SOURCE: Attebery, Louie W. “Vardis Fisher.” In A Literary History of the American West, sponsored by The Western Literature Association, pp. 862-86. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Attebery discusses Fisher's works from five distinct periods of his life and literary development.]

Any serious study of the literature of the American West, wrote Wallace Stegner, will have to include the works of Vardis Fisher.¹ The assertion is proper. From 1927 with Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna to 1968 with the massive Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West, Fisher explored his region, his cultural heritage, and his own past, creating a legacy that is an invitation to progress with him from the particulars of time and place to the universal.

In the course of a fretful, productive life, Fisher wrote more than thirty books, the exact number a quiddity since he co-authored one book, completed most of another, and edited two more. Thirty-five is a reasonable total. In addition, he wrote short stories, countless newspaper columns, and articles for journals. In the quality, quantity, and diversity of such disjecta membra is suggested some justification for his mother's conviction that her caulborn son was destined for greatness.

Although there is a degree of artificiality in compartmentalizing any man's life, Fisher's life and career clearly divide themselves into five periods: the early years, 1895-1915; the university period, 1915-31; the Bridwell days, 1931-34; the Federal era, 1935-39; and finally the Hagerman years, 1940-68.

THE EARLY YEARS, 1895-1915

On March 31, 1895, Joseph and Temperance Fisher became the parents of a boy born with a caul, a sure sign in the folk culture of rural southeastern Idaho that greatness lay ahead for him. But the caul was the only extraordinary circumstance that attended the birth of Vardis Alvero Fisher. The parents, poor and ill-educated, were no different from their relatives and neighbors. The one-room house in Annis in which he was born was made of cottonwood logs with an earthen floor and roof, similar to many frontier shelters.

In 1901, Joseph moved his wife and children some thirty-six miles from Annis to the remote Antelope Hills area of the Snake River's South Fork. Formal schooling was impossible, so Temperance shared her meager education with her children, Vardis, Vivian Ezra, and the youngest, Viola Irene. When Vardis was twelve, the boys were sent to town to board while they finished elementary school. Eight years later at the age of twenty, Vardis was graduated from Rigby High School, finishing the early period of his life.

That period is difficult to assess, partly because Fisher did not live to finish the autobiography he once said would be his next project, after the Gold Rushes book. It is helpful at this point to clarify what appears to have been a distinction in Fisher's mind between “autobiography” and “autobiographical.” By the former he meant the physical facts of one's life; by the latter he meant the kind of intellectual and emotional truth or insight that can be gained from either the physical facts themselves or from an artistic, that is to say selective or imaginative or creative use of those facts. It is for this reason that he could—and did—say, “I am in my books.” The autobiographical importance of his early period, then, lies in understanding Fisher as a fearful, pietistic, precociously intelligent, sensitive lad, spiritually brutalized by the maiming he saw around him: butchered livestock, castrated bulls, de-horned cattle.

The matter of sexuality and reproduction was a concern; there were no sources of information about a matter so obviously important. Another concern was religion, for the Fishers were nominally Mormon. But when Fisher's omnivorous reading habits outstripped the library resources of Rigby, there came religious doubts and problems with the infallibility of the Bible, questions to be answered in some instances (re-phrased in others) only later in the university period. He was graduated from Rigby High School in 1915.

THE UNIVERSITY PERIOD, 1915-31

The Joseph Fishers sought upward mobility for their children. They would have agreed with Lord Verulam that knowledge is power. Their children, the boys especially, were to make something of themselves by getting the best education possible. In this respect the Fishers were acting out the Protestant ethic. The drive for success, which accounts in part for the fact that both Vardis and Vivian earned their doctoral degrees (Vivian in psychology), can be traced back as far as the Puritan establishment.

The university period began with Vardis matriculating at the University of Utah in 1915. To the university he brought many of the unresolved problems of the early years, a limited supply of funds, and high resolve to make his mother proud of him. His experiences as a scholar in Salt Lake City he described thus: “As an undergraduate I had been an undisciplined, self-indulgent youth nourished by my own morbid tastes and fantasies. I had been the darling of my teachers in advanced composition and their flattery had gone to my head like my first drink of bourbon.”²

His undergraduate work was interrupted by a brief stay in the air corps, from which he resigned, volunteering to be drafted into the army. With the armistice he returned from Fort Rosecrans to university life, graduating in 1920.

One of the problems remaining from the early period was that of reconciling certain sentimental notions of love with authentic human sexuality. In 1917 Vardis Fisher and Leona McMurtrey were married, a union that produced two boys. In 1924 Leona committed suicide, leaving Fisher in the midst of doctoral work at the University of Chicago and with two young sons.

In the arduous work of graduate school—he had taken the Master of Arts degree in 1922, also at Chicago—he learned discipline: “I learned, and I learned the hard way—the way of any self-pitying, narcissistic artist, with a headful of nonsense about ‘genius’ and ‘inspiration.’ I squared my neurotic shoulders and pitched in: and in the next three years … I found out what discipline means. …”³ He completed the Ph.D. degree magna cum laude in 1925 and returned to his undergraduate institution to teach English until 1928. In 1927 the Sonnets appeared, his first published work. The next year he married Margaret Trusler and his second published work, the Idaho novel Toilers of the Hills, appeared. From 1928 to 1931 he taught English at Washington Square College of New York University and then exchanged academe for the life of independent scholarship and creative endeavor. With the exception of three quarters' teaching at the University of Montana and service as Writer-in-Residence at The College of Idaho in 1968, Fisher's abandonment of teaching was final.

A brief assessment of the university period reveals three significant elements. First, Fisher received an education in a demanding graduate center, an education that prepared him for a life of the mind, encouraging his philosophical speculations and confirming his rejection of Mormonism. In addition, the discipline of scholarship became the servant of his maturing creativity. In the second place, his writing reached the public. The third significant element was Leona's death. For this Fisher blamed himself and subsequently identified her suicide as the great crisis of his life.⁴

THE BRIDWELL DAYS, 1931-34

Although this period of Fisher's life was brief, it is an interesting one, quite essential to any attempt to understand him. A published writer, father of two sons, and apparently happily remarried, Fisher returned to Idaho to his father's ranch near where he himself had once taken up a homestead.⁵ But the life of the mind was not neglected, as he published a book a year for three of the next four years, excepting 1933, and began a brief association with the University of Montana at Missoula (the summer of 1932 and the summer and fall of 1933).⁶ This was the period of Dark Bridwell and the first two works of his autobiographical tetralogy of Vridar Hunter: In Tragic Life (1932) and Passions Spin the Plot (1934). An attempt to synthesize his academic training at Chicago and his creative impulse begins to show here in his borrowing phrases from a “sonnet” by George Meredith, the subject of his doctoral dissertation, to supply the titles for all four books of the Hunter cycle. And it was generally a time of integration and synthesis when the loneliness and despair following Leona's death and the revulsion he felt toward urban life began to generate powerful intellectual and emotional energy as Fisher found himself back in the western canyon that had so intimidated and alienated him as a child. He had come home again.

