SOURCE: Grover, Dorys C. “Vardis Fisher: The Antelope People Sonnets.” Texas Quarterly 16, no. 1 (spring 1974): 97-102.

[In the following essay, Grover discusses Fisher's “The Antelope People” sonnets, concluding that this series represents the best of Fisher's poetry.]

In the late 1920s Vardis Fisher, the Idaho novelist, essayist, and poet, wrote what he called “The Antelope People” sonnets. Ten in all, they were published in poetry magazines and anthologies, as follows: Voices: An Open Forum for the Poets, VII (March, 1928), pp. 203-204, “Antelope People,” and XLIX (April, 1929), pp. 134-36, poems on “The North Family.” The anthologies are Harold G. Merriam (ed.), Northwest Verse: An Anthology (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1931), pp. 137-39, “Antelope People,” poems “Slim Scott,” “Susan Hemp,” “Konrad Myrdton,” “Perg Jasper,” and “Joe Hunter.” William Stanley Braithwaite (ed.), Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1928 and Yearbook of American Poetry (New York: Harold Vinal, Ltd., 1928), pp. 113-17, poems “Slim Scott,” “Susan Hemp,” and “Konrad Myrdton.” The complete sonnets are appended to this article. Fisher also wrote and published a small book entitled Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna (1927). Except for a few verses scattered throughout the “Vridar Hunter” tetralogy, this was the extent of his published poetry. The Madonna sonnets were the verses of a young poet in search of an ideal love, though in the sequence of verses the poet comments upon many things in society including politics, poverty, and materialism. The Madonna sonnets are in the pattern of Modern Love (1862), George Meredith's sonnet sequence. Fisher wrote his dissertation on Meredith at the University of Chicago.

“The Antelope People” sonnets differ from the Madonna sonnets in that the former are vignettes written in the mode of Edwin Arlington Robinson's The Man against the Sky (1916) and after the theme of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915). Fisher's Antelope People have a likeness to Masters' Spoon River skinflints, whores, drunkards, and derelicts. George Kellogg, for many years the Humanities Librarian at the University of Idaho, Moscow, and a student of Fisher, agreed with me that both Robinson and Masters influenced Fisher in his poetry. In all of the conversations and correspondence held with Fisher, he never mentioned either of those poets, though he praised as well as damned many others.

“The Antelope People” sonnets derive their title from an area in eastern Idaho called the Antelope Hills, where Vardis Fisher was born and reared and where, in the late eighteen-eighties, the Latter-Day Saints from Utah came to settle. Idaho Falls is the central community of the area in the present time. The pioneer Mormons were the first to plow the land and as farmers living in crude log houses they were an isolated, lonely, self-sufficient people. As Fisher recounts in his fictional autobiography, the “Vridar Hunter” tetralogy, their bedding was of animal skins, their food wild game, fish, and the crops they tended. The titles of the tetralogy may be found in Sonnet XLIII of George Meredith's Modern Love, and are: In Tragic Life (1932), Passions Spin the Plot (1934), We Are Betrayed (1935), and No Villain Need Be (1936). The farms were miles apart, and the children received little schooling. Fisher said he learned to read by the Bible, the only book in the home, but he also said he was writing poetry by the age of nine and that everyone in the Antelope Hills knew he was destined to be a great man. His mother, on the other hand, thought he ought to become a bishop in the church.

The early verses, recalled in the first novel of the tetralogy, were those of a child who was very lonely and frightened in a wilderness that was home. The hero, Vridar, awaited the spring and summer, for the winters were long and harsh. There was always the menace of wild animals and raging streams, as well as drought and fire. The isolation and the wild land did strange things to people. During the years in which Fisher was growing up in the Antelope Hills, he knew the loneliness and poverty that pervades his and his neighbors' lives.

