Book Review: Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State

REVIEWED BY PETE WARZEL

I have been working on a second book of essays, having abandoned the first to publishing individual pieces in magazines and literary journals, the concept of “book” depreciated.

And in this second book I feel that the voice, tone, rhythm of detail is right. The book is sound. Then I pick up Rick Bass, any Rick Bass writing, and realize how much work I have yet to do.

Bass is a widely published, numerous awards-winning writer, naturalist, environmental activist, writing mostly essay and short fiction. The Lives of Rocks: Stories (2006) is stunning short fiction. Fortunate Son, here, is a collection of essays that in his own words is a “…journalist’s Texas scrapbook”, the premise being Bass exploring the roots, memories, and the connections, now an exile in Montana, to his birth and youth and family history in Texas. The setting maybe Texas, the writing is universal.

His former profession was petroleum geologist, and that, along with his upbringing by a family invigorated by the outdoors, generates the awe he has for nature, as well as the detail of process that fills his work with wonder. He is akin to John McPhee, the great creative non-fiction writer who lived at The New Yorker and taught, still, I believe, at Princeton. They both take on eclectic subjects in search for understanding a bit of the world around them. McPhee is eastern and has, at least, roots in academia. Bass is nothing but west. 

The first piece of the collection, Into the Fire is a tour de force, a night out in Houston with the author’s childhood friend as Fire Chief, learning about the emotions and mind set, the intricacies of those who put their life on the line to stop property from turning to ash, lives from being incinerated. Bass’s nature writing is at the core of this work as he interprets the fire as “…that seemingly rarest of things, the real thing – and you can see what a living thing, what an awful animal, the fire is.” The animal imagery is a theme of this piece, even to the people who fight it. As Bass notes the anomaly of the deviant firefighter who starts fires he describes how the rest of the tribe senses the sin. “It is elemental, the way they find out. It is the way animals communicate – the way animals, who have been here in the world so much longer than we, communicate. They are never wrong.” It becomes mystical in the detail as fire is everywhere, waiting to burst through. This is nature writing in an urban landscape, wild and beautiful in its destructive energy. This is fierce writing.

Moon Story is a non-linear reflection on his youth in Texas, the lure of NASA in Houston and its moon shots, and the primal experience of watching the great solar eclipse of 2018 at his home in the Yaak Valley, Montana. It is an abstraction that fascinates. Tying the universality of the pull of the moon regardless of place, Bass taps nature once again for the proof. “On full moons, zooplankton rise to the surface as if in the Rapture; oysters spread wider their limestone lips; deer, bedded down, rise as if in a trance no matter what the hour of day is when the moon (which is always full, we must remember) is either directly overhead or, curiously, on the other side of the earth, directly underfoot.” Those details place his narrative in a much bigger world.

The Farm is idyllic. A visit to his father’s farm with his two young girls, his mother off stage having passed away. It is a wonderful recollection, but also a brilliant reproduction of a natural setting on the page. Bass has a proclivity to translate the west succinctly. “Finally it was true dark.” We all know that timing of light here, as light hangs in the sky, lingering, and then extinguished.

And so go the fourteen essays collected in this book. Captivating, well-wrought, universal. The University of New Mexico Press has done well in bringing Rick Bass to their pages.

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Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State

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Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State
By Rick Bass
University of New Mexico Press
216 pages
Paperback

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Book Review: A Pageant Truly Play’d by Tessa West

Reviewed by Pete Warzel

I received an email several months ago from the UK author, Tessa West, asking if I might be interested in her new biography about Constance Smedley and Maxwell Armfield, a British couple, she a writer and playwright and he a painter. The interest might be their employment by the Santa Fe Railway Company during 1920.

I say the book is about Constance and Maxwell, Connie and Max, but it is a bit more than that. While Tessa was researching their lives and histories, she and her brother found several paintings in their father’s belongings given to him by Max. Letters between the two men also were recovered and the book that was to be a biography of man and wife now became much more personal through this serendipitous link with her father. Ms. West uses the relationship to draw a portrait of her father, David, as well as present the biography of these two adventurous artists.

