The Ox-Bow Incident Read online

  2004 Modern Library Mass-Market Paperback Edition

  Biographical note copyright © 2001 by Random House, Inc.

  Copyright © 1940 and copyright renewed 1968 by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in 1940 by Random House, Inc. A trade paperback edition was published in 2001 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  BRANDT & BRANDT LITERARY AGENTS, INC.: “Walter Clark’s Frontier” from One Way to Spell Man (this page–this page) by Wallace Stegner. Originally published in Atlantic magazine, August 1973. Copyright © 1973, 1982 by Wallace Stegner. Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc. CONDÉ NAST PUBLICATIONS: Excerpt from “Make Way for Mr. Clark—The O’Neill Family Afloat and Ashore” by Clifton Fadiman from the October 12, 1940, issue of The New Yorker. Copyright © 1940, 1967 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Condé Nast Publications.

  NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH: Excerpt from “Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Ambiguous American Dream” by L. L. Lee from College English, vol. 26, no. 25, February 1965. Copyright © 1965 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, 1909–1971.

  The ox-bow incident/Walter Van Tilburg Clark.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80740-3

  1. Lynching—Fiction. 2. Nevada—Fiction. 3. Mobs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3505.L376 O9 2001

  813′.52—dc21 00-64584

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION BY WALLACE STEGNER

  THE OX-BOW INCIDENT

  COMMENTARY

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  INTRODUCTION:

  WALTER CLARK’S FRONTIER

  Wallace Stegner

  Max Westbrook’s little book Walter Van Tilburg Clark (Twayne, 1969)—a book whose perceptions I often agree with, though its metaphysical terminology and its Zen-and-Jung dialectic leave me pretty confused—begins with an anecdote told by Walt Clark himself. He said he was once introduced to a lady in the East as the author of The Ox-Bow Incident. She was incredulous. “You wrote that? My God, I thought you’d been dead for fifty years. You know: Owen Wister and all those people.”

  It is an instructive story. For one thing, it demonstrates the swiftness with which The Ox-Bow Incident made its way onto the small shelf of Western classics. It further suggests that a book on that shelf is somehow embalmed. It has no contemporary reality to the ordinary reader; it acquires the remoteness and larger-than-life simplicities of myth and of certain kinds of folklore. And finally, as Westbrook points out, the lady made a common but serious error in relating The Ox-Bow Incident to The Virginian. It is like The Virginian in only superficial ways. Its purpose is not the celebration or even the definition of the cowboy hero whom Wister and Frederic Remington, between them, self-consciously created. To link it with Wister’s belated chivalry is like comparing Conrad with Captain Marryat because both wrote about sailors. In actual fact, The Ox-Bow Incident is more in the vein of Henry James, that “historian of fine consciences,” than of Wister.

  I have just reread Walt Clark, all of him except the early poems and a few ephemeral essays. It was a too-brief pleasure, for he was a novelist for only a decade, from The Ox-Bow Incident, in 1940, to The Track of the Cat, in 1949, and from posterity’s point of view he wrote only four books.

  He and I were alike in our response to the country that bred us. We were Westerners in what desert, mountains, weather, and space meant to us. But I was much more limitedly a product of the young West than Walt Clark was. The civilized tradition of books, ideas, poetry, history, philosophy, all the instruments and residues of human self-examination, all the storage-and-retrieval possibilities of human experience, I knew only in school, and most imperfectly. I was a western boy who came hungrily toward civilization from the profound barbarism of the frontier, and was confronted with the fairly common task assigned American would-be writers: that of encompassing in one lifetime, from scratch, the total achievement of the race. Walt was luckier. He was a western boy who possessed civilization from childhood.

  He grew up in a cultivated home, and his translation westward at the age of eight was not a move toward deprivation. His father was highly educated, the president of the University of Nevada; his mother was a gifted musician. Books, music, ideas that I discovered late and by accident, or never discovered at all, were Walt’s from birth. He really possessed the two worlds of civilization and the West, where I had only the West, so that I became a kind of pretender, or at best a seeker, every morning when I left for school. He was light-years ahead of me in self-knowledge and awareness. When he sat down to write about the West he was not, like me, limited to writing about scrub oak or sagebrush and wishing they were the silver apples of the moon. He was self-consciously trying to graft the silver apples onto the sagebrush rootstock.

