The Truth of the West
GRAVES, JOHN
The Truth of the West Carrington. By Michael Straight. Knopf. 375 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by John Graves Adjunct Professor, Texas Christian University; Contributor, "New Yorker," "Atlantic" MICHAEL...
...Though not a Westerner, Michael Straight has sniffed the air right, has felt the country, has sorted the facts...
...His picture of the big country in those untrampled days is lyrical and minutely observant...
...Truth is likely to be thus specific...
...That Michael Straight, working within these classically narrow limits, should nevertheless have managed to say his truths is tribute to his imagination and his talent...
...In The Big Sky, for example, Guthrie constructed a mountain-man protagonist, Boone Caudill...
...Glover the self-defeated pacifistic photographer (an alter ego sometimes, it seems, for Carrington himself) ; Fetterman...
...It is a rare one, too...
...But facts, in books as in life, hide truths even when they contain them, as a pod hides peas...
...And because all the frontier's latter stages were associated with our West, the very word has 19th century Western connotations...
...In mapping his progress from a scared, mulish, formal snippiness to demoralization and then through Tightness to the certainty and strength of a tragic hero, the author manages to endow him with the kind of complexity that belongs to real people...
...A strong talent has draped its factual framework with scenes and descriptions and characters whose truth at times rings like a bell...
...Welldrawn characters are likely to be thus arguable, and if in the process of making Carrington real the author sometimes lets a minor figure become grotesque, that is probably an inevitable, not even undesirable, result of such focus...
...Adair the war-weary...
...How many clear good voices have sung the West, have preserved it right...
...Old, a general (Straight reports it beautifully), he made a speech to assembled citizens at the ruins of Fort Phil Kearny, his fort...
...Honesty is woven through it...
...And a list that includes a Cather, a Clark and a Guthrie is perhaps matter for thanks...
...If the West has not had many real talents to interpret its whip-scars, no time and place for that matter ever has had...
...This realness gives authenticity, but at some expense of shapeliness and force...
...Mostly there has been laryngitis, and a need that willingness supply the necessary poetry...
...Hampered not only by his well-wishingness, which extended even to the Indians, but also by a doubt of his own capacity for combat leadership, Carrington proceeded with a caution that lit a fire of toughminded recalcitrance among the scarred veteran officers and men under him...
...In one important way, a book like Carrington stands at a disadvantage in comparison to, say, one of Guthrie's...
...It shows a time and a place, but mainly it shows a man, Henry Carrington...
...Its title is apt...
...O'Gara the inveterate Irish private...
...The province of serious fiction is poetic truth...
...And it contains truth—hard truth, philosophical truth, brain truth...
...Does it...
...Mostly real voices have not sung...
...it has no cheapness...
...You can argue with yourself about Carrington...
...Near-mutiny resulted...
...White the Old Testamental chaplain...
...Captain Brevet Lt...
...Carrington seeks to inscribe itself on that list, and probably does...
...This being so, it would seem that the record of American poetic truth —our serious fiction, for one thing— ought to have quite a bit to say about the 19th-century West and the frontier...
...Of analysis, too, we have good supply...
...Because Guthrie had integrity, he could not violate any historical facts about that time and place, but within wide limits he could manipulate Boone, a fictional figment though a superb one, and the other figment-men around Boone, in such a way as to say the truths he wanted to say, exactly...
...But mostly their talents haven't matched their honesty...
...The fort was built, but the Sioux harried it and the trail at will...
...Few...
...Upon this innately dramatic tale of action, told in terms of soldiers who misstep and doubt and squabble and bungle as real soldiers often do, Michael Straight has hung much excellent detail...
...He is possessed of a tragic weakness akin to Hamlet's—his humanitarianism, his thoughtfulness, his ineptitude for command—and it defeats him...
...Human truth...
...Brown the drunken fighting quartermaster...
...Some have, however, and more seem to be coming on...
...Contributor, "New Yorker," "Atlantic" MICHAEL STRAIGHT'S first novel undertakes to bring to life for contemporary readers an actual military operation in northern Wyoming in 1866 which culminated that winter in what is known as the Fetterman Massacre, a battle in which 83 soldiers were surrounded and killed by Red Cloud's Sioux...
