Books Unwritten, Stories Untold

Why the best work of 3 scholars may never reach your bookshelf

By JEFF SHARLET

Patricia Nelson Limerick rises before dawn with the uneasy feeling that she has been

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cast in the role of a hanging judge. A committee has asked her to evaluate a book by a scholar hoping for a job and she has found it wanting, a rickety epic propped up with facts, empty of ideas. She's confident of her verdict, but the words she'll choose to express it, she knows, may make all the difference to the man's prospects. That possibility prompts her to think of her own past.

"I have been fortunate in falling into the hands of kind people," she says of her career when we meet for breakfast a few hours later. "I don't have that kindness myself. This is not a nice profession."

A native Californian, a longtime Coloradan, and a historian of the American West, Ms. Limerick thinks and talks like a New Yorker, quick, sharp, effortlessly cruel. With her weathered face and long, straight brown hair parted down the middle, she looks like one of the hardened pioneers she has written about in several books and countless articles.

But unlike her brave pioneers, rushing across the continent to almost certain failure, Ms. Limerick knows that doom is sooner or later always the outcome. Her own books, landmarks in academe, are weirdly alive with the idea of failure as the driving force of history. It's failure, not success, on which she ruminates, and with which she empathizes. So, she decides, she'll grant the scholar a reprieve. She'll tuck away her knowledge of his weaknesses as something to ponder. Something to measure against her own private lost causes.

Driving over this morning, she'd wondered whether the scholar would know what she really thought of his book. That had led her to recall the latest in the string of small, nasty moments that punctuate her life in academe. Each had reminded her of another, until she'd followed the trail back, past her colleagues' jealousy of her first academic best seller, to the envy that once consumed her whenever a friend scored a publishing success. And that in turn had brought her to the subject of the interview toward which she was driving, a book that would have been called Troubled Land, about ghost towns, that she had long since abandoned.

"I am haunted by death," she says over coffee, so matter-of-factly that it sounds like a medical condition. "Death is what I have to think is at work with every historian, since the fundamental exercise of history is to rescue the dead. To battle the silence of death."

The ghosts of the West bother Ms. Limerick daily. Each represents a story that's gone untold. And because she is aware that the only person she can be sure is thus haunted is herself, she feels a personal responsibility to tell all of those stories and a personal failure for not having done so.

In Boulder, where Ms. Limerick teaches at the University of Colorado, we talk not about her most famous book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (W. W. Norton, 1987), nor her most recent, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (Norton, 2000). We talk about the book she never wrote, and what it means to leave undone something in which you believe.

In the humanities, finished books are the milestones of a career. Successful books solve problems and pose new ones, complicate situations even as they clarify them. A good book may end with the satisfaction of a question thoroughly explored. A great book ends with the uncertainty of new questions no one had thought to ask.

Unfinished books, on the other hand, are utopian, concerned with problems awaiting solutions that will change everything. When the book is finished, disciplines will crumble or be transformed. When the book is finished, truth will finally out. When the book is finished. ... But what about the books that are never finished? They are the flip side of successful research, the projects that scholars abandon, or run away from, or simply can't call complete. How do you know when to quit? What if you give up for the wrong reasons? What if the book you never finished would have been the book that let the dead speak, the living remember, and you, the author, at last rest easy after a job well done?

There are many such stories in academe; here are those of Ms. Limerick and two other scholars.

Stephanie Wood, Mexico, 1984

Stephanie Wood and her husband arrived in the tiny village of San Antonio La Isla in the company of a priest. The town didn't have one of its own. Men crossed themselves, women fell to the earth and kissed his hands and asked for blessings. The priest smiled. On this visit, he had brought them something else besides God. This woman is a historian, he told the people, and she has come to learn about your past.

			Photographs by Kyle Green Stephanie Wood's research focused on the history and veracity of Techialoyans, pictorial records of land deeds in Mexico, hundreds of years old.

Why would an American woman want to know such a thing? Was she working for the government? Was she an agent of lawyers who wanted to steal their land?

The priest ignored their doubts and brought the American couple to the home of Don Longinos Silva. Outside his gate, a huge cauldron sitting on stakes over a fire bubbled with pig fat. But inside, Don Silva's home was clean and quiet. The room he settled them in might even have been called dainty -- lace curtains on adobe.

Sit here, Don Silva said. I'll bring you what you're looking for. He went to get a crate from under his bed, and returned with it as if bearing the ark of the covenant. He opened it and held it before the American woman. There for her to see was the town's oldest document, its Techialoyan, a pictorial record of land deeds.