  He consistently tried to make the past, including the spiritually healthy but largely unrecorded past of the displaced Indians, relate to the present. He repudiated the machismo that won and half ruined the West, but did not repudiate its energy. He wanted it reinformed with spirituality, art, respect for the earth, a knowledge of good and evil. He wanted the West to become a true civilization, not a ruthless occupation disguised as a romantic myth.

  Civilization is Walter Clark’s theme; the West is only his raw material. What else is the burden of The Ox-Bow Incident? That novel is a long way from being a simple reversal of the vigilante stereotype or an ironic questioning of vigilante justice. It is a probing of the whole blind ethics of an essentially false, imperfectly formed, excessively masculine society, and of the way in which individuals, out of personal inadequacy, out of mistaken loyalties and priorities, out of a fear of seeming to be womanish, or out of plain cowardice, let themselves be pushed into murder. We live mainly by forms and patterns, the novel says. If the forms are bad, we live badly. We have no problem telling where good and evil dwell when we are dealing with the Virginian and Trampas in Wister’s book. But here you cannot tell them by the color of their hats. Neither the lynchers nor the lynched are all good guys or bad guys. Many of the lynchers would rather not be there and have not known how to say so. The hanged men are a greenhorn, a senile old man, and a Mexican no better than he should be. The terrified greenhorn, once he has accepted his situation, dies better than the Mexican, who was at first bold and unafraid. Davies, who opposed from the beginning the lynch mood of Tetley, failed to stop him because, quite simply, Tetley had more guts than he did. The preacher’s morality is not binding, because it is imported, almost irrelevant. Evil has courage, good is sometimes cowardly, reality gets bent by appearances. And the book does not end with the discovery that the hanged men are innocent and that lynch law is a mistake. It goes on examining how profound a mistake. The moral ambiguities reverberate through the town. We begin to know the good guys from the bad
guys by the way they deal with their own complicity in a tragic error. And the moral questioning, the first stage of conscience, goes on in the mind of that most Jamesian of cowboys, Art Croft, very much as it goes on in the consciousness of the nameless narrator of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” after the crew comes ashore.

  I suspect that The Ox-Bow Incident’s unchallenged place on the shelf of Western classics is due not to its being fully appreciated and comprehended but to its persistently being misread as the kind of mythic Western Walt Clark was actually all but parodying. Look at the blurbs on the Signet paperback, and at the summary of the book on the first inside page. To Signet and Signet’s readers, it is a novel of excitement and suspense and nervous trigger fingers. They do not read it as the report of a failure of individual and social conscience and nerve, an account of wrong sanctioned and forced by the false ethics of a barbarous folk culture. They do not read it as a lamentable episode of a civilization in the throes of being born.

  Clark’s adaptation of the Western makes use of its machinery but substitutes a complex and ambiguous moral problem for the blacks and whites of the genre. His version of the Kunstroman is equally desimplified. I call The City of Trembling Leaves (1945) a Kunstroman rather than a spiritual autobiography because, though there are unquestionably autobiographical elements in it, Clark has taken evasive action: has made Tim Hazard’s family entirely unlike his own and has kept himself in the book, by name, as a commentator. These disguises do not keep me from believing that a good deal of Tim Hazard’s pilgrimage was also Walt Clark’s. There is much internal evidence, such as the preoccupation with the Tristan cycle, with tennis, with the purifications to be found in the mountains, with the presence of the watchful gods.

