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Reviews
Writing for Her Life: The Novelist Mildred Walker
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By Ripley Hugo
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University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2003. Photographs, bibliography, index. 314 pages. $29.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Mary Clearman Blew
University of Idaho, Moscow
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| Mildred Walker (1905–1998) published thirteen acclaimed novels between 1934 and 1970. Although largely forgotten until recently, when the University of Nebraska Press reissued all thirteen novels with critical introductions, during her lifetime Walker won an Avery and Jule Hopwood Award and was nominated for a National Book Award and three of her books were Literary Guild selections. Her ninth novel, The Southwest Corner, was adapted for the stage and produced on Broadway with Eva Le Gallienne in the leading role. During much of the time that she was writing these novels, Mildred Walker was leading the conventional social life of a doctor's wife in Great Falls, Montana, and keeping her writing life so secluded that her three children were hardly aware of her work and, as adults, had to hunt down copies of her books in secondhand bookstores. |
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In Writing for Her Life, Walker's daughter, the poet Ripley Hugo, draws upon her mother's journals, letters, and notes, as well as her own memories, to re-create the writing life that was kept hidden for so long. Hugo is at her best when she details the landscapes — Vermont, upper Michigan, Montana — in which her mother set her novels and when she describes the friends and neighbors who became models for her mother's characters. |
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In a typescript among Walker's papers, Hugo found an explanation of how her mother came to write Winter Wheat, arguably her finest novel: "It had to do with the country first, then its people.... These tiny wildflowers growing heedlessly out of the dry dirt of the flats are pure color," Walker notes and then, "I saw a teacherage today, a one-room school house, three miles from any other dwelling.... The teacher is usually a girl fresh out of normal school, eighteen or twenty years of age.... How does she stand the loneliness, fall and winter and spring? What does it do to her?" (pp. 139–40). Hugo wonders and finds no easy answer as to how a woman with Walker's sensitivity to detail, her awareness of the human condition, also could be the woman who had seemed to her daughter to belittle, even to sneer at, anyone whose social standing or standards of taste failed to measure up to hers. |
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This and other questions remain: why Walker's novels were neglected for so long (indeed, she was unable to find a publisher for the last one she wrote) and how well the novels have stood the test of the thirty years since her last adult novel to be published, If a Lion Could Talk, appeared in 1970. Some of her contemporaries may have found her novels overly idealized. "... you're quite capable of looking at and examining closely the ugliness of the world. Yet you hardly ever touch upon the ugliness except in terms of someone's sympathy, which is somehow false and unrealistic," wrote a Viking editor in 1948, and Hugo herself, when she called a character from The Body of a Young Man a verbal bully, was quickly corrected: "All of my characters are noble!" (pp. 224, 39). And Walker's Pulitzer Prize–winning friend and neighbor, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., remarked of If a Lion Could Talk, "I was glad to see that Mildred finally allowed herself the obligatory scene — the first time in all her novels" (p. 167). |
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As to the lasting literary value of her mother's work, Hugo cites several of the contemporary western novelists who have found inspiration in Winter Wheat and other novels. Her purpose, however, is less to provide criticism than to re-create the personal life and the writing life of a remarkable woman, and this she has done with careful scholarship, with a writer's insight, and with compassion. Writing for Her Life is a treasure for anyone seeking a foundation for further study of Walker's novels or an understanding of how, in the mid–twentieth century, she was able to find a balance and a voice. |
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