The Ox-Bow Incident (2 page)

Most important, the end of his long struggle to be an artist is not exile or flight, as in so many lives and books, but reconciliation with his town and himself. Art ultimately leads him not away from his limited western American town, but deeper into it. He adds music to Reno without obliterating the traces of Reno that are left in himself. He is not led, as his friend Lawrence Black is, to a self-destructive perfectionism, either. He does not consider himself contaminated by moving from dance bands to symphonies, from folk music to composition, and back again. Ultimately he simply incorporates the divergences of taste between himself and his town. Some things he outgrows, as he outgrows his adolescent adorations and excesses, but they have strengthened rather than harmed him. And that makes
The City of Trembling Leaves
unique in its genre. Clark has not justified himself at the expense of his surroundings, if we may take Tim to represent Clark. He has tried to use them to grow from, and in.

One must admit flaws in this novel. For me, at least, there is an excess of philosophical abstraction. And in trying to present Tim’s adolescent adorations sympathetically but ironically, and at the same time not be ironic about the seriousness of Tim’s efforts to make a unity of his divided heritage, Clark is sometimes overlong and unduly detailed, as if he feared the realistic boy might get lost under the symbolic artist.

It is an almost impossible task that he set himself, at this stage of the West’s history, and it reminds me of another long, imperfect novel about an artist born in a little western town: Willa Cather’s
The Song of the Lark
. But Willa
Cather assumed that the American artist must escape the limitations of his birthplace, and be a stranger in the earth. When Clark lets Tim Hazard, after many failures, achieve his “Symphony of the Leaves” and settle down to live and work in Reno, he has dared to suggest that there is a possible reconciliation between serious art, the ordinariness of a little western city, and the primal gods of the earth. It is something I find hard to believe, but I would like to.

In
The Ox-Bow Incident
, Clark had suggested that the values of the frontier society were narrow, half formed, and in large measure false, and in the mind of the sensitive cowpuncher who was one of the lynchers, he had planted a civilizing seed of conscience and doubt and unrest, and hence growth. In
The City of Trembling Leaves
he proposed that a native western boy, given talent and motivation, might become an artist even in the unlikely arena of The Biggest Little City on Earth, and might make commonplace origins serve art. In
The Track of the
Cat, his third novel, he came in quite another way at the theme of civilization, the evil of the exploitative and profane white culture, and the possibility of reconciliation between that culture’s energies and the watchful gods of the earth. Some reviewers were irresistibly reminded of Melville’s white whale when they read about Clark’s black mountain lion, and the book had a mixed reception. On rereading it, I find myself willing to grant some of the objections but not to grant that the flaws are fatal. In some ways,
The Track of the Cat
may be Walter Clark’s best book.

Objections on grounds of realism are valid enough. Mountain lions don’t act the way Clark’s cat acts, don’t hunt men, couldn’t break the neck of a two-year-old steer, much less a mature bull, much less two or three steers and a bull in one flurry of killing. Only a lion given a heavy injection of literary evil would act that way. Some readers would have liked it better if Clark had made his symbolic beast an old rogue grizzly, the only animal possible to the Sierra Nevada that
could
break the neck of a steer, and
might
stalk his hunter. Once more, never mind. This is not a realistic story. And anyway, Keats said Cortez, Shakespeare put a seacoast on Bohemia. This beast is animate (and in good part imaginary) evil, and if the evil itself is made real to me, I am willing to suspend my disbelief in its objective correlative.

George R. Stewart objected to precisely the sensitivity-within-harshness, the literary transformation of surface realism, that I have called a virtue in
The Ox-Bow Incident
. He insisted that Arthur Bridges, the protagonist, son of a Nevada ranch family, awakened by the bellowing of attacked steers, would not have heard the sound “like muted horns a little out of tune.” That, Stewart said, came out of Walter Clark’s sensibility, not out of the perceptions of Arthur Bridges.