  Never mind. Biography or autobiography, it belongs in the pigeonhole with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Look Homeward, Angel; Wilhelm Meister; The Hill of Dreams, and some more somber books such as Jude the Obscure, and especially some western American portraits of the artist such as The Song of the Lark. It chronicles the development of a sensitive adolescent into an artist. It is focused on the relation between art and life, that obsessive theme of Thomas Mann’s, and it explores that relation not only through Tim’s music and through the painting and sculpture of Lawrence Black but also through the several variations on artistic adjustment made by Tim’s musician friends in Carmel. It reveals a skinless sensibility in its mystical feeling for Pyramid Lake, the Sierra, and the desert. It weds Tim Hazard to the physical universe by a rite of passage and a symbolic skinny-dip straight out of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, or if you follow Max Westbrook’s interpretation of Clark’s writings, out of Jung. These are all fairly standard elements of a literary genre at least a hundred years old before Walter Clark took hold of it—a genre, one should note, often favored by self-obsessed romantics at war with their surroundings.

  But if Tim Hazard is romantic, his book is not. It is steadily cauterized by irony. And the element of repudiation and compulsive self-exile, almost standard among spiritual autobiographies, is absolutely missing. Tim Hazard, this sensitive youth with musical aspirations and a high cultural potential, grows up in Reno, Nevada, and is never at war with it. It does not frustrate him. He hardly notices it, in fact, he is so absorbed in school, and girls, and running, and tennis, and playing in jazz bands. He accepts—and so did I—the standards of his time and place, and tries to star in what they value; and if he can’t accept them he ignores them. His father and brother are not his kind, but he doesn’t think of them as his enemies, or as threats to his spirit. Reno, in its double aspect of middle-class town and jackpot center, is not for him the threat that Dublin was to Joyce, or Asheville and his mother’s boardinghouse were to Thomas Wolfe, or Wellington, New Zealand, was to Katherine Mansfield, or all of America was to Ezra Pound.

  Most important, the end of his long struggle to be an artist is not exile or flight, as in so many lives and books, but reconciliation with his town and himself. Art ultimately leads him not away from his limited western American town, but deeper into it. He adds music to Reno without obliterating the traces of Reno that are left in himself. He is not led, as his friend Lawrence Black is, to a self-destructive perfectionism, either. He does not consider himself contaminated by moving from dance bands to symphonies, from folk music to composition, and back again. Ultimately he simply incorporates the divergences of taste between himself and his town. Some things he outgrows, as he outgrows his adolescent adorations and excesses, but they have strengthened rather than harmed him. And that makes The City of Trembling Leaves unique in its genre. Clark has not justified himself at the expense of his surroundings, if we may take Tim to represent Clark. He has tried to use them to grow from, and in.

  One must admit flaws in this novel. For me, at least, there is an excess of philosophical abstraction. And in trying to present Tim’s adolescent adorations sympathetically but ironically, and at the same time not be ironic about the seriousness of Tim’s efforts to make a unity of his divided heritage, Clark is sometimes overlong and unduly detailed, as if he feared the realistic boy might get lost under the symbolic artist.

  It is an almost impossible task that he set himself, at this stage of the West’s history, and it reminds me of another long, imperfect novel about an artist born in a little western town: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. But Willa Cather assumed that the American artist must escape the limitations of his birthplace, and be a stranger in the earth. When Clark lets Tim Hazard, after many failures, achieve his “Symphony of the Leaves” and settle down to live and work in Reno, he has dared to suggest that there is a possible reconciliation between serious art, the ordinariness of a little western city, and the primal gods of the earth. It is something I find hard to believe, but I would like to.

  In The Ox-Bow Incident, Clark had suggested that the values of the frontier society were narrow, half formed, and in large measure false, and in the mind of the sensitive cowpuncher who was one of the lynchers, he had planted a civilizing seed of conscience and doubt and unrest, and hence growth. In The City of Trembling Leaves he proposed that a native western boy, given talent and motivation, might become an artist even in the unlikely arena of The Biggest Little City on Earth, and might make commonplace origins serve art. In The Track of the Cat, his third novel, he came in quite another way at the theme of civilization, the evil of the exploitative and profane white culture, and the possibility of reconciliation between that culture’s energies and the watchful gods of the earth. Some reviewers were irresistibly reminded of Melville’s white whale when they read about Clark’s black mountain lion, and the book had a mixed reception. On rereading it, I find myself willing to grant some of the objections but not to grant that the flaws are fatal. In some ways, The Track of the Cat may be Walter Clark’s best book.

