FIG TREE JOHN ; An Indian in Fact and Fiction - PETER G BEIDLER

Edwin Corle

Edwin Corle's 1935 novel Fig Tree John has been called one of the finest ever written about an american Indian. Combining anthropological, historical, and literary research, Peter G. Beidler provides as fascinating analysis of Corle's work. He compares the factual Fig Tree John. a Cahuilla Indian from southern California, with the fictional character who is the protagonist in Corel's novel of Apache life. His pioneering study provides new insights into the place of the Indian in American literature.

Edwin Corle was a big, hearty, confident man and a writer when I first met him in 1951. Our meeting was in the Westwood book store on the edge of the UCLA campus. Ed was a graduate of that a Southern California setting and recently been published, and it included Fig Tree John, with an annotation of a high praise for the novel.

And it was natural for Corle to ask me to write a Foreword for a new edition of Fig Tree John to be published by the Ward Ritchie Press, with illustration by Don Perceval.

That led to my wife and me visiting the Corles at their elegant home on the Hope Ranch in Santa Barbara. While Fay and Jean became acquainted in the big house before lunch, Ed and I talked  about book and writing in general and his novel in particular. He had built a separate studio to his own specifications. It housed his working library of upwards of 6,000 volumes. They were shelved around a central desk from which Corle could swivel his chair and size upon the volume he wanted. He and I shared a love for books and an appreciation of their role in research and writing. He was fine working bookman, concerned with facts and accuracy. (I am happy to not in passing that his library was given to UCLA by his widow Jean after Ed's untimely death in 1952)

The letter Corle wrote me, reproduced herein by Peter Beidler, was intended as a summary of our discussion that day in his studio. I was hesitant, as I always am, in contributing a Foreword to another writer's book. I knew that Corle would not like my judgment, then and now, that his first novel  Fig Tree John, was his best novel. What profile writer can accept the implied criticism of his subsequent work? Yet it was true also of Oliver La Frage. He never surpassed Laughing Boy and, he said bitterly, it hung around his neck like the albatross for the rest of a life in which he was to write many more books.

Ed Corle would be pleased with this searching critique in which Peter Beidler pays high tribute to a young writer's first major effort. I see it also as a stimulus to similar studies or other writers' use of Indian subjects: Laughing Boy, for example, and Will Levington Comfort's Apache. Peter Beidler here has demonstrated the necessary combination of skills in literature, anthropology, and history to inspire others as well as himself to like enterprise in this field. So let him go forward. I promise to follow with forewords.

From forword by LAWRENCE CLARK POWELL

The book is published by ' The University of Arisona Press' Tucson, Arizona.