Friday's Forgotten Book: HIGH HUNT by David Eddings

High Hunt was published in 1973, the year we pulled out of Viet Nam.  Lost the war, and finally admitted it.  We even ended the draft, though much too late for me.

Republicans were still in office that year.  Nixon would resign before the next year was out.  American jingoism dipped to a low ebb, and American male machismo looked for somewhere to else stand.

The movie adaptation of James Dickey's Deliverance came out in 1972 and may have been an influence.  Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, was then working on The Hunting Hypothesis, which would be published about the same time as the 1976 Fawcett Crest paperback edition of High Hunt . 

 High Hunt was the author's first novel, in part a coming-of-age novel with a young man's issues written large.  I read High Hunt after it first came out and thought it grand; rereading it now, I see my younger self reading it too.

There are many similarities between High Hunt and Deliverance, though the latter is the much greater work of art, greater in theme, more poetic, and more tightly written.   Some passages of High Hunt now seem either hastily written or too long labored, darlings the author should have excised altogether.  But the parts I either missed or thought too boring to remember back then are more interesting now.

Indeed, there is much here to admire.  It deals with issues concerning the masculine ego, but it is a family saga too with much to say about fathers and sons and the nature of male camaraderie.  Michael Cimino's Viet Nam movie, The Deer Hunter, now makes an interesting companion piece.

David Eddings did not become a successful author until many years later.  His string of fantasy epics became best sellers and brought him some critical recognition too. 

We don't know what Dickey thought of High Hunt, if he read it, nor what David Eddings thought of The Deer Hunter.  I'm not suggesting undue influence connecting these works of art; they were signs of their times. 

But High Hunt has something that makes it stand apart from the other works mentioned here, and that's a hopeful ending.  The protagonist has come to see the ultimate emptiness of masculine rituals, and has asked his love to marry him.  The end of the novel seems to suggest that the search for true love is the highest hunt of all.

As sappy as that may sound, it works for me.

Wednesday's Western: I, TOM HORN by Will Henry

There is an iconic scene in the 1969 movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Paul Newman and Robert Redford keep looking back over their shoulders at the posse they can't seem to shake.  They ask each other, "Who are those guys?"

The historical answer is, they were the enforcers hired by the rich and led by the man most renown for "reading sign," the scout Tom Horn.

In January, 1975, Will Henry's novelization of Tom Horn's life appeared in bookstores.  It followed the historical record but did so creatively, aiming for truth rather than fact, in the form of a long lost autobiography which Tom Horn wrote in jail.

It is not a conventional western, as the lines between right and wrong are blurred with moral and legal ambiguities.  What favors the rich wins out, as it usually does--in life if not in conventional westerns. 

On the flap of the first edition dustjacket (scanned below), Will Henry is called "the dean" of western novelists, having already won five Spur Awards, and it proclaims this as his most important novel.

 Listen to the riff of a few opening paragraphs:

"If Jesus himself had of come down and swore for me, they'd have got it struck from the record and bought him a free ticket out of town on the next train.'

"But that's all washed down the river now.  It can't be roped and towed back upstream again.  Yet a man has to try.  He has to set it right if he can.  He has to say how the times were that ended him in the Cheyenne jail.  What the laws were and what they wasn't.  How justice failed.  The way witnesses lied under vow.  How judges turned stone deaf and juries went blind.  And oh how different the rules read when twisted to convict the innocent.  It has to be remembered, always, what happened to the law out there."

"Out there, a man took the law to be as good as his own word.  Which he gave straight-out, with no tangles in the mane or tail of it.  He neither whined nor tucked his rump when lies and libels rode him down.  Nor did he burn over his brands once he put them into the hide of his testimony.  Whatever he done, or said he done, he stood by it.'

"But sometimes a man wouldn't get his entire herd to the railhead the first drive.  Sometimes there was trail going on  past where he believed he had all his cattle safe-loaded on the stock cars.  He didn't see it at the time.  It's afterwards that it comes to him.  Like when the drive crew's been paid off and the dust of their ponies has settled into the prairie twilight south toward Texas.  That's when a man would look the other way, north, to Wyoming, and his eyes would slit down and he would say to himself, and loud soft, "Damn."

