Skip to main contentPerhaps the best way to gauge the historic diversity in Oregon literature is to consider the first two titles published by the new Powell's Press, which take the reader from the sylvan environs of Silverton, Ore., to the bloody Russian Revolution.
In a joint venture with the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, Powell's Press has begun to offer long out-of-print regional titles on a print-on-demand basis. Its inaugural books, Homer Davenport's The Country Boy and Louise Bryant's Six Red Months in Russia, show the importance of this enterprise in bringing these forgotten gems back to the shelf.
At the turn of the last century, Homer Davenport was one of the most famous political cartoonists in America. As a young man he fell in with William Randolph Hearst, who made Davenport a household name first through Hearst's San Francisco Examiner and then through New York's The Evening Journal. He became a great friend to Teddy Roosevelt, introduced Arabian horses into the States, and then died suddenly of pneumonia while out sketching survivors from the Titanic. Yet however adventurous Davenport's life was, he was always nostalgic for his childhood haunts around Silverton.
A devotee of the famed illustrator Thomas Nast, Davenport's mother decided that her child would be a great cartoonist even before he was born. Through her care, Davenport was sketching by 3. At her death, she begged her husband to carry on her work. The senior Davenport decided young Homer needed a more urban setting and moved house to Silverton so that his son might find inspiration "in the Latin Quarter of that village."
His father's injunction to "study characters" made Homer not only a fine caricaturist, but also a keen memorialist. Published in 1910, The Country Boy is filled with character. Besides his astonishing parents, there are stout piano teachers, sharp drummers and rustic eccentrics, along with brushes with Vaudevillians. Davenport's tale of his pet goose, reprinted in Alfred Powers' History of Oregon Literature, is a powerful coming-of-age story to rival The Yearling. His cracker-barrel style of storytelling is sometimes rambling but always charming.
Louise Bryant's Six Red Months in Russia is also crack storytelling, though Bryant's subject is far more epic and serious: the Bolshevik Revolution. Bryant's book, as her excellent biographer Mary Dearborn writes in the new preface, is the perfect companion to Ten Days That Shook the World, by Bryant's companion John Reed. Both books were written in tandem, though it's Reed's that has long survived in print.
Bryant is there at the fall of the Winter Palace and in various battles between the Red Guard and the anti-Bolsheviks. She chats with Lenin and Trotsky, dodges bullets from snipers, translates an allegory on free speech by We's Evgenii Zamiatin (which first appeared in this book) and takes W. Somerset Maugham on a tour of a thieves' market. She reports on action that she's in the thick of, and it's exciting reading.
Yet specters haunt the margins of Bryant's partisan account of the revolution, which the periodically helpful glossary (an addendum to the first printing) reveals. Too many biographical entries for Bryant's heroes end with "purged" or with the ominously simple "died 1937," "1939" or "1941," Stalin's busiest years. Bryant's almost buoyant sketch of Maria Spiridonova makes for sad reading if one has read Emma Goldman's later meeting with the revolutionary leader in My Disillusionment in Russia. Spiridonova will "die" in 1941.
As a piece of historical reportage, Bryant's account is important, and Powell's Press is to be commended for reviving voices that had been sadly purged from publishing.
Written and illustrated by Homer Davenport
Introduction by Walt Curtis
(Powell's Press, 125 pages, $10)
by Louise Bryant
Introduction by Mary Dearborn
(Powell's Press, 247 pages, $12)
Other titles of interest:
The Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant
by Mary Dearborn
(Replica Books, 384 pages, $32.95)
My Quest for the Arab Horse
by Homer Davenport
(Out of print)
WWeek 2015