|
|
|
Reviews
Fifty Years after The Big Sky: New Perspectives on the Fiction and Films of A.B. Guthrie, Jr.
|
Edited by William E. Farr and William W. Bevis
|
Montana Historical Society Press, Helena, in cooperation with the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West, Missoula, 2001. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 328 pages. $39.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.
|
Reviewed by Elliott West
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
|
|
|
|
In 1997, the Montana Committee on the Humanities and the University
of Montana's O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West hosted
a conference on A.B. "Bud" Guthrie to mark the half century since
the publication of his first significant novel, The Big Sky.
To westerners, and certainly to Montanans, The Big Sky is,
of course, more than a notable piece of fiction. The editors of
this collection, William E. Farr and William W. Bevis, note correctly
that it is not Montana's favorite or most beloved book. A River
Runs through It, by Norman Maclean, and This House of Sky,
by Ivan Doig, probably have a lock on that claim. Guthrie's novel
does haunt us, however, as few, if any, western stories can. Speakers
at the conference considered that haunting, as well as Guthrie the
man and various angles on the saga spanning six novels that began
with The Big Sky. This volume brings those papers together
into a worthy collection, alternately critically tough and affectionate.
|
1
|
|
The eighteen short pieces are bunched under four sections: "Reading Guthrie" (literary analysis), "Guthrie, In Context" (his work in a broader western setting), "Is It 'All Sp'iled?'" (environmental musings), and "Fifty Years Later" (from the perspective of current state politics). As usual in such collections, the contributions are a bit uneven. Richard Hutson's argument that Guthrie's screenplay for Shane is a cinematic document of the Cold War, with the Ryker brothers standing for "a militantly aggressive socialism" (p. 111), is tortured. Similarly, Louie Attebery, while offering some nice insights, pushes a little too hard in fitting Guthrie's six novels into classic patterns of myth and tragedy. Whatever shortcomings there are — and they are slight — are more than offset by the overall merit, however, and any unevenness in quality is compensated by the collection's topical variety and by a willingness to treat Guthrie with the same critical rigor that (we learn from James Welsh in his comments) the man directed at his friends. |
2
|
|
There is Dee Garceau's essay on The Big Sky's women, a sorry collection of whoring squaws and shrewish white gals back home with the idealized Teal Eye in the middle. Garceau takes the historical trouble to remind us of the gendered crosscurrents among American Indian peoples and the subtle roles behind the stereotypes that Guthrie perpetuated. To their credit, the editors lead off with an especially intriguing critique by Ken Egan, Jr. The Big Sky's enduring power rises in large part from its ability throughout to pull us in two directions. Its protagonist, Boone Caudill, embodies the dead-end destructiveness of a frontier mentality that inherently corrupts the place and people it is drawn to. Yet, Boone's dream, the West as virgin paradise, is one many of us have felt, and it is enormously seductive. That contradictory pull and tug continues to illuminate the West today, but, Egan writes, its very power can paralyze us. At best it leaves us with a fatalism, a sense of powerless despair, and at worst it feeds an "apocalyptic dreaming" (p. 15), a sense of the Great Showdown among nut cases like the Unabomber and the Church Universal and Triumphant. Time to grow up, he says, and engage immediate contemporary problems with reasonable faith that problems can be dealt with, imperfectly but with an adaptive endurance characteristic of the American Indian perspective. |
3
|
|
Others among these short essays touch on aspects of Guthrie's work scarcely considered before — Celeste Rivers's look at his apparent allegiance to novels by Frank Bird Linderman, for instance, and Fred Erisman's examination of Guthrie's first novel, Murders at Moon Dance. James V. D'Arc's piece on Guthrie in Hollywood is fresh and graced with delicious trivia. Who knew that Howard Hawks considered Marlon Brando to play the movie's Boone Caudill? |
4
|
|
This collection is a fine tribute, as much as anything because of its critical edge. Another late and lamented master, Wallace Stegner, has come perilously close to being cursed with a kind of filiopiety. These writers have given Guthrie, one of the West's truest voices, the respect of both a tough and a loving retrospective. |
5
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|