Vardis Fisher

An American Atheist Author

Richard M. Andrews

Vardis Alvero Fisher

n the Depression years of the thirties, Vardis Fisher was hailed as one of the most promising authors of the American West. He was compared favorably with his good friend, Thomas Wolfe, or to William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway. Before Fisher died in 1968, he was the author of thirty-six published books and had won the Harper Prize. His work had been published in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Danish, and he had written some fifty short stories and essays for magazines. He had had a regular column in The Idaho Statesman from 1943 to 1950. He had written historical novels about the Donner Party, the Comstock load, the Mormons, the Lewis and Clark expedition, mountain man Jeremiah Johnson (which inspired a movie starring Robert Redford), and a twelve-volume set on the evolution of man and religion.

Sidebar: Vardis Fisher Chronology

Vardis’ books are no longer in print. Few know his name or work, although antiquarian book dealers get $50 to $100 for his books. Libraries and Universities have special collections of his books. His current obscurity has its roots in both his Atheism and the economics of book publishing. Of course, people who cannot find a book in print cannot buy it, and if you have nothing to sell, there is no one to promote your work. Such is the case with Fisher’s books, but the reason his books did not find major publishers to begin with and were not promoted was because of his Atheistic twelve-volume Testament of Man series.

In Tiger on the Road, Tim Woodward’s biography of Fisher (Vardis used to say most people would rather meet a tiger on the road than face the truth about themselves), Woodward wrote:

No one who read it was lukewarm about the Testament of Man. The series evoked reactions from worshipful praise to sneering contempt. It divided critics and scholars – and anyone else who took the sixty or seventy hours needed to read it -– into those who deeply admired Fisher and those who washed their hands of him for good. This was not surprising, as the series questioned some of the most fundamental beliefs in western society.

For its author, the Testament’s toll was beyond calculating. It would cost him twenty of his most productive years, a close friend and publisher, and any hope of maintaining the reputation he briefly enjoyed as one of the nation’s up and coming novelists. People told him he was wasting his time on scholarly books that delved deeply into the past when he could have been writing novels that would have secured his reputation as an artist. Few who knew him doubted his ability to write `successful’ books, but he wasn’t writing the Testament for the best-seller lists. He was convinced he was writing it for the ages.¹

Fisher was ridiculed by reviewers and vilified in the nation’s most influential magazines. In order to write the Testament series he had to read over two thousand books on history, anthropology, psychology, theology, and comparative religion. The series was unique among literary endeavors. The only books I have read that come close to the kind of books in the Testament are Gore Vidal’s Creation and Julian.

The Testament volumes are:

Darkness and the Deep is about the evolution of the ancestors of man.
The Golden Rooms is about man’s life in caves and the use of fire.
Intimations of Eve is about the prehistory of matriarchy and moon worship.
Adam and the Serpent is about patriarchy replacing matriarchy and the development of male dominance.
The Divind Passion is about worship of the sun god and women’s lot in a male-dominated world.
Valley of Vision tells of King Solomon and his conflict with “prophets.”
Island of the Innocent contrast the superior Greek culture with Judaism. It asks the question of what the world would be like if Greek values had triumphed over Judaism and Christianity. The religious rebellion of the Maccabees is its setting. (In my opinion this is the second-best book of the series.)
Jesus Came Again was the most controversial book of the Testament, because it rejected the divinity of Jesus. This book is about what Jesus would have been like had he been a real person.
A Goat for Azazel is about the pagan origins of Christianity. The concept of a scapegoat is an old Jewish idea of a sin offering of a goat driven into the desert to die. (This in my opinion is the best book in the Testament series.)
Peace Like a River is about female subjugation and extreme Christian ascetism or self-denial.
My Holy Satan is about the horrors of the Inquisition. (My number-three pick of the series.)
Orphans In Gethsemane is set in this century. This is a book about what has led us to be the way we are, and makes sense of our male-dominated, Judeo-Christian western society, its families, its values, and its wars. The book is semi-autobiographical.

