An interesting find

My cousin sent me an old Missouri Historical Review from a treasure trove of them I think she found in a thrift shop, and in it is an article on a scholar named T.K. Whipple(1890 – 1939), whose observations on literature were obviously well-known to Larry McMurtry because he quoted him as an epigraph in the opening pages of Lonesome Dove.

“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live and what they lived, we dream.”

Article by Lewis O. Saum, Missouri Historical Review 2005.

He died at a youngish age, of cancer, after having fought in WWI and graduated from Princeton with a PhD. He was caught up in that ancient argument about the novel, should it be representational or should it be only imaginative? Of course as Northrop Frye said, any artistic creation point to something outside itself but is the primary purpose to provide accurate reportage? This has no relevance to the fantasy/science fiction genres but even in those readers are quick to notice if an event is plausible or impossible. When 1984 was first published there was no separate category for science-fiction.

His arguments were drowned in the then-media hype about Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather, slice -of-life taken from the supposedly dismal societies of small towns and supposedly small minds, always with a main character who “escapes”. who “longs for the urban scene” and so on. These novels were inevitably praised for their realism.

In Study Out the Land he wrote “Why do we apply to literature a criterion which we have long since outgrown in the other arts? The novel has become akin to the group photograph. Having looked first for ourselves and having surmounted indignation, we look for our neighbors and fellow lodge members…(but) literature involves creation.”

He was a friend of Edmund Wilson and H.L. Menken, for all that.