Nordstrom is the hero of “The Man Who Gave Up His Name.” (All of the leading roles in these novellas are played by heroes—no other word will do. By the same token the bad guys are bad.) Nordstrom is a troubleshooting corporate executive in Los Angeles with roots, like all of Harrison’s heroes, in rural areas of the Midwest. He gives it all up, career and family, and moves to the East Coast to take up a different kind of life—going to cooking school, for one thing. He has begun listening alone at night to stereo music as varied as Merle Haggard, Joplin’s Pearl, the Beach Boys, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Otis Redding, and The Grateful Dead. The life he gives up is one that he didn’t so much lose faith in as one which he totally lost interest with. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, he is overcome with the feeling of “What if what I’ve been doing all my life has been totally wrong?” Nordstrom has a wife, Laura, a splendidly interesting woman in her own right who is involved in film production, and a daughter, Sonia, a student at Sarah Lawrence. During Sonia’s engagement party in New York City, which Nordstrom attends, he has a seemingly harmless altercation, after a few lines of cocaine, with a sinister trio: a black pimp and shake-down man named Slats, his white girlfriend Sarah, and their pal, a tough named Berto. After the extortion attempt, Nordstrom throws Berto from a hotel room window. Then he heads for the Florida Keys and a six-day-a-week job as fry cook for a little diner. He spends his mornings fishing for tarpon, and late at night after work he dances alone to his transistor radio. I don’t know how to put this without sounding corny, but Nordstrom has found his measure of happiness on this earth.
I can’t begin to do justice to the nuances of character and honest complexities of plot in this work. The writing is precise and careful. Ezra Pound may or may not be right in his assertion that fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing. John Gardner would likely disagree, but I think Gardner, too, would approve this story, not only for the beauty and accuracy of its language, its minute description of felt life, but for its wisdom and the lives it illuminates—including our own.
Each of these novellas is concerned with those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action. In “Revenge,” Cochran, left for dead off a backcountry road in northern Mexico, is found and nursed back to health by a medical missionary named Diller. As Cochran slowly recovers his health, we are shown how he got himself into this fix: it was over a woman, another man’s wife. Tibey (means “shark”) Baldassaro Mendez is a rich, ruthless businessman who made his first million in narcotics and prostitution. Cochran, a tennis pal, falls in love with Tibey’s wife, the beautiful, cultured Miryea—they meet in Tibey’s library over a leather-bound copy of Garcia Lorca’s poetry. After several trysts in Cochran’s apartment in Tucson, Cochran and Miryea try to go away for a few days to Cochran’s cabin in Mexico, but they are trailed by Tibey and some of his henchmen. Cochran is beaten nearly to death, his car and cabin burned, and then “Tibey takes a razor from his pocket and deftly cuts an incision across Miryea’s lips, the ancient revenge for a wayward girl.” Now, several months later, Cochran’s twofold quest begins: to have his revenge on Tibey, and to locate Miryea.
Tibey has put her into the meanest whorehouse in Durango, Mexico, where she is forcibly administered heroin. But she recovers enough to stab a man and is then moved to a secret asylum for “terminally insane women and girls.” Several violent deaths later, part of a plot that often strains at the seams, Tibey and Cochran patch things up long enough to proceed to the asylum where Miryea is dying from, we can only assume, a broken heart.
Medical science cannot save her now. In the most primitive scene of a most primitive story, Cochran places a coyote tooth necklace around the dying woman’s neck. Then: “she sang the song he knew so well in a throaty voice that only faintly surpassed the summer droning of a cicada. It was her death song and she passed from life seeing him sitting there as her soul billowed softly outward like a cloud parting. It began to rain and a bird in the tree above them crooned as if he were the soul of some Mayan trying to struggle his way back earthward.”
Miryea then expires—no other word for it. Despite this embarrassment, the epilogue that follows this scene is curiously moving, and the story itself is eminently worth your time.