Constance Smedley was born to wealth in 1877, Birmingham, England. (One of her father’s ventures was the world’s first company to produce “movies”, and filmed four, one minute scenes from King John by Shakespeare, to show before live performances of the play.) By all accounts she was a pistol, in spite of her physical disability – most likely polio. She attended the Birmingham School of Art and began writing novels after leaving the school. In all she published twenty novels, and another twenty books of non-fiction and children’s literature. Connie also started, extremely successfully, a bricks and mortar club as a creative and business environment for women – the Lyceum – having been dismissed by the Writer’s Club when she proposed there be a special section for women.

Maxwell Armfield was born into a Quaker family in 1881, in the south of England. His family also was well-off, due to the founding and expansion of Armfield Iron Works. Max attended Sidcot, a Quaker School, and then the Birmingham School of Art, several years following Connie. The school was affiliated with William Morris, the multi-faceted and talented artist at the heart of the British Arts and Crafts movement.

About two thirds of the slim book relates their individual family lives, education, and accomplishments. Then, in 1907, never knowing each other despite having attended the same school, they meet. The artistic duo becomes a force in 1909 with their marriage, within an atmosphere of the suffrage movement in England, and the storm clouds appearing in Europe for the Great War. While they lived in the countryside and worked on their individual painting and writing projects in different parts of the house, they also collaborated on “design, illustration, text and theatre.” The Greenleaf Theatre, an endeavor that “…was to bring all the arts together with the intention of using them to project the central concept of a play,” was a successful venture founded by the couple.

But 1914 and the onset of war steered them to America. Here they developed their creative strategies, Max had success in selling his paintings, and they were invited to stage a play at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California, at the university. The Santa Fe Railway extended them an invitation to travel the southwest and depict the striking geography and native scenes for use as promotional material by the railroad as it expanded tourism during this vibrant part of American history. (Although not mentioned by Ms. West, the train car they had for their own *, the meals at stations along the route, and the El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon, were all part of the tourism expansion by the Fred Harvey Company in association with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway).

This is a set piece in a larger arts movement, isn’t it? British intellectuals finding each other, sharing an adventurous spirit and a calling for the arts, turning out books and paintings, plays and stage sets. Then…coming to America. Visiting the center of the tourism boom in the southwest and Santa Fe, and so fitting the pattern being established by artists from everywhere drawn to the beauty and exoticism of New Mexico. (Within the same ten year period, our friend Cormac O’Malley tells us about his father, Ernie, IRA Commander, poet, adventurer, traveling to Santa Fe, directly to El Zaguán, and befriends Dorothy Stewart, writes poetry, keeps magnificent diaries, and explores with Dorothy and her friends, the southwest and Mexico).

The title of Ms. West’s book comes from Shakespeare, As You Like It. Reference is to The Historical Pageant of Progress, a 1911 production in rhyming verse, that the married Armfields were involved staging. In the end, it is a fitting epigram of the lives of these two artists. The book is a look at two very British artists, representative of their time, and a part of the trend of history in the southwest and Santa Fe in the 1920’s, as the city also was discovering itself.

A Pageant Truly Play’d
By Tessa West
Brewin Books, UK
Softbound, 172 pages

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The Roque Lobato House - A Book on HSFF's Register Property Lobato - Morley House

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The Roque Lobato House
Santa Fe, New Mexico
by Chris Wilson and Oliver Horn
Photography by Robert Reck
Schenck Southwest Publishing
2014

Description from book jacket:
The eighteenth-century world that Roque Lobato, soldier and eventual armorer to the Royal Spanish Garrison of Santa Fe, entered was a dark, turbulent, and unforgiving place. Born into a poor family most likely in the 1730s, Lobato grew up during a time when the nature of the Spanish colony was changing. Brash and perulant, Lobato avoided almost certain indentured servitude by opting for the dangerous course of winning honor and wealth as a soldier. As a reward for his many years of participation in the Comanche Indian Wars, Governor Juan Bautista de Anza granted the land for the construction of the Roque Lobato House.

Built in 1785, the Roque Lobato House has not only witnessed transformative historical events but also actively participated in some. In the nineteenth century, the house was intimately involved with Don Gaspar Ortiz y Alarid and the activities of the notorious Santa Fe Ring, known for defrauding New Mexicans of their land titles.

In the twentieth century, the by then renovated house served as a prototype for archacologist and occasional spy Sylvanus G. Morley's Spanish Pueblo revival architectural style, ultimately adopted as the Santa Fe style that unified the city architecture and attracted tourists to the city. Most recently, the Roque Lobato House underwent an extensive renovation that removed many of the changes made in the previous few decades.