Now Ms. Wood smiled. Here it was, the first such record that scholars had found. Or, rather, here was a photocopy.

The original, she knew, was in a museum in Mexico City, but the reverence with which the town regarded even a copy confirmed what she'd come to San Antonio La Isla to discover, the place of the Techialoyans not just in the history of a nation, but in the hearts of its people and the people who'd come before them.

"Señora Wood," Don Silva said, "I have heard that -- some people say that there are scholars in the north who claim -- "

"Yes?"

" -- Is it true that our documents are false?"

Ms. Wood's smile froze. Then she lied. "No," she said. "They're real."

Richard Gibson, Grenada, 1994

Richard Gibson didn't have a ride the first time he climbed Richmond Hill, so he walked. The road was so steep that it switched back and forth. First he'd be looking out at the blue of the sea below; then at the walls of the prison above, green with 200 years of tropical vegetation.

At the top of the hill stood a decrepit wooden guard box. A sullen man emerged, squinting in the sun. Mr. Gibson wiped the sweat from his brow. I'd like to speak to the warden, he said, catching his breath and trying to smile. The guard grunted, opened the gate, and beckoned Mr. Gibson to follow.

A spy? the warden wondered when the American was shown into his office. But the man said he was a scholar. He wanted to speak with some of the prisoners about their involvement with Grenadian schools in the 80's. Nothing controversial.

The warden nodded. He knew who the American meant. The revolutionaries, jailed since the Americans invaded in 1983. In fact, the warden said, he'd been chief of security under the ruler whom the revolutionaries had toppled. They'd thrown him in this very jail. "Can you imagine," Winston Courtney said, crisp and composed in his neat green uniform, "I was once a prisoner here myself?"

While he was behind bars, troops tried to arrest his son for helping a rebellion. His son resisted. "These revolutionaries," Mr. Courtney said,"they killed him."

Mr. Gibson wanted to leave. Apologize and get out. But Mr. Courtney continued.

When he'd come to work for the prison in 1990, he'd found a hell worse than anything he remembered. Daily, the guards tortured the revolutionaries. Not for information, he told Mr. Gibson, but to hear them scream.

Outside the warden's office, Mr. Gibson noticed, the prison was quiet.

"I put an end to that," said Mr. Courtney. "Vengeance is not civilized." In fact, he added, he did not mind when a Grenadian court commuted the revolutionaries' death sentences to life in 1991; he believed in redemption.

"With so much time on our hands," Mr. Courtney said, "we decided to teach our younger inmates how to read."

"Wait a minute," Mr. Gibson said. He'd almost forgotten about the prisoners he'd come to see. He didn't know how to make sense of this man in front of him. "They threw you in jail. They killed your son."

"No." Mr. Courtney shook his head. "That cannot have a bearing on my duty. You must understand, Mr. Gibson. I am an ethical man."

"An ethical man" -- seven years later Mr. Gibson still wonders what that means. We're sitting in his temporary residence, a millionaire's house in the hills above San Diego. Last fall, he came to San Diego State University, which arranged this home for him, to take up a tenured spot in the education department. These days, the best journals of his field will publish nearly anything he writes, and he writes a great deal. Local schools ask for his advice and invite him to speak to their teachers. He is -- following two decades of bare-knuckled labor organizing before joining academe in the early 1990's -- what his wealthy neighbors in San Diego would consider a respectable man. But an ethical one?

"If I'd been Courtney I would have killed those sons-of-bitches," he says of the ex-revolutionaries. But Mr. Courtney hadn't. As the warden had led him from his office to the prison courtyard to meet the former revolutionaries, Mr. Gibson had started thinking about his research, about what Mr. Courtney might call his "duty." He'd thought about the questions he'd come to ask. They were the questions of a scholar. A doubt had begun to form. What more should he ask, he'd wondered, if he wanted also to be an ethical man?

Stephanie Wood

Ms. Wood is a tall, athletic woman with eyes that at first seem decisive. But when she speaks about the book she fled from six years ago, they flicker down to her desk. She tries to smile, but her lips waver.

In 1989, Ms. Wood left a tenure-track job she'd found straight out of graduate school to follow her husband to the University of Oregon. They thought that since she was something of a rising star in their field, Latin American colonial history, with what might be a landmark book on the way, she'd easily find another job. Instead, the book never appeared, they had two children, and Ms. Wood swallowed her pride and accepted an adjunct position at Oregon.