THE FEDERAL ERA, 1935-39

In this five-year period Fisher published five novels: We Are Betrayed (1935; published before Fisher accepted directorship of the WPA writers' project) and No Villain Need Be (1936), the two final volumes of the Hunter tetralogy, April (written after Toilers and before Bridwell but not published until 1937), Forgive Us Our Virtues (1938), and Children of God (1939). In 1937 a son was born; in 1939 the marriage with Margaret Trusler was dissolved.

This was a period of growing confidence and continued and expanding recognition. Fisher was asked to direct the nebulous Federal Writers' Project for Idaho, producing during his largely solo and certainly virtuoso performance Idaho, A Guide in Word and Picture (1937), The Idaho Encyclopedia (1938), and Idaho Lore (1939). Children of God won the Harper Prize for Fiction in 1939. So in this brief five-year period Fisher's industry created a spate of successful works in both fiction and non-fiction. This period ends with considerable doubt on Fisher's part about the growing role of government in the lives of the citizens of a nation. His reservations focused upon bureaucratic waste and upon a frame of mind that prompts the eastern part of the nation to view the West as a source of physical and scenic wealth existing to be exploited. He maintained this skeptical—some would say cynical—view of government and the East the rest of his life.

THE HAGERMAN YEARS, 1940-68

In 1940 Fisher married for the third and last time. Opal Laurel Holmes proved to be a companion, confidante, wife, and helpmate. They settled at Hagerman, Idaho, building with their own hands a house and outbuildings, planting trees and pasture, harnessing one of the valley's thousand springs. For twenty-eight years this was his home. Fisher's creative energies flowed unchecked throughout this period, resulting in twenty-two volumes. When he died at seventy-three, he was at work on his autobiography and a book celebrating the natural wonders of the American West.

Two facts about this period confront the student of Fisher. One is his return to the quest for understanding the hero of his tetralogy. He did indeed return to those books and that quest, rewriting the four as Orphans in Gethsemane (1960), but only after a monumental excursion into the history of the development of the human race, requiring the reading of over 2,000 scholarly books.⁷ Of equal interest is the fact that after an extended period of general reader indifference to the “Testament of Man” series, Fisher began to be recognized again. He was invited to address the Western Literature Association and was named a lifetime member of it. His Mountain Man (1965) was generally well received by reviewers, although neither Newsweek nor Time, a journal not noted for its kindness to this “strictly from Idaho” writer, observed its publication. His and Opal's Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West (1968) was favorably reviewed and widely purchased. Institutional recognition came when he was named Writer-in-Residence at The College of Idaho.

The remarks that follow concentrate upon novels selected from each period, with only brief and incidental commentary upon other literary genres within which he worked.

Drawing upon his own personal history, upon physical characteristics of the region, and upon the oral narratives of his father and uncles, Fisher has created a simple story in Toilers of the Hills. Dock and Opal Hunter pack a wagon, turn their backs to the settlement and the valley, and go to the hills where land is cheap and population non-existent. They build a log cabin and subsist on bread and water gravy while Dock fights the sagebrush and the elements, trying to get the dry land into production. Neighbors gradually get established, and babies are born and many die. But although there are neighbors, there is little neighborliness, and we are reminded of the women in the Old Norse Njal's Saga, who scold the men into hostility. In their third year, Dock and Opal can afford bread and potatoes, and the river yields cutthroat trout. By the time their eighth child is born, Dock has rediscovered the methods of summer fallowing, the key to successful dry farming. The methods work and Dock and Opal have succeeded.

The point of view is essentially Opal's, and through her sensibility we perceive the dominant imagery, as important to the novel as incident. Great gray hills, soaring hawks, the wind, the pervasive quietness—these dominate the landscape and impress themselves upon the soul of Opal Hunter; her moods of loneliness and her sense of abandonment and isolation temper the concluding pages in which success is claimed for dry farming. The book demands a reassessment of agrarian literature and belongs within the tradition of naturalistic truth-telling associated with Garland, Norris, and London.

It often appears that a predominance of Fisher's characters are grotesques in the Sherwood Anderson sense of too singlemindedly pursuing one goal or being too slavish to one motive or possessing one tiny truth to the exclusion of all others. If that comparison is true and if it proves to be a flaw, Fisher more than compensates by his evocation of the power, the felicity, the awesomeness of nature. Indeed, in all his western novels external nature is handled with respect, at times with loving tenderness, and always with a sense of nature's numinousness, part of which man can sometimes feel. It is this aspect of nature in Fisher that refutes the claim—in some criticism expressed only as a worry—that western writers tend to be long on landscape but short on character. Landscape and the processes of nature remind us that ecology has rehabilitated nature in literature. By showing that nature does indeed have the force of character, that she may work with or destroy man, and that the most moral kind of art is that which urges nature's claim for the intrinsic worth of all her works, the ecologist redirects our thinking toward the necessity of including nature in man's schemes lest she simply exclude man, permanently. Fisher—and Owen Wister and A. B. Guthrie and Frank Waters, among many others—saw in the American West a drama in which nature and man might approach that fine point of equilibrium through which alone man's continued presence might be assured. That balance is reached in Toilers of the Hills when Dock rediscovers dry farming, the only way by which man's efforts and nature's fecundity can be brought together into production. Homeostasis is another manifestation of the golden mean.

Whether Fisher was acquainted with Knut Hamsun's great novel of a pioneering venture in Norway is not known, but certainly parallels exist between Growth of the Soil (1920) and Toilers of the Hills, and the two can profitably be compared. Both take place beyond the fringes of settlement, one in backwoods Norway, the other in the back country of Idaho. In both, a fierce independence motivates the principal males, Isaac and Dock, but the women, Inger and Opal, long for opportunities to socialize with their own kind. Both Hamsun and Fisher created novels in which folklife provides the basic rhythmic structure on which the melodies and harmonics of plot develop.

The sense of folklife is shared in the larger sense that both novels are land-based, with the activities of farm life being determined by the traditional means of planting and harvesting. But it is also true in the smaller and more particular sense of a time and place saturated with superstition, folk wisdom, and proverb. Inger, while pregnant, is tricked by a vicious woman—one of those females often found in Icelandic sagas—into looking at a hare. When the child is born, it is harelipped. Knowing the pain of self-consciousness, for Inger is similarly afflicted, she kills the child. Opal Hunter, while carrying her first child, is horrified when before her eyes her husband kills a pup that gets into a kettle of oatmeal: “In her body she had felt a stirring pain … and she had felt a hot burning in her breast and throat. It was little wonder if her child was melancholy, or anything else terrible or misshapen or unloved.”⁸ The child does prove to be melancholic, a condition Dock attributes to the zodiacal sign under which the child was conceived. Dock's folk beliefs also tell him that one bath every three years is wholesome because he sweats himself clean.

