The “Introduction to Mormon Thought” series seems to be yet another type and sign of mature Mormon cultural and intellectual understanding breaking into the mainstream of the tradition. The insularity of any tradition serves as a jumping off point into cultural creation—but insularity alone cannot evaluate itself. The greater self-awareness of the contemporary Restoration movement—expanding even beyond its largest branch—is producing more and better works of art, literature, and scholarship fueled by its peculiar heritage and history and directed through its own local questions to the world at large. The list of artists and thinkers in this vein is long and growing and includes Richard and Claudia Bushman, Joseph Spencer, Adam Miller, Teryl and Fiona Givens, Laura Thatcher Ulrich, Brian Kershisnik, and many others (and this is even while neglecting to mention its brilliant exemplars from the past including Eugene England, B.H. Roberts, Maureen Whipple, Sterling McMurrin, and more). The brilliance of the series (so far, this is only the second book published) is that it gives a manageable dose of Mormon thought, so far directed at specific thinkers in the tradition, especially suited for “injection” into the broader cultural bloodstream.
I was unacquainted with Vardis Fisher until I read this short introduction, though as the author, Michael Austin, emphasizes, he was the first Mormon (or Mormon-influenced) novelist to gain a widespread national readership, and bring Mormon regionalism to the national consciousness.
Vardis Fisher was born in 1895 in Annis, Idaho, and grew up in a family descended from early Saints—his great-grandfather joined the Mormon Church in 1834. His view of the world was deeply influenced by his family’s move from Annis to a small homestead thirty miles away. His childhood was industrious and simple, and as an early reader he devoured the few books in his family’s possession (he later said he read the Bible cover to cover at least two or three times).
From there, Austin summarizes the basic outline of Vardis Fisher’s life before he became a noted novelist—marriage to Leona McMurtrey, a quick stint in the Air Force in 1917, undergraduate education at the University of Utah, and graduate education at the University of Chicago. After a period of drifting away from the Mormon Church, Fisher finalized his break in 1921 when he “wrote a lengthy letter to “Everybody” back in Idaho” and “explained his disgust with the Mormon belief that parents should have many children to give bodies to spirits waiting in the pre-existence”—a direct reference to the Fisher’s differing views on child-bearing and one cause of their marital conflicts. A few years later he informed his family and Leona that he was in love with a fellow graduate student and “on September 8, 1924, Leona McMurtrey Fisher committed suicide by drinking household disinfectant while she and Vardis were arguing.” Austin makes clear that he felt extremely guilty (with good reason) for his wife’s suicide and that this event haunted him for the rest of his life.
Upon graduating with his PhD, he accepted a job teaching English at the University of Utah—but he quickly set about submitting manuscripts (mostly novels) to publishing houses as he had little interest in teaching. His first novel was Toilers of the Hills, “a novel,” Austin writes, “based on the life of Fisher’s uncle, who was among the first to apply dryland farming techniques in Southern Idaho.” This novel is a good example of Fisher’s approach, a semi-autobiographical production set in the landscape that he knew best. After a stint teaching at a university in New York City, Fisher returned to Southern Idaho and focused on writing additional novels, and even worked a stint as the Idaho State Director for the Federal Writers’ Project—an ironic turn of events as the program was part of the New Deal he despised (Fisher was a vocal anti-socialist and libertarian). A few novels later (some critically acclaimed, nearly all ignored by the general public) Fisher wrote perhaps his best received work, an epic novel on the Mormon migration entitled Children of God.
Michael Austin spends an entire chapter on understanding the novel in the context of ‘The Golden Age of Mormon Literature.’ The most fascinating part of the novel is that its first two parts are narrated from the point of view of the major protagonists of the religion—Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. As Austin emphasizes, this strategy presented Fisher with numerous obstacles. He couldn’t sweep fundamental questions (questions that divide adherents and non-adherents of the faith in predictable ways) under the rug when narrating from the point of view of a young Joseph Smith who, to name just one example, either saw, or didn’t see, a vision one spring morning in 1820. Austin writes that “Fisher, with the contrarian spirit that he demonstrated through most of his career, answered these questions in a way that managed to alienate almost everybody—or at least everybody with an extreme position either for or against Mormon truth claims… “Benign delusion” largely sums up Fisher’s attitude toward Smith in Children of God.” In the second section, his view of Brigham Young is fairly apologetic, though he does indulge a few scandalous stories of assassination and intrigue, as he is presented as “the most complex, and ultimately, heroic character” in the novel. The third and final part of the book shifts to the point of view of a family living in a fictionalized United Order community. Entitled “Evening,” the final section dramatizes the disintegration of the United Order and the repudiation of polygamy—the two things that had previously served to set Mormonism apart. Austin notes that “Fisher’s final judgment on Mormonism in the novel is that, after the death of Brigham Young, it ceased to be interesting.”