Talking about a facsimile of a Techialoyan manuscript laid out on the floor of her office, she's as confident as if she were outlining her own family tree. But when she tries to explain why she decided she couldn't publish her book about the pictorial land deeds, and Mexico's Indians, she sounds lost.

She's not so much afraid of being wrong as she is of doing wrong. Her worries stem from her belief that the Techialoyans are "real" only in the sense that they were created by native hands. Other than that, she says, everything about them -- even the land claims they allegedly prove -- is questionable.

The Techialoyans are on the one hand mundane lists of land parcels and local leaders, and on the other, histories of their owners' places in the world. Each is a creation myth in miniature for the community for which it was made. Taken at face value, the Techialoyans -- pictures painted on fig-bark paper with text in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, written in the Roman alphabet -- date back to the 1640's or earlier, a period during which the Spanish were seeking to document their New World territories. But if you study the language of the documents, says Ms. Wood, you find something very strange -- a version of Nahuatl unblemished by Spanish borrowings.

If the Techialoyans really had been written in the 1640's, she argues, they'd have been a mixture of both languages. By then, Nahuatl (from which we today take such words as "chocolate" and "tomato") had been transformed in response to the Spanish invasion -- as had native peoples themselves. Another oddity about the documents are their depictions of native ancestors with facial hair. Although Montezuma is said to have sported a short beard, Indians were generally smooth-skinned.

Most telling are the repetitions from manuscript to manuscript. A landmark in one town looks exactly the same as that in another. A revered ancestor in one village occupies just such a spot of distinction in the history of another community 100 miles away.

All together, the evidence points to the likelihood that the Techialoyans were made decades or more after their alleged times of origin, designed to backdate native land claims in the face of Spanish greed. Ms. Wood thinks that the similarities are the result of their manufacture by just a few artisans, who sold them and were unaware of how intermingled with the Spanish the Indians were even by the 1640's. "Which in one sense makes them very real," she says. "These documents reveal a very sophisticated resistance to the Spanish conquest. At the same time, they offer a native view of history in which the term 'conquest' seems arrogant and simple. Just wrong, really."

Ms. Wood has a book forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press called Transcending Conquest: Indigenous Views of the Spanish in Colonial Mexico. In it, she looks at the "other 'other'" -- Spaniards in the eyes of natives. Key to such a perspective are the Techialoyans, probably the only documents to offer a self-reflexive take on history by Indians of the colonial period. The documents present not only straightforward chronologies, but also the imaginations of their authors as they tried to guess how their ancestors would have seen their new rulers.

But the Techialoyans will not be in the index of Transcending Conquest. Ms. Wood is blunt: "It's not the book I wanted to write."

Ms. Wood's Spanish dates back to her childhood. Her single mother used the wages she earned working as a grocery clerk to take her two daughters on frequent vacations south of the border. Ms. Wood's grandfather was a Scottish immigrant and her grandmother an East Coaster, but once they settled in California, they fell in love with Mexico. They named their daughter not Moira or Fiona but Ramona -- and if Ramona in turn saddled Ms. Wood with the depressingly Anglo name of Stephanie, at least she passed down her deep appreciation of everything Mexican.

"Would I want to be Mexican if I could?" Ms. Wood says. "Yes."

She knows that plenty of scholars would scorn her infatuation with her subject, so she's always kept her claims modest, her research documented, her ideas concise. When in 1991 she presented her theories on the Techialoyans in a lecture at the National School of Anthropology, in Mexico City, she based them on a broad cross-comparison of the documents she had made using a database of her own devising. Like all of her work up to then, the paper was received enthusiastically.

But in the audience was an older anthropologist named Joaquin Galarza, who listened to what Ms. Wood had to say with irritation, and then with outrage. One day not long after, she received in the mail from a Mexican colleague a transcript of a speech that Mr. Galarza had given at the National School of Anthropology -- where, it turned out, he taught part of the time. Ms. Wood, he had declared, was spreading a new "black legend" -- this one about the indigenous people of Mexico.

She was a foreigner who knew little about the culture she said she studied. She probably didn't even really know Spanish. Her work would do nothing but threaten the property of desperately poor Indians.

There was more. With graduate students in both Mexico and at the Musee d'Homme, in Paris, Mr. Galarza had a ready-made audience to whom he could denounce Ms. Wood. And from friends in Mexico, she heard that he'd even gone on a popular radio show there to tar her as an enemy of native people. Then that he had depicted her as an imperialist gringa in a Mexico City daily paper.

