Idaho Commission for Libraries

Many western writers write in the shadow of Idaho's most prolific novelist.

By Barbara Howard Meldrum

Idaho’s claim to literary fame seems to rest on the fact that it was the place where Ezra Pound was born and Ernest Hemingway died; yet Vardis Fisher, born in Idaho in 1895, lived most of his life here, wrote many books that drew in various ways from his Idaho heritage, and died here in 1968. At the time of his death he was known and recognized within the state and honored outside Idaho, but today few persons under the age of forty even know who he was, claims his biographer, Tim Woodward. Some fans of the film Jeremiah Johnson recognize that it was based on a novel by Fisher, but few know if the film follows the novel closely or are aware of anything else about Fisher or his nearly forty published books. Although his reputation has faded, it is important, especially for Idahoans to come to terms with Fisher’s work, in which Idaho figures prominently. This essay seeks simply to provide a brief introduction to the man and his work, emphasizing his Idaho connections and the role of place in his writings.

First, it may be helpful to survey briefly the range of his publications, for Fisher was not only prolific but also versatile. His first novel, Toilers of the Hills (1928), tells of Idaho pioneers in the Antelope Hills region of southeastern Idaho where he raised; it is a farm novel that compares well with the best work of Hamlin Garland and Ole Rolvaag. The Antelope country provided the setting and characters for other works: Dark Bridwell (1931), a powerful novel with the force of Greek tragedy, and April (1937), a comedy that is unique in Fisher’s canon for its happy ending. Fisher also wrote an autobiographical tetralogy, rooted in his Idaho experience, and the poetry (the "Antelope People" sonnets). In the late 1930s he served as Idaho director of the Works Progress Administration’s Writers’ Project, collecting materials and publishing three books on Idaho history and lore that served as models for the national series. He also wrote historical novels about the West: Children of God (1939), which won the Harper prize for Fiction, about Mormon migration to Utah; City of Illusion (1941) about the mining camps of Virginia City, Nevada; The Mothers (1943), the story of the ill-fated Donner Party; Pemmican (1956), a fictionalized tale set in the midst of the "Pemmican War" between the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company; Tale of Valor (1958), about the Lewis and Clark Expedition; and Mountain ManGold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West (1968), portrays the mining era through the lens of painstaking historical research, without the exaggerations of romantic mythmakers. (1965), a story of the mountain man era based on legendary history. His last book,

All these works draw upon Fisher-the-scholar’s relentless quest for truth shaped by his own intense experience as a westerner. His autobiographical tetralogy is a probing psychological study, which led him into new directions, culminating in one of the most ambitious projects in American letters. Recognizing that his "lack of knowledge" thwarted the kind of exploration and illumination of his own life that he sought, he began exhaustive research and writing about the history of human consciousness, beginning with the first emergence of recognizably human life in the Stone Age in Darkness and the Deep (1943). His method, as Joseph Flora aptly phrases it, was "to imagine what Vridar [Hunter, of the tetralogy,] would have done in the times Fisher considers." Over a period of nearly twenty years Fisher completed his Testament of man series: twelve novels that moved through human history to a retelling of the tetralogy in the final volume, Orphans of Gethsemane (1960). This was also the period in which he wrote most of his western historical fiction and published collections of his essays and short stories. Following the completion of the Testament series he wrote Suicide or Murder? (1962), a thoroughly researched and probing physiological study of the death of Meriwether Lewis. This brief survey of Fisher’s publications reveals not only how central to his work was his Idaho experience, but also how supra regional was his achievement. Fisher was not a narrow regionalist who exploited local characters, customs, and settings for their own sake. His region expanded beyond its geographic and temporal borders like the ripples from a rock thrown into a pond to include the larger West, America, the world, and beyond one life to encompass the whole of human experience.

What contributed to Fisher’s growth as a writer? The influence of both persons and places helped define what Fisher would become. Children of Mormon pioneers, his parents were exceedingly hardworking and expected the same of their children. Though minimally educated themselves, they valued learning and worked tirelessly to provide the best possible education for their children: both Vardis and his brother completed doctoral degrees. His parents did not express affection, which contributed to Vardis’s introversion and repressed sexuality. Joe Fisher worked from pre-dawn to after-dark, and his typical response to injury was to slap some tobacco on it and keep working. At the age of thirteen Vardis and his younger brother were left in town alone in a deserted house to care for themselves so they could attend school, wearing patched clothing that set them apart from classmates who were only somewhat better dressed than they. Vardis learned self-sufficiency, discipline, avoidance of self-pity, the value of work, and the usefulness of a seemingly self-assured manner in the face of those who threatened him. These lessons proved invaluable in the years ahead.

A second major personal influence came through the experience of his first marriage when his young wife committed suicide. This was the most significant crisis of his life. He blamed himself and nearly followed her in her death, but he found respite in work, completed his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, started a university teaching career (at his alma mater, the University of Utah, and then at the New York University), and began to write fiction. His efforts to come to terms with himself were expressed most directly in his tetralogy and more abstractly in the Testament of Man series; thus, nearly half his publications stem indirectly from the crisis of his wife’s suicide.

