Walter Van Tilburg Clark

by Les Weil

  Tink-tink-a-link went the meadow lark. And then another one, even farther off, teenk-teenk-a-leenk. Then Gil said, "I'll be glad to get out of here," as if he'd let it all go.

  "Yeh," I said.

  AFTERWORD

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1956, the Virginia Players, an imported stock company, were presenting Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest at the Opera House in Virginia City, Montana. The incongruity between this English farce-comedy and the wild setting and violent history of Virginia City could not have been greater. A wealthy man has done for Virginia City what Mr. Rockefeller did for Williamsburg, restoring the place to a semblance of what it was when it had a reason for existing. The Opera House and the adjoining saloon, the Bale of Hay, are a part of that restoration. After watching the play as if we were in London, we adjourned to the Bale of Hay to wash the inconsistency of it out of our mouths. The man I came to know as Walter Van Tilburg Clark took a position at the extreme left end of the long bar and held it throughout the evening, which was prolonged into early morning. He drank moderately and talked little, but held his place, seemingly completely absorbed in some world of his own, perhaps investing those bare hills and pine-board houses with the vitality they once possessed.

  I suspect it was here that I glimpsed the quality that gives distinction to Clark's novels and short stories. Not content with surface manifestations, he probes for the deeper meaning and the reasons for the westerners' spectacular acts. He is not consciously trying to be either heroic or profound, but rather to see how much he can understand in order that he may make others understand what he sees. His refusal to pander, to join the parade of popular western writers, is something for which he probably deserves little credit. He is bound by his own limitations, one of which seems to be a built-in integrity that forbids him to do what he does not himself respect. Considering his background, one could say that he must have a New England conscience standing guard over his impulses. To such a man fame and fortune come as incidentals, not as a result of a calculated chase. Walter Van Tilburg Clark has skipped the fortune which he could have had, because, as I shall show later, he can write conventional "horse opery" until the world looks level. I mean he could write it if he were somebody else. Many with less knowledge and skill are living in big houses on high hills. In short, Clark is in one sense a victim of his own standard of excellence.

  He was born in East Orland, Maine, on August 3, 1909. When he was eight years of age his father became president of the University of Nevada in Reno. He took two degrees at Nevada, but what is more important, he came to know the people. "Many of our close friends," he says, "were ranching and mining people, and I spent a good deal of time in both these worlds, and a good deal also camping and hiking in the desert hills and the Sierras.... Though I was born in Maine . . . I am essentially a westerner, and mostly of the desert breed." Like Hamlin Garland and Eugene Manlove Rhodes, he had to go East before he got started writing about the West. He published The Ox-Bow Incident in 1940, The City of Trembling Leaves in 1945, and the next year he returned to the West for good. The Track of the Cat appeared in 1949 and The Watchful Gods and Other Stories was published a year later.

  It is not the purpose here to appraise Clark's total achievements or to guess at his place in American literature. It may seem rash to suggest that any western writer can deserve that honor, especially one who chooses the same characters and situations that have been used so much in pulps and thrillers. The stereotyped story has produced the stereotyped critic who forgets that the western author has no choice but to work with the material on the ground at the time of the story. The author or critic may lament with Henry James that there were "no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manners, nor old country houses nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins" in the West. He who writes about Nevada in 1885 has none of these advantages so dear to the expatriate.

  "What is there to do in this town, anyway?" demanded the cowboy who sensed the cultural limitations. " . you have five choices," said Canby, "eat, sleep, drink, play poker or fight. Or can you shoot some pool."

  As for women, the prospect was even bleaker. After the married women ran Rose Mapen out of town, the only unmarried woman known to Canby was "eighty-two, blind, and a Piute."

  On the positive side, what did Clark have to work with in creating high drama in Nevada in 1885? He had scenery -mostly mountainous. He had weather -the wind and the snow. He had men and men only, for the West in those days was a male society. Western writers are notably weak on women. Clark discards them almost completely, refusing to drag them in by the hair. He mentions only two by their full names.

  Since there are no unspoiled women, there is no real love affair. Rose Mapen is attractive enough, too attractive, but that problem is solved when she turns up with a husband -"the damned superior son-of-a-bitch" from San Francisco.

  Men had two ways of livelihood: either running cattle or mining. The Ox-Bow Incident is concerned with cattle, supposedly stolen.