"For what he saw up there, God help him, was the rest of his life's track, and it made him shiver hard in the gloom.  He knew that he must tell the truth about that last dark part of the trail...the part John C. Coble had not wanted into the book."

"Well, maybe that story would work for Mr. Coble, but it sounded wrong somewhere.  It had an off ring to it.  Like a horseshoe on a fouled anvil.  Coble's story would run only up to the edge of the real hell that Tom Horn rode into in Wyoming.  It would rear up short and shy off, where the dark part began."

The Steve McQueen movie adaptation was overly long and should have been edited better, yet it certainly had its good scenes and it presented the historical tragedy well.  It is a worthy parable turning on the evil done in the name of goodness.

Sunday's Book Art: A Walk On The Wild Side and Tropic of Cancer

 S

The poster announces the upcoming reading by authors Peter Joseph and Rick Wallach.  They are reading Ginzberg's "Howl" too, but they might be reading a number of things.  An event not without humor, I suspect.

Rick Wallach, author and editor of a large number of books and articles, is a longtime leading Cormac McCarthy scholar and formerly an associate of the famous mythologists Joseph Campbell and Marcia Eliade.

Henry Miller wrote of the working man, as did Nelson Algren.  Not many authors do that these days.  I believe in the ideas set forth in Dan Bern's song, "Marilyn Monroe Should Have Married Henry Miller."

Making the rounds on the internet this Bloomsday was Eve Arnold's 1954 picture of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce's Ulysses:

This week, when discussing the use of the cat as a symbol of the mankind's animal nature, I recalled the opening of the film version of Nelson Algren's A Walk On The Wild Side.  You can see it on youtube at this link.  

You can also find the ending segment there, which has Brook Benton singing the jazz lyrics to the Elmer Bernstein's majestic theme.  One night of praying, six nights of fun.  The odds against going to heaven, six to one.

That doesn't sound like Algren's novel, but it does sound like the movie, which is something else again.  The book differs and is much better, but even the novel was altered from Algren's original vision before publication.  One deleted segment was later published as a short story in the Nelson Algren edited anthology, Nelson Algren's Lonesome Monsters.    

I like the book cover with the two brick walls, the human figure clausterphobic and perhaps fearful, facing his own monster shadow in the alley.  The first hardcover edition of Lonesome Monsters had a vortex or spiral as in the logo for the Hitchcock movie, Vertigo.

The cat sequence is the most memorable thing about the movie of A Walk on the Wild Side.  Barbara Stynwyck and Anne Baxter seem to suffer through their roles.  A fresh-faced Jane Fonda makes her appearence as the new girl at the brothel.  When asked what she is doing there, she replies, "I run the candy concession."

Here are some more cat images for A Walk on the Wild Side, including the foreign film poster on which the movie was retitled, The Black Cat.

  

Friday's Forgotten Book: THE GHOST OCEAN by Richard Benke



The first edition dustjacket is beautiful, the telephone poles, front and back, being symbols of man's intrusion into the natural world.  There is a fine foreword by one of my favorite western novelists, Max Evans, whose works I plan to discuss some Wednesday soon.

This is a murder mystery first, but as in a lot of the books I recommend, it it not a simple case of whodunit rather but a novel of ideas.  The murdered girl is discovered in the opening chapter.  The suspects include bandits, smugglers of drugs or of illegal immigrants, ranchers, miners, loggers, or either side of the ecological war--including liberal ecologists who want to reintroduce the wolf to the country and desparate ranchers trying to preserve their way of life.

Bureaucrats have their own political interests to protect, and all the suspects here have a thoughtful mix of motives and complicity making the reader reconsider the greater morality and necessary practicality in the issues at hand.