Place also shaped Fisher’s development as a writer. Readers are often shocked, even repulsed, by Fisher’s realistic descriptions of violence and death; at times he seems obsessed with these subjects. The origins surely lie within Fisher’s childhood in the Antelope Hills of southeastern Idaho. At the age of six his father moved their family from the small town of Annis to a remote frontier homestead thirty miles from the nearest town or railroad, at least eight miles from the nearest neighbor---except for Charley Wheatons’s family across the river. The natural setting was exceedingly harsh: access by road perilously steep, farmland that had to be laboriously cleared and plowed, wild animals and rattlesnakes, jungles of trees and bushes---and the Snake River, raging, crashing, thundering, frightening in its power and impersonal dominance. Fisher’s direct commentary on this period of his life emphasizes the imprisoning isolation and the fear he felt as he saw "the picture of death everywhere and the blood of death"---a "though paradise" indeed.

Yet it was people as much as place that frightened young Vardis. Before the family’s move from Annis he had several traumatic experiences at the hands of the family members, as recounted in In Tragic Life.  Then Charley Wheaton and especially son Fred, reborn as the Bridwells in Fisher’s fiction, aggravated the boy’s fears. Fred was a relentless and cruel tormentor. In some ways these frontier characters, as Fisher later fictionalized them, personified the nature Fisher came to know during those tumultuous years. One critic, writing of Charley Bridwell, states that "In a way, he is nature, or natural man." To Fisher, nature can be both beautiful and violent, beneficent and harsh, but it is unthinking, whereas human beings are intelligent and can develop that intelligence to improve their lives and those around them, through controlling themselves as well as nature. For a person to remain a "natural man" is to remain at a primitive level that can be self-destructive, conducive to violence. In Fisher’s work we see his struggle with the dual forces of savagery and civilization, probed to greater depths and revealing greater complexities than in the work of his much earlier precursor, James Fenimore Cooper.

Fisher once wrote, "I loathed and hated the Antelope country." Yet his biographer points out the many ways in which he recreated the scene of his boyhood nightmares in the home he built near Hagerman. In his fiction, he wrote about the place once so terrifying to him in an attempt "to come to some kind of terms with it." In his personal life he reconstructed the scene through application of intelligence and hard work, recreating the early log cabin in a more comfortable but similar structure, planting trees like those in the Antelope Hills, harnessing springs and channeling water to utilitarian and aesthetic ends, and transforming the "library" of his childhood home---the Bible, a book of Mormon doctrine, and a few cheap novels---into a collection of thousands, including those circulated through the postal service. Intelligence, developed and applied, could create a paradise.

And yet, that paradise could so easily be lost. On July 9, 1968, Vardis Fisher died of an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. Whether the death was intentional or not is debatable, but it was definitely the result of his own actions. In terms of the themes of his works, this assessment by John Milton seems most cogent: "the action was careless (and therefore non-intelligent) and thus seemed to symbolize his paradoxical condition of rationality and excessiveness… The argument for rationalism may well have been valid, but as it was carried to its extremes it became emotional---perhaps the final irony."

At the time of Fisher’s death he was widely recognized by western authors and scholars as the dean of western writers. For years he had exerted a strong influence, both personally and through his writings. Outside academic and literary circles he was also well known, though not necessarily admired, through his frequent newspaper columns on contemporary issues. The centennial of his birth in 1995 might well be the appropriate time to revive the reputation of Idaho’s writer with the strongest claim to literary fame.

Vardis Fisher’s many volumes merit our careful reading. Granted, his work is uneven. He can be annoyingly didactic, especially in the Testament of Man series. Often his prose is as tedious and dull as some professors’ lectures: he may have abandoned the teaching profession as a young man, but he was ever a scholar, for better or worse. But Fisher could also write lyrical descriptions of the beauties of nature that can move us to a sense of awe for the wonders of the natural world, and often shocking realism can jar us from complacency. He has penned convincing characterizations of complex personalities and provocative explorations of human destiny. Always, the places in which he lived are woven into the fabric of his art.

Barbara Howard Meldrum is a professor of English at the University of Idaho

Notes:

1. Tim Woodward, Tiger on the Road (Caldwell:   Caxton Printers, 1989), p. xi.
2. Woodward discussed some of the reasons in the chapter "Obscurity by Choice" in Tiger on the Road, pp.  256-67.   Fisher was not entirely obscure in 1968:  he was honored as writer in residence at the College of Idaho and was to have been honored in Salt Lake City in mid-July, but died July 9.  In 1966 he was honored as the first recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award by the Western American Literature Association at its first annual conference.
3. Vardis Fisher, Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him and Other Essays (Denver:  Alan Swallow, 1963), p. 67.
4. Joseph M. Flora, Vardis Fisher (New York:  Twayne Publishers, 1965), p. 75.
5. Vardis Fisher, "Hometown Revisited:  The Antelope Hills, Idaho," Tomorrow, 9 (December, 1949):  20.  Essay reprinted with revision by in Fisher, Thomas Wolfe as I Knew Him, pp. 116-127.

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