When Fisher brought Jesus Came Again to his publisher, Caxton Press, they refused to publish it unless it was rewritten with a divine Jesus. They explained to him that America was in a cold war with the Soviet Union, and Christianity was the best defense against communism, and that they would do nothing to undermine the Christian ideological hold on American culture.²

When Valley of Vision was published, Time magazine led the attack with this review:

STRICTLY FROM IDAHO

Vardis Fisher’s latest volume, the sixth in his fictostenographic history of civilization, is less a novel than a pedantic, prurient diatribe against one of the best-publicized kings Israel ever had. Solomon (10th Century BC) is portrayed as a sort of Old Testament Sammy Glick with chin whiskers, a tough little opportunist who elbows his way into the big money, marries a glamour girl (Khate, an Egyptian princess), and hires a frustrated poet to ghost his copy – even, it would seem, such copy as the Book of Proverbs.

Furthermore, says Fisher in effect, Solomon’s wisdom was not even his own; it was just a lot of words put in his mouth by his ghostwriter and his Egyptian wife. The real Solomon, according to Fisher, was a phony liberal with a father complex and a massive sexual overcompensation; his quarrel with the prophet Ahijah was an exchange of irrelevancies between a dilettante and a fanatic.

Author Fisher shows some sympathy for the hot-eyed Ahijah. It is almost as though there were some burning affinity between the old eater of stones and howler in the waste places and the seer of Hagerman, Idaho, crying his confused and passionate evangel of history in the wilderness of American letters.³

Joseph M. Flora in his University of North Carolina book Vardis Fisher wrote:

Having been denied a Guggenheim fellowship on four occasions, a Newberry fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Grant, he has become accustomed to making his own way, though, midway through the Testament, he experienced agonizing struggles with publishers. Three publishers eventually found the series a poor financial risk and dropped Fisher, and others were wary of taking over in the middle of a financially unsound series which was potentially explosive in its subject matter. Ironically, Fisher expected the controversy to make these volumes best-sellers. Fisher thought of himself as a writer for the “long pull” who would ultimately pay the publisher who stood by him. Jesus Came Again and the subsequent Testament volumes Fisher wrote seemed destined to be unpublished novels.

Fisher himself was at a loss about what to do, and he was sustained only by his vision of the work and by his wife’s confidence. The future of the Testament brightened only when Alan Swallow, who is especially interested in belles-lettres of the United States West, approached Fisher about letting his small firm bring out the novels – at a considerable gamble for Swallow, who was, however, absolutely convinced of Fisher’s literary merit.⁴

In his chapter “Final Judgment,” Flora wrote:

The novels (Testament) increasingly lead the reader to the conviction that Fisher has not revealed the whole of Western religious heritage: the ring of history – a convincing picture of an area and satisfactory devices for presenting factual background – is not present in later volumes in the same force as in the American historicals, though as partial defense of Fisher one must say that the Testament becomes increasingly symbolic. This is not to question that the novels are carefully researched, but to assert that (Fisher) never grasped the dynamism of Christianity, which is also a part of history. Fisher has never seen that, though Christianity has been a religion of the desert, it has also been a religion of the valley of vision. Nowhere does he give a convincing portrait of a George Herbert, who lived in the beauty of holiness, nor a Jonathan Edwards in all of his complexity and stature. These people are beyond Fisher – who might have recalled Cabell and the dynamic illusion. There is a poetic mysticism and beauty Fisher failed to see.

The religiosity of the biographer certainly shows through in the paragraph above. Flora seems not to see the possibility that characters like Jonathan Edwards were beneath Fisher, not beyond him. Moreover, Flora’s reference to the “dynamism” of Christianity implies a positive quality in Christianity which Fisher would have considered illusory. He had no intention of apologizing for Christianity! Even so, Flora rises above his religious bias to conclude:

Nevertheless, one should grant that much of the Testament is imagined as experience. Even in a novel like A Goat for Azazel, one feels Fisher knows people. And because Fisher frequently presents basic human hunger so convincingly, the art of the Testament sometimes runs very high. It is no small tribute to Fisher that the most elemental characters come to life. Indeed, Darkness and the Deep and The Golden Rooms are the best novels of their kind. Fisher’s excellence in showing action and violence as well as compassion mark the Testament as well as the Antelope novels and the Americana. And nowhere will the historical novelist find the challenge to penetrating study greater than in the Testament nor will its readers find a greater spur to thought.⁵

The Testament series is not the only writing of Fisher that the Atheist will find of interest. His Children of God demystifies the Mormon story of Joseph Smith. Also of interest are Fisher’s newspaper columns in the Idaho Statesman and Idaho Statewide, which became the Intermountain Observer. Tim Woodward in his biography of Fisher states:

Around Christmas time , he always wrote a column saying that there was no Christ. We’d get a bunch of cancellations, but the Statewide was the kind of paper that published things regardless of what people thought. We never censored anybody’s writing.⁶

Vardis Fisher was an extremely important American author who never failed to talk and write about Atheism. He never failed to say he was an Atheist and was proud of his Atheism. He did this in one of the most conservative states of the Union between 1930 and 1968, when he died. That type of courage is heroic and much needed in our country today.