I read the book right after it came out back in 2004 and recommended it at some other booksites across the web.  Just now, I looked it up at Amazon and see only one review of it there, a one-star flame by a wildly disgruntled reader.  Good grief, I'll have to add my review there, for this is certainly an excellent if already forgotten novel.

The murder mystery drives the plot and the ideas are discussed on the surface, but the novel also works as a parable.  The protagonist, Will Mann, is like Keith Heller's George Man that I discussed last month (link), an everyman just trying to do the right thing.

Things get complicated in the The Ghost Ocean, probably why that lone reviewer at Amazon didn't like the book.  When rereading it this week, it made me think at times of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing and Rick Bass's The New Wolves and The Ninemile Wolves.  But it also made me think of  David Baron's The Beast In The Garden.

Then there is my own experience with wild things.  I'm liberal and an animal lover, and when they talked about increasing the deer population here in Kentucky, I thought it might not be a bad idea.  So they did, unfortunately by importing deer from the west, and this has had unintended consequences.  Now there are deer all over the place, a hazard to farmers and drivers and, although you might not think so, to the human population at large.

So hazardous have the deer become to traffic, the Kentucky bureaucrats decided to do something about it.  They started importing coyotes from the western states.  Although coyotes won't take down an adult deer, they explained, they will go after the young and newly born, thus helping to curb the deer population.

It wasn't long until the city fella who farms on weekends across from our place knocked on our door.  Said something must be done about our dogs, they were killing his calves.  I had to inform him of the coyote problem.  I told him he need only come around at night to hear them yip and see them run across his fields.

But the coyotes were not the worst problem.  The deer and coyotes brought something else, a danger to us all.

When I was growing up, most of the ticks we saw were what we called dog ticks.  We easily de-ticked our dogs and only rarely found one on one of us.  With the increase in deer population, suddenly deer ticks were all over the farm.  Deer ticks are small, sometimes pinhead size, nasty little devils that are not so easy to find on your dog or on yourself.

The not-so-easy-to-diagnose diseases of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Lyme disease have now struck some of our neighbors, and thus the small ticks have become an everyday threat.  Just this month,  we see where our local hospital is being sued for not diagnosing a case of the tick-transmitted disease in time to prevent someone from extreme suffering.

As I said, The Ghost Ocean is a splendid murder mystery.  Life and literature go hand-in-hand, and life gets complicated.  We ought not live in denial of the complications.

Wednesday's Western: HELL IS EMPTY by Craig Johnson

Wow!  HELL IS EMPTY is a tour-de-force, a cross-genre literary parable, something to shout about, and I'm shouting as loudly as I can.  This is seventh in Craig Johnson's series of mystery/westerns, and while the others are very good cross-genre yarns, this one is something else again.

In this blog, I often discuss the use of the trinity in literature, that universal so eloquently described by Emerson--including  (here), (here), and (here). 

 As in Walter Van Tilburg's  The Track Of The Cat (Western Literature Series), the trinity is often stylized with a spiritual man, an animal man, and a middle man, torn between the extremes of his spiritual/animal nature.  All three are one, the human condition.

Some literary works place a duality on top of the trinity, splitting them, Zeus-like, into two trinities, one light and one dark.  The three in the light are the better angels of our nature, while the three in the shadow self are the furies.


The furies appeared in Virgil’s work, as well as in Dante’s INFERNO, and they were a trinity composed of Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera (blood vengeance, righteous anger, and jealousy). The furies represent the shadow self, the repressed animal nature of man.  Sopholcles used the furies in the Oedipus plays.


At one of the links above, I pointed out how Joseph Conrad used the furies in Victory, and about how Austin Wright used the furies in Tony And Susan, and about how Cormac McCarthy used the furies in Outer Dark.  All of these furies are also trinities--dark animal man, dark middle man, dark spiritual man; you might see them as a stylized shadow side of id, ego, and superego.  All also used the cat as a symbol of our dark or animal nature.

Along comes Craig Johnson's Hell Is Empty.  I was expecting a high quality genre novel.  It's that, but like the three novels mentioned above, it is also a literary parable about the nature of man.

