Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

  Suicide is pondered by the widower, not impulsively but rationally, even dutifully, over a period of years: “If I cannot live without her, if my life is reduced to mere passive continuance, I shall become active. I knew soon my preferred method—a hot bath, a glass of wine next to the taps, and an exceptionally sharp Japanese carving knife.” Yet, sensibly, the widower realizes that if he were to die, the most intimate recollections of the loved one will die with him, irremediably: “I could not kill myself because then I would be killing her.”

  The question is then, for the survivor, how to live? As if one were a balloonist high in the air, imperiled by the whims of the wind-currents, at times becalmed, perplexed. Barnes discovers in himself a sudden love of opera, where previously he hadn’t cared for this “least comprehensible” of art forms; but now, in the rawness of grief, he sees how “opera cuts to the chase—as death does.” Here is an art not fearful of grandiloquence and overstatement: “an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm; an art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart. Here was my new social realism.” Levels of Life might have been amplified by more of these unexpectedly uplifting passages, like those in which Barnes remarks that he talks “constantly” to his deceased wife, years after her death, as Ivy Compton-Burnett reputedly talked to her long-deceased companion, even in the presence of others:

  “Outsiders might find this an eccentric, or ‘morbid,’ or self-deceiving, habit; but outsiders are by definition those who have not known grief. . . . The paradox of grief: if I have survived what is now four years of her absence, it is because I have had four years of her presence.” Another paradox is that “grief is the negative image of love; and if there can be accumulation of love over the years, then why not of grief?” Barnes quotes with approval Marianne Moore’s gnomic remark: “The cure for loneliness is solitude.”

  Barnes says little in these pages about the roles of others, family, relatives, friends and acquaintances, to help alleviate grief. Perhaps, in his case, these have been of minimal help. The Silent Ones are the more reprehensible in his eyes for not aiding in the recall of the deceased wife as they are precious to the survivor as means for “corroboration”: “You need them to tell you that what you once were—the two of you—was seen. Not just known from within.” Barnes has little faith in the power of one’s will to guide, if not control, the waywardness of emotion. In less secular, more traditional cultures, the grieving after death is ritualized; no individual has to invent for himself a way of mourning, at least externally. Death is an occasion—frequent, if still shocking—in the social fabric, not an aberration in personal, private life. As he lives in a secular, urban, intellectual milieu, Julian Barnes presents himself as essentially adrift and unmoored, and stoically so; his grieving is passionate but narrow, as in the “solipsism of grief” he defines himself proudly beyond the range of understanding that a widow or widower might wish to make others happy, granted their own, inward unhappiness; that one might find a temporary way out of the “solipsism of grief” by taking on the grief of another or even, ludicrous as it might seem, acquiring a dog or a cat not for the sake of actually alleviating one’s own grief, but for the animal’s sake. Providing companionship for another, a safe home, some sort of sanctuary amid the buffeting of treacherous wind-currents is not equivalent to retrieving the lost loved one, but it is a gesture of modest charity that might have pleased the lost loved one, if she or he could but know.

  Levels of Life ends on a tentatively hopeful note—not optimistic, but rather rueful. “There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means ‘the longing for something.’” This is one kind of loneliness, the obverse of the widower’s more particularized loneliness, which is the “absence of a very specific someone.” The final, perfectly honed lines of the memoir suggest the balloonist’s quasi-mystic, Romantic expectation: “All that has happened is that from somewhere—or nowhere—an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again. But where are we being taken?”

  Levels of Life

  By Julian Barnes

  “WHEN THE LEGEND BECOMES FACT”:

  LARRY McMURTRY

  When the legend becomes fact,

  print the legend.

