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BOOK REVIEWS |
FRONTIER: AMERICAN LITERA- TURE AND THE AMERICAN WEST. By Edwin Fussell. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1965. xvi+450p.; introduction and index. $8.50.) This is a stimulating though highly speculative book. In the preface Fussell explains he offers it as an example of "imaginative historiography," a method of writing history in which facts are used merely as emblems to illustrate the theme. His procedure seems somewhat similar to that employed in Increase Mather's Divine Providences, in which shipwrecks, comets, earthquakes, and thunder storms illustrate Mather's thought that the hand of God is busy in New England. Like Mather, Mr. Fussell finds signifi- cance in emblems, images, and analogies. The West, he says, had no single or fixed meaning, and so each of the six major writers whom he studies -- Cooper, Haw- thorne, Poe, Thoreau, Melville, and Whit- man -- regarded it and the westward movement according to his own peculiar mind. Mr. Fussell contends that though none of these men lived in the West, their conception of the frontier is the key to understanding their writings. Thus Cooper, he argues, troubled by the con- flicts arising from the confrontation of nature and civilization beyond the settle- ments, resolved the antithesis by creating the tall figure of Leatherstocking, who incarnated "the best of both worlds" (p. 50). Hawthorne, too, so Mr. Fussell continues, was a western writer, for The |
Scarlet Letter takes the reader back to an era when Massachusetts was the fron- tier; and like Cooper, Hawthorne tried to reconcile opposites on the frontier -- thus in the conclusion to The Scarlet Letter Hester (nature, the New World) and Dimmesdale (Puritan ethics, the Old World) have separate graves but share a single tombstone (p. 114). As for Poe, Mr. Fussell thinks "The Mask of the Red Death" is a parable in which Prince Prospero represents the United States; and the Red Death, the retribution which will overtake the nation for its maltreat- ment of the Indian (pp. 165-169). Poe restlessly patrolling the border between waking and sleep, sanity and insanity, equated the terror in his mind with the terror of the actual frontier. Fussell thinks Thoreau hated the actual West, but loved an ideal West and drew inspira- tion from it for his backyard pioneering at Walden Pond. He believes that Mel- ville's intention in alluding to the West so frequently in Moby-Dick is "to insinuate some sort of sly connection between Ahab's business with the White Whale and America's business with the Far West" (p. 261), and that The Confidence Man is Melville's vote of "no confidence in the nation" (p. 303). Whitman, he finds, sang the ideals of the West confidently in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass, but the third edition (1860) revealed a decline in his inspiration; and thereafter, save for an occasional poem or two, Whitman sank into platitude. The reason for the |
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early blight, so Fussell asserts, was the disappearance of the actual frontier, an event which occurred sometime between 1850 and 1860. Without the actual West, the metaphorical West could not survive. The tone of the book is often arbitrary. For example, Fussell finds only "minor vestigial traces of the frontier" in the writings of Mark Twain, whom he dis- misses as "the Buffalo Bill of American literature" (p. 24). He insists that after the Civil War the frontier ceased to en- gage the imagination of American writers, and so he ignores the work of Bret Harte, Mary Austin, Frank Norris, Jack London, and many another worthy. And he is occasionally rude to his predecessors and betters; for he speaks of "Parkman and such types" (p. 45), and scornfully re- marks that Frederick Jackson Turner was "inevitably bewildered about chronology" (p. 441). Fussell, himself, is bewildered about chronology when he implies that the territory Huck Finn was going to light out for was the West of 1885 (p. 25). Still, Fussell has read a great deal, and by noting the numerous allusions to the West in his six favorite authors, his book contributes to our knowledge of American literature. Students of the literature of the Middle West will find his pages on writers like William D. Gallagher, Daniel Drake, and Judge James Hall informative. GEORGE KUMMER Western Reserve University CARPETBAGGER'S CRUSADE: THE LIFE OF ALBION WINEGAR TOURGEE. By Otto H. Olsen. (Balti- more: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965. xiv+395p.; bibliographies and index. $7.95.) This is a thorough, workmanlike history of Albion W. Tourgee's life and times, focusing chiefly on the Civil War and its aftermath. Tourgee, the Ohioan who be- came a southern businessman with his own capital and who served as a North Carolina superior court judge, emerges as symbolic of the best of the carpetbag- gers, motivated by idealism and genuine reform spirit. He is also symbolic of the intolerant self-righteous zealot who through tactlessness alienates even when |