Chris Wilson and Oliver Horn trace the long history of the Roque Lobato House and its fascinating owners. This house was not only pivotal in the development of Santa Fe style but also one of Santa Fe’s most historic houses.

About the Authors:
CHRIS WILSON, former J. B. Jackson Professor of Cultural Landscape Studies of the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning in Albuquerque, and founding director of the its Historic Preservation and Regionalism Program, has written widely on architecture, tourism, and the politics of culture in the Southwest. His coauthored book La Tierna Amarilla: Its History, Architecture, and Cultunal Landscape (1991) won the Downing Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. His book The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tnadition (1997) received the Villagra Award from the Historical Society of New Mexico and the Cummings Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum. Facing Southwest: The Life & Houses of John Gaw Meem (200) sings the virtues of both one of Santa Fe's leading citizens and the regional design tradition he helped to sustain. Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies After J, B. Jackson (2003), also coauthored, provides the most up-to-date survey of cultural landscapes. Wilson was lead author and editor of the award-winning study The Plazas of New Mexico (2011). A Field Guide to Cool Neighborhoods, focuses of pedestrian neighborhoods in North America before and after the automobile.

OLIVER HORN is urrently a PhD candidate in US Diplomatic History at Georgetown University. He also holds an MA degree from Georgetown University in Global International and Comparative History. He
graduated magna cum laude with a BA degree from Washington and Lee University, double majoring in US History and Politics. He has written numerous articles for Heritage Foundation. This is his first book.

Read about the Lobato - Morley on HSFF’s Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation nomination written by Dr. Audra Bellmore.

The Roque Lobato House, Santa Fe, NM

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The Roque Lobato House
Santa Fe, New Mexico
by Chris Wilson and Oliver Horn
Photography by Robert Reck
Schenck Southwest Publishing
2014

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Rebel of the Colorado: The Saga of Harry Leroy Aleson - A Book Review by Pete Warzel

Rebel of the Colorado: The Saga of Harry Leroy Aleson, Written and Illustrated by Renny Russell, Foreword by Roy Webb, Animist Press, Hard cover, 304 pages. (Order at bottom of this page).

Animist Press is a book binding, publishing, and restoration venture located in Questa, New Mexico, started in 2007. A homegrown press of “real books about real people.” So is their latest publication, a large format, substantial, well-produced book, about a man unknown to me previously, with a fascinating story. My sense of the desert Southwest was informed early on by Edward Abbey and his marvelous works and outsized personality. River running on the Colorado, the Green, Glen Canyon before the dam, eco-activism, all took on a heady importance in his writing. Harry Leroy Aleson, born Asleson, the subject of this book, is as much an electrifying character as Abbey, pre-figuring him by thirty years.

Russell writes a chronology of Aleson’s life and work, mostly in introductory sections where he sets the scene, and then quotes his subject’s own writings to tell the story. The illustrations, maps, and photographs are numerous and excellent, enhancing the written tale as it moves along from 1899 to Aleson’s death in 1972. What a story.

Aleson was born in the Midwest and served in World War I in the Army Air Service, a duty that would make him a victim of the horrific chemical warfare of the time, and would put him in and out of hospitals for treatment and surgeries through his entire life. The physical debilitation makes his demanding outdoor life all the more impressive, and indeed he becomes a figure larger than life. He begins his own adventure in the Pacific Northwest then on to itinerant jobs during the Great Depression. In a haunting quote that hints at today’s unrest, especially in Portland where Federal troops police the streets uninvited, Aleson talks about the unrest of joblessness, an economy in turmoil, and lack of food. “The city of Seattle has done nothing towards relief for its citizens. Something must be resolved. I don’t mean bloodshed…. If blackjacks and handcuffs are used to terminate peaceful dissent, they will be given a fitting and ceremonious funeral in Puget Sound, never again to be used on American citizens.”

His introduction to the Colorado River in the 1930s sets the rest of the course of his life and in 1939 endures the ordeal of having his boat washed away while camped, stranded. He meets Georgie White who eventually operates the first woman owned river rafting commercial company, Georgie’s Royal River Rat Company, and they use neoprene boats in 1947, perhaps the first run in such a vessel, sparking the idea of commercial enterprise. They also chase their separate demons together in wild, crazy endeavors. In 1945 Harry and Georgie float 60 miles in a swollen Colorado River in life preservers and backpacks, no boat.

