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50th Anniversary
of Robert Laxalt's
Sweet Promised Land |
“‘My father was a sheepherder, and his home was the hills.’” Thus
begins Robert Laxalt’s book Sweet Promised Land, the best known
book by the best known Basque-American author. This year is the
50th
anniversary of this book.
In order
to welcome the Class of 2011 to campus, the University of Nevada, Reno
will be embarking on a special project by asking incoming freshmen to
read this book over the summer to discuss together when the term begins
this Fall.
Summer Scholars program to welcome the Class of 2011
By John Trent (a senior editor
in
University Communications
[Source: Reproduced here in case it is
moved, but the original was posted online at
http://www.unr.edu/features/sweet_promise/ ]
It only
takes Warren Lerude a matter of seconds — a couple of
carefully crafted thoughts — to explain the impact of the
words. They are words that are more than a half-century old.
Yet they are words that still resonate today.
He recites
them from memory.
“‘My father
was a sheepherder, and his home was the hills,’” Lerude
says, his eyes closing for a moment as he remembers the
Nevada writer Robert Laxalt’s opening sentence to the 1957
book, Sweet Promised Land. Lerude, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist and University professor of
journalism, was friends with Laxalt for more than four
decades.
“Those are
radiant, eloquent words," Lerude says. "You would be
hard-pressed to find an opening line to any book over the
past half century written with such economy, or with such
feeling.”
Laxalt,
known as Nevada’s greatest writer, passed away in 2001 at
age 77. But his 17 books — and in particular, Sweet
Promised Land, considered to be his finest work —
continue to live on.
In order to
welcome the Class of 2011 to campus, the University will be
embarking on a special project this fall. The
Class of 2011 Summer
Scholar Project will ask all freshmen to read Sweet
Promised Land over the summer. When they come to
orientation in August, faculty, staff and administrators
will lead study groups to discuss the book, which also is
celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
“This will
be our entering freshmen’s first opportunity to participate
with faculty, staff and administrators in an academic
setting as they begin their college career, and I can’t
think of a better book to serve as the centerpiece,” Nevada
President Milt Glick said. “Our mission to enliven
curiosity, cultivate critical judgment and encourage our
students to make an informed contribution to the development
of American society is well-served through the reading and
discussion of Sweet Promised Land.
Robert Laxalt
“Robert
Laxalt and his family will always have a special place on
our campus. What better way to honor a great writer, and a
great Nevadan, than to have Nevada students reading,
discussing and learning from his greatest work?”
Praise for
Sweet Promised Land has been universal. The New
York Times said the book “deserves universal regard as
a classic of Americana.” The Washington Post
called the book an “example of the art of writing.”
“Bob Laxalt
was Nevada's Ernest Hemingway,” state Archivist Guy Rocha
said. From his early days as a member of the University of
Nevada’s boxing team to his later years, roaming the hills
of the Carson Range behind his home in Washoe Valley while
on horseback, or in the muted 4 a.m. air of the morning,
writing stories on his trusted Royal typewriter, hours
before his family would awake, Laxalt clearly appreciated
the important intersection between the man of the West and
his environment.
As the son
of an immigrant sheepherder from the Pyrenees Mountains in
France, Laxalt also understood what it meant to seek the
sweet promise of a better life in America.
“Bob was a
terrific writer, and his wonderful books spoke not just to
Basques but to all the sons and daughters of immigrants … to
those who love the American West and indeed all readers who
enjoy simple but eloquent writing,” said Paul Laxalt, Robert
Laxalt’s older brother and former United States senator and
governor of Nevada.
Laxalt’s
connections to the campus were strong. He was a 1947
graduate of the University with a degree in English. He
joined Nevada’s faculty in 1954 as director of news and
publications. He founded the University Press in 1961, and
served as a journalism and writing instructor — influencing
an entire generation of the state’s writers — and for the
final two decades of his life was the University’s
writer-in-residence.