he convinces. Tourgee's futile campaigns for Negro equality and federal support of education are a study in frustration, but they also point to the continued timeliness of his arguments in behalf of civil rights. Advocates of the white supremacy doc- trine were no less intransigent then than now, though one can more readily sym- pathize with the post-Civil War gentry who suddenly found their world over- turned. Tourgee sympathized with them to an extent, but his position as a leader of the Radical Republicans in North Caro- lina led him to partisan attacks that brought vituperation, slander, and virtual ostracism upon himself and his family. As a northerner he was always considered an alien during his fourteen years in the South, all the more so because he opposed the conservatives, championed the yeoman- ry and poor of both races, and managed to stay in the public eye through his own writing and speaking and his enemies' lurid attacks upon him. He left the South in 1879 feeling that Reconstruction had failed, but if he understood the short- comings of federal authorities and con- quered southerners, he was too much an absolutist to accept compromises himself. Tourgee is remembered dimly today as the author of a series of historical novels, the best of which are A Fool's Errand and Bricks Without Straw. These semi-auto- biographical fictions mirror much of his Reconstruction experience, with emphasis on political and social issues. Tourgee con- tributed to the development of realism by portraying a gallery of characters in enough depth and complexity to challenge stereotypes. Artistically, however, his work is rhetcrically turgid, his plots full of melodramatic incident and coincidence in the manner of Cooper or Scott. By the turn of the century Harris, Page, and even the racist Thomas Dixon had con- vinced the North of their more comfortable view of Reconstruction. Tourgee's report, factually accurate even when it oversim- plifies, has failed to capture a modern audience, but Edmund Wilson's recent display of interest may herald some slight revival. Perhaps the most valuable feature of Professor Olsen's biography is his account of Tourgee's North Carolina career, seen |
272 OHIO HISTORY |
against a closely textured background of Reconstruction politics. If the outlines are familiar and the detail seems excessive at times, Olsen deserves praise for his sane interpretation of ex parte contem- porary documents, and his historical treat- ment ably supplements the literary ap- proach of Theodore Gross's 1963 study. Although Tourgee saw to the heart of problems this nation has not yet solved, his reformist views were not generally welcomed even when they transcended party lines. Thanks to his irritating man- nerisms, Tourgee has usually alienated his interpreters. In giving us a full story of his crusades, Mr. Olsen calmly redresses the balance without assuming the role of advocate. CLAUDE M. SIMPSON, JR. Stanford University THE WAR OF 1812. By Harry L. Coles. The Chicago History of American Civ- ilization Series edited by Daniel J. Boorstin. (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1965. xv+298p.; maps, illus- trations, chronology, suggested reading, and index. $5.95.) In a nation greatly addicted to historical celebrations, the year 1962 came and went without any apparent public notice of the fact that it marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the "War of 1812." Americans were too busy celebrating the centennial of Antietam and Shiloh to recall other events in their history. Perhaps it is just as well. There are a good many things about the War of 1812 that Ameri- cans would prefer to forget. Thus, in the centennial year of Appo- mattox and sesquicentennial of the treaty of Ghent, it is pleasantly surprising to see a new book on the War of 1812 stealing a little space from the Civil War displays. A war that cost only a little over a hun- dred million dollars and five thousand casualties seems pretty small nowadays. Yet, from Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt down to Professor Coles, the "Second War of American Independence" has enjoyed treatment by a succession of able historians. I assume that Dr. Coles's raison d'ecrire is not to throw any new light on this |
