Oakley Hall essay

[Dave Monroe]

The gnomic, gun-toting code of the West

By Katherine A. Powers  |  August 13, 2006

Page 2 of 2 -- The book is filled with such
magnificently archaic rough speech as well as scenes
of extraordinary visual power and historical
verisimilitude. The characters come before us and
reappear again, gaining more complexity as their
often-interlinked pasts are slowly filled in. But for
all the interplay between people, Warlock, the town,
is not so much a society but an ever-mutating
congeries. Rumor and fear sway the town, and its
cohesion and identity are constantly undermined by its
lack of legal status and the diverseness of its
populace: miners, their Mexican women, gamblers,
prostitutes, businessmen, itinerant cowboys, and a
scattering of transplanted upright individuals.

"We break into the camps of those wildly inclined, and
those soberly," reflects one of the town's good
citizens in his journal, "those irresponsible and
those responsible, those peace-loving and those outlaw
and riotous by nature; further, into the camps of
respect, and of fear -- I mean for oneself, and for
all decent things besides."

What is right and what wrong, and what a man's gotta
do, for that matter, become an intricate calculation
of unarticulated loyalties. The basis of the code of
the West, then, is essentially the absence of society.
Yes, I can follow the importance of this void, of a
sense of right and wrong forged in a brutal world, one
with few amenities and no tradition except violence, a
world wrested by force from the Indians. But as the
novel continued into its last 100 pages or so, it
became mired in terminal portentousness, and I found
myself unable to understand the motives and deeds of
its actors. Is this guy going to feel compelled to
shoot that guy, or that guy this, or is this other guy
going to feel he's got to haul off and shoot one or
the other or both so there's no shooting between them?
And, if so, why? And what about Miss Kate Dollar , the
whore with the heart of gold turned to a cinder? Will
she pull out her derringer and ruin the whole manly
business? I hoped she would.

Michael Pettit calls the cowboy "the most manly of
souls" in "Riding for the Brand: 150 Years of Cowden
Ranching" (University of Oklahoma , $29.95), and even
though I think Plantagenet Palliser could give any
cowpuncher a run for his money in the manliness
stakes, I will simply accept his point of view as
appropriate to a native of Texas and scion of ranching
stock. The book is part family saga, part Western
history, and part memoir filled with revelatory detail
and written in engaging prose with a touching pride of
family that seems to me especially Southwestern.
Pettit follows his ancestors from Georgia to Alabama
to east Texas and on deeper into the state until, as
the family grew and its members hived off, they
established ranches in west Texas and New Mexico.
Pettit juxtaposes past and present, his family's
pilgrimages to his grandparents' ranch with his
ancestors' frontier passage, and the conditions under
which his cousin keeps the family ranching tradition
alive with earlier realities of ranching life. Along
the way he traces the forces that are aligned against
cattle ranching as a going concern: the pressure of
development and the disappearance of tough young men
willing to work for a pittance.

In response to David Goodwillie's letter to the editor
of August 6, 2006, in which he takes exception to my
comments on his memoir, ``Seemed Like a Good Idea at
the Time," made in my column of July 30, 2006: It
still remains true that I, personally, cannot believe
every incident in this book (the phone in the toilet
being the one that immediately springs to mind). But
please note that I did not say that the incidents were
not true, but merely that I could not believe them.
The concocted dialogue is another matter. I do not
accept Mr Goodwillie's contention that capturing ``the
essence of what was said years ago" demands ``artfully
recreating real-life conversations." I never suggested
that memoirs are journalism; of course they are not.
But, really, since when, except in fiction, did anyone
get to choose words for other people and call them
true? If I showed up in someone else's book using
words I had not chosen myself, no matter what their
gist, I would say, ``I never said that. These are not
my words. This is not true."

Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in
Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays.
She can be reached by e-mail at pow3 at verizon.net. 

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/08/13/the_gnomic_gun_toting_code_of_the_west/?page=2

--- Paul Di Filippo <pgdf at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Foax--I cut and pasted the entire article behind
> this URL and sent it in to the List, but it never
> arrived.  Perhaps bagged by a size filter....

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