Some of Fisher's characters succeed in rising above their environment, but when he could find no answers for himself in the obscurity of his life, he explored the enigmas in others, recording in verse vignettes of souls warped by spiritual conflicts. Fisher does not bring to his characters a sentimental sympathy, and unlike Faulkner's Southern poor whites, Fisher's poor farmers exceed the Southerners in hope. Some of them endure better than others, but misunderstandings in families, poverty, and the tragedies that occurred about him are painfully revealed. He saw The Antelope People as an extension of himself and of human life. From the time when he first began to understand what life was, when he recited his first verses to his mother, he tried to tell about life. His course was set. He would be a writer. In his youth, he discovered the people about him, their habits and oddities, their sins, their hatreds, and their peculiar mannerisms.

The Antelope Hills provided a landscape against which he cast the portrait of Slim Scott, Joe Hunter, Susan Hemp, Konrad Myrdton, Perg Jasper and the members of the North family, who may or may not resemble actual individuals he had known. He explored the twisted minds of men and women trapped in the lonely hills, and he saw through the conflict of their minds to the dilemma of their predicaments. His concern was with the individual in his or her relation to others, or, in one personality, the baffling connection with inscrutable darkness in which that person lived. Sensitive to their problems, he gave no solutions, but marked the place in society, such as it was on the Idaho frontier, that each occupied. He faced moral questions with a clarity of theme, and in a brief sonnet presented an individual's life history.

Slim Scott and Joe Hunter appear in Fisher's tetralogy as the same kind of men that he presents in the sonnets. The dramatic setting of Slim Scott against the hills is reminiscent of Robinson's Man against the Sky, but there is, of course, a great difference. Fisher says that Slim Scott's “furtive shadow” lingered after his death,

And on the hills of Antelope there stalks
A phantom when the sky is full of hawks.

One is reminded of how the people of Concord remarked Thoreau walking alone at night through the village and woods but, of course, the analogy ends there, for Fisher's Scott is demented and his walks are of no avail to either himself or his Antelope neighbors. Fisher's reflection is not the tranquil reflection of the neighbors of Thoreau.

Another strange individual who stalked the Antelope Hills was Susan Hemp, who had a conscience that “was a cauldron of distrust.” She lived alone, apparently insane. Fisher says, in truly beautiful and tragic lines, that

When winter comes, she wanders forth at night,
A solitary black in fields of white;
When April burgeons all the hills, she goes
Into her dark house and she locks the doors.

This behavior was indeed odd, for the Antelope Hills in spring are a joy to behold. They are incredibly beautiful, as Fisher tells in his Antelope novels Toilers of the Hills (1928), and April, A Fable of Love (1937). Susan Hemp appears in the novels as the same strange person of the sonnet.

Fisher is not insensitive to Nature. He sees the mountains as majestic, but to Perg Jasper they are fearsome.

He hated these mountains, for here Nature reared
Stupendous aspirations to the sky,
And dwarfed, because it could not glorify,
The small precise dominion he revered.

Perg Jasper loathed the mountains because they were larger than he and conquered him just as the skyscrapers dominated him when he went eastward. Fisher also saw the barren hills, the drought, the thistles, all of which bent men's backs before the plow. Joe Hunter, one of the strong men on the frontier, was able to conquer it in his own way; but few loved him. Joe Hunter was uncouth, a brute, unclean from head to feet. Fisher says Joe Hunter

… poured his great dream into golden wheat;
Until his gnarled and calloused hands had wrought
A deep and quiet holiness of work.

Fisher respected the laboring man and was awed by the results one man could accomplish against a wild terrain. He knew it took a man of strong character and will to beat Nature when all that man had to work with was his determination and his back. In the Antelope novels one views the daily lives of the men and women where year after year the wilderness recedes a little. But those first people knew tedious hardship and isolation.

