Sky Determines: An Interpretation of the Southwest, by Ross Calvin (New York, 1934; republished by the University of New Mexico Press) lives up to its striking title. The introductory words suggest the essence of the book:
In New Mexico whatever is both old and peculiar appears upon examination to have a connection with the arid climate. Peculiarities range from the striking adaptations of the flora onward to those of fauna, and on up to those of the human animal. Sky determines. And the writer once having picked up the trail followed it with certainty, and indeed almost inevitably, as it led from ecology to anthropology and economics.
Cultivated intellect is the highest form of civilization. It is inseparable from the arts, literature, architecture. In any civilized land, birds, trees, flowers, animals, places, human contributors to life out of the past, all are richer and more significant because of representations through literature and art. No literate person can listen to a skylark over an English meadow without hearing in its notes the melodies of Chaucer and Shelley. As the Southwest advances in maturity of mind and civilization, the features of the land take on accretions from varied interpreters.
It is not necessary for an interpreter to write a whole book about a feature to bring out its significance. We need more gossipy books—something in the manner of Pinon Country by Haniel Long (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1941), in which one can get a swift slant on Billy the Kid, smell the pinon trees, feel the deeply religious attitude toward his corn patch of a Zuni Indian. Roy Bedichek's chapters on the mockingbird, in Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, are like rich talk under a tree on a pleasant patch of ground staked out for his claim by an April-voiced mockingbird. In The Voice of the Coyote I tried to compass the whole animal, and I should think that the "Father of Song-Making" chapter might make coyote music and the night more interesting and beautiful for any listener. Intelligent writers often interpret without set purpose, and many books under various categories in this Guide are interpretative.
3. General Helps
THERE IS no chart to the Life and Literature of the Southwest. An attempt to put it all into an alphabetically arranged encyclopedia would be futile. All guides to knowledge are too long or too short. This one at the outset adds to its length—perhaps to its usefulness—by citing other general reference works and a few anthologies.
Books of the Southwest: A General Bibliography, by Mary Tucker, published by J. J. Augustin, New York, 1937, is better on Indians and the Spanish period than on Anglo-American culture. Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with Bibliography, by Mabel Major, Rebecca W. Smith, and T. M. Pearce, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1938, revised 1948, takes up the written material under the time-established heads of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, etc., with due respect to chronological development. A Treasury of Southern Folklore, 1949, and A Treasury of Western Folklore, 1951, both edited by B. A. Botkin and both published by Crown, New York, are so liberal in the extensions of folklore and so voluminous that they amount to literary anthologies.
Of possible use in working out certain phases of life and literature common to the Southwest as well as to the West and Middle West are the following academic treatises: The Frontier in American Literature, by Lucy Lockwood Hazard, New York, 1927; The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, by Ralph Leslie Rusk, New York, 1925; The Prairie and the Making of Middle America, by Dorothy Anne Dondore, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1926; The Literature of the Rocky Mountain West 1803-1903, by L. J. Davidson and P. Bostwick, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939; and The Rediscovery of the Frontier, by Percy H. Boynton, Chicago, 1931. Anyone interested in vitality in any phase of American writing will find Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (three vols.), New York, 1927-39, an opener-up of avenues.
Perhaps the best anthology of southwestern narratives is Golden Tales of the Southwest, selected by Mary L. Becker, New York, 1939. Two anthologies of southwestern writings are Southwesterners Write, edited by T. M. Pearce and A. P. Thomason, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946, and Roundup Time, edited by George Sessions Perry, Whittlesey House, New York, 1943. Themes common to the Southwest are represented in Western Prose and Poetry, an anthology put together by Rufus A. Coleman, New York, 1932, and in Mid Country: Writings from the Heart of America, edited by Lowry C. Wimberly, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1945.