His advice
to his students?
“Take your
writing seriously,” Laxalt would tell his students, “but
never take yourself too seriously.”
Sweet
Promised Land is
the story of the journey of the Laxalt family’s father,
Dominique, who came to America from the French Pyrenees at
16 years old to start a new life as a sheepherder in Nevada,
as well as Dominique’s journey home 47 years later to the
village of his birth.
 What
follows is a story of great clarity. It deals with the
strong pull of conflicted emotion, where a father realizes
his home is no longer in the mountains of the Pyrenees but
in the sheep camps of the Sierra. By book’s end, Dominique’s
heart song has truly become American. “I can't go back,” he
says at one point. “It ain't my country anymore. I've lived
too much in America ever to go back.”
Sweet
Promised Land is a
story of assimilation and appreciation for old ways and new
ways, where the story of immigrants is emblematic of a new
America, an America of dreams and stark realities, a
difficult yet promising America.
Fifty years
later, as the Class of 2011 embarks this summer on reading
Laxalt’s carefully crafted words, the story has lost none of
its currency or relevance.
“We were
among the last whose names would tell our blood to know
another language in our homes, to suffer youthful shame
because of that language and refuse to speak it,” Laxalt
writers. “And the irony of it was that our mothers and
fathers were truer Americans than we, because they had
forsaken home and family, and gone into the unknown.”
Robert Laxalt’s
Sweet Promised Land:
A Place to Come To
by David Río Raigadas Universidad del País Vasco
Source: Reproduced here in case
it is moved, but the original appeared as
Basque Studies Program
Newsletter
· Issue 54, 1996 and it was posted online
at
http://basque.unr.edu/09/9.3/9.3.54t/9.3.54.03.laxalt.htm
This article was
originally presented by the author as a paper at the II International
Conference on Regional Literatures (Space and Place: The Geographies of
Literature), Liverpool John Moores University, April 11-13, 1996.
Sweet Promised Land (1957)(1), the first and possibly best-known
of Robert Laxalt’s books, appears to be a personal and rather simple
story about the journey of the author’s father, Dominique, to his Basque
homeland after forty-seven years as an immigrant sheepherder in the
American West. In fact, the book has been often described as an intimate
biography or as an affectionate memoir of a son to his father. Even
Laxalt himself has emphasized to me the personal quality of this story:
“I couldn’t write it as a novel because something was missing. I
thought that the poignancy of this trip moved me very much. It was a
story of discovery for me, too. [..] It was a book written from the
heart.”(2)
The intimate approach taken by Laxalt to portray his father’s life
pervades the whole book and contributes to its success. Readers feel
attracted by Laxalt’s personal and direct statements on his father and
the fact that it is the true story of a man viewed through the eyes of
his son, though some incidents in the book may have been a little
fictionalized. Laxalt himself felt that the work meant an invasion of
his family’s privacy and was particularly apprehensive of his father’s
reaction toward it:
“When I told him about it, I thought I was running a risk of getting
shot, but he accepted it well and even a little detachedly.”(3)
However, Sweet Promised Land must be read as the story not only
of Dominique Laxalt, but of many Basque immigrants in the American West.
The book goes beyond its personal level to embody the experience of
Basque immigrants in the United States and even becomes a metaphor for
American immigration in general.
Laxalt wrote this story about his Basque father at a time in which
Basques were neither well-known nor popular in America. As William A.
