1 comments about The North American Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame Graham.

1. R.B. Cunninghame Graham's books are the sort of non-fiction that can almost be passed off as fiction. Desolate but fascinating wastelands, journeys over the silent terrain of the Americas, encounters with the bare edges of existence -- all make his works so engaging that I can't think of any writers to compare with him except his friends Joseph Conrad and W.H. Hudson.

   Culled from his thirty or more books, Graham's "North American Sketches" were written between 1880 and 1925. They form the companion volume to his stunning South American and Scottish sketches also edited by John Walker. Here, we travel with the eccentric Scottish gaucho and radical MP for Menteith to the Mexican frontier and the Texas borderlands.

   It is a savage world oscillating between barbarity and loneliness Graham describes for us. Time is punctuated with bloodshed, pointless cruelty, man's inhumanity to man, but also with hope and awe of this still wild land. "A Hegira," perhaps the most powerful sketch, depicts Graham's repeated encounters with six fugitive Mexican Apaches escaping from "the law" as he and his wife head north from Mexico City to their San Antonio ranch. "Silent and stoical the warriors sat," he describes them in the first encounter, before their flight, "not speaking once in a whole day, communicating but by signs; naked except the breech-clout; their eyes apparently opaque, and looking at you without sight, but seeing everything." These figures from two worlds meet up again. "Days followed days as in a ship at sea; the waggons rolling on across the plains" as Graham's party continually spies traces of the Apaches fleeing to their homes in the north, pursued by Mexican Indian hunters who, over a week, track down and kill them all. Nothing during his journey inspires in him so much fascination as those "stoical," silent "indios bravos": "I wondered what they thought, how they looked upon the world."

   There is in these sketches a profound sense of disenchantment with civilization as practised, with "progress" as conceived. The American and Mexican public, he writes, doubtless believe in the problematical "Uncle Sam's Justice [sic]," the "poetical justice" of slaughtering Indians. Nevertheless, Graham does not completely scorn "civilization"; far from it. "We might have taught [the Indians] something, they might have taught us much, but soon they will all be forgotten, and the lying telegrams will speak of 'glorious victories by our troops.' " Some sketches, in fact, exhibit Graham's great admiration for the Anglo and Mexican societies he in other places condemns. "A Chihuahueño" is a wonderful portrait of Miguel Sáenz, a mestizo from Chihuahua. Full of Sáenz's witty proverbs, the sketch shows Graham's fascination with folk sayings. "Trust not a mule nor a wench", Sáenz quips; and "Among soldiers and prostitutes all compliments stand excused."

   Graham's portraits of Mexico and Texas are every bit as fascinating as his awesome South American Sketches. If you like W.H. Hudson and Joseph Conrad, you'll love R.B. Cunninghame Graham.

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