) no Sac and Fox talk of grandxad parents and sacred rivers. These are novelists, playwrights, academics, professional writers — all white, all middle class, some (like Garland) even “genteel,” all aspiringly “upwardly mobile,” artists all, with an eye for form, for stylizing “fact.” But, paradoxically, because these are poets in the Wordsworthian sense, the Iowan and non-Iowan, white and non-white reader should feel quite truthfully and beautifully, in a much broader and aesthetically beneficial sense, the presence of people on the land, people in Iowa, “A Place to Grow” as the state motto has it — as if to give official support to Andrews’ theme. Every reader will find a favorite author or two among the fourteen. James Hearst and Manfred are mine, followed closely by Andrews, LloydJones, and Van Etten — three of the more lyrical “poets” in their descripxad tions of past days in Waterloo, Mason City, and Emmetsburg, respectively. In his reminiscence, Andrews asks, “Did You Ever See A Dream Walking —■ ?” to which he answers “I did,” as he talks about his infatuation with the stars, movies, and theatres of small town northeast Iowa in the 20s. By extension, what Andrews has brought together so nicely in Growing Up in Iowa is the “dream walking” in words, the journeys toward art, of poets as people whose feet and spirits — like their less articulate but kindred citizenry — are firmly planted in nurturing Iowa soil.