2023-08-08 12:49:43
Not without reason Mary Hunter Austin’s favorite: the coyote.
Photo: Unsplash/Jonathan Pie
Mary Hunter Austin comes to California at the end of the 19th century, where her brother runs a small farm in the Owens Valley. She just finished college. She falls in love with this inhospitable landscape “between the high Sierras south of Yosemite” which “extends southeast across a vast assemblage of broken mountain ranges beyond Death Valley and immeasurably into the Mojave Desert.” Austin is affected by flora and fauna, by the lonely coots, the gold prospectors, shepherds, the last indigenous people who live here in and with nature – less by the narrow-minded small town dwellers, for whom everything they don’t know and understand is the good ones morals violated.
She is a sister in the spirit of Thoreau, who would rather tuck into the bushes than chatting away her time with a tea party and who, like the transcendentalists around Thoreau’s teacher Ralph Waldo Emerson, hopes to sense the divine power flow in the heightened experience of nature. In special moments she even succeeds. She wanted to be a writer from an early age and at 24 she published her first story in Overland Monthly, the most respected literary magazine in the West. She works as a teacher, writes regularly for newspapers and magazines, and gives lectures. A good decade later her first book The Land of Little Rain (1903) appears, which Alexander Pechmann has now discovered for the German readership, excellently translated and postscripted.
“You can’t get to the heart and soul of the country in a month’s vacation. You have to spend summer and winter with the country and wait for its special events«, she writes on the first pages of »Where little rain falls«. This collection of essays is the first result of her search for these “events” that had been going on for at least a decade and a half. What is special is often enough the ordinary, which you just have to observe long enough.
You can lose yourself in page-long word paintings of the vegetation that pair amazing botanical knowledge with lyrical language potency. This sometimes reads somewhat statically, it sometimes takes effort not to skip over their additive descriptive fury despite its undoubted quality. But she seems to notice this herself and dynamizes her landscape portraits by personifying nature and making rivers, trees and even clouds into acting subjects.
“When a storm isn’t brewing, one can be content to watch the cloud streams and the chambers of the sky. From Kearsarge, for example, one looks out over the Inyo Mountains and sees soft pink masses of cloud dormant on the horizontal desert air; to the south, a belated white troop rushes to a gathering of their kind at the back of the Oppapago; sniffing at the foot of the Waban, a downy mist creeps south. On the clean, smooth paths in the center of the sky and in the highest strata of air small herds drift without shepherds and wander in the opposite direction.”
When it comes to the animal world, too, she tends to anthropomorphize, which one can smile at, but the reading gains immensely as a result. Last but not least, her darling, the coyote, much scolded by her contemporaries, acts like an individual with her.
“Both the red fox and the coyote roam during the night hours, and both kill for the sheer lust of carnage. The fox isn’t particularly talkative, but the coyote wanders chattering through the darkness, gossiping, warning, and scolding twenty tones at a time. They walk on quiet soles, the splay-footed creatures, so that the lonely camper can sometimes see their eyes all around in the dark and hear their soft breathing when no leaf stirs and no twig breaks under their paws. The coyote is our true lord in the Tablelands, so he wants to know if you have a long black reed that could sink teeth into your guts a thousand yards away, for he is bold and inquisitive.”
Even more impressive, however, are her completely unprejudiced, very warm-hearted, humanistic portraits of the people she meets in this barren landscape. They have adapted to their environment and, for Austin, are an integral part of nature. The gold prospector for example. He ‘had gotten to the point where bad weather didn’t exist for him, and one place was as good for him as any other, so long as he could be in the great outdoors. I don’t know how long it takes to get so steeped in the elements that you ignore them.”
But even such a primitive man has so much civilization implanted in his childhood and youth that he has no other aim than to get rich, and then go to London and lead the life of a prosperous citizen. In fact, he succeeds, and Austin misses the chance encounters with him for years until one day he finally sits by the fire again with his coffee pot and frying pan. »No one is stronger than his destiny.«
For them, however, the true natural people are the »Indians«. Austin approaches them respectfully and without conceit and tries to learn from them. In fact, in later years she is considered a sought-after specialist for the indigenous culture of California. There is, for example, Winnenapʼ, the wise medicine man and great storyteller of the Paiute, who is eventually killed by his own people and who humbly accepts his fate because he knows the tribal rules. »If three patients die during his treatments, he has to give up his life and his office.«
Or Seyavi, the basket weaver, who learned early on “that it’s much easier to get along without a man than you would initially think”. Austin pays the most attention to her, also because she can tell her a lot about the legends and fairy tales of her tribe. A year after her debut, Austin published a book containing these stories, The Basket Woman. A Book of Fanciful Tales for Children. Above all, however, she is impressed by the naturalness with which Seyavi leads an independent life as a partner.
She becomes a role model. After the success of her debut, Austin separates from her husband, a bankrupt who also hinders her writing ambitions, and from then on lives as an independent woman in different constellations – in a commune near Monterey, in Los Angeles and also in Greenwich Village. She frequents the libertine, bohemian circles, meeting Sinclair Lewis, Ambrose Bierce and Jack London. Later she goes to Europe, gets involved in the suffragette movement, lectures on free love, gets friendly support from the great social utopian HG Wells and finally advances to become one of the most important voices of the early women’s movement. Her commitment to social reform is reflected in various writings, of which her feminist novel »A Woman of Genius« gets the most attention. Her diverse oeuvre, which includes plays as well as novels, travelogues, short stories and essays, is still awaiting discovery in Germany.
At least a start has been made with Austin’s first and most successful book to date. In »Where little rain falls« her different interests, to which she will devote her own books, blossom in a colorful confusion like on a wild meadow. Her respect for Native American folk art and culture bears the most fruit later, eventually leading her to become a dedicated advocate of her political cause. But Austin’s debut is already an impressive plea for her emancipation and so impressive because she does not use reasoning, but simply describes the people – and distinguishes herself as an incorruptible chronicler.
Mary Hunter Austin: Where Little Rain Falls. a.d. american English and with an afterword by Alexander Pechman. Young and young, 224 p., born, 24 €.
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