Douglass has pointed out,
“...the Basque-Americans were few in number, scattered lightly over
the vastness of the American West and [...] their ethnic success as
sheepherders par excellence identified them closely with the region’s
most denigrated occupation.” (1986:xiii)
Set against this particular background, Sweet Promised Land
constituted a vindication of the role of the immigrant Basque
sheepherder in America, represented by the figure of Dominique Laxalt
and his capacity to endure hardship in the New World. Basques in America
identified themselves with Dominique’s story and felt encouraged to show
their ethnic pride. At the same time, the wider public in the United
States discovered Basques, “they discovered this romantic sheepherder
thing,” in Douglass’ words.(4)
Although the book deals mainly with the way of life of Basque sheepmen
in the American West, their experiences can be regarded as a symbol of
the struggle of American immigrants in general. In fact, Laxalt himself
agrees with this point and he even, in all modesty, refers to his lack
of a deep knowledge about the Basques to support this idea:
“Sweet Promised Land became an immigrant book, not
particularly a Basque book, because I didn’t know so much about the
Basques.”(5)
The truth is that the story works as a classic tale of immigration,
where the immigrant’s experience is portrayed by Laxalt as a process
divided into three basic stages: the immigrant’s decision to abandon his
homeland, his fight for acceptance in the new country and his impossible
return to his native land once the assimilation process is over.
Throughout these different stages Laxalt shows his deeply felt concern
with the modern individual’s need for meaning, for a sense of place and
identity.
Although Sweet Promised Land emphasizes primarily the challenges that
immigrants must face in America and their often fruitless attempts to
recapture the past, it also explores the main reasons that lie behind
their decision to seek their future in America. Thus, immigration is
presented as the only way to escape from poverty for many European
youths, symbolized by Dominique. He, as most immigrants, regretted
leaving his native land, but he was well aware that he had to find an
opportunity in life somewhere else:
“What chance was there if I stayed? There was no money for anything.
I wanted stock and the land to move in, [...] and we didn’t even own the
property where we lived.” (1986: 35)
At first, the journey to America was viewed by people like Dominique
just as a temporary experience, as a way to earn enough money to return
home. However, most of these immigrants soon realized that their way to
success was in America, a raw new land that could provide them with a
chance in life if they were ready to suffer and work hard. Thus, America
represents for Dominique and many other immigrants the land of
opportunity, the place to make their fortune. Nevertheless, Sweet
Promised Land also describes the decline of America as a land of
opportunity since the mid-century, particularly for new groups of
immigrants like the Puerto Ricans, who are shown leaving for Brazil in
search of another America.
Although Laxalt stresses the importance of the economic reasons in the
immigrant’s decision to abandon his native land, he also refers in the
book to the lack of freedom of these people in the Old World. Thus, for
instance, one of the characters in Sweet Promised Land, Michel, escapes
from France in order not to be imprisoned after running away from the
seminary where he was to be ordained. Besides, there are other
references to the restrictions imposed by the French authorities on one
of the main symbols of the Basque culture: the Basque language. This
meant, as Dominique says, “to be made to feel that it was a crime to be
born a Basque.” (1986:76). Being unable to display their ethnic identity
in their own land, these people feel constricted in the Old World and
they set their heart on America, which symbolizes for them not only the
land of opportunity, but also of freedom.
The integration experience of the immigrant in American society is
described by Laxalt as a gradual process in which the immigrant’s desire
for acceptance and his reluctance to lose his ethnic identity often act
as opposing forces. He particularly focuses his attention on the
challenges that the newcomer must face during his first years in
America. Thus, he gives in his book a detailed description of the
hardships endured by his father when he first arrived in Nevada.
Although Dominique’s struggle for integration presents some specific
characteristics related to his condition of Basque sheepherder, the
tests he must undergo during this process illustrate the hard lessons
the ordinary immigrant usually has to learn in the new land.
One of the
first challenges that the immigrant must face in America is the
adaptation to a new setting, often completely different from that of the
Old World. Laxalt particularly emphasizes the deep impact that the
Nevada desert produces on Basque sheepherders like Dominique, who longs
for his green land:
“You would have to see the beauty of the Basque country before you
knew what I meant, but I remember going out into that cruel desert when
I first came, and nights when I cried to sleep in my tent.” (1986:
50)
Thus, on their way to integration, these immigrants will inevitably have
to adjust themselves to a harsh landscape, with a devastating climate,
and gradually they will have to overcome their nostalgia for the old
country, too.