  John Ford

  Already in the 1880s a cannily vulgar mythologizing of the Old West has begun. Here are Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday awkwardly impersonating themselves in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Denver, as reported in Larry McMurtry’s radically distilled new novel The Last Kind Words Saloon:

  The gunfighter skit involving Wyatt and Doc did not, at first, go well at all. For one thing the pair had not bothered to practice—both despised practice, on the whole. “Pull a pistol out of a holster and shoot it—why would that require practice?” Wyatt wondered. . . . Sure enough, on the very first draw, Wyatt yanked his gun out so vigorously that it somehow flew out of his hand and landed twenty feet in front of him with the barrel in the dirt. Doc, meanwhile, had the opposite problem: he had jammed his pistol in its holster so tight that it wouldn’t’ come out. This behavior annoyed Doc so much that he ripped off the holster and threw it at a bronc, that happened to be loose in the arena. The crowd was largely silent: this was not what they had expected; many members of the audience were eager to get on to the dramatic reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand. . . . “They’ve made it into a comedy routine,” [Bill Cody] said. . . . The second night went little better. Some prop man filled Doc’s gun with blanks but forgot to do the same with Wyatt’s. Doc then shot Wyatt six times while Wyatt snapped his useless pistol six times.

  If the fabled gunslingers had been skilled actors playing “Wyatt Earp” and “Doc Holliday”—quasi-historic Wild West figures—the audience, eager to be entertained, would have applauded; unfortunately, the men are the actual Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, thus at a disadvantage. By the time they finally get their routine right, the crowd has lost interest; by the sixth night of performing, the show is shut down by its owner Harry Tammen, “the magnate who owned the show and most of Colorado.” The disappointed gunslingers are told that there are other shows: “Texas Jack might hire you, and there’s plenty of gambling dens in Denver.”1

  Drawing upon the particular sort of bittersweet/sardonic nostalgia for the Texas past that pervades McMurtry’s grand epic Lonesome Dove (1985), the most acclaimed and best-loved of McMurtry’s many novels, The Last Kind Words Saloon is a deftly narrated, often comically subversive work of fiction described by its author as a “ballad in prose whose characters are afloat in time; their legends and their lives in history rarely match.” If Lonesome Dove is a chronicle of the cattle-driving West that contains within its vast, broad ranges a small but heartrending intimate tragedy of paternal neglect, The Last Kind Words Saloon is a dark postmodernist comedy in which intimacy is flattened to cartoon thinness, and human personality is a matter of the most fleeting mortality. Much of McMurtry’s fiction, from the early, perfectly rendered Horseman, Pass By (1961) and The Last Picture Show (1966) through Lonesome Dove (1985), Texasville (1987), Streets of Laredo (1993), Duane’s’ Depressed (1999), and By Sorrow’s River (2003) has been richly elegiac,2 but in The Last Kind Words Saloon the author has replaced elegy with a merciless sort of irony. It’s as if Vladimir and Estragon of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot have been transformed into two aging gunslingers trading wisecracks and platitudes in an existentially barren Western landscape, waiting for a redemption that never comes.

  Though the author admiringly alludes to John Ford’s famous remark about life and legend as a preface to The Last Kind Words Saloon, the novel seems to subvert the director’s dictum: it isn’t the inflated legends of Western gunslingers with which the novel is concerned but the less-than-heroic lives behind the legends; the lives of men like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Kit Carson, Johnny Ringo, Buffalo Bill Cody, and the participants of the notorious 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, among others, who have figured in the history
of the Old West largely by chance, having been in the right place at the right time.