Michael Austin helpfully contextualizes this pathbreaking novel—which won the prestigious Harper Prize and, “in September of 1939…climbed to #2 on the Times best-seller list—behind only John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath”—as “within three years of [its] publication…eight more Mormon-themed novels were published by national presses” and would eventually “constitute the nucleus of what would eventually become the academic study of Mormon literature.” These novels include Jean Maw Woodman’s Glory Spent, Paul Bailey’s For This My Glory, Maurine Whipple’s Giant Joshua, and Virginia Sorensen’s A Little Lower than the Angels. Mormon, or Mormon-adjacent writers, were finally coming to view the Mormon world as something deserving of attention and serious writing. In some ways, this process parallels that of their Puritan (or Puritan-influenced) spiritual (and sometimes literal) forebears. In the early 19th century Emerson and others encouraged a new and singularly American literary sensibility and style—a challenge accepted (and a style forged) by Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville and others. The pattern here being the creation of a new cultural environment, and then the ensuing lag between the establishment of this new culture and the recognition of its singularity. Vardis Fisher helped persuade American publishing houses of the worthiness of Mormon literature and helped other potential writers of Mormon Regionalism take up their pens and explore the ramifications of this new world.
Displaying yet again the contrarian nature that Austin highlights throughout the book, after publishing Children of God, Fisher—instead of focusing on Western novels—subsequently took to writing the Testament of Man series. As Austin documents in the book’s last chapter, in the series Fisher, “set out to tell nothing less than the religious, psychological, social, and sexual history of humanity.” To put it succinctly, it was a commercial and critical failure—and the critical consensus hasn’t changed much in the past decades (in fact the series is now virtually ignored). Though Austin notes some interesting vestiges of a Mormon worldview (or a “not quite not Mormon worldview”) in the series, the chapter is slightly lacking in focus. To some extent that is not Austin’s fault. The Testament of Man series is both an astonishing feat of (now mostly anachronistic) research and very weird (not to mention a bit solipsistic). Austin writes that “in one of the few recent treatments of the The Testament, written for a centennial celebration of Fisher’s work edited by Joseph Flora and published by the University of Idaho Press, anthropologist Marilyn Trent Grunkmeyer calls the series a “massive exploitation of one of the greatest perduring male fantasies of all time.”” Though Austin thinks there “is much in the novels worth appreciating,” he also quotes Fisher scholar Joseph M. Flora as describing the basic set-up of the series as “[imagining] what Vridar [Vardis Fisher’s semi-autobiographical recurring character] would have done in the times Fisher considered.” As a brief thought exercise that may be fascinating, but as a twelve-volume series that would get old very quickly.
Austin’s final lines are a perfectly concise summary of his introduction to Vardis Fisher— “For nearly all of his adult life, Vardis Fisher was a religious unbeliever; of this there can be little doubt. But Mormonism was the religion he didn’t believe in—and this fact had profound implications for his work as a writer.” In this formulation one can be defined in opposition to something, just as much as one can be defined in an embrace of something. Though this theory seems to reflect reality, it is also one that is not fully embraced by most Latter-day Saints today, at least on a practical level. If we think of orthodox Mormonism as a central circle, we can think of its varieties and heterodoxies as concentric circles around the central hub of orthodoxy. Defining a Mormon artist, intellectual, or writer as such when they belong to this “central circle” is a relatively easy and uncontroversial task. However, as you work your way through the outer rings, and as the gravitational pull of mainstream Mormonism wanes, it often becomes more difficult and controversial to identify persons orbiting on the “fringes” as belonging to Mormonism. Thus, Michael Austin’s ending formulation not only helps to justify defining Vardis Fisher as a Mormon writer, it can also help to justify defining a great many peripheral and cultural Mormons through a decidedly Mormon lens. Such a view is resonant with Joseph Smith’s view of the Restoration, a view as expansive as the reach of the tradition today. By removing credal barriers to the assigning of Mormon labels one can easily accomodate a great many exciting and innovative figures in the pantheon of Mormon creators. But, more importantly, one can also accommodate their challenging perspectives—paradigms that are as complex and nuanced as the culture the Restoration tradition deserves.
There’s also a commonsense necessity to this practice, for if not Mormon what else could this Vardis Fisher poem be?
Time built a pioneer and set him down/ Upon the grayest waste of Idaho./ He clubbed the desert and made it grown/ In broad and undulating fields of brown./ He laid his might upon it, stripped its frown/ Of drought and thistles; till by sweat and glow/ He left the aged and barren hills aglow/ With color—and its flame was his renown./ He poured his great dream into golden wheat;/ Until his gnarled hands had wrought/ A deep and quiet holiness of work.
Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist by Michael Austin
University of Illinois Press, 112 pp., $14.95