Laxalt also portrays isolation and loneliness as common trials for the
immigrant. Besides, in the case of the Basque sheepherders the challenge
becomes especially arduous. Their loneliness is not simply the result of
their condition of newcomers, their ignorance of the language or the bad
reputation of their job, as was often the case with other immigrants.
The loneliness of the Basques is also produced by the utter solitude in
which they find themselves as sheepherders on the open range. In the
most desolate corners of the American West they long for human company,
for the sound of a human voice, and the monotony of their lonely life
exposes them to potentially severe mental strain. Related to this, it is
worth mentioning that, even though the Basques had a special reputation
among all nationalities in America for their capacity to endure
solitude,(6) Laxalt includes in Sweet Promised Land a Basque
sheepherder, Joanes Ergela (or Crazy John), who loses his mind from
loneliness in the mountains. This example works as a symbol of the
serious nature of the ordeals that the immigrants must undergo in their
new country.
Another major challenge that immigrants must face is economic survival,
a subject that plays an important role in Sweet Promised Land. Laxalt
shows that immigrants, apart from suffering hard working conditions, as
in the case of the Basques mentioned above, usually have a difficult
start making their living in the New World. America may be the land of
opportunity, but working hard is not enough there. The newcomer must be
ready to fight competitors, even resorting to violent means. In
addition, he must resist the temptation of wasting his money, even if
that means staying away from town for a long period. Last but not least,
his economic success often depends on a volatile market. All these
features are perfectly represented in Sweet Promised Land by the
struggle experienced by Dominique and Basque-American sheepherders in
general. Thus, these immigrants are shown in open conflict with the
cattle ranchers for the feed and the water. Besides, the book describes
their obsession with saving and their difficulties in resisiting the
temptation of wasting their money in town. Finally, Laxalt also
introduces the livestock crisis of the 1920s as an example of the
uncertain economic conditions: the sheep market began to go and
immediately most of the Basques lost everything for which they had
worked so hard.
Apart from the different challenges mentioned throughout this paper,
immigrants must sometimes confront hostility, fun-making or contempt
from the host community. In some cases this hostile atmosphere is
closely related to economic reasons, as we saw in the conflict with the
cattlemen described above. However, in many cases this situation is
simply due to the cultural and ethnic distinctiveness of the newcomers.
They do not fit into the standard patterns of the American society
because they are outsiders, who speak a different language and have a
different culture. And at that time in America, as Robert Laxalt
remembers, “it wasn’t fashionable to be ethnic.“(7)
As a result, the Basques, as other groups of immigrants with special
ethnic features, will experience some bullying, fun-making, and
rejection. Laxalt does not wish to exaggerate the importance of these
incidents and consequently he does not include any episodes of violent
discrimination against the Basques in Sweet Promised Land. However, he
shows how two young Basques are made fun of just because of their speech
and clothes and he also refers to the shame suffered by Basque-American
children when they speak Basque in public. These examples illustrate the
intolerance of the American society in the first half of the twentieth
century toward expressions of cultural or ethnic diversity. As William
Douglass has pointed out,
“persons who clung to their native language and who continued to
manifest Old World lifeways were suspect.” (1986:x)
So, these immigrants, in spite of their reluctance to lose their
original identity, will often have to hide their ethnic heritage or to
renounce it in order to become Americans.
