Lawrence Clark Powell on the Southwest

“Seek essences, enduring things, touchstones, and symbols; try to recreate in prose what makes this country so increasingly meaningful and necessary to one. Altitude, distance, color, configuration, history, and culture – in them dwell the essential things, but they must be extracted. ‘Crack the rock if  so you list, bring to light the amethyst.’ Costs nothing to try. Some have succeeded – Lummis, Lawrence, Long, La Farge, Horgan, Waters, the Fergussons – proving that it is possible.  Stand books on the shelf, hang up maps, gaze in the turquoise ball, finger the fragment of  red adobe from Pecos, reload the blue Scripto, take a fresh yellow pad, then sit down and see what comes.” -Lawrence Clark Powell, Southwest: Three Definitions, p. 21.

If those words make you want to grab your Scripto and write about the Southwest or your  literary landscape elsewhere, you might want to read more by Lawrence Clark Powell (1906-2001). A rare book acquisition librarian and book collector, Lawrence Clark Powell was the perfect reader for anyone writing about place. He read everything, remembered all he read, knew many of the authors, publishers, artists, librarians, book collectors, and book dealers, and he wrote about it all.

In his books Southwest Classics and California Classics, Powell all but worships writers of those regions. His highly readable and entertaining books consist of chapters devoted to the authors he thought best captured these places, providing biographical information, synopses, and an explanation of their significance in Southwest and American writing. Since many of those authors are obscure today, Powell’s writing is the best place to learn of forgotten gems.

Powell also created delightfully annotated bibliographies. His best, Heart of the Southwest: A Selective Bibliography of Novels, Stories and Tales Laid in Arizona and New Mexico & Adjacent Lands (1959), is very fortunately available in full-text here.

Here are two of the 119 entries:

“40. O’KANE FOSTER (1898 – )
In The Night Did I Sing
New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942. [324 pp.]
A loving and lyrical pastoral novel of the Mexican American Taos Valley village called Sangre de Cristo, full of a deep brooding sympathy for the brown people and a distaste for the restless road-building Anglos, typified by a crew of Texas surveyors.

105. IDAH MEACHAM STROBRIDGE (1855 – 1932)
The Loom of the Desert
Los Angeles [Artemesia Bindery], 1907. 141 pp.
Dramatic vignettes of desert lore by the author-printer-binder who was the first to “glamorize” the Nevada desert. Illustrations are by Maynard Dixon. This volume and the author’s In Miner’s Mirage-Land (1904) and The Land of Purple Shadows (1909) represent the beginnings of fine book production in Los Angeles, in which content, format, and illustrations join harmoniously.”

Powell did several other bibliographies, including Southwestern Century: A Bibliography of One Hundred Books of Non Fiction about the Southwest.

If you are a librarian, you’ll want to read Powell’s books of essays on librarianship, including his travels and adventures acquiring rare books for the UCLA Library, where he spent most of his career.

Powell unapologetically validates bibliomania. If you’re an obsessive enough book collector or book lover that you enjoy reading about anything books, his other works, such as Books in My Baggage, include endless stories about great finds, unforgettable bookstores and memorable proprietors, small presses, and great book collections.

Many of Powell’s books are available in inexpensive used editions at www.bookfinder.com

Here’s a quote from Powell that kept me stoked as I was writing  my historical novel set in New Mexico and the Navajo reservation, Land Beyond Maps:

“Because of  these creative writers we see the Southwest differently than we would if  they had  not written. By the power of  their prose, their vision becomes our vision… We see New Mexico as Calvin, Lawrence, and Luhan, Rhodes and the Fergussons saw it… How real they are! I close my eyes and there is Zane Grey—I mean Lassiter—straining to roll the rock. There is Miss Cather and her friend, lost in canyons below Mesa Verde… Across the wide southwest I am ever aware of my historic predecessors, all of  whom came this way and left their books on the land as legacies to those who follow…legacies to us their grateful beneficiaries.” -Lawrence Clark Powell, Southwest Classics, 1974, pp. 10-11.  

Maida Tilchen is the author of the newly-released novel LAND BEYOND MAPS.

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