Today, Mr. Galarza charges that Mexican scholars who lend credence to Ms. Wood -- and there are many -- are symptoms of a malaise in Mexican academe. Whenever a foreigner presents a theory about Mexico, he tells The Chronicle, too many of his countrymen embrace it as better than their own.

Ms. Wood deserves no such respect, he says. She is an interloper on Mexican intellectual ground. She lacks respect for a scholar who has spent 30 years in the field (Mr. Galarza himself, who insists that one can actually locate every place named in the documents). Worse, in his mind, is what he calls her ignorance of the threat that her falsehoods pose to indigenous people. He does not claim to understand her motivation. Perhaps, he says, she is blind to her own lies.

Most Techialoyan scholars dismiss Mr. Galarza as a bit of a crank. "He represents the last wave of ultranationalism," says Xavier Noguez, a historian at the Colegio Mexiquense, in Zinacantepac. "He's no longer an academic power."

"Stephanie should just ignore him," insists James Lockhart, an emeritus professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everyone else does."

But other scholars understand why she fears Mr. Galarza -- and the possibility that he could be right about her work's potential damage to native people. "I can see that Stephanie's research might be abused," says Elizabeth Hill Boone, a historian at Tulane University. "If a people hold something to be an ancient truth, the essence of their past distilled into a document, well, if someone charges that those documents are invented, you're wounding them pretty seriously."

"That's why Stephanie's the one who should do this book," she adds, pointing out that other scholars, less sympathetic to native claims, could cause more harm than Ms. Wood.

But Mr. Noguez, Mr. Lockhart, and Ms. Boone have something that Stephanie Wood lacks: tenure, and the confidence that follows.

"Galarza pushes buttons," she says. "I don't know, is there some kernel of truth to what he says? That I'm upsetting people? That I'm endangering their lands? That maybe my Spanish isn't good enough?"

Ms. Wood never got the chance to talk those questions over with her antagonist. She was too shy to contact him directly, and, for reasons of his own, he preferred to attack from afar rather than confront her at one of the several conferences and parties they both attended.

But in the absence of real discussion, Ms. Wood began questioning her motives herself. Why was it so important to know? She'd loved feeling like a detective uncovering secrets, but weren't secrets kept that way for a reason? Were her reasons for exposing them -- her curiosity, her career -- more important than actual lives?

"It dawned on me that maybe this wasn't so removed from real life as I'd imagined," she remembers.

In 1995, she opened her mail to find another attack. An article by Mr. Galarza in Ce-Acatl, a journal of Aztec studies of which he is the editor. In big, bold type, the article was titled "FANTASIAS." Ms. Wood, he wrote, is the most "brilliant example" of an unpleasant breed of phonies, falsifiers, and delusionals.

"That was the day I gave up," she says. The excuse of dispassionate scholarship no longer seemed worthy. "If I have to choose sides," she thought, "it should be with the community."

Richard Gibson

Richard Gibson's father died young and left him a one-dollar coin, and his mother was a teacher in the Detroit public schools. She raised him alone. They weren't rich but she was as good a teacher to her boy as she was to her students, and the one thing Mr. Gibson loved best was learning. He learned enough to win a scholarship to Cranbrook, a fancy boy's school outside the city with a campus of green fields and small classrooms with teachers who believed in education, not just instruction. For a man who has spent his adult life either trying to foment revolutions or studying them, he is remarkably enthusiastic about his private-school days: "They taught us that you can comprehend and transform your world. You can understand it and act on it and what you do counts."

			Top: Richard Gibson's interest in education reform in Grenada eventually led him to study how the United States invaded and reshaped the country. (Photo by Tim Rue.) Above: U.S. soldiers in Grenada. (Photo by Richard Gibson.)

After a stint with Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960's, Mr. Gibson became a teacher himself, then an organizer for the National Education Association. His union brothers from those days remember him as one of the best. "Rich could talk to anyone, he could listen to anyone," says Tony Hernandez, a fellow organizer who's since risen in the N.E.A. "He just loved being around schools."

In 1980, friends of friends asked Mr. Gibson to go to Grenada to consult on its government's nascent literary program, based on the ideas of the Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire. Freire, who died in 1997, mixed Marxism with the influence of radical Roman Catholicism in an argument for education aimed at changing one's surroundings. Classrooms from South America to Scandinavia have experimented with his theories in diluted form, but the Grenadians wanted to go all the way. When the revolutionaries spoke of literacy, Mr. Gibson's friends told him, they didn't just mean A-B-C's.