Moreover, there is a folk quality to the names of Fisher's characters, which are well chosen to stimulate reader response and to show the Mormon predilection for names that reflect genealogy through euphony, rhyme, and alliteration. The Fisher children themselves had such names, as do the characters Quirl Avery, Hype Hunter, Lem Higley, Perg Jasper, Con Wote. With respect to dialect, Fisher's ear is accurate. The Mormons swear by saying “by hell,” “by damn,” and “for hell's sakes.” “Out of” becomes “outen,” “shrivel” becomes “swivel,” “dubious” becomes “joobus,” “shivering ague” becomes “shiverun ager.”

Between the Norwegian and Idaho books run two further parallels. There is the matter of the almost indescribably hard work which both men undertake, becoming what Jack London called work beasts. And there is also the fact that through this work, this sacrifice of self, a land and people emerge. As the soil grows and the land becomes productive, people become independent. These two literary naturalists thus seem to validate agrarianism, certainly not the one of which Jefferson dreamed but not altogether a nightmarish one either.

Turning to the Bridwell period, we may look briefly at the book giving its title to this phase of Fisher's life and then at the rationale underlying the autobiographical tetralogy which begins at this time. Fisher's second novel is also regional. Appearing first in 1931, the book was reissued in paper in 1958 by Pyramid Books as The Wild One and given a lurid cover. The reissuance, according to an announcement verso on the title page, was done “by arrangement with the Claxton [sic] Printers, Ltd.” If Fisher needed further evidence of the indifference of the eastern publishing establishment to western matters—a claim he made throughout his life—he could have found it in this publisher's error.

To the Upper Snake River country come Charley and Lela Bridwell. Charley is a combination of many contrasting elements: brutality and tenderness, capability and desultoriness, insight and shortsightedness, slovenliness and a liking for bathing and water. But Charley's overriding attribute is laziness. In a sense he is a throwback to the mountain man, notoriously improvident, who took nature's bounty for granted. Nor does it seem necessary to make a more than desultory attempt at farming a few acres, raising just enough hay for a cow and sometimes a horse, enough fruit for canning, and enough vegetables for the table. A gifted parasite, he borrows relentlessly from his neighbors, using and abusing their horses and equipment and slaughtering beef that does not belong to him. Ironically, his neighbors love him.

Three children are born, two boys and a girl, and since Charley passes on to them his view of the world, the three grow up almost as savages. Taught at home, they learn only writing and spelling, developing remarkable skills at the latter but having little or no sense of how to use the words on their spelling lists. It is soon apparent that Jed, the second child, is obsessed by an Oedipal hatred. When he is four, he tries to kill Charley with a stove lifter. But his hatred and cruelty extend beyond his father, as he divides the world into the good and the bad, protecting and loving the one and waging unceasing war on the other. In the course of time the daughter is seduced and impregnated by a sheepherder on whom Charley has earlier played a joke and whom Charley forces into marriage with her. Jed leaves home, and the other son finally follows his example.

Two more babies are born to Lela and Charley, and their births force Lela to realize the ambitions which Charley's personality has suppressed for so many years. Encouraged by Prudence Hunter's precept and example, she makes something of the Bridwell farm, principally by raising turkeys, as was frequently done by homesteaders and marginal farmers. She hoards the profits and in 1917, after twenty years on the place, takes her two younger children—after a violent scene in which the returned and vengeful Jed is nearly killed by his father—and leaves Charley and the river. The book ends with Charley walking “eastward into the gray dawn. … By none who knew him was he ever seen again.”

The Bridwells are richly conceived characters replete with contrasting impulses. Nevertheless, it is through each one's overriding passion that they are all made memorable, and it is upon the basis of those flaws that the ending is justified and necessary.⁹ Charley's lazy indulgence and gluttony combined with the fact that he is increasingly out of touch with the times must have their consequences. Add to this his cruelty and warped sense of humor, and those consequences will necessarily be serious. The children also suffer the consequences of their natures. Beth's sexually responsive nature necessarily makes her an easy target for the seducer. Thiel's problems develop because he is easily led by his younger brother. His lack of will power or force of character send him into obscurity. Jed is driven by cruelty, hatred, and revenge directed at many objects, but the latter two principally at his father. Jed, too, must be driven off the stage because he violates the moral order of the universe, the golden mean of human behavior. In the end it is Lela who triumphs. It might be argued that even she becomes a driven person in her desire for financial independence, but the drive toward positive goals usually carries approbation rather than condemnation.

With two published novels behind him, Fisher could now assess his accomplishments and project work for the future. In the two novels he had rendered the effects of environment upon the shaping of human life. His parents and neighbors figured in these books, and Fisher himself appeared in a few memorable scenes, in one as a terrified younger boy whom the older Jed threatens to castrate. It may have been in the shaping of that scene that Fisher made one of the major artistic decisions of his life—that he should undertake the novelistic exploration of how his being born to Temperance and Joseph Fisher in an environment of brutal isolation made him what he was. So he began his autobiographical tetralogy of Vridar Hunter.

Fisher was convinced that he had caused the suicide of his first wife (he was probably correct in this, to the extent that any one can cause another being to do something), and the guilt and remorse associated with that conviction were almost more than he could bear. From his psychologist brother he borrowed an insight called “autocorrectivism,” through which Fisher believed his sanity was saved. This notion claimed that a neurosis is the means by which the normal personality copes with what would otherwise result in psychosis. The neurosis, once recognized, need not be a cause for celebration but it can be appreciated for what it is—a striving by the personality to correct itself. As part of his attempt to understand Leona's suicide, Fisher began In Tragic Life, a widely praised novel whose protagonist, Vridar Hunter, grew up in the backwoods Idaho community in circumstances nearly identical with his own.

The second volume, Passions Spin the Plot, marked the end of Fisher's third period and also his financial dependence upon writing, for he was shortly to be named to a federal post with a living wage. In the Federal period, Fisher finished the tetralogy, did a considerable amount of expository scholarly writing, and finished the period in grand fashion with Children of God, a major and money-producing work. With the ＄7,500 Harper prize money and the savings made possible by his WPA salary, Fisher established the basis for his subsequent financial strength.

We Are Betrayed and No Villain Need Be concluded the tetralogy, but Fisher was obviously never completely satisfied that he had indeed discovered his hero's problem in his past. Evidence for this conclusion rests principally on his decision to launch one of the most ambitious literary probes of this century, exploration which resulted in the twelve novels making up the “Testament of Man” series, the last one of which is a rewriting of the tetralogy into one novel, Orphans in Gethsemane, to be discussed in connection with the Hagerman years.¹⁰

To return to Children of God as representative of Fisher's best work of the Federal period, we note, first of all, the balanced perspective with which Fisher perceived his subject, the founding and growth of the Mormon church. He set out neither to prove nor disprove Mormon theology and claims about revelation but to dramatize and narrate Mormon history. That history, Fisher believed, reposed in two men, each given roughly one-third of the novel, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and in the establishment's growing to maturity in Utah, the final third of the book.

