Through a Bifocal Darkly

...Sometimes he nearly sounds like the narrator of an episode of The Untouchables: "In the middle of the empty, arid prairie those two desperate men turned to each other...

...The same analysis might be made of One Smart Indian...

...Denying ironic possibilities, it asserts instead the power of—I am almost embarassed to say it—destiny...

...Seidman's recurring pitfall is forcing the trivial into the realm of the portentous...

...This neat authorial trick makes the hero's astute observations concerning the two cultures appear to be unbiased and "innocent"—although the reader has the satisfaction of knowing better...

...In contrast, One Smart Indian's hero, Tumbling Hawk, dispenses rending choices and weighty judgments like an Achilles of the Plains...

...That," says the legend, "is why White man sees the way he does, with one eye that's too small, that looks at things too closely, and one eye that's too big, an eye that sees too far away...

...Still, much of this strange novel, so concerned with the momentousness of its tiniest details, is as fine as the above passage is laughable...

...But Berger's tale is simply grand, using the stereotyped Indian to literary effect, while Seidman's is a grand failure...

...White man receives the magical ability to make his eyes fly out of his head, but he uses the gift too many times and is forced to steal a new pair of eyes—one eye from a mouse, the other from a buffalo...

...One can even appreciate why he chose to "improve" on Little Big Man...

...The troubled half-interpretation that follows does not merely dash stereotypic expectations...

...You dirty stinkin' Injun,' snarled the man who was dirt himself and stank...

...No matter that the Kiowa and Comanche were already locked up in Oklahoma reservations by the time Custer got his, and that it would have taken a pretty potent bunch of smoke signals for the Cheyenne and Arapaho to plan mass devastation: Both were hiding out from a riled-up U.S...

...This is tricky business for a writer whose own culture does not force its young men to obtain such hallucinations and then to organize their lives accordingly...

...Berger's Jack Crabbe is a weak sort of hero, tossed from one world to the other at what happen lo be both the plot's most climactic moments and his own best opportunities...

...it is the price he pays for attempting to chronicle the complex tragedy of Cheyenne society in microcosm...

...He didn't tell Tumbling Hawk there might have been ways to pursue the vision at the time because that time had passed...

...Seidman could have easily let cliche take over, for example, when narrating the encounter between the young Tumbling Hawk and Rumbling Wings, the shaman who helps interpret his vision...

...It has something to do with proving your enemy worthy of conquest—a need the Cheyennes understood, too...

...the Pawnee's knife pinned his Adam's apple to his spine...

...T cannot tell you all of this story.' The shaman began circumspectly, aware of the effect of his words on the tense child...

...it also gives the book a tighter metaphoric structure...

...What was important in so many popular treatments of Indians for a long time was that we conquerors needed to find terms terrifying enough to fit the vanquished...

...Instead he uses the magnification of a small but significant detail to humanize the shaman: "As Rumbling Wings listened to the elusive story, the shaman found himself slightly annoyed that he couldn't easily comprehend the vision...

...1 bet if I squeezed your arm the impression would stay there for a long time like it was made of tallow...

...He only gradually learns the exact meaning of the vision that he, like any other Cheyenne boy, experiences before becoming a warrior, yet he is always aware that it holds deep, traumatic import for himself and his people —and he strives to make every choice, every thought, every action, a fulfillment of it...

...His last words gurgled in his throat...

...Robert Seidman's first novel, like Berger's book, is useful because it attempts to graft an element of quirky human complexity onto the hitherto mythically one-dimensional image of the Plains Indians...

...He was surprised to stumble over a particle of vanity he thought he discarded years before...

...The problem has nothing to do with imitation...

...They're the savages the narrator in John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was talking about when he dreadfully intoned the list of tribes on the warpath after Custer's Last Stand: "Cheyenne and Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche...

...Rumbling Wing's ironic prediction to Tumbling Hawk that "you will always see only a part of what is before you" neatly mirrors the cloudy nature of the vision itself, the pattern of partially mistaken steps the boy will take throughout the novel, and the half-blind response made by the Che-yennes to the inexplicable world of the whites...

...Reviewed by Andrew Giarelli Early in Thomas Berger's magnificent novel Little Big Man, the 111-year-old Injun fighter Jack Crabbe turns to the story's "editor" and says: "You're a sissy, ain't you, son...

...Of course, Crabbe himself has little choice in these moments: He must either adapt or die...

...Army in southern Montana...

...Yes sir, a big fat sissy...

...Everyone knows about that kind of Indian—the ones whose very names are supposed to elicit a thrill in white souls...

...In the end, he has reached for too much...

...I knowed a fellow looked like you come out West and went among the Kiowa and they tied him up and let the squaws beat him sore with willow sticks...

...he is guilty of the crime committed by the foolish "White man" of the Cheyenne legend that serves as the book's Preface...

...Far from being a savior who makes each culture acceptable to the other, he is a demon in the eyes of both Cheyennes and whites...

...One cannot really fault Seidman for choosing to plow in another man's already finely-cultivated field, telling a story set in the same historical moment, among the same people, with the same kind of character who inhabits both Indian and white cultures but never belongs to either...

...One Smart Indian makes no show of innocence and is for that reason one of the most naive novels I have read in years...

...Tumbling Hawk, the "one smart Indian," tries to fit his whole life into a realization of his vision before he comprehends that the reverie meant the opposite of what he thought...