We are introduced to the furies in the first chapter, a dark threesome headed by the dark spiritual man, a pathological animal man.  When you look into the darkness, the darkness looks back, and the protagonist recognizes some of his own nature in this animal man whose name is aptly, Raynaud Shade:

"I'd been distracted by my thoughts for only a second, but when I paid attention again his pale eyes were studying me from under the dark hair.  He had this unnerving ability that whenever you refocused your eyes on him, he was there with you--like a cat in a cage."

The book is highly ambitious and although I might wish that it was a bit more subtle in its references to Dante's Inferno, I cannot fault it at all.  It is a towering achievement.  Bravo!  A genre western/thriller on the surface with literary nuances galore.  How rare is that!

I've long been a supporter of Craig Johnson's writing, and now even more so.  You don't need to have read Dante or Austin Wright or Joseph Conrad or Cormac McCarthy.  If you haven't read Craig Johnson yet, do yourself a favor and send for Hell Is Empty while it is still available in first edition.  You won't be sorry.

Monday's Long Quote For The Last Day Of Spring

Spring leaves today, summer begins tomorrow.  We go from morning freshness to the heat of the day.

Here's a good June quote, the opening of Ivan Doig's novel, English Creek:

That month of June swam into the Two Medicine country. In my life until then I had never seen the sidehills come so green, the coulees stay so spongy with runoff. A right amount of wet evidently could sweeten the universe. Already my father on his first high patrols had encountered cow elk drifting up and across the Continental Divide to their calving grounds on the west side. They, and the grass and the wild hay meadows and the benchland alfalfa, all were a good three weeks ahead of season. Which of course accounted for the fresh mood everywhere across the Two. As is always said, spring rain in range country is as if halves of ten-dollar bills are being handed around, with the other halves promised at shipping time.

And so in the English Creek sheepmen, what few cowmen were left along Noon Creek and elsewhere, the out-east farmers, the storekeepers of Gros Ventre, our Forest Service people, in just everyone that start of June, hope was up and would stay strong as long as the grass did.

Talk could even be heard that Montana maybe at last had seen the bottom of the Depression.  After all, the practitioners of this bottomed-out notion went around pointing out, last year was a bit more prosperous, or anyway a bit less desparate, than the year before.  A nice near point of measurement which managed to overlook that for the several years before last the situation of people on the land out here had been godawful.

I suppose I ought not to dwell on dollar matters when actually our family was scraping along better than a good many. . .It gravels me every time I read a version of those times that makes it sound as if the Depression set in on the day Wall Street tripped over itself in 1929.  Talk about nearsighted.  By 1929 Montana had already been on rough sledding for ten years.  The winter of 1919--men my father's age and older still just called it "that sonofabitch of a winter"--was the one that delivered hard times.  Wholesale.

. . .Trouble never travels alone, so about that same time livestock and crop prices nosedived due to the end of the war in Europe.  And right along with that drought and grasshoppers showed up to take over dry-land farming.  Anyplace you looked you saw people who had put in twenty years in this country and all they had to show for it was a pile of old calendars.

Then when drought circled back again in the thirties and joined forces with Herbert Hoover, bad progressed to worse. . .Cattle rancher after cattle rancher and farmer after farmer got in deep with the banks. . .And then foreclosure and the auctioneer's hammer.  At those hammered sales we saw men weep, women stricken as if they were looking on death, the children bewildered.

So it was time hope showed up. 

 

Best Book Diary: Jon Ronson's THE PSYCHOPATH TEST

Jon Ronson's thought-provoking The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry is certainly one of the best new books of the year.  Though not the first to make these revelations, the book is one of the best on the subject, journalism structured in such a way to create a tension in the narrative, to make the outcome seem in doubt.

Then at the end, Ronson makes readers question what they have read--so that they can come to their own conclusions.  Can psychopaths be cured and taught to feel empathy?  Probably not in this lifetime.  Are those damn ruthless CEOs psychopaths?  Those who lay people off gleefully while they ruin their companies, their employees, and their stockholders?  Probably so.