Beyond the Outposts by Max Brand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Pulp Western Prairie Bromance Tragedy “It seemed a fitting thing to me that such a man as my father, having gone on his way through the country, should drag behind him a wake of this sort, full of hatred and blind fury. I remember that I rejoiced because of the greatness of his strength—because to a boy nothing seems really worthwhile but strong hands and a stout heart.” Under at least seventeen pseudonyms Frederick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) wrote hundreds of novels, short stories, and poems in multiple genres, including mystery, romance, and medical. His most famous pseudonym was Max Brand, under which he published umpteen early 20th-century pulp westerns like the book that was turned into the classic 1939 movie (with Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich!) Destry Rides Again. Beyond the Outposts (serialized in 1925) is the first novel of Brand’s I’ve read, and I found it pretty impressive: a compact, serious pulp grandfather to Thomas Berger’s more sprawling and humorous Little Big Man (1964). Brand’s first-person narrator, Lew Dorset starts by saying, “Books are queer things, mostly written by people who want to show how many ways they can tell a lie,” only to claim that “Everything that I put down here is fact, and I hope the doubters will come to me for the proofs. That includes you, Chuck Morris. All that I write is the truth and only half the truth, at that, because how can Indians and the prairie be packed into words?” After that provocative prologue, Lew concisely tells the story of his life from a babe to a twenty-two year old man, including the loss of his mother and father at birth, the abusive upbringing at the hands of his slimy and sadistic uncle, his flight from Virginia to the prairie in pursuit of his outlaw father, his adoption by the Sioux and life among them, and above all his tragic bromance with the aforementioned Chuck Morris, his best friend who, he hints early on, ended up his bitterest foe. The complexity of Chuck Morris’ character and relationship with Lew is neat. When sixteen-year-old Lew first meets the two years older Chuck, Chuck seems more moral and aware because of his passionate denouncement of slavery, while Lew ignorantly and furiously defends “Virginia gentlemen” and their slave system. After recovering from the brutal fight sparked by their disagreement, they become inseparable bosom buddies, with Lew doing a fair amount of hero worship of the older boy, finding Chuck the most handsome man he's ever seen, a hero a young God with a golden head and flashing eyes, and muscle and pride and strength beyond his size. Chuck also teaches Lew how to survive on the prairie and gives him valuable perspective on Indians, pointing out that there are good and bad Indians just like with white men. But as the novel develops, Chuck becomes a self-centered, irresponsible, unethical heel who doesn’t take being criticized or rejected very well and says things like, “It's not what a man is but what he seems to be” that counts. The book is a paean to guns (at one point Lew opines that shooting a rifle is a science using your head like taking pictures with a camera, whereas shooting a pistol is an art using the heart like making an oil painting), horses (the legendary wild White Smoke is glorious), and the prairie (sublime and open, though maybe it had richer life than Brand writes it). Its depiction of Native Americans is often impressively ahead of its times, criticizing the “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” concept, demonstrating how different tribes had different cultures, relating with respect and interest details of prairie Indian culture (from fighting to marrying), and condemning the practice of white people to trade trash to the Indians like poor quality knives, defective guns, and strong, impure alcohol. However, Lew falls in love with a white girl instead of with an Indian girl, he repeatedly says things like, “I had to return to my own kind,” he calls Pawnees and Cheyenne “horse-thieving red devils,” and the Sioux girl Chuck falls in love with, Black Bird, is the most attractive young lady in camp because she’s half white: “No Indian ever had eyes so big and tender or hair so soft.” Finally, much of Brand’s novel reads like a western Princess of Mars, wherein a white man leads a bunch of barbarians to victory against their enemies. Thus, it’s a mixed bag re race and cultural understanding, much more sympathetic to Indians than most other genre works of its era, but still condescending to them. About gender, it’s less impressive. Black Bird is underdeveloped and so is Lew’s love interest Mary. The vivid characters are all male. Chuck and Lew and his Father and Sitting Wolf and Standing Bear are all much more interesting than any female character. Some things get a little obvious in the plot, like the identity of the Pawnee war chief Bald Eagle, which I figured out ten chapters before Lew thinks of it. But Brand writes some wise lines about human nature etc., like “It rarely pays to bribe a person through affection; it costs a part of their love.” And some vivid similes, like “They handled me as if I were a fire that might go out and like a fire that might burn them to a crisp.” And some savory dialogue, like “You sneakin’ wolves… can’t you find no man-sized meat? Have you got to eat veal?” And the ending is bracingly bleak. Kristoffer Tabori, with his deep scratchy weathered voice, is the ideal reader for the audiobook. View all my reviews
