Tending the Garden
Essays on Mormon Literature

edited by
Eugene England &
Lavina Fielding Anderson

Signature Books, Salt Lake City, 1996.

Table of Contents:

1. Mormon Storytellers Dale Morgan

2. On Words and the Word of God:
The Delusions of a Mormon Literature Karle Keller

3. Mormondom's Lost Generation:
The Novelists of the 1940's Edward A. Geary

4. Toward A More Perfect Order Within:
Being the Confessions of an Unregenerate But Not Unrepentant
Mistruster of Mormon Literature Marden J. Clark

5. To Tell and Hear Stories:
Let the Stranger Say Bruce W. Jorgensen

6. Just the Fiction, Ma'am Tory C. Anderson

Part 2. Criticism of Major Generes and Works

7. Desirable Fruit:
Book of Mormon Imagery Richard Dilworth Rust

8. Literary Form and Historical Understanding:
Joseph Smith's First Vision Neal E. Lambert and Richard H. Cracroft

9. The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt:
Some Literary, Historical, and Critical Reflections R. A. Christmas

10. The Didactic Heresy as as Orthodox Tool:
B. H. Roberts as Writer of Home Literature Richard H. Cracroft

11. Juanita Brooks:
The Mormon Historian as Tragedian Levi S. Peterson

12. I, Eye, Aye:
A Personal Essay on Personal Essays Mary Lythgoe Bradford

13. Beyond "Jack Fiction":
Recent Achievement in the Mormon Novel Eugene England

14. Mormon Foklore:
Cut from the Marrow of Everyday Experience Wiliam A Wilson

15. From Walden Pond to the Great Salt Lake:
Econigraphy and Edgendered Species Acts in Walden and Refuge
Cecilia Konchar Farr and Phillip A Snyder

cover

Preface:
Lavina Fielding Anderson

This First Volume of Critical Essays on Mormon Literature takes its place among earlier anthologies with such agricultural titles as Greenlug Wheat and Harvest. The metaphor of the rifle is deliberate. While I know no one who believes that creative literature springs up spontaneously in the footsteps of the muse, still, much of the labor of creative writing is invisible, while criticism looks like work. It is full of lists and footnotes. It is organized and linear. In short, it is a labor-intensive crop that has to be cultivated purposefully, and it plays a secondary, though vital nurturing role in preparing and maintaining the garden of primary, creative literature.

The project originated from a dual source. When Signature Books conceived an essay series in 1988, I was invited to propose and help edit a selection of literary criticism. The board of directors, of which I was and am a member, reviewed the proposal and suggested essays. They were polite but unenthusiastic: Were there really enough important critical essays available? We could all remember when there was barely an audience for Mormon creative works. Was it not slightly presumptuous to think that literary criticism could command a significant market?

Still, I continued to add to the tentative table of contents. Then Eugene England, who has taught Mormon literature at Brigham Young University since 1977 (a course in Mormon literary criticism is yet to be approved), independently proposed the idea of such an anthology to Signature in 1990. And finally Bill Mulder, Mormonism's grand doyen of letters, read his "Telling It Slant: Aiming for Truth in Contemporary Mormon Literature" to a gathering of the [p.vii] Association for Mormon Letters on 20 September 1991, in which he called for just such a compilation.¹

The first question, whether there were enough significant essays to compile, was easily answered. Even pared to the most essential, the compilation we first submitted would have run over 500 pages, and we had to pare again. We particularly regret the condensing of Gene England's detailed and helpful critical bibliography of "Mormon Literature: Progress and Prospects," from the 1930s on, which appears in full with photographs with the major Mormon writers in Mormon Americana, Vol. 2, edited by David J. Whittaker (Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 1995); and the omissions of Richard H. Cracroft's "Attuning the Authentic Mormon Voice: Stemming the Sophie Tide in LDS Literature," Sunstone 16 (Oct. 1992): 51-57 and Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1994, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: AML, 1994), 1:34-43; Samuel W. Taylor's spritely and acerbic analysis of the weaknesses of home literature, "Little Did She Realize: Writing for the Mormon Market," first published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Autumn 1969): 33-39; the critical essays of Orson Scott Card, A Storyteller in Zion: Essays and Speeches (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1993); a number of the seminal essays written for or collected in Steven P. Sondrup, ed., Arts and Inspiration: Mormon Perspectives (Provo, UT: BYU Press, 1980); and the serious ethical work in criticism of Wayne C. Booth, particularly some of the concepts in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), "Art and the Church: Or, 'The Truths of Smoother,"' Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13 (Winter 1980): 9-25, and "Why Do Mormon Writers Find It So Hard to Climb Parnassus?" Visiting Author Lecture, AML Annual (1996): 8-19. B. W. Jorgensen's "To Tell and Hear Stories: Let the Stranger Say" is also condensed from the full version, published in the AML Annual I994 (Salt Lake City: AML, 1994), 1:19-33, and Sunstone 16 (Oct. 1992): 25-35. Indispensable resources in building a culture for the critical appraisal of Mormon literature are the readings, annual meetings, and proceedings of the Association for Mormon Letters, the critical introductions in the major anthologies cited in England's introduction to this volume, and the entries on literary topics in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992).