The first or Joseph Smith—dominated section is called “Morning,” and it ends with Smith's death. The Brigham Young section, “Afternoon,” deals with the remarkable success of the transplantation of the saints in Utah. Of the many interesting minor threads of this section, none is more engaging than the role of the avenging Angels or Danites, the armed protectors of Zion, and Porter Rockwell, the gunslinger, who was always ready to do Brigham's bidding and “sock” some offender away. The third part, “Evening,” considers the implied question of how or whether Zion will survive in view of Mormon surrender to the Federal government. Has the vitality been lost, as the McBride family, representing three generations linking Smith, Young, and the Utah transplantation, feel? This family has been especially prominent in the communal experiment of the church, and the experiment's abandonment by the church is a blow to them. Children of God is an engaging book with an excellent balance between incident or event, on the one hand, and character and setting on the other. Fisher leaves no doubt that the new environment with its isolation, its natural wealth, and its great agricultural potential, helps account for the success of the saints. But he also recognizes their industry and the genius of Brigham Young.

Fisher, for whom irony was a frequent ally, said in God or Caesar?: “I received a Harper award for one of the poorest novels I have written” (pp. 241-42). In the context in which the remark appears, Fisher is belaboring the manner in which such awards and grants as the Guggenheim are given. It is therefore difficult to know whether he really held his Mormon novel in such low esteem.

When Fisher's first two novels were assessed, he was hailed as a regionalist along the lines of Thomas Hardy, with the Antelope Hills of Idaho his Wessex, as he says in God or Caesar? (p. 214). With his third novel, he began to be identified with such naturalists as Zola, Norris, and Dreiser (p. 214). In this, the Hagerman period, Fisher was to demonstrate the breadth and depth to which regional writing might legitimately aspire, always striving for the universal beyond the particular. This is particularly well illustrated by Fisher's momentous quest for understanding modern man, a specific western American man named Vridar Hunter.

Surveying his tetralogy, Fisher gradually became convinced that childhood alone does not hold the key to an understanding of the man. The man is not there, Wordsworth to the contrary notwithstanding, but in the entire past of the human species, and to understand him that past must be recovered. It was that task of recovery that set off Fisher's most ambitious quest. His series began with ape-man times and carried the human story through crisis after crisis. A brief indication of the titles and central concerns will permit at least a glance at the intellectual platform underlying this series which he called the “Testament of Man.”

Such an undertaking must be selective. Accordingly, Fisher chose those climactic moments in human history when mankind seemed to take a giant step in a certain direction. As he said, “Enlightened minds must wonder what the world would be like today if the torrent [that carries us along] had taken another channel at any one of a dozen … moments in history. What if Greek values had triumphed in that war more than twenty-one centuries ago?”¹¹

In considering the first novel of the “Testament,” Darkness and the Deep (1943), we are reminded of that superb sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey when a bone weapon hurled high into the air in a moment of ecstatic intuition summons the laws of force and fulcrum which in turn transmogrify the bone into an awesome artifact of space technology. So in this novel we find a protagonist physically weaker than his fellows and sexually frustrated by their strength which keeps him away from the women. But he is more intelligent, and his frustration advances that intelligence, making him into a shaper and user of weapons which make him leader of a family group. The second novel opposes Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon peoples and recounts the discoveries of fire—hence the title, The Golden Rooms (1944)—and art. Perhaps, though, the greatest discovery is that man no longer lives in one world, as Joseph Flora puts it, but two: the physical world and the world of the mind.¹²

Fisher explores matriarchy and patriarchy in Intimations of Eve (1946) and Adam and the Serpent (1947); father-son hostility, Hebraic prophecy, desert barrenness, and forgiveness and mercy in The Divine Passion (1948), The Valley of Vision (1951), The Island of the Innocent (1952), and Jesus Came Again (1956). Three novels of the Christian world—A Goat for Azazel (1956), Peace Like a River (1957), and My Holy Satan (1958)—deal respectively with love and compassion as the essence of Jesus's ministry, the distortion of that ministry by Christian ascetics in the desert, and persecution and torture of heterodoxy by the orthodox in the Middle Ages. Then came the rewritten tetralogy entitled Orphans in Gethsemane: A Novel of the Past in the Present (1960). It is a big novel both physically (1245 pages in the two-volume Pyramid Edition) and in the sweep of its ideas. It is a painful novel, for its protagonist seems both destined and determined to suffer. There are blood and violence in it. But in spite of all this, it is an affirmation of sorts.

As with all significant books, this one has many entries. There is, for instance, the challenge of finding the historical prototypes behind their fictional refractions. The Hunter family is obviously the Fisher family. The Bridwells are the Wheatons with Francis Wheaton as Charley Bridwell.¹³ David Hawke is Thomas Wolfe. Professors Elmer T. Merrick and Laura Mayfield are Harold G. Merriam and Lucia Mirrielees of the University of Montana at Missoula. Reuben Taylor Rhode is James H. Gipson of the Caxton Printers. Lloyd Bell is the poet Floyd Dell. Governor Don B. Long is Idaho Governor C. Ben Ross. Angus Boden is W. H. Auden. Robin Welsh is Alan Swallow. But such riddling can become a kind of game and the book merely a roman à clef.

A more profitable approach to the book is an analysis of its structure, which may be described as circular and chronological since it is the chronicle of the life of Vridar Hunter and, secondarily, an accounting, sometimes brief, of the lives of those who influenced him or were touched by him. It is in this texture of human connections that part of the richness of the novel reveals itself, for the protagonist is usually sensitive to his total environment. If the structure is chronological and historical, the perspective on that structure is psychological and ecological. That is, Fisher details motivation and explores the psyche of his characters, but it is in the interplay of character, the web of conflict and influence, that the ethical problems are given voice. And that, properly understood, is the heart of human ecology, which is concerned with the web of human relationships in the totality of the environment. Human ecology is not, therefore, simply a biological term.

Between the time of Vridar's birth in the Snake River Valley and his return to it “incurably a mountain man, a man of the American West,”¹⁴ the circle of life has been touched by hundreds of people and events. At the center of his early life are his parents, the meaning of whose relationship to him and to each other is for a long time unclear to Vridar. Near the center of his life are his brother and sister, important for reasons similarly obscure. But the relationship at the heart of the tragedy of his life is his love affair with Neloa, whom he marries, by whom two children are born, and whom he drives to suicide. About life being tragic, Fisher was absolutely unequivocal: “All of us, with Robinson's Flammonde, have a dark hill to climb; because life is tragic … we fall easily into … self-pity. …”¹⁵ Twice more Vridar marries, and each time the web of circumstances and human connections is complex and rich.