A few years later, President Ronald Reagan and the American right wing would accuse the revolutionaries of conspiring with Cuba to export Soviet-style totalitarianism. There were indeed Cubans in Grenada, but to Mr. Gibson they looked like middle-aged "nine beers a day men," working construction on an airport runway much-needed if the island was ever to develop a tourist industry.

The other big project under way on the island was education. To Mr. Gibson, the new schools seemed in spirit less like re-education camps than like the excellent boys' school he'd attended years before. Except that these schools were free.

"It wasn't the promised land," he recalls, "but it was obvious when I visited that the overwhelming majority of the people thought this was the best thing that had ever happened in their lives. People are pouring into schools, knocking down the doors, there aren't enough literacy volunteers. They're doing something that after years of going around organizing schools in America, I didn't know was actually possible."

Maybe it wasn't. The Grenadians soon devised a Freirian textbook -- but standardizing a Freirian curriculum is a bit like trying to show silent movies over the radio. The revolution's leaders seemed to take the same bulldozer approach to democracy, as if it could be achieved in a closed circle of competitive, ruling-party elites. By the time Mr. Gibson returned home, he wondered if they'd learn the diplomacy they'd need to navigate each other's egos -- not to mention the big-stick tactics of the United States -- before it was too late.

He went back to Grenada in 1983 to find his worst fears realized: its schools moribund, its ruling party paranoid and disintegrating. He wanted to stay on, see if he could help, but then he received word that back in Detroit, his mother was dying. He wrote a letter describing his concerns and scraping together all the advice he could think of, then got on the next plane home.

Not long after Mr. Gibson left, the frayed leadership snarled and turned against itself, and a week later, the U.S. military invaded. Within a month, he charges, the United States had cleaned the island of every scrap of paper that could possibly be considered revolutionary, from correspondence with Castro to lesson plans on how to read -- and transform -- the world.

In the years that followed, Mr. Gibson slowly lost faith in the more modest ambitions of the N.E.A. He had a chance to call the shots working in Washington as the director of organizing for another union, but what he needed was a mission, not policy. He wasn't a communist and he didn't believe in God, and there was nothing left for him in the unions. There was only one hope. He'd go back to school.

He wrote his dissertation at Pennsylvania State University on Freire, using Grenada as a case study. Near the end of it, he went to Grenada to fill in some blanks. To do that, he had to pay a visit to the prison on the hill.

There he met a kindly old man who liked the nice white American visitor and gave him a broom that he'd made from straw. Mr. Gibson recognized him as Hudson Austin, once a brilliant leader of the revolutionary military. Phyllis Coard, whose books on radical education were among Mr. Gibson's favorites, sat spinning on a loom while they talked; only there was nothing on the loom. She'd been in isolation for more than a decade, her only visitors in the years before Winston Courtney's tenure the guards who raped her uncountable times.

Only one former revolutionary, Bernard Coard (Phyllis's husband) seemed unbroken. Bring me books, he said. So over the course of that visit, and another a few years later, Mr. Gibson traded. For Lukacs, Mr. Coard told Mr. Gibson about the literacy program. For V. S. Naipaul, he told him about the party turning on itself. And for books without names and as yet unwritten, he told Mr. Gibson stories that made no sense together, about the death of a man he considered a comrade and about the murder of that same man, for which he was convicted. In the vast space between those two versions of history, he said, Mr. Gibson would discover the killing of the revolution.

At first, Mr. Gibson didn't want to hear it; he'd come to learn about schools, not nightmares. Besides, he didn't believe Mr. Coard. Mr. Coard was a killer, everyone knew it; he'd been convicted by a Grenadian court and should consider himself lucky he hadn't been executed. Mr. Gibson didn't believe the United States account of the invasion, but he didn't believe Mr. Coard's either.

"But Coard's one bright bastard," he says. And the story the man told made more sense than any other. So Mr. Gibson stopped asking people about schools and started asking them about the day Grenadian troops, allegedly at the command of Mr. Coard, gunned down Maurice Bishop, the charismatic frontman of the revolution.

Dennis F. Carter, a State Department official who was then the sole U.S. representative in Grenada, remembers Mr. Gibson criss-crossing the island in 1994 looking for sources who remembered the last days of Bishop's and Coard's power. "He really did the nuts and bolts," he says. "He talked to everyone, not just the polished people, although he spoke to them, too."