All these hardships that immigrants must endure to achieve their
integration in American society are symbolized in Sweet Promised Land by
boxing, a sport whose rules Dominique and other immigrants understand
perfectly well. The comparison between boxing and the immigrant
experience enables Laxalt to enhance the sacrifice of these newcomers in
America:
”Like the men in the ring, they too had stood alone and fought alone,
with their only weapons the hands that God gave them, and the fight was
everything they had ever done and seen and felt.” (1986:65)
 The
struggle for acceptance of the immigrants also extends to their
descendants, for whom boxing works as a useful model, too. As Laxalt
knows from his own experience, second- generation Americans often must
fight harder than the rest, just because they “were born of old- country
people in a new land.” (1986:66)
Although Laxalt’s interest is mainly focused on the obstacles that the
immigrant finds on his way to integration, he also shows how the
newcomer gradually becomes familiar with the host country and its people
and even identifies himself with them. This process has its origin in
the immigrant’s capacity to adapt himself to the new environment without
questioning it:
”...afterward it wasn’t suffering, because it was the way things was,
and a man couldn’t do anything about it, and maybe that’s why he didn’t
spend the time thinking about it, either.” (1986:50)
However, the self-identification of the newcomer with American society
is accelerated by a series of elements that represent the progressive
acceptance of the immigrant by the host community. As an example of
this, Laxalt describes the first time that his father did not feel like
a stranger in America. It was an encounter with a group of bandits,
where he discovered that even the cruel people who inhabited the harsh
land were capable of kindness toward a foreigner like him. This incident
shows him that the new country is not only a place of disillusionment
and brutality, but also of generosity and love.
In Sweet Promised Land, Laxalt also pays close attention to the
last stage of the immigrant experience: the impossible return of the
native. The book shows the return to the homeland as an unrealistic idea
for most immigrants. Certainly, Laxalt provides the reader with the
examples of two Basques (Nazario and the innkeeper) who come back to
their native land after a few years in America and decide to remain in
their country of birth. However, these two cases can be regarded as
exceptions because most of the Basque immigrants in the story fail to
return to their homeland. In addition to this, the main character,
Dominique, who manages to see the Basque Country again, prefers in the
end to go back to America.
Although a lot of immigrants in Sweet Promised Land talk about
going home, their return is nearly always postponed and in most cases it
never takes place. Two opposite reasons may be argued to account for
this situation: the failure of the integration process, and its
overwhelming success. Actually, the book describes a group of Basque
immigrants who are unable to overcome the challenges of the new land,
but have to remain in America because their return has become physically
impossible. They have failed to save money or they have been defeated by
adversity, age, or loneliness. As one of the characters in the story
says,
”...they were lost souls, and they did not even have the good fortune
to be lost in their own hell. They were foreigners when they came and
they will always be foreigners.” (1986:107)
As a contrast to these immigrants, Laxalt focuses his attention on the
figure of his father, who symbolizes the success of the assimilation
process. After forty-seven years in the New World, Dominique is so
integrated in the American society that his early wishes to return to
the Basque Country and settle there have vanished. We can even see how
he hesitates when his family encourages him to go back to the old
country for a short visit to his sisters. His nostalgic trip to the
Basque Country is portrayed by his son, who accompanies him, as a
shocking and ambiguous experience. In particular, Robert Laxalt
emphasizes the deep impact produced on his father by his sudden return
to the old country after forty-seven years of absence. Besides, the
return becomes a catalyst for very opposite feelings. On the one hand,
it is a moment for joy, reward and fulfillment. Dominique has the
opportunity to meet his relatives again and these welcome him as a hero,
as “the youth who had gone out into the world in beggar’s garb and come
back in shining armor.” (1986:122) On the other hand, the return makes
Dominique feel sad and old because he realizes that too much time has
gone on and nothing can be the same again. His parents and some of his
old friends are dead and, in spite of the joyous reunion with his
relatives and the recall of youthful memories, he cannot avoid feeling
like a stranger in his own land.
Robert Laxalt ends his tale of immigration by stressing the
impossibility of returning to the past. To illustrate this point, he
uses the example of his father’s nostalgic trip to the Basque Country.
Actually, Dominique’s final decision to leave again for the United
States shows that once the assimilation process is over and the old land
has become only a dimming memory, the return of the native is nearly
always a chimerical idea. As Dominique says at the end of Sweet Promised
Land,
“I cannot go back. It ain’t my country anymore. I’ve lived too much
in America ever to go back.” (1986:176)
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