Journal of the Southwest

A Dedication to the Memory of Harvey Fergusson, 1890-1971Author(s): Cecil RobinsonSource: Arizona and the West, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter, 1973), pp. 311-314Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40168208 .

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A DEDICATION

TO THE MEMORY OF

HARVEY FERGUSSON

1890-1971

by CECIL ROBINSON

University of Arizona

When he died in Berkeley, California in 1971, Harvey Fergusson was regarded as the best of the native Southwestern novelists. For nearly fifty years, he had drawn repeatedly upon the experiences and impressions of his youth in New Mexico for inspiration and materials to create vivid stories that reflected the para- doxes of its history. At the time of his death, only one of his fifteen books - Rio Grande (reissued in 1967) - was in print, yet Fergusson's stature as a major inter-

preter of the Southwest had been firmly established.

Fergusson was born on January 28, 1890, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the son of Harvey Butler and Clara May Huning Fergusson. He was the second of four children (the others were brother Francis and sisters Erna and Lina) all of whom grew up to be writers. The family lived in a world of comfort and prestige. The maternal grandfather, Franz Huning, was a German immigrant who had become a wealthy merchant in New Mexico; Harvey's father, a Southerner of Scotch-Irish stock, enjoyed a flourishing law practice, and would serve as terri- torial delegate and the state's first congressman. Material security, however, did not bring inner peace for Harvey. He was a shy boy who later spoke of the "glass wall of inhibition" that stood between him and the world at large. His childhood was not unhappy, however. The wide river country and the mountains of New Mexico became his domain, and by the time he was fourteen years old, he was

ranging the wilderness for days on horseback. Because of this wanderlust his father sent him at the age of sixteen to the

New Mexico Military Institute at Roswell, where he spent a year that seemed like

[3»]

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3 1 2 ARIZONA and the WEST

a "term in a penitentiary." He briefly attended the University of New Mexico, then was enrolled in Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where his father had matriculated when Robert E. Lee was president. There Harvey studied

English in a desultory way - and learned to drink, which loosened the shackles of his inhibitions.

Receiving a B.A. in 191 1, Fergusson returned to New Mexico and worked for the Forest Service as a timber cruiser and map maker. Covering all parts of the state, he stored impressions which he would use later in his fiction. In an effort to please the elder Fergusson, with whom he had strong tempera- mental differences, Harvey joined his father in Washington and entered law school. Within two weeks, however, he sold his books and went to work for the

Washington Herald. He changed jobs rapidly, putting in stints as a reporter in Savannah, Richmond and Chicago. In 19 14 he returned to Washington as an editor for the Haskins Newspaper Syndicate which not only gave him an oppor- tunity to travel, including trips to Latin America, but also enabled him to begin a literary career. In 191 5 Fergusson began publishing articles - nonfiction and fiction - in Eastern magazines. One of the first pieces was "Beavers That Work for the Nation," which appeared in Technical World in August. A decade later most of his writing was appearing in the American Mercury magazine. Several of his books were serialized in this publication.

Although Fergusson was away from his native New Mexico, the images of his youth fired his imagination, and he began working on a novel. At its comple- tion, literary critic H. L. Mencken read the manuscript, applauded its freshness and authenticity, and personally forwarded it to the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Knopf published the book, The Blood of the Conquerors, in 1921. The novel portrayed the decline of a proud Spanish family in a small South- western town. Fergusson also drew upon his newspaper experiences for several novels, one of which, Women and Wives (1924), was a parable of his marriage to a Virginia society woman with the unlikely name of Polly Pretty. This marri- age, for reasons developed in the novel, ended in divorce.

In 1923 Fergusson moved to New York to work as a free-lance writer. Stand- ing five feet, ten inches tall, he was rangy and muscular with a boney, Scotch face. Although intense and quiet, he came to enjoy life in the metropolis where, in large gatherings, he could "browse" socially. But the tug of his native region was strong, and he began making regular summer trips to New Mexico. Avoiding Albuquerque and environs, he escaped into the mountains to hunt and fish. After his novel, Hot Saturday (1926), produced something of an explosion, Fergusson was even less inclined to socialize with old acquaintances. The setting for the story was Albuquerque, and his character portraits of local people were drawn very closely. The following year Harvey published Wolf Song, a novel dealing with the mountain men of New Mexico. With this work, he found his metier. Thereafter his best novels were set in New Mexico when Mexican and Anglo- American struggled for dominance. His books were not historical novels in the Walter Scott tradition, but were tough-minded, well-paced stories drawn from the "living museum" of Fergusson's West.