  There was a semblance of law, but it was enforced, if at all, almost by common consent. The code required each man to furnish his own protection, and only when the code was violated did the law function. If it failed, or was too slow, the habitually armed men took it into their own hands and considerably shortened the process of justice.

  Prior to 1885 wild Indians were a factor in western life, but by the time of the Ox-Bow incident they were irrelevant.

  Finally, Clark had Canby's saloon, which was the forum and the club of this male society. These are the ingredients of western life, and the writer who portrays it can no more ignore them than the English writer can escape the thatched cottages and ivied ruins of Victorian England. When Clark accepted these limitations and sought to handle his shopworn material in such a way as to create high drama, he set himself a hard task, made more difficult by the hack writers who have cut the psychological ground from under the serious one. He did not deceive himself as to the problem. He says, in a letter dated Mill Valley, California, September 1, 1959:

  "Like everyone else who has ever wanted to use western materials, especially from the past (and it seems to me we have to establish contact with the past, literally, before we can handle the present with any depth), I had repeatedly found the stereotypes, both the people and the situations, of the standard 'horse oprey' in my way.... So, in part, I set about writing The Ox-Bow Incident as a kind of deliberate technical exercise. It was an effort to set myself free in that western past by taking all the ingredients of the standard western (which were real enough after all) and seeing if, with a theme that concerned me, and that had more than dated and local implications, and a realistic treatment, I could bring both the people and the situations alive again."

  Act One of this five-act tragedy is conventional western, nothing else. Two young men ride over the divide into Bridger's Wells, dismount at Canby's, get a little high, and engage in a poker game which ends in a fight. At that juncture an excited youth arrives to report the rumor that Kinkaid has been killed and maybe fifty head of cattle have been stolen. Lynching is mentioned.

  What does Clark do next? Where does he go with his story?

  What you expect is that the good guy will lead the posse and eventually, after much hard riding through the sage and around the boulders, bring the bad guy to bay. And since the good guy has the best horse he will outride his posse and face the bad guy alone, and they will fight it out in a six-shooter duel to the delight of all adolescents from six to sixty. Why, after such a beginning, anybody could finish according to the formula.

  But Clark bids farewell to the formula right there. The theme emerges, and the mob forms, finds its leaders, and vacillates because only two of some twenty persons involved really want to participate in the deed of that wild night. The mob is composed mainly of those who lack the physical or the moral courage to oppose it or refuse to be in it. The night riders find three men asleep in a valley where a little mountain stream has designed a course that looks li
ke an oxbow. Only three men vote against the "incident" which takes place at about sunrise. The main body starts back, only to meet Kinkaid, who is very much alive, and to learn that the cattle were bought and not stolen. Tragedy piles on tragedy as the story crashes to its end some twenty-four hours after it began. There is no hero.

  The book was immediately acclaimed as something special in western writing. The reviewers were followed by the literary appraisers and the scholars who are now searching all of Clark's work for symbolism, and they are making many guesses. Being leery of symbol hunters, I hit upon the highly original idea of asking Clark what deeper story he was trying to tell. I quote his answer.

  "The book was written in 1937 and '38, when the whole world was getting increasingly worried about Hitler and the Nazis, and emotionally it stemmed from my part of this worrying. A number of the reviewers commented on the parallel when the book came out in 1940, saw it as something approaching an allegory of the unscrupulous and brutal Nazi methods, and as a warning against the dangers of temporizing and of hoping to oppose such a force with reason, argument, and the democratic approach. They did not see, however, or at least I don't remember that any of them mentioned it (and that did scare me), although it was certainly obvious, the whole substance and surface of the story, that it was a kind of American Naziism that I was talking about. I had the parallel in mind, all right, but what I was most afraid of was not the German Nazis, or even the Bund, but that ever-present element in any society which can always be led to act the same way, to use authoritarian methods to oppose authoritarian methods.

  What I wanted to say was, 'It can happen here. It has happened here, in minor but sufficiently indicative ways, a great many times.'"

  As Clifton Fadiman has said, "Such a book can never be followed by another of the same kind; it stands by itself." It reveals the integrity of the author who has reversed the western formula, preserved the vitality of real life, and proved that western men are pretty much like other men and that literature can be made of their folly.

  -WALTER PRESCOTT WEBB