After his death, the Mormon historians Davis Bitton and Leonard Arrington tried to claim Vardis as one of their own because of his stature. In 1976 Arrington presented a paper to the Association of Mormon Letters entitled “The Mormon Heritage of Vardis Fisher.” In 1983 Mick McAllister presented to the same group a paper called “Vardis Fisher’s Mormon Heritage.” This so infuriated Vardis’ widow Opal Fisher that she sent out press releases about Vardis’ Atheism. The controversy over Fisher was so great that in late 1996 The Daily Herald in Provo, Utah, published an article about the conflict and conceded he should not in any way be considered a Mormon. One wonders why they tried this in the first place, but now that they tried and failed, Hartt Wixom in his article “Mormons can’t claim Idaho author” seems bitter and out to cast stones at Fisher’s reputation.⁷

Opal Fisher publicly debunked her husband’s supposed “Mormon Heritage” when she spoke at the American Atheists Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1981. Opal was a member of American Atheists and a regular contributor to the Utah Chapter until her death in 1995.

When Opal Fisher died, her will directed $237,000 from her estate to the University of Idaho for the creation of a humanities professorship.⁸ She also left Albertson College of Idaho a first-edition set of all of Fisher’s work and additional copies of his works which the college will sell to create a scholarship fund. Albertson College also received an enormous amount of books from Fisher’s private collection.⁹

Now that both Vardis and Opal are dead and unable to defend their writing or see how their donations have been used, Albertson college slights Fisher’s Testament work in this section of the Vardis Fisher biography on the college’s web site:

VARDIS ALVERO FISHER

Fisher’s work divides, not very neatly, into four categories. The excellent regional work with which he began his career was compared favorably with that of William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, and Fisher’s friend Thomas Wolfe. The sources he drew upon for these novels soon would take him down two divergent paths. One led to the frontier Americana for which Fisher is now remembered: definitive novels on the Mormons, the Donner Party (The Mothers), and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Tale of Valor). A novel on the fur trade (Mountain Man) was the primary source for the film Jeremiah Johnson. These novels, with their naturalistic insistence on the sordid details and commonplace violence of frontier life, set a standard for verisimilitude now commonplace among historians and novelists of the West.

His other path nearly destroyed Fisher’s career. In 1939, unsatisfied by the tetralogy, Fisher determined to find the human character in the history of the species and began a series of novels that would culminate in a revision of the tetralogy. The twelve-volume Testament of Man which began with some promise, soon degenerated into didactic polemics. The early novels on prehistoric man, Darkness and the Deep and The Golden Rooms, compare favorably to other attempts in the genre. Others, such as three on the evolution of Judaism, are less successful. A superb retelling of the death of Jesus (Jesus Came Again) is the literary high-point of the remaining books.

By the time the Testament had reached the early Christian era, Fisher was established in his fourth literary role, as state curmudgeon, through weekly columns in various Idaho papers. He had found a kindred spirit in J.H. Gipson of the Caxton Press, but even Gipson refused to publish books with the Testament’s negative view of Christianity. Fisher and Gipson shared vehement atheism and vehement anticommunism; ironically, as Fisher’s biographer Tim Woodward points out, Gipson’s objection came not from a desire to promote religion but from the belief that books so destructive of Christian values would promote communism.

Through the patronage of publisher Alan Swallow, Fisher was able to complete the Testament in 1960 with a single-volume revision of the tetralogy that brought Hunter’s story up to the late 1950s. Eight years later, a few days before his death, he told a Salt Lake City reporter that he had begun his autobiography. Had he completed that book, it is possible that the relationship between the fictional Hunter’s life and the life of Vardis Fisher would have been further confused, though it might also have been clarified.