Of all of “The Antelope People” sonnets, Konrad Myrdton is perhaps the most puzzling. Konrad Myrdton, who, like Perg Jasper, appears as a minor character in Fisher's early novels on Idaho, is a disillusioned man who gives no affirmation to his life. Of all the personae of the sonnets, only Baby North seems hopeful. The rest are doomed by their own inward disillusionment and vacant minds. The members of the North family are pursued by doubt and grief and by the bigotry of a stern religion. Of Baby North, Fisher says she

… never heard a tale of God at all,
Except the tale told when the wild bird sings,
But when stars filled the purple evenings,
There fell the light of heaven on her wall.

And the parents of Baby North

… dared not leave a baby's spirit free;
But first baptized it and then prayed with tears
While thrushes sang mad music in their ears.

Charles North doubted there was a God, but he trod the narrow path just in case. His wife, Lizzie North, is detached from life by a warped mind which dwells upon sexual frustration, or perhaps her sexual frustration has caused her warped view. However that may be, she is driven to a state of insanity by some flaw in her relationship with her husband, the bishop.

The sonnets to the Antelope People are spiritual dossiers, vignettes, cryptic one-act dramas starring people illuminated and projected into reality by the poet. Jess North is an imbecile, and his sister, having lost her lover, has neither friends nor inner resources. She does not destroy herself; she lives on, clinging to a life she does not understand, attempting to define it and failing. One theme recurs endlessly, the tragedy of each human being. The Antelope People are suffering beings, and Fisher understands the depths of anguish in them.

The tragedy of life is its mystery, and the reasons which cause the spiritual failure of Slim Scott, Susan Hemp, Perg Jasper, Lizzie North, and the rest are mysterious. Mankind's ultimate destiny remains inexplicable, but Fisher says it should not be meaningless. Though no optimist, he would like the Antelope People to find themselves, to see their foibles, and to accept life with some hope. Hope, if hope it may be called, is a small light in the darkness, pinpointed at the end of a tunnel, but it is all that there is with which to fight doubt. In a desolate, obscure society each must find his own hope, for each is alone, an orphan, dependent upon no one but himself in the end. It is this realization one gets from the sonnets. Even so, most men cherish life, and the will to live persists. Though love appears to have departed from the lives of the Antelope People, Fisher sees that love has been there and that where this is so man endures even under the most supreme hardships. Madness, Fisher says, is an escape from life, an unjustified farce cast by an unjust God.

Except for Baby North, all of the Antelope People question their fate. The poet questions the destiny of the Baby. One does not experience sadness for the people, for one sees too clearly what each is or has become. It is in the nature of things, Fisher says, that certain people are betrayed not so much by the mysteries of life as by their own character. The tone of the sonnets is one of solitary meditation about the destinies of individuals absorbed in their own darkness. Fisher spares us the moralizing that sometimes appears in his novels about Idaho. The sonnets are succinct, clear, and provocative meditations without sympathy or defense. They are thirty-five-millimeter frames picturing individuals fraught with miseries more terrible than death, in a world of Nature which serenely destroys each person who searches uncomprehendingly for light. The secrets of each individual are given in a sharp sketch providing psychological insight into a personality. One cannot be certain, but it may be that Fisher projects his own voice into some of the vignettes, such as that of Charles North with his doubt of a just God and Perg Jasper with his ambivalence about mountains and cities. Fisher's novels also project his skepticism about God. Reared in a Mormon home, he renounced church membership in his youth and remained unconnected with any religious group. He also disliked large cities, and in the 1930s he returned to Idaho to remain until his death in 1968.

Fisher's poetry created no big stir, perhaps because he was in the tradition of Robinson and Masters, who had employed the form and style some twenty years earlier. But “The Antelope People” sonnets have merit in that they are the only writing we have in American literature about this part of Idaho in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Though Ezra Pound came from about the same area of Idaho, so far as I know he never wrote a line about Idaho or its people. “The Antelope People” sonnets are the best of all of Fisher's poetry, but none has been reprinted since its first publication. A further study of the Antelope People may be found in the novels. …