Good Guys as Bad Guys
ALLEN, STEVE
Good Guys as Bad Guys Heroic Love. By Edward Loomis. Knopf. 245 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Steve Allen Author, "Mark It and Strike It," "Fourteen for Tonight'' AT THE END of "Friendship," one of...
...The heavy is easily identifiable in mass-produced fiction...
...Loomis seems quite the equal of his contemporaries at accurately reporting the stench, filth, misery and pain of war...
...He was a California cowboy...
...But life, as has been widely observed, is very little like the motion pictures...
...And yet there is no shortage of sin and suffering, no lack of drama...
...Both the fallen soldier and the vanished mistress are vital, breathing indications of Edward Loomis' admirable recognition of the quality of man, that creature who in second-rate fiction is frequently good or evil but who in first-rate literature is usually good and evil...
...Anybody that knew her...
...But the unforgettable character of "Mustangs" is Sam Leathers, a tough and thoughtless cowboy doomed to defeat by his lack of understanding of the forces that control him and his society...
...The message is hardly less subversive than that of Christ...
...He was a good man, wasn't he...
...But I like to remember him...
...Typically, too, Orville performs a daring act that cements his position...
...A good cowboy, a tough young man...
...Its locale, like that of the second entry, "Mustangs," is the American West and somehow it seems most appropriate that the author has selected such a traditional stage upon which to parade his version of a hero —who is also a villain...
...There is simply a moving revelation of the human predicament...
...Loomis does a moderately strange thing in "Mustangs" with a character named Dick Tatum...
...But in life he is not always so easy to find and we are sometimes forced to look for him in our own mirrors...
...He has the tolerant vision and the evident understanding that a shadow can exist only because there first came light...
...Typical enough, in a sense...
...I reckon he'll mostly rot, in a little town, in them little jobs, working for wages...
...In the book's last tale, "A Marriage," the soldier-narrator watches the receding figure of a woman he loves as she walks down a poplar-shaded road out of his life, and he says to his companion: "Anybody would love her...
...What is more, he communicates this to the reader by means of a spare prose style that is remarkably well adapted to what he wants to say...
...Outwardly he has all the attributes of the hero, whether real or fictional...
...There is composure, plainness and dignity in his method...
...a good roper and a beautiful rider...
...and he was a hunter...
...What's a man to do if he ain't got money and the weather on his side...
...Were he a wide-screen Western cowboy, the story would end with his riding off into the sunset after this incident...
...It ain't enough to have a strong back," Sam says, in a moment of insight, "and be willing to work, and know how to do it...
...He knew the slopes and high valleys where deer wandered in the Sierra...
...Clearly, Loomis knows this...
...Wasn't he...
...Unlike most of us, softened by the affluence of our society, Loomis also is able to experience the simple, physical satisfactions that the less fortunate draw from the small and elementary things of this world...
...There are no villains, in the traditional sense, in any of his stories...
...but he is the superior of many at presenting recognizable human beings rather than sexually twisted, sadistic caricatures...
...Orville Led-yard, described as "once the hero of our town and now one of our most distinguished citizens" (a fascinating distinction), has a shadowy figure to worry about and to go about armed against: himself...
...Reviewed by Steve Allen Author, "Mark It and Strike It," "Fourteen for Tonight'' AT THE END of "Friendship," one of the five stories that comprise this collection (and whose climax has the power to move him to tears who has the capacity for them), a slender Oklahoma boy-turned-soldier says of a fallen comrade: "God damn it, he was a bad influence on me, making me mean like I am...
...Eventually the reader comes to know that he is just another poor slob, the victim of his own insecurities...
...At first Tatum is unpleasant, negative, unsympathetic...
...There is no contrived climax to the story, no neat and "just" ending...
...The title story, "Heroic Love," is, I think, the most fruitful source of clues to Loomis' philosophy of man...
...So Orville is condemned to continued existence, to suffer sexual temptation, to weaken and unnerve himself in the internal struggle such temptation induces, to be a hero undone by love...
...The best I ever knew in all my life...
...If he is able to convey excitement when he desires to do so, it is because of the events he describes rather than any feverishness in the description...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 45