  Objections on grounds of realism are valid enough. Mountain lions don’t act the way Clark’s cat acts, don’t hunt men, couldn’t break the neck of a two-year-old steer, much less a mature bull, much less two or three steers and a bull in one flurry of killing. Only a lion given a heavy injection of literary evil would act that way. Some readers would have liked it better if Clark had made his symbolic beast an old rogue grizzly, the only animal possible to the Sierra Nevada that could break the neck of a steer, and might stalk his hunter. Once more, never mind. This is not a realistic story. And anyway, Keats said Cortez, Shakespeare put a seacoast on Bohemia. This beast is animate (and in good part imaginary) evil, and if the evil itself is made real to me, I am willing to suspend my disbelief in its objective correlative.

  George R. Stewart objected to precisely the sensitivity-within-harshness, the literary transformation of surface realism, that I have called a virtue in The Ox-Bow Incident. He insisted that Arthur Bridges, the protagonist, son of a Nevada ranch family, awakened by the bellowing of attacked steers, would not have heard the sound “like muted horns a little out of tune.” That, Stewart said, came out of Walter Clark’s sensibility, not out of the per
ceptions of Arthur Bridges.

  Yes. Of course. I, too, would question that technical impropriety, that intrusion of the authorial mind, if I ran across it in a student story. But Walter Clark was no student, and what his authorial voice had to say was important. His Arthur is endowed with some of the prophetic mysticism and second sight of Joe Sam, the family’s Paiute hired man. Moreover, it is only by peering over the shoulders of his characters and nudging us occasionally with his own voice that Clark is able to steer us among the tensions of his story and suggest the conflicts among his generally inarticulate characters—between Curt and Joe Sam, Curt and his brother Arthur, Gwen and the mother, all the rest of the family and the drunken father. Love and hate, good and evil, are as thick as the air in that ranch house. And I keep remembering that one of Walt Clark’s abiding intentions was to naturalize sensitivity, subtlety, spirituality, modulated and ambiguous ideas, in his realistic western settings. He chose not to be limited by the verbal and spiritual vocabulary of probability. So far as I am concerned, it is bad if he does it badly, legitimate if he gets away with it. He gets away with it.

  Especially in its early sections, The Track of the Cat is a slow, tense drama, melodramatically lighted. For years, as a teacher, I used it as a magnificent illustration of how to achieve suspense by mere eyestrain. The characters are never overexplained; they reveal themselves in speech and act, and if their creator’s need to make them cast a long shadow sometimes strains them toward some monomaniac excess, they are actually less strained in that way than some of the characters (the preacher, say, or Tetley) in The Ox-Bow Incident, or the wonderful, manic musician Knute Fenderson in The City of Trembling Leaves. Having granted the black panther a little legitimate heightening, we should not deny the same indulgence to the human characters.

  Symbolic, all of them, but for the most part persuasively real, too. There is a real lion loose in the mountains, but the black painter of evil lives in the ranch house. He lives in Curt, as dominating and arrogant as the worst of the Ox-Bow lynchers; and in Curt’s mother, harshly pious, capable of suffering but invulnerable to understanding; and to a lesser extent in Curt’s weak and evasive father. Their evil has already defeated the gentle brother, Arthur, long before Curt finds Arthur’s broken-necked body in the snow. The same family evil—an evil that we soon recognize as a regional evil, a social evil, an evil of attitude and spirit like the cowardice and mob impulse in The Ox-Bow Incident—has completely destroyed the sister, Grace. The only one capable of resisting it, the only one of them, besides the defeated Arthur, who can make contact with the primitive survivor Joe Sam, is Hal, the youngest son. Most readers will identify themselves with Hal and feel his role as their own. It is hard to resist the temptation to be a culture hero. It is important to notice that Hal’s position, his hopeful stance as combiner and reconciler, is the essential stance of Art Croft, too, and of Tim Hazard, and of Walter Clark.