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A Sender Of Words: Essays In Memory Of John G. Neihardt ed. by Vine Deloria, Jr

1985; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1985.0016

1948-7142

P. A. T. Wild,

American Environmental and Regional History

Reviews 79 zation of the 1954 edition of Schaefer’s novel. Added to those commendable features is the inclusion of most of the essays on Shane listed in Etulain’s Bibliographical Guide. Having taken seriously its responsibility to further the study of the region’s literature, the University of Nebraska Press deserves commendation for pub­ lishing Work’s edition of Shane. Ironically, a remark of Schaefer’s included in this edition seems to scoff at such ventures: “Scholarship strikes me as a dull and stupid waste of time. All that piling up of detail! And for what purpose?” Undoubtedly, some scholarship is a waste of time, but some of it sheds light on the literature, helping us to understand and appreciate it. And those like Barzun who feel that any scholarship smothers the work it is meant to illuminate should consider what Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren say in American Literature: The Makers and the Making-. “If a literary work has any artistic value it will always reveal itself to be in excess of the historical comment, speaking to the reader in its own mode and living its own life. [Such literature] is also lighting up history— is even changing history.” Just such a novel is Shane. JAMES H. MAGUIRE, Boise State University A Sender Of Words: Essays In Memory Of John G. Neihardt. Edited by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Salt Lake City, Utah: Howe Brothers, 1984. 177 pages, $15.95.) A Sender Of Words shows the Nebraska poet, journalist, and novelist John G. Neihardt serving as a bridge between two radically different ways of life. Almost inevitably, this collection of essays by a variety of authors not only is uneven but now and then veers off the track from enlightening analysis into less than well-considered praise for Neihardt. In his enthusiastic dis­ cussion of Neihardt’s poetry, for example, Dee Brown rightly lauds the Nebraskan for turning western history into an appropriate subject for art; but his intimation that Neihardt’s verse may be superior to John Keats’s work will cause some eyebrows to rise. Similarly, Frank Waters slips into hyperbole and wishful thinking by declaring that an Indian vision of life can become “our vision” — a tall order considering vastly different circumstances. Yet on the whole, the good and generous light shed by A Sender Of Words reduces the above complaints to mere irritations. Rightly so, the anthology concentrates on Neihardt’s major contribution in prose, Black Elk Speaks, a vision by a Lakota Indian interviewed by Neihardt in 1931. Here even scholars in the field will perk up at the revelations. Anthropologist Raymond J. DeMallie explores the circumstances of Neihardt’s visits with aging Nicolaus Black Elk on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Thanks to DeMallie’s researches, for background we dip into the diary of Enid Neihardt, who accompanied her father to make a stenographic record of the conversations. 80 Western American Literature Roger Dunsmore offers startling and somewhat puzzling insights into the character of Black Elk. Born into “the last generation to experience the old way of life on the plains before the bison were gone,” the young warrior served as a scout for the Army, then performed in “Buffalo Bill’s” Wild West show. Apparently, conflicts swirled within the man whose childhood vision haunted him into old age. A convert to Catholicism, he in turn went through a period of evangelizing his tribesmen. Then, after the publication of Neihardt’s book, he made a public and strenuous declaration of his continuing commitment to the Christian faith. But what might seem a contradiction in white men’s terms makes a different kind of sense in a native culture. Contrasting the poverty-stricken Black Elk with “sun-tanned gurus proclaiming Truth in the Astrodome,” Dunsmore reminds us that in the Lakota’s view one does not egotistically pursue other-worldly experiences. Instead, a vision seeks out the man, guar­ anteeing him nothing but perhaps frustration through a lifetime of wrestling with its bright reality. In the lesson of that struggle, Dunsmore suggests, may lie the central message of Neihardt’s book. PETER WILD, University of Arizona Trimotor and...