The title story, “Legends of the Fall,” is a virtuoso piece ranging in time back to the 1870s and touching down as recently as 1977. The story begins in Montana in October 1914, with three young brothers on their way to volunteer in the Canadian Army so they can fight in the Great War. The brothers are Alfred, the eldest, who will later become a U.S. senator from Montana; Tristan, the middle brother, who is the hero of this narrative and who, like Ahab, will curse God and so bring down upon his life the gravest kind of misfortunes; and Samuel, at eighteen the youngest, and a student at Harvard. Their father is William Ludlow, a wealthy rancher and retired cavalry officer who has seen duty under Custer. Here is a description of Custer from a work rich with description of man and nature: “Ludlow remembered Custer making an erratic speech to the troops with his long blond locks punctuated with clinging grasshoppers.” The mother of these young men is an eastern socialite who spends most of each year going to concerts and taking lovers.
Samuel is killed in France (his heart is removed from the body by Tristan, encased in paraffin, and shipped back to Montana); Alfred is severely wounded; and Tristan goes crazy and begins to take German scalps. Later, after his return home, Tristan marries his Boston cousin, Susannah, and takes her out to the ranch. But, restless, he soon pulls up stakes and leaves for a ten-year stint at adventuring that takes him to Africa and South America on his own sailing vessel. He returns to Montana to find that his wife has divorced him and married Alfred. But Susannah, too, has gone crazy and is later committed and dies in an institution. Tristan marries a half-breed, and they have children and a few years of grace. But this happiness is shattered when his wife is accidentally killed by a Prohibition agent. (You don’t curse God and get off scot-free.)
Tristan goes mad again for a while, then gets into whiskey-running in a big way. There are numerous bloody encounters with the vicious “Irish Gang” of San Francisco, including a murderous chase to Saratoga Springs, New York. The story ends with more violence back on the ranch in Montana, with the bad guys really getting it.
Despite a breakneck, mile-a-minute plot, this is a good tale—“rousing” is a word they used to use. Jim Harrison is good, and with this book he does honor to the old art of storytelling.
Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1979.
Bluebird Mornings, Storm Warnings
“Whole thing works on gravity. Heavy falls and the light floats away,” says a wheat rancher, explaining how a threshing machine operates in “The Van Gogh Field,” the title story in this startlingly original collection by William Kittredge, a book which won the 1979 St. Lawrence Award for Fiction. Heavy falls and the light floats away. And, a little later on in the same story: “What you do matters. What you do, right or wrong, has consequences, brother.” I have to think this is true in life as well as in the best fiction. What you do matters. Listen up: these are wonderfully rendered stories about people and their actions, and the consequences of those actions. It is about a special and particular place in this country that has not had many writers speaking for it. I think of Wallace Stegner, Mary Beal, H. L. Davis, Walter Van Tilburg Clark. To this group of writers we can now add William Kittredge.
The West is a far country, indeed, but this is not the West as in West Coast, cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver; these cities, for all the influence they exert on the lives of Kittredge’s people, may as well be on the European mainland. The West that figures in these stories runs from Red Bluff in north central California, through eastern Oregon into Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Drawing from the small towns and glens, tourist courts and spent farms, Kittredge presents us with a gallery of characters who are light-years away from the American
Dream, characters whose high hopes have broken down on them and gotten left behind like old, abandoned combines.
Kittredge knows the weather up there in his country, inside and outside. And the barometer is dropping fast; a man could get hurt, a man could get killed. They die, some of the people in these stories, of alcohol poisoning; or they get kicked to death by a horse, or crushed by a combine, or they burn to death in a car, drunk and sleeping beside the highway. Or else they’re slaughtered by a strange kid “gone rotten” as in the novella “The Soap Bear,” a brilliant, virtuoso piece of writing that puts me in mind of William Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid” for its demonic intensity and its vivid depiction of a place. Listen to what follows. How would you like to have this one in your house, with the drop on you, after he’s already committed murder five times over?
“Your feet get cold,” he said, “you put on your hat. There’s a rule. Your head is like a refrigerator, so you have to turn it off to get your fingers and toes warm. So you put on your hat.…”
He got up and went into the hallway where his lime-yellow stocking cap was stuffed into the pocket of his sheepskin coat, and pulled the cap down over his wet hair. “Now,” he said, “I don’t feel no pain, because my head is covered.