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Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “You’re no better than the things you kill.” Imagine a compact, undigressive Moby-Dick about buffalo hunters instead of whalers. Both Melville’s epic and John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing (1960) depict an obsessive leader who takes men with him away from civilization to kill impressive wild creatures. A big difference between veteran buffalo hunter Miller and Captain Ahab is that the former hasn’t been mutilated by a bull buffalo, and his holocaust of a hunt has nothing to do with revenge. In that way, Williams’ novel is more terrible than Melville’s, because Miller is not existentially struggling against “whiteness” etc. but is merely a man with enough powder, lead, and endurance to kill thousands of buffalo. After twenty years in Boston and three years at Harvard, William “Will” Andrews, whose Unitarian lay minister father encouraged him to read Emerson more than the Bible, arrives at the aptly named Butcher’s Crossing on the Kansas prairie. The “town” is an inchoate collection of six shabby structures and a few tents, reeking of manure, dust, heat, and buffalo hide brine pits. What on earth is Will doing there?! He wants to leave cities to experience wilderness and nature and become a transparent Emersonian eyeball, a free and clean part of God. Will his expectations be fulfilled when he goes on a buffalo hunt with the experienced, laconic hunter Miller, his Bible reading, whisky drinking, one-handed right hand man Charlie, and the unpleasant, pessimistic, skilled buffalo skinner Schneider? Miller claims to know a pristine hidden valley in the Colorado mountains where they will find thousands of prime wild buffalo, the hides of which ought to be bring thousands of dollars. All they need is a little capital with which to outfit their team, which Andrews, having received a bequest from an uncle, is eager to provide. The novel, then, has some usual western genre features. A young, innocent, sensitive guy from the east goes west to experience nature and hooks up with a seasoned, capable hunter and his grizzled sidekick. A shrewd businessman and a good prostitute appear. A handful of Indians make a miserable cameo. A quest ensues for an elusive mountain valley sheltering a vast herd of buffalo. But in its philosophical underpinnings and questionings, the novel is not a usual western. The story is introduced by a pair of epigraphs, one by Emerson from “Nature” (nature blessing people with the sanctity of religion) and one by Melville from The Confidence-Man (nature freezing people to death or making them idiots). The dueling epigraphs and novel remind me of Melville’s annotated copy of Emerson’s essays on microfilm I read in graduate school, where he wrote in the margin at one point something like, “I pity the fool who subscribes to this!” Williams (I believe) is more in Melville’s camp regarding nature. And at times the book doesn’t feel like a usual western: “In his mind were fragments of Miller’s talk about the mountain country to which they were going, and those fragments glittered and turned and fell softly in accidental and strange patterns. Like the loose stained bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, they augmented themselves with their turning and found light from irrelevant and accidental sources.” The novel is sensual. Williams writes vivid details involving the five senses of activities like smelling a rotting buffalo carcass, being thirsty, climbing a steep mountain too quickly, being lost in a blizzard, submersing oneself in a fast cold river, shaving after eight months in the wilderness, looking at a woman’s nude body, and so on. Concise, poetic writing: “A patch of turning aspen flamed a deep cold in the green of the pine,” and “The sip of whisky seared his throat as if a torch had been thrust into it.” Many vivid details, too, about the “craft” of buffalo hunting: making bullets, sharpening knives, shooting buffalo, skinning buffalo, dressing buffalo, stacking hides, thawing frozen thongs in a bucket of pee, and, of course, plenty of details of the buffalo’s body, like “His head lowered, his upturned curving horns, shiny in the sunlight, bright against the dark mop of hair that hung over his head.” It is at times an awful novel. Miller’s knowledge that Indians use every part of the buffalo, even down to making beautiful and clever and fine bone toys and implements from them, does not prevent him from becoming “an automaton” in a non-stop orgy of killing them for nothing more than their hides. Far from using every part of the buffalo in the service of life, they sprinkle strychnine on the myriad carcasses to kill wolves. Although Charlie hates wolves as the devil’s brood, Miller’s destruction of the buffalo is a cold, mindless response to the life in which he has immersed himself. I regret that the point of view character and moral center of the novel Will doesn’t evince a little more discomfort with the holocaust of over 4,000 buffalo, but I suppose that just makes him a 19th-century rather than a 21st-century man. The novel shares with Williams’ historical academia novel Stoner (1965) his careful writing and psychological insights. Butcher’s Crossing is a literate western, and it must be quite disturbing to anyone who loves animals alive more than dead. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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