To summarize the story is to take yet another path into the novel, and interpretive summary invariably emphasizes point to point correspondence between the lives of Vridar and Vardis. Such a path the biographical critic may take with considerable profit, for any information that illuminates the foreground of a literary work is welcome. Orphans is one of the most intensely autobiographical American novels ever written, reminding the reader that Vardis Fisher and Thomas Wolfe had been colleagues and friends and raising the question of whether these two orphans influenced each other or whether their penchant for autobiographical fiction was a matter of confluence.

But summary of a long novel is always difficult and certainly unfair in cases where the feeling for detail and the ability to render scene are strong. This is the case with Fisher, and the matter is complicated by his attempts to evoke images involving all the senses, particularly those of taste and hearing.

Vridar's life falls into the same five periods identified for Fisher. He, too, was born with a caul on a stormy March night. He early experiences violence, terror, and an absence of expressed parental love and tenderness. His early recollections are

of a sheep with its head pulled up and back, its throat butchered open from ear to ear, its blood pouring out; of an enraged father grasping a cat by its heels and crushing it around a post, the squawk of it when it struck, the smell of it, the sight of it as it lay senseless in the yard; … the stench of burning hair and hide and the agonized bawling, the branding iron, the knife, the blood. … And the nights under downpours, with water and chunks of mud falling from the ceiling to the untanned deer and elk skins of his bed … the sound of river waters and night winds, of wolves and coyotes and mountain lions … of a horse screaming because of turpentine poured into his bowels by the Bridwell boys—It was life that thousands had lived with zest and appetite, but he had been a … child so … sensitive that it broke his heart to watch what strong men loved. … He had been deeply afraid of his father, even afraid of his mother. …

(II, pp. 23-24)

Vridar is late getting into and graduating from high school. He is the protector of his younger brother, Marion (Vivian), who has crossed eyes. In his developing sexuality, he falls in sentimental, chivalric love with Neloa Doole (Leona McMurtrey), suffers guilt and anxiety about masturbating, and, in short, experiences the emotional confusion of adolescence. He goes to college, intensifies his questioning of the Mormon church, has considerable academic success, and marries Neloa only after forcing her to admit she is not a virgin (he is) and after finally and painfully accommodating that fact to his unyielding conviction of the importance of virginity. But he never forgets her fall from innocence and never lets her forget. Neloa becomes pregnant, and Vridar accepts an invitation from Washington, D.C. to become an air cadet, resigning later in protest against the high-society snobbery of the training center. He returns home, is drafted, sent to Fort Rosecrans, and mustered out after the Armistice without ever going overseas.

After finishing college, Vridar attends graduate school at Midwestern University in Chicago in summers while teaching at Wasatch College during the academic year. The two important strands of his life—scholarship and marriage—begin to unravel. As he pursues his graduate degree and works on a novel, he becomes aware of an irreconcilable split in himself: “the idealist, credulous and self-pitying, and the thinker, ironic and ruthless” (I, p. 598). With a fellow student, Athene Marvell, he finds intellectual, then emotional sympathy. When, finally, they are intimate, Vridar forces himself to extirpate the sentimental notion of love that has had Neloa for its object since he was a twelve-year-old Idaho schoolboy. He vacillates between the two women: “an unreasoning love on the one hand; a conviction of duty and courage on the other” (I, p. 265). As tensions increase, Neloa finds that she is once again pregnant; Vridar is astounded, for he had been scrupulous in his use of contraceptives. Neloa has an abortion, and after she recovers there is a scene in which Vridar forces the truth that she has been intimate with another man, as he had so many years earlier forced the truth of sexual activities from her. His mind returns to earlier scenes in Antelope and Idaho Falls. Their final confrontation ends with Neloa drinking a glass of lysol, and in spite of medical attention, she dies. Book One ends with Vridar's vow at the crematorium to work seven years, for their marriage had endured that long, and if at the end of that time he has produced nothing worthwhile, he will join her in death.

In Book Two, Vridar finally pulls himself together, finishes the Ph.D. degree magna cum laude and with Athene Marvell, behind whose portrait stands Margaret Trusler, returns to Wasatch College to teach. He continues to write, gets into trouble with the Mormon mouthpieces of the college administration, and takes a position in a New York City college where an aspiring young writer named Hawke is among his colleagues. Here he publishes his first novel. Sick of the city and its ant-swarms of people, its dirt, and its ugliness, he returns to Idaho, married to Athene. He is impelled west, moreover, because he feels too shy to be an effective teacher, because his father and sons are in Idaho, and because “he had never known until he went East how much he loved the West—its magnificent mountains, its vast forests of Douglas fir, pine, and spruce; its great clean rivers, the strong pungent scent of its campfires, and above all, the boundless semi-arid landscapes smelling of sage” (II, p. 169). With this move and the almost total abandonment of teaching, the second period of Vridar's life concludes.

Vridar works on his father's homestead near the Bridwell place, still seldom comfortable around his father. But his visits to the river and forests displace his old sense of terror and isolation. A western publisher, Reuben Taylor Rhode, agrees to publish Vridar's next novel. Athene comes west to join him, and, now a nationally recognized regional writer, Vridar is invited on two different occasions to teach summer sessions at Montana College in Missoula. As he continues his exploration of his past, Vridar confides to Athene that his books are no good and that it is impossible to explain the man in terms of his childhood. He must go back “to the ape, to the cell, to the stone” (II, p. 222). The third period of Vridar's life concludes when he accepts an invitation to become state director of the WPA Writers' Project.

The fourth period of Vridar's life is memorable for several reasons. In the first place, he puts together a remarkable effort, and Idaho is the first state to publish under the terms of the Project. Hunter is scathing in his indictment of the eastern establishment which frustrates him nearly every step of the way as he takes his job seriously, works a sixteen-plus hour day, and begins to assemble text and photographs for publication—all this on one of the smallest budgets and lowest salaries in the nation. He learns that Washington bureaucrats survive by never finishing a piece of work and by patronizing political strength. But Idaho, a thinly populated western state, must not publish before more populous ones. And to see that it does not, a Washington official is sent to Idaho. Vridar and Rhode, who plans to publish the guide, get the arrogant easterner drunk and ship him home via Union Pacific. This is Vridar's response to the frame of mind that sees the West as exploitable, a place to be visited for its pure air, water, and scenery and mined of its resources but to be neither lived in nor taken seriously, for all important matters are resolved east of the Mississippi.¹⁶

In the second place, Vridar writes a prize- and money-winning novel making it possible for him to resign as Project director for Idaho and Regional Editor of the Rocky Mountain States. The second marriage is dissolved, and with Angele he moves to Hagerman, to build a permanent home. Thus he is launched into the fifth and final period of his life.