Yes. Of course. I, too, would question that technical impropriety, that intrusion of the authorial mind, if I ran across it in a student story. But Walter Clark was no student, and what his authorial voice had to say was important. His Arthur is endowed with some of the prophetic mysticism and second sight of Joe Sam, the family’s Paiute hired man. Moreover, it is only by peering over the shoulders of his characters and nudging us occasionally with his own voice that Clark is able to steer us among the tensions of his story and suggest the conflicts among his generally inarticulate characters—between Curt and Joe Sam, Curt and his brother Arthur, Gwen and the mother, all the rest of the family and the drunken father. Love and hate, good and evil, are as thick as the air in that ranch house. And I keep remembering that one of Walt Clark’s abiding intentions was to naturalize sensitivity, subtlety, spirituality, modulated and ambiguous ideas, in his realistic western settings. He chose not to be limited by the verbal and spiritual vocabulary of probability. So far as I am concerned, it is bad if he does it badly, legitimate if he gets away with it. He gets away with it.

Especially in its early sections,
The Track of the Cat
is a slow, tense drama, melodramatically lighted. For years, as a teacher, I used it as a magnificent illustration of how to achieve suspense by mere eyestrain. The characters are never overexplained; they reveal themselves in speech and act, and if their creator’s need to make them cast a long shadow sometimes strains them toward some monomaniac excess, they are actually less strained in that way than some of the characters (the preacher, say, or Tetley) in
The Ox-Bow Incident
, or the wonderful, manic musician Knute Fenderson in
The City of Trembling Leaves
. Having granted the black panther a little legitimate heightening, we should not deny the same indulgence to the human characters.

Symbolic, all of them, but for the most part persuasively real, too. There is a real lion loose in the mountains, but the black painter of evil lives in the ranch house. He lives in Curt, as dominating and arrogant as the worst of the Ox-Bow lynchers; and in Curt’s mother, harshly pious, capable of suffering but invulnerable to understanding; and to a lesser extent in Curt’s weak and evasive father. Their evil has already defeated the gentle brother, Arthur, long before Curt finds Arthur’s broken-necked body in the snow. The same family evil—an evil that we soon recognize as a regional evil, a social evil, an evil of attitude and spirit like the cowardice and mob impulse in
The Ox-Bow Incident—
has completely destroyed the sister, Grace. The only one capable of resisting it, the only one of them, besides the defeated Arthur, who can make contact with the primitive survivor Joe Sam, is Hal, the youngest son. Most readers will identify themselves with Hal and feel his role as their own. It is hard to resist the temptation to be a culture hero. It is important to notice that Hal’s position, his hopeful stance as combiner and reconciler, is the essential stance of Art Croft, too, and of Tim Hazard, and of Walter Clark.

I am perhaps eccentric in responding less to Curt’s disintegration—evil destroying itself—than to the slow, tense
drama of the ranch house. I feel Curt’s disaster as a necessity of the plot rather than as a realistic probability. My experience with the Curts of the world does not lead me to think that either as persons or as symbols they are ever touched by the primal gods, that they ever comprehend good and evil, that they are very often visited by poetic justice. Curt at the end of this novel is something out of Eugene O’Neill, an Emperor Jones in chaps, where the others, heightened or not, are authentic. But I will put up with both him and the black panther—excesses of the literary and symbolizing imagination—in order to experience the believable, complex, human torments of that ranch family in a crisis.

All of Walter Clark’s novels were written from ideas, I believe, especially from a preoccupation with problems of good and evil within the context of the real West. He was a little like Hawthorne in knowing all the time what he wanted to say. The characters he created to say it through, whether historical or contemporary, have most of the time a solidity and realism that are altogether admirable. If he had a weakness, it was that sometimes his ideas outran their realistic base, and he steered his people, or talked about them, instead of letting them act. Not often. And when the symbolic larger meanings emerge, as they do so often, from realities as solid as logs, when we meet and recognize the substance before we are asked to contemplate the shadow, then I follow him with my hat in my hand. He wasn’t quite, like Hawthorne, trying to develop a usable past, or not that alone. He was trying, rather, to marry sensitivity and ideas to the half-primitive western life he knew. He kept trying to do the impossible, and he never missed it far. From 1949 on, many of us were waiting for the book that would outdo the three fine earlier books and cap the career. It never came. Why?