unfrequented corner of American history, but to fill an assignment in the Chicago series, which he does in a competent and workmanlike manner. He resists the strong temptation to exploit the war's paradoxes and his judgments are nicely balanced. He finds Hull a little less culpable, Madison a little more effective, the militia not quite so irresponsible, the navy a bit less glorious, than others have done. Other- wise, his book is an adroit condensation of well-known facts, set forth in a plain, easy succession of declarative sentences. Only once does the author essay a touch of humor (p.225). This apparently threw him off stride, for on the next page his usually acceptable syntax shows a tend- ency to go astray. In spite of his limited space, Coles tells an interesting story with a few touches that may surprise the average reader. Tecumseh, the savage, upbraiding General Procter, the civilized Englishman, for al- lowing the Indians in his command to massacre prisoners; the citizens of Lewes, Delaware, firing back the Poictiers' spent cannon balls with powder brought down by the Du Pont brothers; a boatload of Wellington's Peninsular veterans, each transporting a heavy cannon ball in his knapsack, overturning and disappearing beneath the waters of Lake Borgne -- these are unforgettable vignettes. The war indeed had its bizarre side, culminating in the New Orleans campaign, where both armies had trouble finding enough firm soil on which to plant their artillery; where Jackson's cotton barricades caught fire and Packenham's sugar cask embra- sures dissolved into a sticky morass; and where a motley collection of coonskin hunters, Choctaw Indians, French pirates, Creole aristocrats, freed Negroes, and Ten- nessee farmers shattered an army which had beaten Napoleon at Waterloo. Serious students of history will be especially grateful for two features of this book -- the excellent
eight-page essay on "Suggested Reading" (pp.277-285), and the equally helpful section of Chapter I entitled "The Problem of Causation" (pp.27-37). This review of historians' opinions about the causes of the War of 1812, from Madison's listing of grievances in his war message through the full circle |
BOOK REVIEWS 273 |
of western expansionism, agrarian cupid- ity, economic sectionalism, and back to maritime spoliation and national honor recognized once more by Horsman, Per- kins, and Brown, will become required reading in historiography seminars. LYNN W. TURNER Otterbein College GUIDE TO MANUSCRIPTS AND AR- CHIVES IN THE WEST VIRGINIA COLLECTION, NUMBER II, 1958- 1962. By F. Gerald Ham. (Morgantown: West Virginia Library, 1965. xiii + 147p.; index. Free.) This is a calendar of the 437 accessions to the manuscripts and archives collection in the library of West Virginia University in the six years since the publication of the first volume. The entries provide care- ful and comprehensive descriptions of the various collections. These are very mis- cellaneous in character, and range from the papers of important land speculators, politicians, or merchants and the records of successful or speculative undertakings to clippings which are trivial or seemingly utterly worthless. Some of the items are concerned directly or marginally with Ohio; these can be readily found via the excellent index. Overall, a necessary ref- erence work for any library with an interest in West Virginia or its neighbors. ROBERT L. JONES Marietta College THE MIDDLE WESTERN FARM NOVEL IN THE TWENTIETH CEN- TURY. By Roy W. Meyer. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. vii + 265p.; appendix, "An Annotated Bibliography of Middle Western Farm Fiction, 1891-1962," bibliography, and index. $5.00.) In a carefully scalpeled segment of middle America reaching from Ohio to Nebraska, and from the prairie provinces of Canada to Missouri, Dr. Meyer finds 170 regional novels of the past seventy years that he judges worthy of evaluating for their (1) accuracy in handling physi- |
cal details of farm life, (2) use of vernac- ular, and (3) reflections of typical farm attitudes, beliefs, or habits of mind. No- table among the last are "conservatism, individualism, anti-intellectualism, hostil- ity to the town and a type of primitivism." In an earlier period of fiction, the short stories of Hamlin Garland seem to come nearest to acceptable accomplishment. In the twentieth century, four major trends emerge, in which Dr. Meyer finds the fol- lowing emphases. The farm novelist as "Historian" he sees best in Willa Cather and Ole Edvart Rolvaag. In Miss Cather's stories, particu- larly O Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia (1918), and "Neighbour Rosicky" from Obscure Destinies (1932), Meyer feels that "the story of the pioneer's struggle to subdue the land and of the immigrant to adjust to the new environment was first raised to the level of high art." The most penetrating treatment of the pioneer theme came, however, in Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927).
