Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 5

Obscurely published but one of the best books on Mexican life. OP.

7. Flavor of France

THERE IS little justification for including Louisiana as a part of the Southwest. Despite the fact that the French flag--tied to a pole in Louisiana--once waved over Texas, French influence on it and other parts of the Southwest has been minor.

ARTHUR, STANLEY CLISBY. _Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover_ (1952) and _Audubon: An Intimate Life of the American Woodsman_ (1937), both published by Harmanson--Publisher and Bookseller, 333 Royal St., New Orleans.

CABLE, GEORGE W. _Old Creole Days: Strange True Stories of Louisiana_.

CHOPIN, KATE. _Bayou Folk_.

FORTIER, ALCEE. Any of his work on Louisiana.

HEARN, LAFCADIO. _Chita_. A lovely story.

JOUTEL. _Journal_ of La Salle's career in Texas.

KANE, HARNETT T. _Plantation Parade: The Grand Manner in Louisiana_ (1945), _Natchez on the Mississippi_ (1947), _Queen New Orleans_ (1949), all published by Morrow, New York.

KING, GRACE. _New Orleans: The Place and the People; Balcony Stories._

MCVOY, LIZZIE CARTER. _Louisiana in the Short Story_, Louisiana State University Press, 1940.

SAXON, LYLE. _Fabulous New Orleans; Old Louisiana; Lafitte the Pirate_.

8. Backwoods Life and Humor

THE SETTLERS who put their stamp on Texas were predominantly from the southern states--and far more of them came to Texas to work out of debt than came with riches in the form of slaves. The plantation owner came too, but the go-ahead Crockett kind of backwoodsman was typical. The southern type never became so prominent in New Mexico, Arizona, and California as in Texas. Nevertheless, the fact glares out that the code of conduct--the riding and shooting tradition, the eagerness to stand up and fight for one's rights, the readiness to back one's judgment with a gun, a bowie knife, money, life itself--that characterized the whole West as well as the Southwest was southern, hardly at all New England.

The very qualities that made many of the Texas pioneers rebels to society and forced not a few of them to quit it between sun and sun without leaving new addresses fitted them to conquer the wilderness--qualities of daring, bravery, reckless abandon, heavy self-a.s.sertiveness. A lot of them were h.e.l.l-raisers, for they had a l.u.s.t for life and were maddened by tame respectability. n.o.body but obsequious politicians and priggish "Daughters" wants to make them out as models of virtue and conformity. A smooth and settled society--a society shockingly tame--may accept Cardinal Newman's definition, "A gentleman is one who never gives offense." Under this definition a shaded violet, a b.u.t.terfly, and a floating summer cloud are all gentlemen. "The art of war," said Napoleon, "is to make offense." Conquering the hostile Texas wilderness meant war with nature and against savages as well as against Mexicans. Go-ahead Crockett's ideal of a gentleman was one who looked in another direction while a visitor was pouring himself out a horn of whiskey.

Laying aside climatic influences on occupations and manners, certain Spanish influences, and minor Pueblo Indian touches, the Southwest from the point of view of the bedrock Anglo-Saxon character that has made it might well include Arkansas and Missouri. The realism of southern folk and of a very considerable body of indigenous literature representing them has been too much overshadowed by a kind of _So Red the Rose_ idealization of slave-holding aristocrats.

ALLSOPP, FRED W. _Folklore of Romantic Arkansas_, 2 vols., Grolier Society, 1931. Allsopp a.s.sembled a rich and varied collection of materials in the tone of "The Arkansas Traveler." OP.

ARRINGTON, ALFRED W. _The Rangers and Regulators of the Tanaha_, 18 56.

East Texas bloodletting.

BALDWIN, JOSEPH G. _The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, 1853.

BLAIR, WALTER. _Horse Sense in American Humor from Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash_, 1942. OP. _Native American Humor_, 1937. OP. _Tall Tale America_, Coward-McCann, New York, 1944. Orderly a.n.a.lyses with many concrete examples. With Franklin J. Meine as co-author, _Mike Fink, King of Mississippi River Keelboatmen_, 1933. Biography of a folk type against pioneer and frontier background. OP.

BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Folk Laughter on the American Frontier_. See under "Interpreters."