We also call attention to three lacks that we trust will be remedied [p.ix] in the future. Our volume includes no critical essay about Mormon hymn texts as poetry, despite the significant place music holds in Mormon culture. Very little critical work has examined either texts or hymnody except for Jean Anne Waterstradt's "In Hims of Praise: The Songs of Zion," Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1994 (Salt Lake City: AML, 1994), 1:190-95; Karen Lynn's "Measuring the Achievement of the New LDS Hymnal," Mormon Letters Annual, 1984 (Salt Lake City: AML, 1985), 124-28; and Michael Hicks's AML award-winning Mormonism and Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

Second, although numerous Mormon poets have received individual attention in reviews and at sessions of the Association for Mormon Letters and although book reviews of anthologies of Mormon poetry have noted trends, characteristics, and historical periods in Mormon poetry, the joyous labor of appraising past achievements in Mormon poetry has barely begun. Poems of the "home literature" movement in particular have yet to be evaluated and placed in context with the more technically sophisticated but frequently more ambiguous works of professionally trained poets. Ground-breaking work on Mormonism's most famous poet is Maureen Ursenbach Beecher's "Inadvertent Disclosure: Autobiography in the Poetry' of Eliza R. Snow," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (Spring 1990): 94-107, and reprinted in her Eliza and Her Sisters (Salt Lake City: Aspen Books, 1991), 57-72. The death in the summer of 1994 of Clinton F. Larson, long one of Mormonism's most challenging and prolific poets, signals the need for a serious reappraisal of his work. Mormon poets who concentrate on Mormon themes have often received critical short shrift as "provincial"; surely Mormonism as a culture is sufficiently secure to appraise these works now without superciliousness. Meanwhile a concerted effort needs to be made to examine the work of a growing number of young Mormon poets who publish nationally on themes not explicitly Mormon.

The third area is that of Mormon theater. Considering the hearty and heady dramatic tradition that flourished in pioneer Utah's isolated communities, the current dearth of Mormon plays is lamentable. The Correlation-driven decision in the late 1960s and early 1970s to eliminate dramatic departments from Mutual Improvement Associations and to limit local drama to an occasional stake dramatic [p.x] "activity" and an annual roadshow—if that—seems to have been part of a vicious spiral downward. With fewer people acting and attending plays, fewer aspiring playwrights wrote. With fewer original plays, there were fewer productions. With wards and stakes forbidden from sponsoring the touring commercial works of private playwrights, Mormon dramatists have been cut off from their natural audiences. BYU's Department of Theatre and Film usually produces one or more Mormon plays per season, and Sunstone has consistently published a play every year or so; but relatively few plays have been able to achieve sufficient financial success to reward their makers. Perhaps the founding of Tuacahn, a center of the performing arts near St. George, Utah, in 1995 will help receive Mormon drama.

Even given this present dearth of creative work, critical literature on Mormon drama is shockingly scarce. Except for reviews of current plays in local newspapers, virtually nothing is available except for Orson Scott Card's review, written under the pseudonym of Frederick Bliss and P. Q. Gump, "Mormon Shakespears [sic]: A Study of Contemporary Mormon Theatre," Sunstone 1 (Spring 1976): 55-56; Eric Samuelsen's, "Whither Mormon Drama: Look First to the Theater," Annual of the Association for Mormon Letters, 1995: Papers from 1993-94 (Salt Lake City: Association for Mormon Letters, 1995), 13744; Nola D. Smith's "Madwomen in the Mormon Attic: A Feminist Reading of Saturday's Warrior and Reunion, "Association for Mormon Letters Annual, 1994 (Salt Lake City: AML, 1994), 1:13944, and "Polly and Katy: Mormon Feminists Take the Stage," Annual of the Association for Mormon Letters, 1995 (Provo, UT: AML, 1995).

A critical examination of Mormon theater needs to begin, obviously, with a bibliography sufficiently eclectic to welcome those homemade hybrids, roadshows, and the steadily growing number of summer pageants without condescension. At the other end of the spectrum, the production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America demands that the perimeters of bibliography be sufficiently broad to include works by non-Mormons in which Mormonism is a major element.

This preface may appropriately pay tribute to the work of the Association for Mormon Letters, an organization created twenty years ago (1976) to foster literary criticism. An overwhelming majority of papers published here had their first airing in an AML session. [p.xi] Many of the authors have also served as officers of this association. AML has given form, focus, and deadlines to the textual insights that flicker into being during readings or discussions but which may quickly flicker out again without ever finding permanent expression.

This close association between the Association for Mormon Letters and the core of Mormon literary criticism is not without a negative side. Its newsletter and proceedings circulate internationally; conferences and readings have taken place on both coasts and points in between. Still, writers who live and work primarily away from the Wasatch Front and who do not use explicitly Mormon themes or settings sometimes feel little connection to the community AML best represents. These problems will, we hope, also be addressed by new generations of writers and critics; and the creation of AML-LIST, an Internet forum, in the spring of 1995, is already attracting discussants both nationally and internationally.²

The first half of this book provides historically important surveys of Mormon literature and broad critical theories that explore criteria and aesthetics, while the second half focuses on major genres and works, including Mormon scriptures.

For many readers, these pages will be a convenient collection of old friends and familiar voices; but for others, it will be a door into a newly discovered garden. We hope the stay is a pleasant one. Those who love Mormon letters are a diverse and welcoming community. The metaphor of creative works flowering in spontaneous splendor while critics sweat away with hoes, sprinklers, and compost breaks down swiftly in reality. All are creators, all are cultivators—and of each others' spirits as well as each others' works.