Some have guessed that teaching distracted him, and certainly he was a teacher incredibly generous with his
time. But he was always a teacher, even while writing the earlier books. He taught in Vermont, in the Cazenovia (New York) High School, at the University of Montana, at San Francisco State, at Nevada, with shorter stints at Stanford, (Connecticut) Wesleyan, and perhaps other places. He wrote his three novels and his volume of short stories between the demands of teaching, and I can’t believe that it was teaching that stopped him. Moreover, he told me in the early 1960s that he wrote all the time, and kept throwing away what he wrote. That was long after
The Track of the Cat
.

So did he, after all, fall victim to the perfectionism that he specifically repudiated in his character Lawrence Black? Possibly. What he had written had been widely misunderstood. His clash of belief and attitude with Leslie Fiedler at the University of Montana might have made him determined to say it in some way that even Fiedler could understand, and he might have become discouraged with the difficulty. It is likely that the dramatization of his difficulty, through the Fiedler episode and the challenge that Fiedler issued in such essays as “The Montana Face” would have made him more self-critical. And yet he was always self-critical. I cannot conceive that mere difficulty or misunderstanding would have silenced him or made him destroy his work.

What, then? I wish I knew. There is perhaps part of an answer suggested by the fact that from 1962 onward he devoted much of his creative time to editing the diaries of an obscure pioneer named Alfred Doten. To turn from fiction to history has been the tendency of scores of American writers who were reared on the thinly civilized frontiers. We have all done it, ever since Edward Eggleston started it in Indiana more than a hundred years ago. Once we have written the books that deal with the early years of our region, or with our own growing up to identity and awareness, we are likely to find neither the present nor the past
rich enough to nourish the imagination. For one thing, the western past has been sanitized by myth, and cut off from the real past and real present. For another, both present and past are too new. The apparent maturity that comes with the creation of valid literature about a new region is apparent only. Culturally, the first literature, even when it is fine, may be premature, the product of importing a seasoned and organic tradition into an unseasoned place and society. And the growing of a native tradition takes generations.

This is speculation only. I was speculating in those terms years ago, and about others than Walter Clark. I had myself in mind too. I looked at Bernard DeVoto, and Paul Horgan, and A. B. Guthrie, and H. L. Davis, and other good western writers, and I found them often slipping away from fiction and into history, as if at a certain point in their careers they found that they had done what their circumstances permitted, and had now to start digging the foundations for the real cultural house that would come only with time. In a sense, that is the history of American literature, not merely of western literature. The kind of cultural deprivation that Hawthorne and Henry James lamented is not fatal, as witness their own careers. Neither is it fatal in the West, in a newer time, as witness the strenuous effort and real achievement of Walter Clark.

But without a more developed and cohesive society than the West, in its short life and against all the handicaps of revolutionary change and dispersion, has been able to grow—and without a native audience for its native arts—there may well come a time in a writer’s career when the clutch slips and the gears will not take hold on the materials that are most one’s own.

If those things are true, or partly true, then it is understandable why Walter van Tilburg Clark’s years as a novelist should have been short. The remarkable thing is that he rendered his own divided inheritance with such subtlety and skill, and never took refuge in exile. His books are on
the permanent shelf, and I don’t mean the shelf of mythic, easy, deluding Westerns. His theme was civilization, and he recorded, indelibly, its first steps in a new country. He naturalized the struggle between good and evil in Nevada as surely as Robinson Jeffers naturalized tragedy on the Big Sur coast.

—

W
ALLACE
E
ARLE
S
TEGNER
(1909–93), the prolific novelist, biographer, historian, essayist, environmentalist, and longtime head of the creative writing program at Stanford until his retirement in 1971, is best known for his writings about the American West. His novels include
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
, the Pulitzer Prize–winning
Angle of Repose
, and
The Spectator Bird
, winner of the National Book Award.