He marries Angele and begins his exploration of his—and our—past. In the course of that exploration, he sometimes suspends work to take an occasional side path to write a book on a subject or about a problem that has long interested him. But always his big work, indeed his life's work, is the series. When no one will publish the books and he sinks into despair and drink, he meets Robin Welsh, poet-professor-publisher, who is eager to bring the novels out. Vridar's story ends as he and Angele on a soft summer night surround themselves with fragrant apples: “Until morning they would be here, eating apples and drinking whiskey, breathing woodsmoke and talking; until at last, still looking at the stars and thinking of light-years, and of the microscopic insect explaining the solar system in a mote of metaphysics, they would turn their faces to the cool waters and sleep” (II, p. 513).

Identification of theme is yet another way into the study of a novel, and with it the commentary on this novel concludes. It has been previously stated that the book is the story of a quest, and indeed it is, for the protagonist is painfully pursuing self-knowledge. If he is unable to account for himself, for the pain he feels, and for the pain he causes, he may well destroy himself. That knowledge finally comes: fear is the touchstone in understanding man's continuing story. Vridar's progression from ape-man to contemporary neurotic has been shaped by fear, subsumed in the legacy from the Judaeo-Christian tradition as the sense of sin and utter unworthiness. Who besides the Jews “had so lost themselves in a colossal act of submission and projection until they were all stricken orphans going into Gethsemane to pray!” (II, p. 432). Vridar cannot get beyond fear, for he accepts Welsh's contention that the universe is “essentially unknowable to human beings … non-rational rather than irrational” (II, p. 569). But it doesn't stop there; Welsh's thoughts continue with what is part of the affirmation at the end of the quest:

There is no future for the individual being, in some mystical sense. Dust to dust, and the unknowable miracle is that the dust is somehow alive, and that, through the long, long centuries, the dust is somehow alive with consciousness. That this consciousness can occasionally respond to meaning and direction gives the only possible hope for man, and the only possible reason for wanting to be alive, to act, to do anything. But that is reason enough.

(II, p. 570)

There is also the theme, important though not the principal one, of West-East opposition. Vardis Fisher was an implacable foe of the incestuous, self-aggrandizing eastern literary establishment, refusing to accept its moral, philosophical, and literary commonplaces. Through his protagonist he registers surprise, first, then righteous anger when he learns that members of the establishment—all friends—review one another's books as if the writers were total strangers! More than that, he learns that eastern publishers, reviewers, and critics do not really believe anybody in the West has anything worth saying, especially about the West itself. To write about the West successfully one had best refurbish eastern stereotypes of it. And that Vridar Hunter refuses to do.

Finally there is the theme of the responsibility of the historical novelist. The novelist must know his subject thoroughly, and, equally important, must feel his subjects, must get into the sensibility of his characters.¹⁷ Vridar spends time in a cave when he is in ape-man times, on the desert when he writes of the early Christian ascetics, in a place very much like a dungeon when he writes of the punishment of heretics. Only thus can he sense what such experiences were like, and only by describing those sensations can he make his writing live.

Before Fisher began writing his “Testament of Man” series, he produced notable western books. Of these space permits mention only of City of Illusion (1941), a novel of quick riches and losses in Virginia City, Nevada, with the remarkable Eilley Orrum Hunter Cowan Bowers, self-styled Queen of the Comstock; and The Mothers (1943), a novel of mother force and courage in the Sierras among the Donner party. Tamsen Donner is unforgettable. Pemmican (1956), a novel of the contest for power in the fur trade in Canada, and Tale of Valor (1958), an imaginative and forceful novel of the Lewis and Clark expedition in which the principals become authentic and therefore vulnerable human beings, were done while he worked on the series.

As a conclusion to this discussion of Vardis Fisher as a western writer, Mountain Man (1965) poses special problems. Based loosely on two strands of western legend, that of John “Livereating” Johnston and that of Jane “Crazy Woman” Morgan, this book projects a nineteenth-century man of feeling, Sam Minrad, into an environment in which such a sensibility can most fully realize itself: not a salon or a Gothic pile or a grotto but the Rocky Mountain West. The two strands come together when, in 1846, Sam Minard, an intelligent, educated, music-loving mountain man, discovers Kate Bowden insane with grief and shock over the slaughter of her three children. Her husband has been scalped and carried off on the back of a Blackfoot horse, but not before Kate has killed four of the ten warriors with an axe. From the moment of his discovery Sam feels responsible for Kate. He builds her a little cabin, sees to it that she has food and blankets, and otherwise provides for her as best he can. Word passed to other mountain men enlists their guardianship, and her insanity together with their solicitude assures her protection from the Indians. Sam marries Lotus, a Flathead princess, builds a cabin, and for a brief time they live an idyll, feasting upon the choicest foods nature can provide and loving one another.

All that ends when Sam, returning from a trapping expedition, finds his wife's bones mingled with the bones of an unborn child. She has been killed by Crows. Swearing vengeance upon the entire Crow nation, Minard quickly becomes known as The Terror, not merely killing all of the Crow warriors he can find but cutting off their right ears so that his work will be known. After Sam and a few mountain man friends kill some fifty Blackfeet, the Crows find the body of Kate, who has frozen to death, and build a cairn over her remains. When Sam sees what they have done—it is near the cairn Sam has built for the bones of Lotus and the unborn child—he knows it is time to cease the blood feud. The book ends on a strong note of reconciliation. When Sam enters the lodge of a wise old Crow chief, the two men exchange understanding and smoke pipes of peace. The vendetta has ended. Sam leaves the Crow camp, makes his way past the Oregon Trail whose numbers of emigrants he counts regretfully, then turns and heads “straight north, back into the valleys and the mountains.”¹⁸

Mountain Man is an interesting book, remarkable for its strong story line and dramatic rendering of events. In no other novel is there a greater sense of the beauty and wonder of the American West. And that, as has been insisted on earlier, is no confession of novelistic weakness. Nature, the landscape, and scenic wonder have the ethical force of character; such books as this and The Big Sky, though in most respects vastly different, are vital to a developing sense of responsibility for the West, for they provide a means by which we can compare what the West used to be with what we have done with it. It is an appropriate farewell to the subject of the West, for it is Fisher's last novel, and in it he distilled the emotional response most westerners feel for their region.

The theme of this book can be described variously, but one way of getting at its ethical significance is to consider the importance of time. Time as theme becomes transparently clear when the brevity of the love of Sam and Lotus is examined. Just so short a time did the American West remain pristine and free after the mountain man entered her. If Lotus can be thought to stand for the values of the primitive West and if Sam represents the essence of the mountain man tradition, then it is appropriate for their union to be short-lived. “For a brief season,” Fisher quotes Bernard DeVoto's Across the Wide Missouri in a prefatory note to the reader, “… the myth so generously begotten became fact. For a few years Odysseus Jed Smith and Siegfried Carson and the Wingshod Fitzpatrick actually drew breath in this province of fable. Then suddenly it was all myth again. Wagons were moving down the trails, and nowhere remained any trace of the demigods who had passed this way.” In time, Kate's insane anguish is foregone. In time, Sam's feud is ended. The time of winter and freezing cold is only part of the cycle of a year and is displaced by warmth, flowers, and singing life. There is a kairos moment, a fullness of time, for all things.