  Appropriately, The Last Kind Words Saloon derives its title from a portable sign which one of Wyatt Earp’s brothers carries with him to affix to a number of saloons in Texas and Arizona. (“Warren Earp drug it around all over the place. We never did know what he meant by it,” Wyatt Earp’s wife, Jessie, comments years later.) The novel is divided into four sections determined by their settings: Long Grass, Denver, Mobetie, Tombstone. As in a classic western film characters seem to arise out of the landscape and to be contained within it; though many things will happen to Wyatt, Doc, their wives, companions, and adversaries, human agents seem curiously passive here in the West, like puppets in the service of history. Less distinctive even than the small Texas brush town Lonesome Dove, Long Grass is “nearly in Kansas, but not quite. It’s nearly in New Mexico, too, but not quite. Some have even suggested that we might be in Texas.” (As Wyatt observes: “The one thing that’s certain is that Long Grass has no newspaper office. . . . For that matter it has no news.”) It is in Long Grass that the novel begins, with a cinematic flourish of a scene that swiftly introduces most of the main characters of the novel; it is in Tombstone (Arizona) that the novel’s climactic scene is placed, with the legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral. For pages the novelist has been foreshadowing this dramatic spectacle and yet, when the gunfight at last erupts, it is rendered so offhandedly that the incident feels anticlimactic, unreal. (Note that “offhandedly” is a gun-term, meaning shooting a gun without aiming it and without premeditation.) Narration has shrunk to film-script brevity as Wyatt, Doc, and Wyatt’s brothers walk armed up the “dusty street” toward the Clantons’ corral:

  “This is a damn waste of time,” Wyatt said.

  “Now didn’t I predict that very thing?” Doc said. “I told you to let it be.”

  But just as he said it gunfire erupted and Morgan went down.

  “No, no . . . I don’t want this,” Virgil said. “I’m the sheriff.”

  Then he went down too.

  Ike Clanton quickly ran into the photographer’s shop and was not shot. Both McLaureys fired and Wyatt killed them both. Somebody hit young Clanton, who died after a brief agony.

  Doc was nicked, Wyatt untouched . . .

  When Wyatt walked in on Jessie she grabbed him and held him tight and kissed him passionately.

  “You fool, you could have been killed,” Jessie said, crying.

  “Yes, but I wasn’t, let go,” Wyatt said.

  So much for legend.

  READERS OF THE LAST Kind Words Saloon are likely to think of a film script more readily than a ballad, for the novel unfolds with the dreamlike fluidity and lightness of touch of film with its quick cuts, flashbacks and ever-moving, restless camera; there are fifty-nine short chapters divided into paragraphs that are frequently single sentences, and these sentences simple declarative sentences. Landscape is purely visual, atmospheric: “beyond the tiny town there was the vastness of the plains: colorless, gloomy, vast: the sea of grass.” The sketchily drawn figures of The Last Kind Words Saloon do indeed seem to float about freely in time; often they are hardly more than fleeting images on a screen, uttering gnomic remarks to one another:

  “Do you ever wonder what it will be like to die?” Doc asked.

  “No, I don’t spend very little time in idle speculation,” Wyatt said.

  Like former Texas Rangers Captain Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrea of Lonesome Dove, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday are contrasting personalities: Earp is taciturn, Holliday loquacious. Earp has a “big reputation as a gunfighter, which puzzled Jessie, because as far as she knew he had never actually killed anybody.” Doc is affable, “rarely sober.” Earp has been a pimp, a law enforcement officer for hire, and a saloon-keeper; Doc shuns work, but is a capable gambler. The men appear to be friends by default, as if they have no choice. Their conversations have the ring of repartee. As both are poor at impersonating themselves, both are poor shots at target practice when they are alone and unobserved:

  Wyatt fired three times, shattering no bottles. Annoyed, he threw his pistol at the line of bottles, knocking over three. Then he took a derringer out of an inner pocket and shattered two, to his surprise.

  Doc was still struggling with the difficult prone position. He shot but no bottles shattered. He drew back his arm to throw the gun but then caught himself at the last second. “Throwing guns is a bad habit,” he said. “You might throw your gun away just as some loose Indians come charging down upon you.”

  “There ain’t no loose Indians, Doc,” Wyatt said. “But if there were, throwing your gun wouldn’t help you.” He fired once more with the derringer and shattered a bottle.

  “Good lord, I hit one,” he said. “Luck ain’t to be despised.”

  “Who said I despised it?” Doc said, dusting off his vest.

