Mary Hunter AustinBesprekingen

First Edition

Reading for calm relaxing moments, a beautiful and poetic set of reflections on life in the eastern Sierra Nevada and Owens Valley more than a hundred years ago.

What a wonderfully selection of short stories by a regional writer who was many things, a recorder of regional culture, as well as an ecologist and a feminists. This is also a scholarly work and the editor of this collection of stories provides the historical as well as social background to each story. This book id like fine wine; to be taken in small sips and and enjoyed at a leisurely pace.

En este clásico venerado sobre el desierto, Austin medita sobre las maravillas de estas tierras y captura tanto el paisaje, como la enorme variedad de vida animal y vegetal, o los pocos seres humanos que las habitan.

Enjoyable read on the natural and cultural history or desert California. Writing style is definitely indicative of the time, and a bit stilted in parts. But easily overlooked for me due to the fascinating subject matter.

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 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.½

In "The Land of Little Rain," Mary Austin proves in many ways the equal of Henry David Thoreau as well as a bit of an amateur sociologist. Her writing is fine if at times a bit precious.

Autobiography by the American author Mary Hunter Austin published in 1932. Most famous for her Western literature and writings on Indian life. Over half the book involves her early years before moving west. The final section covering the period after she left California and primarily lists the people she met and places she went. Perhaps that was the style of the times or perhaps the author thought other areas had been fully explored in her fiction.

This collection of short stories was published as part of the University of Nevada Press Western Literature Series. While exhibiting the prejudice of the times (circa 1880-1930), those who enjoy Western Literature in general and storytelling in particular will welcome this collection. The author sympathetically explores life during the time of white settlement of eastern California. She writes of the human response to nature and the inevitability of change.

This might be a great book for people who like to read long, flowery descriptions of scenery and what animals are doing. I personally found it slooooow and boring. I was forced to read it for school, so I would never have chosen to read it on my own.

Perhaps the book just wasn't "for" me.

Not sure how this got into my collection.  I kinda should like it, I guess, as I try to appreciate the desert southwest & mountains, and learn about the history of feminism and environmentalism from the SW rural perspective.  But I just couldn't get into it.  I did page through, trying samples from each section, but nothing doing.

"Mary Austin was convinced that the valley [Owens Valley*] had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles--that city would never stop until it owned the whole river and all of the land. One day, in Los Angeles for an interview with Mulholland, she told him so. After she had left, a subordinate came into his office and found him staring at the wall. "By God, " Mulholland reportedly said, "that woman is the only one who has brains enough to see where this is going." [Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner]

Savvy about early 20th century CA water rights and politics and steeped in 19th century Transcendentalism, Mary Austin is best known for these exquisitely written vignettes that describe the landscape and the inhabitants of the Owens Valley. Her lyricism is finely tempered by acute observation. The book closes with an imperative: "Come away, you who are so obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas." Come away, indeed.

*[from Wikipedia: "Owens Valley is the arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States, to the east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mountains on the west edge of the Great Basin section. The mountain peaks on either side (including Mount Whitney) reach above 14,000 feet in elevation, while the floor of the Owens Valley is at 4,000 feet, making the valley one of the deepest in the United States. The Sierra Nevada casts the valley in a rain shadow. The bed of Owens Lake, now a predominantly dry endorheic alkali flat, sits on the southern end of the valley. The valley provides water to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the source of half of the water for Los Angeles, and is infamous as the scene of one of the fiercest and longest running episodes of the California Water Wars."]

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 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

Mary Austin wrote about nature, specifically in the American Southwest. The Land of Little Rain is a collection of essays celebrating the California desert, an area many would consider a formidable, unforgiving landscape. She brings it to life, describing the flora and fauna in minute detail. Even Scavengers, an essay about buzzards, makes for fascinating reading as she shows how the birds help keep the desert clean -- except, of course, from the litter left by careless humans.

This book was published in 1903, and Austin's language takes some getting used to. In the introduction, Terry Tempest Williams writes about recording these essays as an audiobook, and initially
missing her voice completely. It was only in hearing the text out loud that I realized the era that held Mary Austin. It was a Victorian diction written through the perceptions of a radical spirit. Mary Austin wrote through the lace of her age. (p. xiv)

Reading this book piqued my interest in Mary Austin, en early feminist who worked tirelessly for Native American rights and what we now call "sustainability." I'm saving these essays for a re-read after I learn more about this fascinating woman.

A stunning tribute to the savage beauty of the area known as Death Valley. To most travelers it is a parched, empty territory, unwelcoming and forgiving. In a collection of essays that date back almost a century, naturalist and writer Mary Austin (1868-1934) breathes life into the desert landscape, describing its wondrous beauty. A great read which just might inspire a road trip down south!

This is copy number 25 of a limited edition of 500 450 copies signed by Mrs. Alla T. Ford of Lake Worth, Fla. I also have a duplicate copy. Privately printed by Opium Books of Hong Kong. [They must have been under opium’s influenced as they printed and bound this sloppily done tome. It is difficult to read; the stamping on the cover and endpapers are lopsided, and the boards are badly warped. This book demonstrates very poor workmanship. [rek/83 direct]

This piece was first published in St. Nicholas, 1917 December, 45 (2):156-62. This is copy 291 signed by Mrs. Alla T. Ford of Lake Worth, Florida. Edition limited to 500 copies. Printed with red ink on green paper. Privately printed by Opium Books. This book demonstrates very poor workmanship. The boards are warped and endpapers lopsided.

I bought this because of a recommendation in Lawrence Clark Powell's "A passion for Books". Having skimmed through it I am waiting to be snowed in before I give it my full attention. That should be soon, according to our pessimistic weather forecasters (Nov 2005)

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 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.

NA