“You got to do lots of things this way,” he said, “with your head turned off.”
Here are some of the places that figure in these stories: Vacaville, Nyall, Arlington, Horn Creek, Black Flat, Frenchglen, Mary’s River, Corvallis, Prineville, Manteca, Davanero, Bakersfield, Shafter, Salem, Yakima, Paiute Creek, Klamath Falls, Tracy, Walla Walla, Donan, Red Bluff, McDermitt, Denio, Walker Lake, Bitterroot, Cody, Elk River, Clark Fork, Lompoc, Colorado Springs.
Some names: Clyman Teal, Robert Onnter, Jules Russel, Ambrose Vega, Davy Horse (so called “after his right leg was crushed against a rock-solid juniper gatepost by a stampeding green colt he tried to ride one Sunday afternoon when he was drunk, showing off for women”), Ben Alton, Corrie Alton, Steffanie Rudd, Jerome Bedderly, Oralie York, Red Yount, Lonnie, Cleve, Big Jimmy and “his running pal, Clarence Dunes,” Virgil and Mac Banta, Sheriff Shirley Holland, his wife, Doris, Billy Kumar who is “dumber than rocks,” Marly Prester, Amos Frantz who “kept a whore from Butte whose name was Annie,” Dora and Slipper Count.
There’s poetry in the naming of these places and people, but there is little poetry in the lives of the characters who populate Kittredge’s stories. Or maybe there was a little, once, in the beginning, but then something happened—it was worked out of you, or you drank too much, too long, and it left you; and now you’re worse off than ever because you still have to go through the motions, even though you know it’s for nothing now, a senseless reminder of better days. Now, no matter what, even if your brother is being buried that day, killed in a barroom brawl, you still have to go out and feed the stock. If you don’t feed them, they won’t be fed. You have to do it. There are obligations. And maybe this same brother, you’ve just found out, is the father of the child your wife is carrying. This is going to take some figuring, adjustments are going to have to be made. This is from “Thirty-Four Seasons of Winter,” one of the finest stories in the book.
If the characters in these stories listen to music, it’s music by Waylon Jennings, Roger Miller, Loretta Lynn, Tom T. Hall singing “Spokane Motel Blues,” Merle Haggard, Linda Ronstadt and “Party Doll,” church music like “Rock of Ages” and “Nearer My God to Thee.” If they read anything at all, they read the Sporting News. Besides, where most of them live, the big city newspapers, the papers from Seattle or Spokane or Portland or San Francisco, they’re a day late getting there and so the gloomy horoscopes are a confirmation rather than a prediction.
One of the characters in “The Man Who Loved Buzzards” has had dreams that carry over from night to night. She lives with the certainty that if she can raise the money to get a better house and move away, the dreams will stop. She doesn’t, and they don’t, of course.
There’s God’s plenty of “dis-ease” in these stories, a phrase Camus used to describe a certain terrible kind of domesticity. Listen to this middle-aged man, a childless man into his twentieth year of marriage:
How do you go to your own house when something has gone bad on the inside, when it doesn’t seem like your place to live anymore, when you almost cannot recall living there although it was the place where you mostly ate and slept for all your grown-up life? Try to remember two or three things about living there. Try to remember cooking one meal.… Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house.… And then there is a morning you walk in and take a look in your own house, like any traveler.
“When I grew up,” the kid said, “you knew my father, his name was Mac Banta down there in the Bitterroot.”
“I never knew anybody named Banta,” Holland said.
“Well, he was there anyway,” the kid said, “and there was those spring mornings with the geese flying north and I would stand out on the lawn with the sun just coming up and the fence painted white around my mother’s roses, and it would be what my father called a bluebird morning.… My sister would be there, and my mother and my father, and the birds playing in the lilac. Comes down to a world of hurt was what my father would say, and he would laugh because nothing could hurt you on those bluebird mornings.”
