Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934)

10. Stories from the Country of Lost Borders by Mary Hunter Austin (1987, 309 pages, read Feb 15 - 26)
Edited by Marjorie Pryse
American Women Writers Series

This is two collections of stories, along with an introduction. The collections are The Land of Little Rain, published in 1903, and Lost Borders published in 1909. The stories within each collection are linked together by location, the California desert, and form an cohesive whole. They are presented as if nonfictional, but without any show more indication that they are anything but fiction.

This was a rediscovery of sorts published within the American Women Writers Series (in 1987). I haven't heard of Mary Hunter Austin outside of this book and I doubt she is all that well known today. Austin spent her young adulthood in the deserts of California, in the vicinity of Death Valley, and that region is the focus of both collections.

The Land of Little Rain

"You get the very spirit of the meaning of that country when you see Little Pete feeding his sheep in the red, choked maw of an old {volcanic} vent―a kind of silly pastoral gentleness that glozes over an elemental violence"

Austin came across to me as something like an Edward Abbey of early 20th-century. Independent and bohemian when these things were anathema for women socially, she apparently was a strong and egocentric personality, and it comes out in her writing. Most of these stories are extensive natural descriptions with numerous plants described, often beautifully and sometimes in strikingly memorable ways. But her most interesting stories to me were the three or four focused on people, with my favorite being a chapter on The Pocket Hunter, a pleasant loner endlessly looking for pockets of preciously stones to find, and who seems to have become one with the desert. "The Pocket Hunter had gotten to the point where he knew no bad weather, and all places were equally happy so long as they were out of doors. I do not know just how long it takes to become saturated with the elements so that one takes no account of them."

The natural descriptions were interesting, and carefully done, but also a bit tedious. My overall feeling on reading this was that I was glad to have experienced it. It clearly has value, but I didn't love reading it.

Lost Borders
I expected more from Lost Borders because I knew from the introduction that all the stories are about people. So, I was disappointed when the first several were not terribly engaging. But they accumulated and then I reached The Fakir where the narrator brings herself into the story, and exposes herself. Encountering a neighboring housewife's adultery, she finds herself momentarily bonding with the man, a complete rogue, and assists him in a critical way, helping him out of town and then helping to cover up the incident. And at some point during this she realizes she is being played by the player too, and she, briefly, ponders why and how, maybe stunned at her own vulnerability. Her otherwise pervasive confidence stumbles openly. It's a striking moment. And, after this every story seemed to have some extra and bigger complexity, coming out of the book and extending a long way. These stories could have been written today, if that desert culture were still in existence.

Just because it's on mind, I'll add that the collection ends with a story on the Walking Woman, who lost her name and wanders seemingly endlessly and unmolested through a desert only populated, sparsely, by lonely men. The narrator finally catches up with the woman and is given a story you might not expect and presented in such a wonderfully unhindered way - and leaves us pondering what women give up to live in society and who would they be if they could shed it all like the Walking Woman.

Overall, I'm glad I read the first collection, and moved in a literary way by the second collection. A bit of gem. I picked this up randomly off my shelves and it turned into a nice find.

To read in the context of my 2014 LT thread go to post 246 here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/163456#4584819 show less

If you can, choose to read the 1950 edition of The Land of Little Rain. It has 48 photographs taken by Ansel Adams.

California’s sparsely populated Owens Valley is the geographic heart of this volume, a place familiar to seekers of high-altitude trips in the eastern Sierra Nevada or access to the state’s northernmost desert lands. Mary Hunter Austin lived there during the late 19th and early 20th centuries but the valley she wrote about in 1903 isn’t the same as ours. After diversion show more of much of its water supply to Los Angeles it couldn’t be. This gives her book even more interest, and there’s plenty to enjoy and consider, in the valley or elsewhere, as she writes of Indians, long-time Mexican residents, miners, wildlife, and natural wonders all about.

Austin’s prose has a disposition:
“Somehow the rawness of the land favors the sense of personal relations to the supernatural…All this begets…a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an explanation that passes belief…it represents the courage to sheer off what is not worth while. Beyond that it endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do beasts, so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day did gods. Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at.”

And while she doesn’t strain after poetic effects, sometimes it can’t be helped: “If the fine vibrations which are the golden-violet glow of spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it would be just that mellow double note [of the burrowing owl] breaking along the blossom tops.” She must enjoy her thoughts too, to write this: “Very likely if he knew how hawk and crow dog him for dinners, he would resent it. But the badger is not very well contrived for looking up or far to either side.”

Each short chapter is an individual undertaking, aware of the others but its own self entire. One or more will be a favorite, and if you’re like me each will seem to have said something new, even if just in a passing observation. show less

This is the first Penguin Nature Classic that I have read, and it sets a high standard for the others to meet.

Mary Austin was an early 20th century naturalist, described by Terry Tempest Williams in the Introduction to this edition: “… a woman, candid and direct, who was utterly focused on her vision, and her vision was focused on the arid lands of the American West”. Tempest describes her as cantankerous, but then goes on to say that Austin’s writing conveys “… an abiding and show more enduring compassion and humility that came through the rigors of her disciplined eye toward nature.”

I found Austin’s narrative anecdotal; more travelogue than natural science essay. She conveyed wonderfully the contrast between sparseness and abundance in the turn of the desert seasons. Tempest ascribed to Austin “… a Victorian diction written through the perceptions of a radical spirit.” For me, Austin’s prose, while not simple, does not suffer from the weight of Victorian complexity. For me, her prose sings: It tiptoes the edge of poetry from time to time; it is gorgeous. It has the rhythm, song and repetitions of traditional storytelling. I fell in love with it, starting with the third paragraph in the first essay, the one that begins: “This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermillion painted, aspiring to the snow line.”

Passionate about the desert, Austin was also clear-eyed about the realities of the life and lives she loved. While she referred to animals as if they were another kind of person and members of her larger family, she did so with the respect you might expect of a St. Francis and not with the cutesy fantasy of a Disney. She was also reassuringly clear that sheep are breathtakingly dim. Sadly, she was also prescient about the impact of western migration on the health and wellbeing of her desert and its denizens.

I loved it and will reread it with pleasure. show less

Originally published in 1903, these essays vary in location from Fort Tejon up through the Owens Valley. She originally moved to the southern San Joaquin Valley unwillingly, with her mother and two brothers, sometime before 1889. This book, her first book-length work, describes and examines residents, flora, and climate of this area before Los Angeles's aqueduct took water from Owens Lake (it was built 1908-1913), and in fact before Los Angeles was barely a city at all (the city had just show more over 100,000 people in 1900).

I especially liked the essays that included details about the flora of the areas. However, all of these essays are interesting in that they represent places and ways of life that no longer exist--but they did still exist when she was writing these pieces.

The introduction is copyright 2003 by Robert Hass, former poet laureate, a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, and professor as Cal. This introduction is...problematic. Interestingly he calls out Austin's 1923 works as trying to appropriate Native American oral traditions. I cannot comment on the validity of that, but in this introduction he calls her daughter a "damaged child" (she was born mentally disabled as explained in the author-less author bio). He also twice calls the southern San Joaquin Valley the San Fernando Valley (pages xiii and xviii)--how this made it into print is mind-boggling to me.

This is the second nonfiction classic I had read in the last few years that has an introduction written by a poet--and both have egregious, sloppy, embarrassing errors. show less