...You will take up your authentic Navy Model Colt for Wister, for Rhodes, for Andy Adams, for later troubadours...
...A man who feels it already, who has known the country while a little wild emptiness still existed, or seemed to, who has talked to its old ones and seen what kind of men they were, who maybe grew out of them— such a man is willing to read his own poetry into any utterance about the West that isn't purely false...
...In December on a hell-for-leather foray into the Indians' territory, specifically forbidden by Carrington, Colonel Fetterman led 82 of his admirers into a bristling trap from which not one emerged...
...The authenticity of his historical details appears to be complete...
...Homer sang of long-past glories, sniffing the feel from some air somehow...
...Working the mines of factual data, men like Turner and Webb have dug out and refined our heritage and arranged it in order before us...
...The characters he has reconstructed from hints in the scrappy record are many and well conceived: Phisterer the quiet German adjutant, a music-lover and a reader, efficient...
...This derives from factuality...
...But, passing, it left its marks like crisscrossed wagon-ruts or whip-scars across our problematical national psyche...
...Not altogether...
...The same kind of integrity held Michael Straight within tighter limits...
...In November when a firebrand war hero...
...Dozens...
...not only could he not violate the facts about time and place, but he couldn't violate them about his characters either, since they were real...
...One believes in Carrington...
...William Fetterman, was assigned to the battalion, the rebels rallied to him...
...What it amounts to is that during the past half-century, with the facts available and with the evanescent feel still in the air to be sniffed, to be rubbed between the fingers, few real talents have grabbed the two things and fused them, and truth perishes...
...If the tragedy is then to scale the cathartic heights of terror and pity, though, Henry Carrington should die...
...The book's focus is upon Colonel Henry Carrington, commanding officer of the short-handed battalion to which the slaughtered belonged...
...But mostly they ring because he already likes what they're singing about rather than because the singing is good...
...It took two generations of rotting defeat for the South to spawn Faulkner...
...Maybe that's as it should be...
...From Lewis and Clark to Teddy Blue Abbott, from Francis Parkman to an Oklahoma homesteader's weatherworn widow pencilling misspelled recollections and paying her savings to have them printed locally, we've had thousands of first-handers to tell us what happened...
...Bisbee the virulent Carring-ton-hater...
...Margaret Carrington who awakes from a numbness of lost children to stand by her man...
...The book has a quantity of virtues, but truth-saying is its big one...
...Human truth, American flavor, is acknowledged to contain a good dollop of a vanished physical phenomenon and frame of mind called the frontier, a ringworm-spreading, snake-undulating fringe of Caucasian society that edged from one coast to another over a period of two and a half centuries or so, and then was no more...
...A desk soldier during the Civil War, he was in this, his first fighting command, given the well-nigh hopeless assignment of building a fort in totally wild country and guarding with too few men a long segment of the wagon trail to Virginia City against the aroused and assembled Sioux...
...Carrington, as here presented, was a stiff and formal figure exactly of the kind the 19th century was prone to produce, principled to the verge of priggishness, yet such a humanitarian thinker that he found authority's requisite harshness hard to exercise...
...Of heart truth, though, of poetry...
...That Carrington was right in waiting for reinforcements and appropriate moments for action is clear, at least by this account...
...In the end he is close to tragic stature...
...He lived on for many many years, and after long effort he cleared his name...
...Of facts we have a store almost too rich for any one man's digestion...
...To someone who feels the West and loves it, many voices ring resonant—factual, analytical, even fragmentarily poetic...
...Carrington lost his command and was held responsible...
...There it is...
...Henry Carrington, for instance, is a tragic hero...
...But he should have died...
...Complicated by the presence of women, ripped by conflicting pulls among its officers, surrounded by proud warrior savages, the battalion lost discipline...
...Some are worth it...
...But he can't, because he didn't...
...But Tightness could not cope either with his contemptuous subordinates or with hard-nosed superiors farther back toward civilization...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 18