Witness after witness told Mr. Gibson a version of the same tale. After a leadership struggle between Bishop and Mr. Coard, Bishop led a mob to one of the island's armories. Armored personnel carriers arrived on the scene with instructions from their commanding officers to calm things down. The soldiers approached out in the open, their weapons at their sides. Then, from the fort, someone opened fire. The first man to die, says Mr. Gibson, was the leader of the troops sent to restore order.

No one disputes that the soldiers returned fire, nor that having won the fort, they seized Bishop and his comrades and shot them on the spot. But no one had ever heard Mr. Coard or his fellow prisoners say anything about killing Bishop, Mr. Gibson says. There didn't seem to be villains, he found, but rather, too many guns and too little patience on both sides. "I don't think anyone was to blame."

The convictions of the Grenada 17, he came to suspect -- but admits that he can't yet prove -- reflects the mourning of a people over the death of their brightest star, a grief manipulated by American interests determined to rid Grenada of radicalism once and for all. Even Winston Courtney, now retired, thinks this the likeliest explanation. "You could have heard the American influence in the courtroom," he remembers telling Mr. Gibson. "The judges were caressed by the dollar."

Over the years, Mr. Gibson's work on Freire has fallen by the wayside. He finished his dissertation -- "the best we've ever seen," says his adviser at Penn State -- and published large portions of it in journals. But more and more, he thought about Mr. Coard and the other revolutionaries sitting in jail.

What did he owe them? They may not have been murderers, but they were to his mind guilty of every other mistake they could have made. They'd moved into rich men's houses and set themselves apart from their people. They'd canceled elections. They'd ruined wonderful schools, even if those schools were of their own creation. They had killed the only real revolution Mr. Gibson had ever seen.

But they were innocent. Of that he felt certain. It wasn't a question of what he owed anyone, he realized; it was a question of what an ethical man should do.

He had all that he needed to publish a good, scholarly book. But a truly great book, he decided, would be one that would set people free.

The State Department's Mr. Carter says the United States sees the case of the Grenada 17 as a Grenadian internal matter. He believes the men in power now are well-equipped to run their own affairs. They were "silly" once, he says of the Grenadians, "but we all grow up to be Republicans." He also says that a document Mr. Gibson gave him, which Mr. Gibson argues hinted at the extent of U.S. meddling in Grenada, was probably destroyed in an "unfortunate" electrical fire that consumed much of the paperwork from Mr. Carter's tenure as charge d'affaires there. Then again, he says, maybe he shredded it.

In 1997, Mr. Gibson sued the Central Intelligence Agency for access to the tons of documents from the Grenadian revolution that U.S. forces seized right after they conquered the island -- documents that he hopes will prove the jailed revolutionaries innocent. Mr. Gibson won. But in appeals the government pleaded special security interests, insisted on blacking out what it couldn't hold back, and claimed that the rest had been lost or sent back to Grenada. The court was satisfied, but Mr. Gibson was not. Although the case drained his bank account, he doesn't plan on giving up. These days, he's lying low in his house in the hills, waiting until he can raise enough money to go back to court.

"I need an ending," he says. He believes the U.S. government is holding it prisoner: "the smoking gun document" that will let the Grenada 17 return to their lives, and he to his.

Patricia Nelson Limerick

The rumor got about: "The dead are to return." --anonymous Pine Ridge Sioux, 1890

Ms. Limerick has set herself an even more difficult task than Mr. Gibson's. She awaits not the freedom of prisoners but the resurrection of every story that's been forgotten. She's been waiting ever since she was a kid in Banning, California, writing obituaries for the local rag and visiting the old folks down at the Casa Del Rey Retirement Home.

"Those people are more vivid to me than people I met last week," she says. She remembers in particular the grace of a 97-year-old man named Ralph Houghton. Somehow word got around to Charles Kuralt in 1971 that here was this young lady at the height of the kingdom of youth who had chosen to hang out with nonagenarians. He brought his television cameras to Patty's little town for one of his America specials, and he said, Why don't you and Ralph take a whirl? Ms. Limerick still remembers the way it played on the tube: a shot of just their feet skimming over the tile of the senior home, hers young and pink-toed in sandals, Ralph's dapper in wingtips. Ralph died not too long after that, but Ms. Limerick even now thinks about him often. She figures she'd better be ready, in case he shows up one of these days.

			Top: Patricia Nelson Limerick, whose analysis of Western history infuriated many traditionalists, abandoned a book about abandoned places. (Photo by Chris Takagi.) Above: Abandoned building. (Photo by Mark Klett.)