The continuing theme throughout Fisher’s work is an obsessive dedication to learning and promulgating the truth, the Socratic need to know thyself. His historical fiction is notable for its foundation in meticulous research and its rigorous objectivity. Despite his vehement and unwavering dislike for Mormonism, his novel on the beginnings of the church is admired by believer and non-believer alike. The Testament’s greatest power is its ability to describe sympathetically the visionary element of the Judeo-Christian world-view to which Fisher traces most of the cultural neuroses of modern America.

The voice of the novelist is an essentially tragic voice, in that his rationalist philosophy aligned him with the reductionism of the sociobiologist who is convinced that behavior can be explained by the accumulation of detail, but his emotional upbringing promoted a nearly pathological mysticism. The hero of The Golden Rooms is haunted by the imagined ghosts of the Neanderthals he has killed. The last happy figure in Fisher’s work, mad Kate Bowden of Mountain Man, lives in the wilderness of northern Wyoming where she tends the graves of her massacred children and sings lullabies to their envisioned spirits in the empty dark.¹⁰

© 1989 Caxton Printers, Ltd. Reprinted by permission.
Opal Fisher between directory Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford at the Boise premiere of Jeremiah Johnson in 1972.

By any standard, Vardis Fisher led an extraordinary and exemplary life. He was born in the Western frontier in Annis, Idaho, in 1895 to Joe and Temperance Fisher. Vardis Fisher’s father Joe and one of his brothers were sent by Brigham Young to start a colony in the Upper Snake River Valley. Accordingly when Vardis was six years old, his father loaded the family onto a dead axle wagon and headed up the South Forks of the Snake River thirty-six miles. The nearest neighbor was ten miles from the Fishers when they stopped, and that was just the way Vardis’ father wanted it to be. (Vardis’ mother would be in her fifties before she had a house with running water.¹¹)

With no schools nearby Vardis was taught by his mother until he was twelve.¹² Then the family decided Vardis and his brother were old enough to go to school in Annis, and the two boys spent a year living there with their Aunt Phoebe. By the time Vardis was thirteen and his brother Vivian was ten, the family had decided the boys could manage on their own and found a vacant house near Annis for them. The parents stocked the house with fruits, dried meat, bread, and goose grease butter, blankets and clothing. For half a year the boys were alone in a land where it could be dangerous to take out the garbage.¹³ For most children a fourth grade education was considered enough for Antelope country, but the Fisher children would go on to college.

It was in Annis that Fisher met his childhood sweetheart, Leona McMurtrey, a woman he married in 1917. After he graduated from high school, he went to Salt Lake City to the University of Utah. Idaho had only one college, in Moscow, and that was further away than Salt Lake. After Fisher received his BA, a professor he liked encouraged him to go to graduate school at the University of Chicago. In Chicago Fisher first experienced how the non-Mormon world lived. After receiving his MA he went back to the University of Utah to teach, but did not feel academically secure in this position, and returned to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D.

Fisher again returned to Utah to teach, but this time he began to have trouble with the Mormon Church and knew after three years that he could not reach tenure before the Church hierarchy would have him fired or force him to resign. He applied and was accepted for a position at New York University in Washington Square.¹⁴ When Fisher left New York University he had a wife and two children. He returned to Idaho in 1931 to write novels and was hired by the Works Progress Administration (the WPA federal writers project) as the state director in 1935. Fisher wrote the Guide To Idaho for the WPA, and his office was the first among state offices to publish.

Fisher’s first wife Leona died in 1924. In 1928 he married Margaret Trusler and had one child with her. That marriage ending in divorce, his last marriage, in 1940, was to Opal Laurel Holmes. He lived with her in Haggerman Idaho until his death in 1968.¹⁵ While married to Opal, he coauthored a book with her on gold mines of the old west, Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West (Caxton press, 1968).

Vardis Fisher rose from a life of poverty, ignorance, and superstition to one of some affluence, a Ph.D., and freedom from the Mormon religion of his family; he was able to become an Atheist intellectual. His Testament of Man books were a bold attempt by a lone Atheist to popularize his Atheism. Though his attempt to do this was not a complete success, his books are still with us and could still be used as a tool for the advancement of Atheist philosophy. One can only hope that Fisher’s Testament will find it’s way back into print so that a new generation of hungry minds will not be denied access to one of the greatest historical fiction series ever written. The impact of good fiction writing can be great. No one would deny that Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses will make a lasting impression on Islam. If Atheists could find a way to obtain the Testament and make it as available as the Verses, it could have a major impact on religion in general.