  The Last Kind Words Saloon begins with a clandestine meeting in a “royal purple” railway car between the Texas rancher Charlie Goodnight and the “tallest man in England, and also the richest” Lord Benny Ernle; their plan is to be partners in “the largest ranch in the world.” Ernle has made himself a “legend” in the West “by ordering the construction of a vast castle on a bluff overlooking the Canadian River.” But in several swift chapters the wealthy Englishman is dead in a riding accident in rough terrain, and the deal with Goodnight is thwarted. Like a sardonic chorus Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday are observers of this folly at a distance.

  In the interstices of the white men’s blundering stratagems, Kiowa Indians behave badly under the leadership of the demonic Satank and Satanta the Red Bear. Their atrocities are the stock-in-trade of westerns, though their motive would bear scrutiny in another, more traditional novel of the sociology of the West:

  The teamsters played a heavy price for blundering into the People’s country. The leader, a stout man who yelled the loudest, was chained facedown from a wagon tongue and slowly burned alive—his screams could be heard for a long time, along with those of a tall boy who had his genitals cooked over a small fire. . . . The other two teamsters were disemboweled, their guts pulled out so some hot coals could be stuffed into their stomach cavity. Satank also cut off their noses and forced them to eat some of their own offal.

  Afterward the members of the little war party felt fine. Torturing whites was a splendid way to spend the afternoon. Seeing to it that your enemies died as painfully as possible was the best revenge for what the whites had taken from them.

  The women of The Last Kind Words Saloon are familiar McMurtry types, sharp-tongued wives and “whores” who appear to be, however improbably in this rough environment, more than matches for the men. Wyatt Earp has an uneasy relationship with his wife, Jessie, who frequently goads him into hitting her; when Doc Holliday asks Jessie why she behaves in this way she says, “To see if he’s alive. To see if he cares.” (Earp does, enough to knock Jessie violently across a room and split her lip. “Oh, Jessie, why will you provoke me? I don’t mean to hit you—it just wells over.”) About the inquisitive reporter Nellie Courtright it is said that annoying as she could be, “there was no denying she was pretty. Bearing children had not spoiled her figure. If anything she was higher-breasted than Jessie.” The rancher Charlie Goodnight’s sexually aggressive schoolteacher wife Mary tells her husband that she is giving him ten years “to make this into a proper county, with judges and courts and all that goes with a county. And after the courthouse I want a college, where people can learn their algebra. Do those two things in a timely fashion and maybe I won’t leave you for brighter climes.” The consort of the wealthy, doomed Englishman is the exotic San Saba, “the most beautiful whore on the plains”; San Saba has a unique background, having been born in a Turkish seraglio and raised by eunuchs until she’d managed to be purchased and rescued by Lord Ernle. (“Rather filthy specimen, that sultan,” Lord Ernle said. “Hamid something. I couldn’t see wasting such beauty on Orientals.”) Casually it is revealed that Lord Ern
le, with an English wife and an exotic American consort, nonetheless prefers “enjoying his many boys” though McMurtry doesn’t chronicle any of these dalliances.

  With the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the saga of The Last Kind Words Saloon comes to a rudely abrupt end. As a kind of epilogue is a final chapter titled “Nellie’s Visits by Nellie Courtright,” a chattily nostalgic look back to the 1880s:

  Once I got bitten by the journalism bug there was nothing to stop me from going wherever the stories took me, which was pretty much all over our Old West as it was waning. . . . I had long forgotten Wyatt Earp and his violent brothers when he was brought to my attention by a story in an Oakland newspaper about a riot that took place in Oakland. There had been a big prizefight and Wyatt Earp had been the referee.

  Nellie Courtright has been winding her way through The Last Kind Words Saloon, writing up tales of the Old West for such papers as the New York Sun; of the novel’s brave, plucky, reckless and undaunted women, Nellie is perhaps the most admirable: “She was needing money just then—she had six girls to educate and clothe so she immediately took the job.”