Viewed artistically, certainly Cather and Rolvaag remain the "finest practitioners of the genre." The farm novelist as "Arbiter of Val- ues" he sees best in John T. Frederick's Green Bush (1925);
as "Social Critic" in Paul Corey's Acres of Antaeus (1946); and as "Psychologist" in Herbert Krause's stories, especially The Thresher (1946). In Krause's writing, he says, all the major themes of farm significance -- historical, social, economic, and psychological -- com- bine to make The Thresher the best exam- ple of "what farm fiction had become after fifty years of existence." Ruth Suckow, Glenway Wescott, and Josephine Johnson have also reported the farm world with mature awareness, but Corey and Krause represent the highest development thus far in recording farm life in all its realistic complexity. American farm fiction came to its fullest efflorescence in the twenties and thirties. These decades of attempted self-realization in most areas of American regional art, Dr. Meyer might have pointed out, prof- ited much during the Great Depression years from a vast flurry of government- subsidized recording on the rawer levels of local history and folk materials. An- other slight flowering has come since 1955. |
274 OHIO HISTORY |
It is always easy to play "Here's An- other!" with an honestly selective study. Ohioans will wish that Dr. Meyer had not had to cut hide from hair so as to leave out the country village stories of Sherwood Anderson. And, there is no mention of Mary Hartwell Catherwood's fine early farm stories. Within his chosen limits, however, Dr. Meyer has pioneered in a useful and judicious report. ROBERT PRICE Otterbein College HORACE MANN ON THE CRISIS IN EDUCATION. Edited, with an introduc- tion, by Louis Filler. (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1965. xvi + 243p.; frontispiece and chronology. $6.00.) Almost as frequently quoted, misquoted, and maligned as John Dewey, Horace Mann stands as the threshold to popular education as indeed does Dewey to the experimentalist mode. (Other than this, little similarity exists in the philosophy and action of these reputed protagonists of a broader -- and freer -- American education.) Until now, perhaps the most comprehen- sive analysis of Mann and his times rested in a chapter in Merle Curti's Social Ideas of American Educators (1935). To sum up Curti's judgment, one may quote his conclusion: "Mann, the idealist, was inconsistent in many ways; his principles and his practice sometimes were quite divergent, and his methods of combating social evils changed with circumstances and the years. But his social vision re- mained undimmed to the end" (p. 138). Louis Filler, a professor of American Civilization at Antioch College, through a critical editing of Mann's written words (it will be recalled that the rural-born Bostonian served as president at Antioch in his senior years) has sought to revivify Horace Mann; to translate from an almost copybook image the genuine profile of another Promethean figure of America's federal age. Unfortunately, no such clear-cut por- trait emerges from the variety of observa- tion, epigram, and pronouncements of our |
greatest prophet of the educational awak- ening in America. Nor is this Professor Filler's fault; the clay with which he worked is of too varying a consistency; Mann is neither Emerson nor Thoreau; he is frail and he is adamant; he is pro- found, prolix, and pettifogging; he is a giant, yet the times were out of joint for gianthood such as his. Nevertheless, IN- VICTUS mirrors Mann as well as any of his age -- possibly any age. Death found him not disillusioned, but disappointed. And is this not the story of the whole human career? Filler's labor of love (and this is no flimsy accolade) is divided into five parts: Thoughts, Horizons, Tools, The Educa- tional Debate, and The Higher Education. How many of Mann's aphorisms are plagiarized every day: "Lost between sunrise and sunset two golden hours"; "The 'lower orders' are those who do nothing for the good of mankind"; "The more I see of our present civilization . . . the more I dread intellectual eminence, when separated from virtue"; "An apple is not an apple until it is ripe"; "Insult not another for his want of the talent you possess; he may have talents which you lack." Professor Filler's selection, of course, follows his own vision of Mann. There is no opportunity to show Mann (as Curti suggests) as other than Crusader and his goal other than a Holy Grail; yet mayhap he was not entirely always on the angel side -- did he not, in fact, champion the political and economic status quo, was he not sectarian (although Unitarian), was Mann not intransigent: an abolitionist, a temperance worker, a classicist? If these are faults, he grievously atoned for them. One fault, however, must be laid at the editor's door: there is no index. Mann's wonderful conception of life demands that we (who read as we run) have the key to his mentality. "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." And, to his wife, as Mann lay dying: "Sing to me, if you have the heart." In Lucinda Matlock's words -- "It takes strength to love life." KENNETH V. LOTTICH University of Montana |