Aleson forms Western River Tours in 1947 and in 1952 partners with Dick Sprang, comic book artist of Batman, who also has an obsession with the Southwest rivers and landscape. Canyon Surveys, the venture, surveys what Aleson calls the ‘white space” on Utah’s map.

The book is full of river characters who blazed the trails for today’s commercial adventures, all wild, wooly, and maybe just a bit unbalanced. Russell, in his introduction to the life in “Author’s Notes”, presents a concise image of Harry Leroy Aleson. “Undeniably, his appeal is that because he didn’t fear death and lacked good judgment, his misadventures are as extraordinary and frightening as they are amusing.” He was a step beyond eccentric. A read of the chronology of Aleson’s life at the end of the book is almost incomprehensible in its scope, its insufferable motion, and its distance traversing the wild geography of America.

Russelll’s book about the life and times of Harry Aleson is big and unruly, like his subject. But it is filled with quotes from Aleson’s writings and notes that present a man on a mission, in love with life outdoors and on the rivers, reckless, lucky, tough, and one of the first to realize the commercial opportunities of running rivers through the glorious landscapes of the Southwest. The life portrayed in this fascinating book is a wild ride.

Pueblo Chico: Land and Lives in Galisteo since 1814: A Book Review by Pete Warzel

Pueblo Chico is cultural historian Lucy Lippard’s second book on the history of Galisteo, New Mexico and its surrounding areas. As to be regularly expected, the Museum of New Mexico Press did an excellent job in the design and printing of this book with wonderful historical and current photos of the geography, townscape, homes, and people of this “little town.”

Lippard’s research is extremely deep and her writing is eloquent. 1814 is the start of this volume as the year of the first of two land grants by the Spanish governor of the territory to a group of “citizens of this village”, the origin story of the community that came to be – “the Mexican village of Galisteo.” At the time there were nineteen people in residence there. A second grant in 1816, to the same petitioners, made land ownership confusing, and provided fodder for the legal battles later in the 1800s when American interests and the Santa Fe Ring were acquiring as much New Mexico land as possible, legally or not.

The Galisteo basin had been populated by the Tano/Tewa for hundreds of years with several pueblo ruins in the area around what is now the village of Galisteo. Plains Indian raids made pueblo life difficult. Spanish settlement became a buffer for the more established towns (Santa Fe) and the Spanish, Mexican, and finally American military, had outposts in or near Galisteo. General Kearny sent horses to graze at Galisteo following the Army of the West’s possession of Santa Fe, soon followed by a tax collector in the village to charge a toll on the Santa Fe Trail to the capitol city.

In the 1900s we begin to see a recognizable Galisteo, with the land next to the new church, Iglesia Nuestra Señora de Los Remedios, deeded to the Sociedad de San José who used it to build La Sala de San José, a dance hall added to the Historic Santa Fe Foundation Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation in 2015, and a wonderful space now for art exhibits and events.

The 1950s brought drought, and the village began the final change to what we know visually today, as small ranches and farms were sold, ancestral homes abandoned. Ranches were consolidated in the sales, and the village itself attracted “…Anglos ‘of a special kind,’ who began to buy up inexpensive old adobes, a trend that off in the 1960s and has barely faltered since, though prices have risen exponentially.” Rural electricity and water treatment arrived and the village became a magnet for artists/creatives, slanting as time went on towards an older, more affluent population.

The book is a history of the village, but even more so an examination of a cultural landscape where history, geography, and different cultures shaped a home land. Lippard calls this “the vortex of land and lives….” Acequias, as everywhere in Northern New Mexico, were key in ensuring livability, and there were three functioning in the village in the late 1800s. In 1926, severe flooding destroyed the ditches and in an interesting note, Lippard says that there is very little oral history remaining about the ditches, since they were not there for this oldest group of elders born in the nineteen twenties and thirties, “…so their memories do not include working acequias.”

Lippard has done exhaustive research about her adopted village, and written an engaging book. The photographs are exquisite, giving a whole sense of time and place to the present. It is a weighty work of scholarship that creates a living history of Galisteo, but also places it in the greater context of trends and actions in the greater Southwest.

