The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer by John Joseph Mathews (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer by John Joseph Mathews Alexander Steele John Joseph Mathews, The Short Stories of John Joseph Mathews, an Osage Writer, edited and with an introduction by Susan Kalter. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 287 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30; e-book, $30. Composed of seventeen unpublished short stories written mostly between 1945 and 1951, this remarkable collection that Susan Kalter has brought together reveals a fascinating and unexpected side of John Joseph Mathews. Most readers familiar with Mathews know him for his meticulous nonfiction in classic works like Talking to the Moon (1945) and The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961). His literary reputation has rested until now on his only novel, Sundown (1934), a complex “mixed-blood” bildungsroman that has received renewed critical attention in recent years, particularly within Native, multiethnic, and modernist studies. Whereas Sundown grounds itself firmly in the land of Osage County, most of the stories here, as Kalter comments, are perhaps best thought of as “travel stories” (47), albeit of considerable varieties. As a kind of variation on travel stories, there’s rapid movement within and across Mathews’s short fiction. The collection presents a kaleidoscope of genres, locales, dialects, characters, and action that will no doubt be of interest to researchers and readers of Native American literature, as well as those of twentieth-century American fiction more broadly. The Short Stories certainly “reveal a dimension of [Mathews’s] writing and thinking as yet unrecognized” (xii). In fact, Mathews’s overall range may be the most surprising and [End Page 172] rewarding component of Kalter’s rich recovery. Readers may smirk at mock Westerns like “Too Small for a Horse” and then dive into irony drenched political satires like “The Liberal View,” a story in which Mathews clearly has a good time taking aim at oxymoronic bourgeois (American) “Marxists” blind to their own socioeconomic privilege. Only a short time later Mathews shape-shifts once again and begins experimenting with speculative (or what Kalter calls “futuristic”) fiction in baffling stories like “Natural Science,” a kind of “World War Three antithriller” (191) involving a mysterious “Sun-Bomb” that apparently supplants its atomic predecessor in the hands of the off-kilter scientist turned “Supreme Commander” of “Westeurope,” General Joe Higgins (226). Kalter’s editorial work is also deft and illuminating. Her introduction and footnotes strike an enviable balance in tone that speaks equally to scholars and general readers. But what synthesizes this sometimes unwieldy set of stories are Kalter’s four section introductions for the “Westerns,” “Travel Stories,” “Stories from Indian Country,” and “Stories of World War II and the Cold War.” Taken together, her editorial efforts weave historical, contextual, archival, and biographical information with subtle gestures toward literary analysis. Her quiet guidance is apparent in the footnotes for the masterful, but dense, “Moccasin Prints,” a showstopper and the collection’s best story (with the runner-up perhaps being “Only a Blonde,” with its wry humor, uncanny atmosphere, and tense parallels with some of Paul Bowles’s expatriate stories of misadventure and danger, whether real or imagined). Kalter’s notes emphasize, for example, not just that the original title for “Moccasin Prints” was “Like Leaves of Sumac” but also gloss for readers that with such keen and potent imagery Mathews implies that “the ground was covered with blood and/or redcoats,” as sumac turns crimson in the autumn (268n7). Such observations are subtly and appropriately imparted throughout. Kalter’s editorializing enhances and enriches the reading experience without distraction. What scholars of western American literature may find most surprising about these “stories for a nuclear age” is that Mathews focuses “on stories reflecting his European heritage and specifically reflecting upon and critiquing the bourgeois aspects of what he called Amer-European Life” (185, xvi). Kalter rightfully argues [End Page 173] that such cultural critique, aimed especially at white middle-class Americans, in many ways holds these stories together, irrespective of thematic style or genre play, no matter how unexpected or bizarre. By the same token, the extent to which Mathews seems determined in these stories not to focalize from an explicitly Osage perspective may offer some...