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IDOL OF THE WEST: THE FABU- LOUS CAREER OF ROLLIN MAL- LORY DAGGETT. By Francis Phelps Weisenburger. (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syra- cuse University Press, 1965. ix+220p.; illustrations, bibliography, and index. $6.95.) The title of this book is as much an overstatement as the subtitle is an under- statement of fact. Daggett was in no sense a widely known and idolized western figure as were, for example, John C. Fre- mont, Mark Twain, and Kit Carson. Dag- gett, swept westward from his boyhood state of Ohio with the tide of the Cali- fornia gold rush migration, emerged (how, his biographer, who devoted five lines to the youth's formal education, fails to ex- plain clearly) as a highly literate leading San Francisco and Virginia City (Neva- da) journalist. He was co-founder and editor of California's Golden Age, a lit- erary publication, and subsequently served as editor of the Territorial Enterprise. Daggett wrote news copy, poetry of a sort, plays, a novel (Braxton's Bar), and collaborated with Hawaii's King Kalakaua in writing The Legends and Myths of Hawaii. While
basically a journalist, the many-sided Daggett served as clerk to the United States court in Nevada, was chosen a Hayes presidential elector, and in 1880 was elected Nevada's "Lone Congressman." Subsequently he became minister to Ha- waii, and it was in this capacity that he became a collaborator with the ruler of the island kingdom. Idolization of Daggett, if such occurred, came from his romping youngsters and his many personal friends in the Comstock. This carefully prepared biography is the product of extensive examination of available sources located mainly in Ohio, Washington, and California. By virtue of being a collateral descendant, the grandson of Daggett's sister, Weisenburger happily had access to family papers, but this re- mote blood relationship to his subject doubtless heightened his interest rather than colored the author's portrayal of the talented, interesting, urbane, and restless westerner. In a slightly pedestrian and as such precise manner, Weisenburger not only characterizes the God-fearing frontier environment in which the boy Rollin was reared, but he also describes in consider- |
able detail the lusty, and to the author degrading, life of Virginia City during the days of its mining boom. One cannot help but speculate what Lucius Beebe would have done with an identical set of notes, but of one thing the readers of this book may be assured: whatever might have been the author's literary temptations, he has remained faithful to the canons of his profession by writing a solid, factual, restrained, and, on the whole, thorough biography of Rollin Mallory Daggett. OSCAR O. WINTHER Indiana University NEW ENGLAND TRANSPLANTED: A STUDY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATIONAL AND OTHER CULTURAL AGENCIES IN THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RE- SERVE IN THEIR NATIONAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING. By Kenneth V. Lottich. (Dallas: Royal Pub- lishing Company, 1964. x+314p.; bibli- ography and index. $5.95.) When the Pilgrims, and the great Atlan- tic migration that followed in their wake, moored their barques on the wild New England coast, they brought to the New World the culture, the institutions, and the patterns of thought of their British ancestry. So, too (thirty years before the opening of the Erie Canal), when General Moses Cleaveland led the vanguard of Connecticut migrants into the lands along the southern shore of Lake Erie that were known as the Western Reserve, he and those who followed brought with them their New England heritage. But whereas the culture transplanted from old England was soon reshaped by the hardships and vicissitudes of life in the wilderness, the Connecticut tradition in the Western Re- serve evinced a remarkable vitality and longevity. The thesis of Professor Lottich's study is that this singularly persistent tradition was largely the result of the edu- cational system that developed in the northeast corner of Ohio. Thus the present volume, which is squarely in the genre of Parrington, Beard, and Curti, presents in detail the narrative of the growth of ele- mentary and secondary education, with less attention to higher education, in the Con- |
276 OHIO
HISTORY |
necticut Western Reserve, the influences that shaped that growth, and the role of other cultural agencies that contributed to it. Moreover, this intellectual heritage not only persisted, but also even tended, as Lottich says, "to crystalize" -- to remain more like New England than even New England itself, to out-Yankee the Yankees. Parenthetically, it should be noted that though this volume was in no way intended as a refutation of Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis that American democracy was born out of the duress of primitive life on the western frontier, it does show that in the Western Reserve a democratic way of life inherited from its parent society was deposited in a new setting where the Connecticut traditions of church, school, and town fostered the spiritual, intellectual, and political well- being of the people. Here was to be found, not a new social pattern conceived in response to the exigencies of the wilder- ness, but an old and tested way of life lifted entire from its native soil. The author's enthusiasm for his sub- ject has prompted him to attribute to the Western Reserve, and the Puritan matrix in which it was molded, certain educational "mileposts of lasting impor- tance" to the state of Ohio (of which it eventually became a part) and to the United States generally: the early estab- lishment of institutions of higher learning at Athens and Oxford; the founding, throughout the state, of many colleges and academies; the development in the West of higher education for women; the opening, at Kirtland, of the state's first normal school and "the dissemination of the normal school idea"; the sponsorship, at Sandusky, of the first teachers' institute in the state and one of the first in the nation; the organization, at Akron, of the Ohio Education Association, which pro- vided a model for other associations in |
