Bringing a Hero to Life
HERRICK, WILLIAM
Bringing a Hero to Life Under the Fifth Sun: A Novel of Pancho Villa by Earl Shorris Delacorte. 622 pp. $14.95. Reviewed by William Herrick Author, "Hermanos," "Golcz," "Shadows and...
...He never raped a woman, never took a woman against her wishes...
...His enemies killed him at six o'clock in the morning as he was returning home after a night with a woman who had once before betrayed him, and probably knowingly sent him to his death...
...I stepped into the poverty, into the mestizo family—pan Indian, part Basque—of Doroteo Ar-ango, and believed every word...
...Marshal This or That, hard and lean as a steel rod, face adamantine, two Colt .45s heavy against his thighs, stalked the bandits through cattle ranges, arroyos and mountain passes...
...this true believer in the democratic revolution...
...Before I quit for the night, I had read over 200 pages...
...I believed every word...
...It did not seem possible to create a serious fiction about a famous historical personage, to persuade the reader that what he is reading is true...
...Pancho Villa, a killer, a squanderer of wealth, a Robin Hood to the poor...
...He had two children and four wives...
...I wondered why Earl Shorris, whose nonfiction The Death of the Great Spirit I found a most beautiful book about the American Indian, had written a novel instead of a biography of Pancho Villa...
...Earl Shorris has crossed the line from fact to art...
...Under the Fifth Sun is alive...
...We learn from this book who Pancho Villa was from birth to death...
...1 finished the book in three days, and even when I wasn't reading I still lived with the Doroteo Arango who became Francisco Pancho Villa...
...He immediately turned into a dictator...
...Let's kill the gringos...
...He never forgot his own impoverished beginnings and his hunger...
...He instills in him guts and blood and excrement , and gives him a fantastic memory and a unique voice: crude, intelligent, foolish, wise, ignorant...
...Villa, Zapata and Orozco fought a savage war that overthrew Carranza...
...Villa, forgiven his sins and crimes, was permitted to buy a farm and have a bodyguard of troops, his Golden Ones...
...Then he became the leader of a bandit gang...
...Of course, later one learned that Pancho Villa was more...
...His armies controlled most of Mexico...
...What did he eat...
...The major characters are well rounded and drawn with insight and great sympathy...
...Again we learn what too often seems, unhappily, to be the iron law of revolution: You win only to be betrayed: by generals, the Church, politicians, the rich landowners, and the poor men who kill and rob to become rich...
...this arrogant leader...
...Bandit...
...Then Madero led a revolution for democracy under the slogan of effective suffrage and no reelection...
...Aided by German officers and arms, and finally by Woodro w Wilson, Carranza and his generals defeated the revolution...
...he yearned to own a farm and till the soil...
...Where did he come from...
...Dirty Mexican greaser fat with pork lard...
...Thief...
...Actually, I forgot the words...
...How did he live...
...He could have assumed power after the first defeat of Carranza and been recognized by Wood-row Wilson...
...It wasn't until he was 32 years old and in prison that he learned how to read, taught by a fellow prisoner, a Zapatista...
...At last the land was redistributed...
...Doroteo Arango was 16 years old when a rich landlord raped his sister...
...I lived with the hunger, with the few seeds of corn that withered and died before they took root, and I mourned the death of Do-roteo's father...
...Shortly afterward, he was betrayed and killed...
...Reviewed by William Herrick Author, "Hermanos," "Golcz," "Shadows and Wolves" Pancho Villa...
...What they ate and how they starved, what they wore and how they prayed—always torn between their ancient Aztecs traditions and their Catholicism...
...On the other hand, only the writer of fiction has the freedom to reconstruct a man's full life...
...He was a sensitive, sweet man with women and the poor...
...Then Carranza was duped and defeated by Alvaro Obregon and Plutarco Elias Calles...
...He neither drank nor smoked...
...to have a wife and children and be decent and honorable...
...But the three vaccillat-ed, ruling by convention...
...He killed many men...
...Killer...
...He won, and was soon outmaneuvered by generals and radicals who wanted more...
...There was great freedom and great happiness in Mexico...
...On a Saturday morning, 10 cents clutched in a bony fist, 1 went to the movies, sat high up in the balcony, chewed a Tootsie Roll, and watched clean-cut American cowboys, the good guys, chase filthy Mexicans, the bad guys...
...universal education and effec-tivesuffrage wereproclaimed...
...When he was infatuated with a woman he married her...
...there can be no witness, no reporter, no friend, no comrade who can testify to that...
...Earl Shorris molds Pancho Villa from desert sands and mountain rock...
...That's the way I saw him as a boy...
...But he spent his life fighting as a bandit, guerrilla chief, revolutionary, and general of armies...
...He was indeed a bandit, a rustler, yet he was also a revolutionary against Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, a comrade of Francisco Madero, and the redeemer of the peasant leader Zapata...
...We learn howhelivedandhowthe people of Mexico lived...
...First, Porfirio Diaz double-crossed the revolution led by Benito Juarez and became an iron-fisted, bloody tyrant...
...When he was 45, the revolution more or less won, Pancho Villa attained his goal—a life of peace, a home and children...
...As Villa grows into the man he was to become, Mexico grows too, a cruel mestizo country that remains loyal in many ways to its mystical Aztec heritage...
...Forty-five years old...
...No biographer can ever know what really happened moment to moment...
...I was utterly fascinated by this asthmatic giant, canny brute, romantic idealist, anti-clericalist...
...The descriptive writing, especially of the battle scenes, is marvelously done...
...He refused, saying he was too ignorant a man...
...Two red-hot, half-naked Mexican tamales leaning against him as he laughs uproariously, then booms:" Va-manos, hombres...
...Whom did he love...
...He stalked the landlord and shot him, though not fatally...
...As a general for Francisco Madero he was an intuitive strategist and a wily tactician, beloved and hated...
...That is the only book he ever read...
...Rustler...
...His primer was Don Quijote...
...But what made him tick...
...Under the Fifth Sun, 622 tightly packed pages long, quickly drew me into the desert land of Canatlan, its high sun and arid soil...
...He once started Dante's Inferno at the urging of a friend, but he gave it up to return to the romantic don...
...He was born in 1878 and died in 1923...
...Yet, I told myself, if I can't cross the line from fact to fiction and believe that this book is the truth, then Shorris will have failed...
...Once more Villa was on the run...
...He had lived a thousand...
...After bloody battles, Venustiano Carranza came to power in alliance with Villa, Zapata and Pascual Orozco...
Vol. 63 • November 1980 • No. 21