"Where could you go to live to not be haunted by death?" she asks me one morning.

Isn't that sort of the American idea? I suggest. The myth? Go West, escape the past?

"Hmm. Well, I suppose," she says. "But those drugs don't work for me."

Ms. Limerick went east for the first time when she did her Ph.D. in American studies at Yale, and rounded out her tour of blue-blood prestige with four years of teaching at Harvard. She didn't really like either. Eastern cities felt cramped, and the Ivy league was stuffed with too much ambition. When the chance came to go back West at the University of Colorado in 1984, she thought she was saved.

But in Boulder, the old deans of Western history frowned on this uppity woman presuming to know more about cowboys and Indians than they did. They were glad to have her there -- she satisfied the feminists -- but they didn't want much to do with her. Every day at noon, the old men traipsed by her to a table of their own, one to which she was never invited. Lest it seem as if she cared, she kept her head down, writing instead of eating. "Colorado hadn't worked for me," she remembers. "I was going to write my way out of here."

The result of many lonely lunches was The Legacy of Conquest, never out of print since. Today it's hardly shocking, but just 14 years ago it read to some like revelation, to others like heresy. The West, Ms. Limerick argued, was shaped not so much by rugged individualism and settlement as by invasion, delusion, and stubborn denial of its own fault lines. But most scholars still presented its past as "a kind of property in which Americans deserved to take pride."

She didn't deny that one could learn lessons from history, but she had different ones in mind. "Westerners were both sinned against and sinning," she wrote. "Contrary to the old divisions between good guys and bad guys, [they] combined the roles of victims and villains."

Legacy sold slowly at first, but in 1989, The Washington Post ran an article about the "new" Western history that read like a wrestling match between Ms. Limerick and Frederick Jackson Turner, who in 1893 declared the frontier closed and to whom we owe much of what we now recognize as the mythology of the West as landscape-for-the-American-dream. Profiles of Ms. Limerick followed in The New York Times and even People.

She was mortified. Two of her best friends in Boulder are Turner's grandson and his wife, who now began jokingly introducing Ms. Limerick as "the woman who's been saying all those terrible things about Grandfather."

If Turner's descendants took her work with good humor, most scholars didn't. At one conference, someone said, "You're making the last years of a number of historians very unhappy." At another, the wife of a senior scholar said, "I know what they're saying about you, and I think it's terrible." Ms. Limerick, who for all her sharp edges is prone to tears, broke down crying.

What they were saying, she knew from friends, was that she was disrespectful and a naysayer of the worst sort, entranced by her own considerable talent as a writer into telling stories that were only half-true, and doing so with such force and power that a public that didn't often pay attention to scholars was now inclined to dismiss them all as false prophets, forecasting only failure.

Ms. Limerick couldn't help herself. She began to write again. Everyone had misunderstood. Western expansion hadn't been a futile exercise. She'd meant to say that its study was a great opportunity, just as the old mandarins insisted. Well, almost. The past 200 years, she wrote, have been a chance for Americans "to learn the lesson that everyone else on the planet had faced for a long time: the centrality of failure in human enterprise."

Ms. Limerick's list begins with the Spanish explorers who went looking for golden cities and died in the desert. It continues with the Indians and their long march of defeats; missionaries murdered by the souls they saved; ranchers ruined by repeated collapses of the cattle market; scientists poisoned by radiation at the Rocky Flats Superfund site; and the crew of the space shuttle Challenger, killed en route to the most recent final frontier.

"They're the other half of the story," says Ms. Limerick, and she wanted equal time for the losers. The book she started to write about them would have looked for their stories in the places they abandoned. "Ghost towns," both literal and figurative, she wrote, are where "we can most profitably study the collision between simple expectation and complex reality." She would have closed the book with the explosion of the Challenger and the end it brought to analogies between pioneers and space cowboys, between Western expansion and our conquest of the cosmos.

One of Ms. Limerick's heroes, in fact, is a man named Roger Boisjoly, a NASA engineer who exposed some of the mistakes made around the Challenger launch. "As a result," she notes, "he was shunned."

"I think about Roger often," she muses one afternoon. We're driving over Boulder Creek on our way up the hill to her home near the base of the Flatirons, the massive slabs of stone that stand like a wall between the mountains and the plains. Ms. Limerick sees herself as a whistle-blower. She believes that had she been in Mr. Boisjoly's position, she would have done as he had. But not -- or at least, not only -- to save lives. "Saying things people don't want to hear is also about the arrogance of needing to be right. Pride," she says, "is one of the two compelling forces in my life."