both the East and the West; the passage of the Akron High School act which within a year was generalized as a state statute; and the Rice act, introduced by Harvey Rice of Cleveland, which reestablished the Ohio state education office and provided for the organization of union high schools throughout the state. To this list Lottich might have added the installation at West- ern Reserve University of the first chapter of Phi Beta Kappa west of Schenectady, New York, and the tenth in the country. The extent to which the derivative cul- ture of the Western Reserve can be cred- ited with all of these developments sug- gests an interesting problem in historical causality that probably cannot be solved; to this reviewer much of the argument sounds a little like a young doctoral candi- date's defense of his thesis. The historical importance of the Western Reserve needs no such defense, it can stand squarely on its own two feet as being entirely worthy of study, of and for itself, as an im- portant eddy in the westward flow of American culture. Within the confines of his topic, Lottich has written a well-reasoned and carefully documented narrative that brings together a substantial amount of valuable material throwing much needed light on an im- portant period in the history of education west of the Alleghenies. A definitive cul- tural history of the Western Reserve still remains to be written, one that will weave into a single tapestry all the threads that comprised the pattern of life in this unique pioneer society. When such a work is in preparation, its author will find Lottich's study of a neglected chapter in the history of American education very useful indeed. JESSE H. SHERA Western Reserve University |
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BOOK REVIEWS |
FRONTIER: AMERICAN LITERA- TURE AND THE AMERICAN WEST. By Edwin Fussell. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1965. xvi+450p.; introduction and index. $8.50.) This is a stimulating though highly speculative book. In the preface Fussell explains he offers it as an example of "imaginative historiography," a method of writing history in which facts are used merely as emblems to illustrate the theme. His procedure seems somewhat similar to that employed in Increase Mather's Divine Providences, in which shipwrecks, comets, earthquakes, and thunder storms illustrate Mather's thought that the hand of God is busy in New England. Like Mather, Mr. Fussell finds signifi- cance in emblems, images, and analogies. The West, he says, had no single or fixed meaning, and so each of the six major writers whom he studies -- Cooper, Haw- thorne, Poe, Thoreau, Melville, and Whit- man -- regarded it and the westward movement according to his own peculiar mind. Mr. Fussell contends that though none of these men lived in the West, their conception of the frontier is the key to understanding their writings. Thus Cooper, he argues, troubled by the con- flicts arising from the confrontation of nature and civilization beyond the settle- ments, resolved the antithesis by creating the tall figure of Leatherstocking, who incarnated "the best of both worlds" (p. 50). Hawthorne, too, so Mr. Fussell continues, was a western writer, for The |
Scarlet Letter takes the reader back to an era when Massachusetts was the fron- tier; and like Cooper, Hawthorne tried to reconcile opposites on the frontier -- thus in the conclusion to The Scarlet Letter Hester (nature, the New World) and Dimmesdale (Puritan ethics, the Old World) have separate graves but share a single tombstone (p. 114). As for Poe, Mr. Fussell thinks "The Mask of the Red Death" is a parable in which Prince Prospero represents the United States; and the Red Death, the retribution which will overtake the nation for its maltreat- ment of the Indian (pp. 165-169). Poe restlessly patrolling the border between waking and sleep, sanity and insanity, equated the terror in his mind with the terror of the actual frontier. Fussell thinks Thoreau hated the actual West, but loved an ideal West and drew inspira- tion from it for his backyard pioneering at Walden Pond. He believes that Mel- ville's intention in alluding to the West so frequently in Moby-Dick is "to insinuate some sort of sly connection between Ahab's business with the White Whale and America's business with the Far West" (p. 261), and that The Confidence Man is Melville's vote of "no confidence in the nation" (p. 303). Whitman, he finds, sang the ideals of the West confidently in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass, but the third edition (1860) revealed a decline in his inspiration; and thereafter, save for an occasional poem or two, Whitman sank into platitude. The reason for the |