CLARK, THOMAS D. _The Rampaging Frontier_, 1939. OP. Historical picturization and a.n.a.lysis, fortified by incidents and tales of "Varmints," "Liars," "Quarter Horses," "Fiddlin'," "Foolin' with the Gals," etc.

CROCKETT, DAVID. _Autobiography_. Reprinted many times. Scribner's edition in the "Modern Students' Library" includes _Colonel Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in_ _Texas_. Crockett set the backwoods type. See treatment of him in Parrington's _Main Currents in American Thought_. Richard M. Dorson's _Davy Crockett, American Comic Legend_, 1939, is a summation of the Crockett tradition.

FEATHERSTONHAUGH, G. W. _Excursion through the Slave States_, London, 1866. Refres.h.i.+ng on manners and characters.

FLACK, CAPTAIN. _The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the Backwoods_, London, 1866.

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_. Nothing better on backwoods life in the Mississippi Valley.

HAMMETT, SAMUEL ADAMS (who wrote under the name of Philip Paxton), _Piney Woods Tavern; or Sam Slick in Texas_ and _A Stray Yankee in Texas_. Humor on the roughneck element. For treatment of Hammett as man and writer see _Sam Slick in Texas_, by W. Stanley Hoole, Naylor, San Antonio, 1945.

HARRIS, GEORGE W. _Sut Lovingood_, New York, 1867. Prerealism.

HOGUE, WAYMAN. _Back Yonder_. Minton, Balch, New York, 1932. Ozark life.

OP.

HOOPER, J. J. _Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs_, 1845. OP. Downright realism. Like Longstreet, Hooper in maturity wanted his realism forgotten. An Alabama journalist, he got into the camp of respectable slave-holders and spent the later years of his life shouting against the "enemies of the inst.i.tution of African slavery." His life partly explains the lack of intellectual honesty in most southern spokesmen today. _Alias Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper_, by W. Stanley Hoole, University of Alabama Press, 1952, is a careful study of Hooper's career.

HUDSON, A. P. _Humor of the Old Deep South_, New York, 1936. An anthology. OP.

LONGSTREET, A. B. _Georgia Scenes_, 1835. Numerous reprints. Realism.

MASTERSON, JAMES R. _Tall Tales of Arkansas_, Boston, 1943. OP. The t.i.tle belies this excellent social history--by a scholar. It has become quite scarce on account of the fact that it contains unexpurgated versions of the notorious speech on "Change the Name of Arkansas"--which in 1919 in officers' barracks at Bordeaux, France, I heard a l.u.s.ty individual recite with as many variations as Roxane of _Cyrano de Bergerac_ wanted in love-making. When Fred W. Allsopp, newspaper publisher and pillar of Arkansas respectability, found that this book of unexpurgations had been dedicated to him by the author--a Harvard Ph.D.

teaching in Michigan--he almost "had a colt."

MEINE, FRANKLIN J. (editor). _Tall Tales of the Southwest_, Knopf, New York, 1930. A superbly edited and superbly selected anthology with appendices affording a guide to the whole field of early southern humor and realism. No cavalier idealism. The "Southwest" of this excellent book is South.

OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. _A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States_, 1856.

_A Journey Through Texas_, 1857. Invaluable books on social history.

POSTL, KARL ANTON (Charles Sealsfield or Francis Hardman, pseudonyms).

_The Cabin Book; Frontier Life_. Translations all OP.

RANDOLPH, VANCE. _We Always Lie to Strangers_, Columbia University Press, New York, 1951. A collection of tall tales of the adding machine variety. Fertile in invention but devoid of any yearning for the beautiful or suggestion that the human spirit hungers for something beyond horse play; in short, typical of American humor.

ROURKE, CONSTANCE. _American Humor_, 1931; _Davy Crockett_, 1934; _Roots of American Culture and Other Essays_, 1942, all published by Harcourt, Brace, New York.

THOMPSON, WILLIAM T. _Major Jones's Courts.h.i.+p_, Philadelphia, 1844.

Realism.

THORPE, T. B. _The Hive of the Bee-Hunter_, New York, 1854. This excellent book should be reprinted.

WATTERSON, HENRY. _Oddities in Southern Life and Character_, Boston, 1882. An anthology with interpretative notes.

WILSON, CHARLES MORROW. _Backwoods America_. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1935. Well ordered survey with excellent samplings.