For some tastes, Sam's musical turn of mind is mildly incredible as he bursts into song or plays his harmonica in a land where hostile Indians lurk. For others Sam's fondling of the bones of his wife and child and kissing the hair still attached to the skull of Lotus is so gothic as to be repugnant. However, it must be remembered that although Sam is a nineteenth-century man, his sensibilities are those of an eighteenth-century man of feeling, and the Graveyard School of English poetry had earlier created characters such as he.

At the beginning of this study, it was suggested that Fisher left a rich legacy of essays. They are far too numerous and too scattered through dozens of periodicals to be assessed here. However, the following is evidence of the quality of his mind and the kind of concern that impelled him to the typewriter. Entitled “Vardis Fisher Says,” the column appeared in the Buhl, Idaho Herald, Thursday, April 29, 1965, and said in part:

Henry Miller years ago wrote a book about this country that he called “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.” Most likely he did not know what a fine prophet he was, or what a superb irony he put in his title; for it will be air-conditioned. This nation has technological know-how, and so it seems safe to predict that its vast acreages of junked cars and its swarming bedlams of the “mentally sick” will be air-conditioned. The nation's face, if seen from far above, will become more and more a network of freeways and superways, overways and underways, and thousands of abandoned highways or pieces of them; together with the vast sprawl and effluvia and smog of the ever-expanding cities. The politicians, the manufacturers of diapers and toys, and millions more call it progress.

I'm actually glad that I'll not be here to see it. Those like me are called reactionary because we shudder at the picture of four or five hundred million people in the noise and stinks and crowding of huge cities, who will never know the smell of the clean beautiful land before it was swarmed over; of the wonderfully graceful animal life before it was hogtied and fenced in the illsmelling pens, for their captors to stare at; of the almost infinite variety of wild flowers, and of lovely birds singing everywhere before the sons of Adam chased them off the planet; and the marvelous beauty of the thousands of unpolluted lakes and streams. …

It is, of course, too early for any final assessment of Vardis Fisher, and in any case final assessments nearly always prove to be both semi-final and arrogant. However, the following may be affirmed. He began as a regionalist and never lost that identity, expanding his vision like a good regionalist beyond the narrow and provincial to become what Robert Frost called a realmist, one who discovers the promise and disappointment, the baseness and nobility, and the joy and pain of the human condition with himself and within his territory. Fisher probed the motives of his characters, dissecting their shifts and evasions, not sparing even his fictional self. Fisher took Ben Jonson seriously and blotted his thousand lines. His blotting resulted in his rejection of the tetralogy, his immense search into the past of mankind, and the novelistic result of that search. Critical opinion may divide when the massive and powerful Orphans is compared with the tetralogy, but Fisher was unequivocal in his own preference.

As one who tried to write honestly about the West, either the West he knew or the earlier one he so carefully researched, he is close to the literary tradition of Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, surpassing them both in range of intelligence, depth of perception, and ambition. He came to understand his region's history, its folkways, its dialect, its capacity to excite fear and terror as well as its power to inspire feelings of tenderness and rapture. Future scholars may find that in these he compares not unfavorably with William Faulkner, another realmist.

Vardis Fisher left a legacy that will be read, enjoyed, and argued about for years to come, or at least as long as there is a vision or even a memory of the freedom, the purity, and the promise of the American West. He will remain an inspiration for younger writers who sometimes despair in the face of the hostility of the establishment—the critics and publishers—encouraging them by precept and example to realize their noblest ambitions. His call is always “God, not Caesar!”

Notes

1. Wallace Stegner, “Born a Square—The Westerner's Dilemma,” Atlantic 213 (January 1964): 46-50.

2. Vardis Fisher, Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him and Other Essays (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1963), p. 107.

3. Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him, pp. 107-108.

4. Joseph Flora, Vardis Fisher (New York: Twayne, 1965), p. 20.

5. Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him, p. 122.

6. Letter from Maribeth Dwyer, Information Services, University of Montana, 17 September 1979.

7. Vardis Fisher, “What Is the Evidence? Comments on the Testament of Man Series,” unpublished lecture at The College of Idaho (Jan. 23, 1968), p. 2.

8. Vardis Fisher, Toilers of the Hills (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), p. 83.

9. It is instructive to note that Fisher's own choice as a title for his second novel was Those Strange Bridwells, a title that suggests his awareness of the grotesqueness of the principals of the cast. God or Caesar? (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953), p. 148.

10. “Before I had completed the four novels of my tetralogy I felt that I didn't have a good grasp of the thing … because I didn't have enough knowledge.” “What Is the Evidence?”, p. 3.

11. “What Is the Evidence?”, p. 8.

12. Vardis Fisher, p. 8.

13. Tim Woodward, “Mystery Solved—The Fate of ‘Charley Bridwell’,” Idaho Statesman, 22 November 1983.

14. Orphans in Gethsemane Pyramid Edition (New York, 1960), vol. II, p. 101.

15. God or Caesar? p. 89.

16. Time's July 2, 1951 review of The Valley of Vision was headed “Strictly from Idaho,” and over the years Fisher grew accustomed to questions as to why he chose to live and write in Idaho, of all places!

17. Some readers have pointed to an error of Fisher's in describing the milking of a goat, for the animal was presented as if its udder had four quarters like a cow instead of the two proper for the caprine species. It may have been a mistake, or it may have been a deliberate joke aimed at the eastern city dweller who typically knows little of rural life. There are precedents for such humor. One recalls Melville's phallic jokes which must have passed over the heads of many of his readers. And closer to the mark is Thomas Wolfe's delightful joke in Look Homeward, Angel when a stanza of poetry is attributed to Longfellow but is really by Tennyson! As an English teacher, Wolfe was surely aware of what he was doing, just as Fisher, who raised sheep, must have known that sheep and goats possess similar milking characteristics.

18. Vardis Fisher, Mountain Man (New York: William Morrow, 1965), p. 372.

Primary Sources (in chronological order)

Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna. New York: Harold Vinal, 1927; souvenir edition reissued by Opal Laurel Holmes, Boise: 1981.

Toilers of the Hills. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928.

Dark Bridwell. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

In Tragic Life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran; Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1932. This and the following three works comprise Fisher's “Vridar Hunter” tetralogy.

Passions Spin the Plot. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran; Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1934.

We Are Betrayed. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran; Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1935.

No Villain Need Be. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran; Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1936.

The Idaho Encyclopedia. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1938.

Idaho Lore. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1939.

Children of God. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939.

City of Illusion. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941.

The Mothers: An American Saga of Courage. New York: Vanguard Press, 1943.

* Darkness and the Deep. New York: Vanguard Press, 1943.