In 1927 he tried marriage again, this time to a talented newspaper woman,

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DEDICATION 313

Rebecca McCann. The next year, while they were driving from Salt Lake City to Albuquerque in a snow storm, Rebecca caught a cold which developed into fatal pneumonia. For the rest of his life, Fcrgusson carried a sense of guilt for

having exposed his city bred wife to the rigors of Western weather. Pressed by financial problems, Fcrgusson moved to Hollywood in 1932 to

write for the film studios. By this time he had already begun working in the area of nonfiction. Rio Grande, a splendid cultural history of New Mexico, appeared in 1933. Prudently investing the five hundred dollars a week he received inter-

mittently in Hollywood, Fergusson attained financial freedom, and in 1937 settled in Berkeley, attracted by the University of California Library. Here he spent the rest of his life, characteristically avoiding the company of faculty and students. When not writing, he would head for the mountains or for wilderness streams.

Though he never remarried, he developed a strong friendship with a younger woman, Quail Hawkins, whose devotion to him relieved the loneliness of later

years. Freedom from outside pressures allowed him to give further vent to his

philosophical temper, and in 1944 he published a remarkably objective auto-

biography, Home in the West.

During the late 1950s Fergusson published his last and best novels. Particu-

larly outstanding was his Grant of Kingdom (1950). The idea for this novel went back to his impressions of the ruins of the Maxwell mansion during his Forest Service days. Lucien Maxwell had obtained a sprawling two-million acre domain in northeastern New Mexico as a dowry through his marriage to Luz Beaubien, whose family received the grant from the King of Spain. Here Maxwell built an enormous house with thirty-eight rooms, including a dining room that could seat one hundred guests. Fergusson's imagination was stirred, and fictional elements coalesced with historical fact to create a novel of great narrative power. Four years later, he again drew upon the history of New Mexico to write The Conquest of Don Pedro. Using as his model the Southwestern trader Charles Ilfeld, he vividly delineated, in the character of Leo Mendes, a portrait of the Jew as Western

pioneer. Though Fergusson repeatedly used historical materials, his attitude toward

the past was not nostalgic. He condemned clinging to an older way of life when such a way had clearly ceased to be functional. While regarding retreat into wilderness as a recharging experience, he also believed that there must always be a return to, and a coming to grips with, the present. Yet many of his literary themes were developed from his own family experience. He admired the adapta- tion that his immigrant grandfather made to the West, but at the same time was critical of his father's adherence to the values of the Southern gentleman and the bitter memories of the lost cause. Franz Huning became Harvey Fergusson's spiritual father, and in his novels Fergusson made effective use of the Huning memoirs, now lodged in the library of the University of New Mexico.

During his last seven years Fergusson lived in declining health, and on December 27, 1 971, in his eighty-first year, he died of a heart attack. By his own

request, Walt Whitman's "The Last Invocation" was read at the funeral. This was followed by a reading of Fergusson's only published poem, "Timberline." He was buried in the East Bay area of Oakland-Berkeley.

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3 1 4 ARIZONA and the WEST

Fergusson's stories were not widely popular in his day, possibly because he

departed abruptly from the revered formula. In a genre where the lone hero

traditionally kissed only his horse, he dared to treat the theme of sexuality realisti-

cally and in some detail. In recent years, however, there has been a revival of interest in Harvey Fergusson's works, and today he stands as a major interpreter of the cultural history of the land he loved - the Southwest.

A SELECTED LIST OF THE WORKS OF

Harvey Fergusson RELATING TO THE SOUTHWEST

For a bibliography of Fergusson's works, see Saul Cohen, "Harvey Fergusson: A Checklist," a leaflet (1965) in the library of the University of California, Los Angeles.

*"Beavers That Work for the Nation," Technical World Magazine, XXIII (August 1915), 814-18.

* "Domesticating the Mink," Country Life, XXIX (November 1915), 100-102.

The Blood of the Conquerors. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. 265 pp. *

"Billy the Kid," American Mercury, V (June 1925), 224-31.

Hot Saturday. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. 261 pp.

Wolf Song. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927. 206 pp.

*(ed.) The Last Rustler. The Autobiography of Lee Sage. Boston: Little, Brown and Com- pany, 1930.303 pp.

*"Cult of the Indian," Scribner's, LXXXVIII (August 1930), 129-33.

""Exploring the Southwest in Your Motor," Travel, LVII (October 1931), 26-28.

*Rio Grande. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933. 296 pp.

The Life of Riley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937. 328 pp.

*Home in the West: An Inquiry into My Origins. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1945. 247 pp.

Grant of Kingdom. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1950. 31 1 pp.

The Conquest of Don Pedro. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1954. 250 pp.

*Nonfiction

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