Read an excerpt from A Goat for Azazel.

Vardis Fisher Chronology

1895 Vardis Fisher Born

1915 Graduates Rigby High School

1917 Marries Leona McMurtrey

1920 Bachelor of Arts, University of Utah

1922 Master of Arts, University of Chicago

1924 Death of Leona McMurtrey

1925 Ph.D. University of Chicago (Magna cum Laude)

1925-28 Assistant Professor of English, University of Utah

1928 Toilers of the Hills
Fisher marries Margaret Trusler

1928-31 Asst. Professor of English, Washington Square College, New York University

1931 Dark Bridwell

1932 In Tragic Life

1932-33 Summer Professor, Montana State University

1934 Passions Spin the Plot

1935 We Are Betrayed

1935-39 Director of Idaho Writers’ Project of WPA

1936 No Villain Need Be

1938 Forgive Us Our Virtues

1939 Wins Harper Prize for Children of God (available from American Atheist Press)

1940 Marries Opal Laurel Holmes

1941 City of Illusion

1943 The Mothers
Darkness and the Deep (Testament of Man, Vol. I)

1944 The Golden Rooms (Vol. II)

1946 Imitations of Eve (Vol. III)

1947 Adam and the Serpent (Vol. IV)

1948 The Divine Passion (Vol. V)

1951 The Valley of Vision (Vol VI)

1952 The Island of the Innocent (Vol VII)

1956 Jesus Came Again (Vol VIII)
A Goat for Azazel (Vol IX)
Pemmican

1957 Peace Like a River (Vol X)

1958 My Holy Satan (Vol XI)

1959 Love and Death

1960 Orphans in Gethsemane (Vol XII)

1962 Suicide or Murder?

1963 Thomas Wolfe As I Knew Him and Other Essays

1968 Death

References:

¹ Tim Woodward, Tiger on the Road (Caldwell, Idaho, Caxton Printers Ltd., 1989): 160.

² Told to me by Opal Fisher. Also recounted by Vardis Fisher in fictional form in Orphans In Gethsemane (Denver, Allen Swallow, 1960): 917-919.

³ The Time magazine review is quoted in: Vardis Fisher, God or Caesar, 256-257.

⁴ Joseph M. Flora, Vardis Fisher (New York, Twanyne Publishers, 1965): 23.

⁵ Ibid, 142.

⁶ Tim Woodward, Tiger on the Road (Caldwell, Idaho, Caxton Printers, 1989): 237.

⁷ Hartt Wixom, “Mormons can’t claim Idahoan author,” The Daily Herald (Provo, Utah, 2 Dec. 1996): C6

⁸ Rich Boesler, “Record numbers donate to UI,” The Spokesman-Review (Moscow, Idaho, Thursday, 12 Sept. 1996); obtained from http://www.virtuallynw.com/~vnw/stories/1996/sep/12/s127018.htm

⁹ Associated Press, “Woman leaves scholarship fund, set of books to Albertson College” (Caldwell, Idaho, 17 Oct. 1996); obtained from http://www.idahopress.com/fisherCollection.html

¹⁰ Mick McAllister, “Vardis Alvero Fisher”
http://www.media.utah.edu/medsol/UCME/f/FISHER,Vardis.html

¹¹ Woodward, p. 22.

¹² Milton, John K., Three West: Conversations with Vardis Fisher, May Evans, Michael Straight, (Vermilion, South Dakota, University of South Dakota, Kakota Press, 1970).

¹³ Woodward, pp. 44-45.

¹⁴ Milton, pp. 5-7.

¹⁵ Nielsen, Judith, http://drseuss.lib.uidaho.edu/specialcollections/manuscripts/mg218.htm, “Manuscript Group 218, Vardis Fisher, 1895-1968,” August 1990.

Richard Andrews founded the Utah Chapter of American Atheists in 1979 and served as its director or co-director until 1993. A successful activist for Atheist and separationist causes, he was named American Atheist Chapter Director of the Year for 1980, and Atheist of the Year for 1993. He currently serves on the board of directors for the Society of Separationists, American Atheists General Headquarters, and United Secularists of America. For many years he was a personal friend and correspondent of Opal Fisher, the widow of Vardis Fisher.