What's the other? I ask.

"Death," she says."I'm governed by it."

Pride drove her to keep expanding her argument toward a theory of failure -- which brought her around to death again. She'd lost friends over The Legacy of Conquest; her next book, she knew, would make even more enemies. Every one would be like another nail in her coffin. The price of being right, she thought, would be dying alone.

"Death versus pride," she says. "'Death versus pride, death versus pride. Hmm. The verdict is out."

Perhaps, but pride takes precedence in the courtroom of Ms. Limerick's mind: She will not leave judgment in her own trial to anyone but herself, so until she makes her decision, Troubled Land lies fallow. There never came a day on which she stacked up her notes and written pages for the book and put them in a file folder marked R. I. P. There are just all the days on which she decided that she preferred the friendship of colleagues and neighbors to the odd satisfactions of being right. Her most recent achievement of note, she insists, isn't even scholarly. "I have been accepted as a member of the Boulder Rotary Club," she boasts -- a group that 10 years ago considered her an enemy of the Western way of life.

She likes to spar with the old men (and a few women), but she leaves every argument open. The book she wanted to write would have been her last word, metaphorically. So she decides each day to leave it unsaid.

She told me that since she last stopped working on Troubled Land, others have said what she wanted to say. To her mind, Legacy helped kick-start a re-evaluation of Western history. The subsequent arguments she might have made were picked up by younger scholars. "You could even say I was scooped."

We arrive at her home, and Ms. Limerick settles down by a window in her living room to read the proposal she wrote for Troubled Land. She'd dug it out of her files and given it to me the day before. I'd taken it with me for a night and read it, then read it again. I'd never seen anything like it. This morning I'd handed it back to her: "Scooped by who?" I'd asked. Now she reads her proposal for the first time in years. "Hm. Yes," she murmurs, as if grading an undergrad's paper. She puts it down. "Yes. Well. That's pretty good," she says. Then she cries.

Last year Ms. Limerick published Something in the Soil, a collection of essays she'd written for various journals, conferences, and magazines. "Everything she writes about the history of the American West deserves attention," Larry McMurtry said of it. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., of Harvard, wrote that Ms. Limerick is "blazing a trail toward a new understanding" of history.

But it's not the masterpiece she could have written.

Stephanie Wood's forthcoming collection will, she hopes, reorient her field a few inches. Maybe, too, it'll light a fire under hiring committees at Oregon, where she'd like a tenured spot beside her husband.

She only wishes that she weren't afraid to take her best work out of her desk drawer.

Richard Gibson, meanwhile, checks his bank balance. More and more often, he thinks about giving up and turning his research into a novel.

All three take solace sometimes in thinking that what they have to say -- their most original findings and their most piercing analyses -- has been silenced by people afraid of the truth: of failure in the West, forgery in the past, a small corner of the cold war still unended. The fact that these three books remain unpublished is, in one sense, a proof of their value.

But no one has rejected the books. Each scholar could list obstacles -- from other scholars right on up to international conspiracy -- but none fully explains why they turned away or why they remain in limbo with what has become, for each of them, the story of their lives. Ms. Wood, in order to remain a part of a community she loves, denied her own knowledge of a part of it. Mr. Gibson finally found a mission small enough that he could actually picture the better world that would result at its end, only to lose his way in the minutiae. And Ms. Limerick, on the cusp of discovering a new trail through the gloom of failure and loss that afflicts her, retreated.

One day, in a course she was teaching at Colorado on water in the West, Ms. Limerick had as a guest a distinguished, silver-haired scientist who'd spent a lifetime fighting floods around the world. He had been a conscientious objector during World War II, he said, but over the years he'd seen more death and destruction than he ever would have as a soldier. After his talk, Ms. Limerick raised her hand like a student and said, "You didn't want to be an agent of death. And yet here you are, so close to so many deaths." It's sobering, the scientist nodded. That surprised Ms. Limerick. Sobering? She says she is haunted by death -- but, in truth, she finds it intoxicating.

She and Ms. Wood and Mr. Gibson are obsessed with stories cut short and the problem of silence, whether that of others or their own. Authors of abandoned books may convince themselves that their work still exists as a dream of better ideas, a more honest history, a future with a little bit of justice. But the longer their work sits in their desk drawers, and the larger it looms in their minds, the less utopian it looks. In the end, every unfinished book is a ghost town.

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