Every great or even every really good writer makes the world over according to his own lights. Garp is right—John Irving is right. This area of the world, this part of our country, this scrupulously observed vision, this is the world according to Kittredge; and he writes of this land and its inhabitants with pity and terror, and, it must be said, love. These powerful stories are troubling and unforgettable. I urge your attention to them.
The Van Gogh Field by William Kittredge. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978.
A Gifted Novelist at the Top of His Game
The publicity release for this book would remind us that Vance Bourjaily is one of America’s major writers. I don’t think this claim can be taken lightly. The proof of the matter lies in this compelling and relentlessly authentic work of art, A Game Men Play. It’s his finest novel since The Violated, which up to now has been his best, and best-known, work.
A Game Men Play is a big book and one charged with acts of violence and dismay: you couldn’t begin to count all the murders and “re-locations,” the double and double-double dealings that occur in its pages. But, surprisingly, it is also—and this is more to our purpose—a long and profound, sometimes pastoral meditation on the human condition.
The settings are as various as any you’d want to conjure: the deck and cabin life of a Norwegian freighter on a voyage from San Francisco to Wellington, New Zealand; Caracas, Venezuela; St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands; an Argentinean horse ranch; the Greek islands of Crete and Corfu; Cairo and Alexandria; the Russian steppes and Vladivostok; Berlin during the Cold War; Thailand; Santiago, Chile; Honolulu; Montevideo, Uruguay; Yugoslavia during the German occupation; New Orleans; the high life and low of New York in the late 1970s. In many of these places we are witness to scrupulous renderings of violent acts, part of the vicious game some men play.
The novel is Conradian in its entanglement of motive and its intricacy of plot. It is filled with lore of all sorts: the raising, training, and racing of horses; soldiering, mostly behind-the-lines guerrilla stuff, covert CIA activity; and as complete an inside look at the vile pursuits of terrorism as you’d ever want. But since I can only touch on the story’s main lines, which will not begin to tell you what the novel is about, I want to say that it has to do with the not insignificant matters of courage, loyalty, love, friendship, danger, and self-reliance, and a man’s lifetime journey of self-discovery.
The hero of this remarkable novel—and he is a hero, praise be—is a man of integrity and deep complexity; he has character, in the oldest and truest sense of that word. His name is C. K. “Chink” Peters (nicknamed because of the slightly slanted eyes he inherited from his mother, a Mongolian), and he is
far and away Bourjaily’s best fictional creation to date.
During World War II, Peters gained prominence as a young OSS agent tagged “Der Fleischwolf” (The Meat Grinder), and after the war found himself in the nascent CIA—the Agency, as it’s called. Peters has written a small book on guerrilla warfare, and the book as well as its author have come to assume some fame in underground circles, mainly a radical IRA group whose members are fanatical but suave terrorists with European and Middle Eastern connections. Now forty-nine and free from involvement either domestic or Agency-related, Peters is living in a rooming house in San Francisco when the novel opens. He is about to sail for Wellington with a group of horses destined for a New Zealand breeder when he sees a television news account of the murders of Mary and Wendy Diefenbach in their New York apartment. He has not seen these girls since their childhood when their father, his friend, neighbor, and wartime commanding officer, Walden Diefenbach, took away Peters’s wife. Diefenbach is now a UN ambassador-at-large, often mentioned as a potential secretary of state. Peters sends a telegram asking if there’s anything he can do, waits, then goes ahead and sails.
Peters spends a lot of time talking to his horses, believe it, on the way to New Zealand; and so, in long flashbacks, we have the story of his life. Moving from past to present, this way and that, using the freighter as both metaphor for a journey and real oceangoing vessel, we follow him through prep school, where he goes on a wrestling scholarship but studies foreign languages, then enlistment in the military, army and Agency service. He later attends Yale and takes a degree in German medieval history. Happily married, he settles on the eastern seaboard to breed and race horses with Diefenbach as his country squire neighbor. This Diefenbach is a Machiavellian character with plenty of charm and intelligence who runs up against the IRA, whose agents set out to bring him down. Through a dreadful foul-up, his daughters become the victims instead.