* The Golden Rooms. New York: Vanguard Press, 1944.

* Intimations of Eve. New York: Vanguard Press, 1946.

* Adam and the Serpent. New York: Vanguard Press, 1947.

* The Divine Passion. New York: Vanguard Press, 1948.

* The Valley of Vision. New York: Abelard Press, 1951.

* The Island of the Innocent. New York: Abelard Press, 1952.

God or Caesar? The Writing of Fiction for Beginners. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953.

* Jesus Came Again. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1956.

* A Goat for Azazel. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1956.

Pemmican. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956.

* Peace Like a River. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1957.

* My Holy Satan. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1958.

Tale of Valor. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958.

Love and Death; The Complete Stories of Vardis Fisher. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959.

* Orphans in Gethsemane. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960.

Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him and Other Essays. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1963.

Mountain Man: A Novel of Male and Female in the Early American West. New York: William Morrow, 1965.

Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1968.

* Books belonging to the “Testament of Man” series

Secondary Sources

Attebery, Louie W. “The American West and the Archetypal Orphan.” Western American Literature 5 (Fall 1970): 205-17. In its literature and folklore, the American West seems particularly well adapted to the presentation of the orphan. The author examines works by Twain, Guthrie, and Fisher and western folklore for their reflection of this archetype.

Chatterton, Wayne. Vardis Fisher: The Frontier and Regional Works. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1972. This excellent survey of Fisher's western and regional works provides a brief biographical synopsis, including the information that Fisher wrote about a half dozen novels (unpublished) before Toilers of the Hills. No mention is made of Fisher's third quarter of teaching at the University of Montana. Fisher's Antelope People poetry is acknowledged as a significant passageway into his regional fiction. Chatterton corrects the record about the Harper Prize in 1939 it was ＄7,500.

“Dear Mr. Fisher/Dear Mr. Schwartz: A Correspondence.” The Bookmark: University of Idaho Library 27 (September 1974): 3-25. This is an interesting exchange of letters between Fisher and bookshop owner Schwartz, during the course of which Schwartz discovers that Fisher, for whom he has high regard, is not the leftist liberal he had thought. Fisher's letter of 28 November 1933 from the University of Montana, Missoula, provides a clue that he was then teaching there, as indeed he was.

Etulain, Richard W. Western American Literature: A Bibliography of Interpretive Books and Articles. Vermillion, South Dakota: Dakota Press, 1972. Revised Edition, 1982. For works before 1972, this is a standard bibliography in 137 pages. The Fisher material is on pp. 64-65 in the 1972 edition, pp. 138-40 in the 1982.

Flora, Joseph M. Vardis Fisher's Story of Vridar Hunter: A Study in Theory and Revision. University of Michigan: University Microfilms, 1962. A careful study of the tetralogy and its revision as Orphans in Gethsemane, this book argues that the revised work is an improvement in nearly all respects, a testimony to Fisher's growth as a writer. Glancing comments on other Fisher novels and Flora's placement of Fisher in the milieu of the literary scene of the 1930s add to the merit of this dissertation.

———. Vardis Fisher. New York: Twayne, 1965. This is the most complete, most reasonable assessment available of Fisher and his works. Incorporating material from his dissertation yet going beyond its limitations, Flora has written a book that is the beginning point for Fisher scholars. Here are a chronology, a bibliography (both primary and secondary sources), and a clear discussion of Fisher's power as a novelist. He chooses not to discuss Fisher's power as a poet. Particularly fine is Chapter 6, “Americana,” in which Flora discusses the works with western themes.

———. “Vardis Fisher and James Branch Cabell: An Essay on Influence and Reputation.” The Cabellian 2 (Autumn 1969): 12-16. Noteworthy for reminding readers of Fisher's long-standing appreciation for Cabell, this essay cites some of the particularities of that appreciation, including Cabell's impact on the tetralogy.

Grover, Dorys C. “Vardis Fisher: The Antelope People Sonnets.” Texas Quarterly 17 (1974): 97-106. Robinson and Masters in The Man Against the Sky and Spoon River Anthology influenced the ten sonnets referred to as the Antelope People Sonnets. These poems appeared in poetry magazines and anthologies, and except for poetry that appeared in the tetralogy and Orphans, they are all the poems Fisher published, excepting Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna. Grover reminds us that the Antelope sonnets are “succinct, clear, and provocative meditations without sympathy or defense … the only writing we have in American literature about this part of Idaho in the first quarter of the twentieth century.”

Kellogg, George. “Vardis Fisher: A Bibliography.” The Bookmark: University of Idaho Library, Supplement to Vol. 13 (March 1961): 1-19. This is an excellent bibliography of works by and about Fisher, limited only by the fact that it stops with 1961. Included here are a listing of all foreign and domestic editions of Fisher, books edited by him, his publications in periodicals (nearly two pages), his writings in anthologies, nearly three pages of writings about Fisher, and approximately eight pages listing book reviews. Kellogg updated this work for Western American Literature (see below).

———. “Vardis Fisher: A Bibliography.” Western American Literature 5 (Spring 1970): 45-64. Following essentially the same format as above, Kellogg brought his excellent bibliography up to date, including a projected (and subsequently finished) doctoral dissertation on Fisher's poetry.

Milton, John R. “The Primitive World of Vardis Fisher: The Idaho Novels.” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 17 (July 1976): 369-384. Fisher's use of animalism to underscore the nature of primitive man in all of us serves to show that man has this heritage but need not be captive to it. Fisher's Idaho novels provide an excellent place for the study of man under the control of senseless fears, according to Milton.

Taber, Ronald W. “Vardis Fisher: New Directions for the Historical Novel.” Western American Literature 1 (Winter 1967): 285-96. This is an important essay in understanding Fisher's advancement of the historical novel, to which Fisher himself provided the clue when he said in God or Caeser?: “Note here the reviewer's obvious distaste: ‘Once upon a carefree time, escapists could pick up a historical novel confident of finding … sword play and midnight love. Nowadays the historical novel is often as minutely researched as a Ph.D. thesis.’ If it is historical it has to be” (p. 163). Taber's article expands this idea and shows how Fisher, through his research, attempted to recreate the thoughts of his characters.

———. “Vardis Fisher and the Idaho Guide: Preserving Culture for the New Deal.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 59 (April 1968): 68-76. In this article the background for and the execution of the Idaho Guide are described. Fisher's accomplishments in bringing out the prototype for subsequent guides emerge from a weight of material researched by Taber.

Westbrook, Max. “The Ontological Critic.” In Interpretive Approaches to Western American Literature, edited by Daniel Alhofer and others, pp. 49-66. Pocatello, Idaho: Idaho State University Press, 1972. An essay in a particular kind of literary criticism, this wide-ranging piece is especially rich in its exposition of archetypal criticism. In this scheme of things, Dark Bridwell has a place, as Westbrook explains in the closing paragraphs.