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Pueblo Chico: Land and Lives in Galisteo (Book)

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Pueblo Chico: Land and Lives in Galisteo since 1814
Lucy R. Lippard
Museum of New Mexico Press
Hardcover
336 pages

$39.95

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Book Review • The King of Taos - Reviewed by Pete Warzel

The King of Taos • Max Evans

Reviewed by Pete Warzel
(Order the book at bottom of review)

There is something about New Mexican writers who tap the same vein of sensibility in their stories, exceedingly well, and entertainingly so. Stan Crawford, John Nichols, and here, Max Evans, have all gone to the well of character, for which the odd conglomeration of people in our state offers great promise for their rollicking tales. The King of Taos is almost plotless, more a collection of character studies that run the gamut of locals expatriated from the land and doing odd jobs to survive, artist immigrants, would be writers, Pueblo Indians, guys on the make, and strong women, in Taos, New Mexico during the 1950s. No matter about the plot, this book is a hoot.

Max Evans, again like Nichols and Crawford, pulls no punches when it comes to presenting his cast whole, all warts and foibles in macro vision. It is an equal opportunity comic barrage, and oh so Northern New Mexican. Not much has changed since the 1950s.

The Sagebrush Inn is there for the drinking, as is the Taos Inn. Writers are working as bartenders and the only painters making money in town are commercial artists. Did I say that incessant drinking is the tie that binds this story? I am not sure that is social commentary as much as a trope to allow for outrageous action and pitch perfect dialogue.

Zacharias Chacon is the leader of a group of misfits who haunt the drinking establishments of the town and commiserate about their toils and troubles. The running thread of the novel is Zacharias’s daily wait for the government check to come for his injuries during World War II, now five years delinquent after filing for compensation. His daughter Rosita goes to the post office, dutifully every day, to retrieve the check and finds her father in whatever bar the crew is settled in for the day. “It did not come Papa. Maybe tomorrow.” And optimism springs eternal as the rest of the drinking crew affirm that tomorrow will be the day.

Shaw Spencer, a newly arrived wannabe artist, becomes part of the gang, along with Indian Tony from the Pueblo, The Lover, The Undertaker, The Woodhauler, and interestingly, two real people plugged in as fictional characters – Patrocino Barela and Dal Holcomb. Shaw struggles with his art while the others just seem to go with the flow. He blows his money stake quickly and becomes partners with Zacharias in a wishful business venture where they will buy a D6 tractor and utilize Zacharias’ skills as a bulldozer operator. Shaw succeeds at his painting, then fails, makes money, then fails, broke again. His best-selling paintings are “portraits” of his model Anna, a sometimes lady of the night, whose backend is the focal point of the paintings.

And so, the days go. Funny yes, and sad. The eternal monotony of a small town with no opportunities is the rhythm of the novel. But, as Gene Atkins, the writer/bartender of the Sagebrush Inn says, “Well, I venture to say that you’ll find this a very different small town here.” And as we know Taos, so it is. The miracle happens.

A check for $36,000 is delivered by a delirious Rosita to her father and the crowd goes wild. The whacky string of promises that Zacharias made over the years to his friends for when he would be paid and rich are met, one by one, debts fulfilled, including a truck load of presents for his wife “Mama” who has been long neglected but never, ever, unloved. This band of drunken misfits, this gang of slap dash friends, are each ethical, caring people, watching out for one and all, covering each other’s backs no matter the situation. The boastful promises of drink come true, and nobody blinks at the fulfillment. Zacharias Chacon is the King of Taos.

Northern New Mexico lends itself to complex relationships, neighbors watching out for each other, as well as to descriptions of the beautiful land that unfolds everywhere before your eyes. Max Evans gets the land, the rhythms of the dialogue, the absurdity of the dreams, just right. This is a young man’s book, full of optimism and irony, and indeed the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book explains that he began this novel in the late nineteen fifties, and put it away. He was much younger then. It took an old man of almost ninety-five to finish it, to add the knowledge of sympathy, empathy, and the serenity of camaraderie that makes the world go round. 

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The King of Taos: A Novel • Max Evans

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The King of TaosMax Evans
UNM Press
Hardcover, 176 pages
$24.95

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