Winning the West

...The reader doesn't have to stretch his mind to understand anyone or anything that goes on...

...And there is a very creditable job of delineating the Indians...

...Could anyone despise Cranshaw so wholly as the young officer seemed to...

...It cost him his imposture...

...Together they lifted into sight their own vision of their life together...

...This is not to say that A Distant Trumpet, overlong and trite as most of it is, does not have its moments...

...The style of writing is of the "she laid her head upon his manly breast" variety, and doesn't vary much from one page to the next...

...Unfortunately, the novel's pedestrian style, its superficial, wide-ranging treatment of both characters and incidents, and its cloyingly "genteel" tone seriously mar it for any but the most durable book-club reader...

...In it Horgan does a commendable job of recreating the desert country just north of the Mexican border and the life that must have existed on a frontier Army post during this Indian-fighting phase of American history...

...The people, events and setting are much as they must have been during a time when America was still westering...

...The charm he had tried to invoke now inadvertently came to his being, and in his misery he gave Matthew for the first time a qualm of sympathy for him as a fellow being in mortal trouble...

...And when Kitty dies we are spared the sight of her...

...Another reason the novel fails is that so much of it is told instead of just being permitted to happen, and told in obvious detail...

...Even the adultery of Kitty Mainwaring, one of the officers' wives, first with Matthew and then with Corporal Rainey, is not given us as direct experience...

...Thus every emotion is strained through rather coarse sensibilities, and we seem to be viewing most of the action and people once removed...

...Nothing is left to the imagination...

...Presumably, he is trying to show us just what it is that makes everyone tick...

...But the mountains of background detail fail to take the place of real characterization...

...Despite their brutality, they are not just the bad guys, but a real people...

...But we have to plow through many pages of trite writing before we reach that point...

...Horgan has a real feeling for the open plains of the Southwest, for its shimmering, empty distances, its dust and heat and monotony, and for its beauty, too...

...His mouth trembled...

...Tears came up to his eyes...

...The eager, thoughtless, impulsive youth vanished in Cranshaw, and his place was taken by a weak self for whom he sorrowed...

...As such, it is not a conventional novel of the "old" West with stock characters...

...Despite its romantic tone, A Distant Trumpet tries to treat honestly one important phase of American life and history...

...Cranshaw could not believe this and yet he must...

...There are no ambiguities here...

...A Distant Trumpet is essentially the story of Lieutenant Matthew Carlton Hazard and his young bride, Laura, and their Army service at Fort Delivery, a lonely outpost deep in Apache country in Arizona Territory during the 1380s...

...One result of this predigestion of the material is that nothing gets through that is likely to shock or upset even the most tender-hearted or genteel of readers...

...This overlong biography of Matthew is bad enough (inasmuch as it's not really germane to the central story...

...Reviewed by Joseph Cowley Editor, Research Institute of America PAUL HORGAN, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for his non-fiction work, Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, has returned to the desert regions of the Southwest for the historical setting of this big sprawling novel about one small phase of winning the West...

...The effect, needless to say, is at first cloying sentimentality and finally deadly monotony...

...Everything is softened, watered down—brutality, fighting, love, sorrow, the commonness of the soldiers...

...It starts with the birth of Matthew four years before the Civil War in Fox Creek, Indiana, and brings us forward through his childhood to the lime when, as a cadet at West Point, he meets and becomes engaged to Laura Greenleaf, daughter of an ineffectual colonel and a rather formidable mother...

...As it now stands, the superficiality of the novel's style and treatment of character, scene and incident will prove insuperable to the serious reader...

...Scenes involving them in their natural setting are the best in the book...

...He always has the author to comment on the action and the people, to tell him what to think and feel...

...The climax of the novel is a show-down between Matthew and the Apache Chief, Rainbow Son...

...but the author does the same for each of the principal characters—and some who are not so principal...

...Her love beat in her throat and roved him through her longing hands...

...We learn about it through a haze of words and polite talk...

...A full third of the book goes by before it even begins to get off the launching pad...